Sunshine State by Sarah Gerard

Author:Sarah Gerard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

We wear plastic gloves and greet each person. Again I serve grits. Some people ask for the grits on top of their eggs. Some crack jokes. Some prefer not to make eye contact. I recognize a woman with paint around her mouth from the last Saturday, and a man who wears his bandana down over his eyes. Couples move through the line together, bickering or talking sweetly, holding plates for each other. About 150 people attend the breakfast each week, and more toward the end of the month before they get their government checks. It costs $240 to feed them all,46 some of which comes from grants, but most of which came from the budget of Trinity Lutheran Church and the congregation doesn’t want to pay anymore.

“It’s been going for six years,” says Tom Snapp, counting as people file out of the elevator. “G.W. started it. We’ve got enough for one more week. I made an appeal to the congregation several months ago, and they gave a couple thousand dollars. But you know, at two hundred forty dollars a week, it goes quickly, and I don’t think the congregation’s in a mood right now to want to shell out more and more.”47

We get to the end of the line and start serving seconds. As the food runs out, volunteers carry away the trays. A few people come back with empty pastry containers and ask for food to go, for friends who couldn’t make it this morning.

“Everyone consistently says it’s the best breakfast in town,”48 G.W. tells me later, smoking out on the steps. It rained during the breakfast and the sidewalks are heating up, making the air kind of balmy. People mill around the church entrance, sleepy after filling their bellies. “St. Vincent was never a breakfast place. They’ll give you a frozen bagel and a hunk of cream cheese. Watery coffee. And just call it breakfast. This breakfast is made with love and care. The cooks are real good, you know? I’m kick-ass. Now I train other people to do it because I don’t believe in top-down solutions. I don’t believe in solutions that are brought to you by a committee that doesn’t have any skin in the game.”

G.W.’s most recent episode of homelessness began in St. Petersburg in 1998. He was living in a mother-in-law apartment behind a house, and it burned down. He was cooking then, in various beachside restaurants, and doing the books for his landlord, who managed some small companies. He lost everything he owned in the fire. He thought he could get another place immediately—then he lost his job. Then someone stole his belongings while he was sleeping. He couldn’t clean himself, nor present himself as a chef. He lived on the streets for the next eight years.

“When I was homeless,” he says, “the people who were lying on either side of me were coming to shake the bush, to get me out of the bush, so that I could take a birdbath and go cook for people.

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