“Very much for profit,” he said. “At the end of the day, the employer pays LaborReady about twelve dollars an hour for the person’s work; then LaborReady pays the worker minimum wage. So they’re taking a fifty-percent commission.” It wasn’t exactly altruism, but it also wasn’t that different from the way UT paid me and other professors out of student fees, after subtracting a larcenous overhead tax. As we backed into the street and then headed for downtown, Roger pointed to the railroad tracks just behind the business. “For the homeless, the railroad tracks are a pretty good way to get from one place to another,” he said.
“They’re straight and flat; they often follow creeks, so there’s a source of water; and there are plenty of places where people can set up camps.” I glanced down the tracks, and sure enough, a wide swath of trees and bushes bordered the creek and right-of-way—and the rails ran directly to downtown, a broad, bumpy freeway for people bumping through life on foot.
As Roger threaded the Honda downtown through intersections and around corners, I was struck by how much longer and less efficient our route was than the railroad tracks. We could almost have walked the mile in the ten minutes it took to traverse it by car. We passed the gutted shell of an old warehouse along Jackson Avenue, which had been destroyed a year or two before in a huge, spectacular fire. Prior to the fire the building had occasionally been inhabited by squatters, who would settle in for a few weeks or months, before being rousted—also for a few weeks or months—by the police, acting on the pleas of downtown merchants. Just up the block, near the corner of Jackson and Gay—Knoxville’s main street—Roger stopped in front of a storefront called the Volunteer Ministry Center. Peering inside, I glimpsed a couple of scruffy men and a young woman working at a computer. “This is the dayroom,” Roger said. “People who need a meal or someplace to just spend the day can hang out here. Or they can sign up for a program that helps them deal with drug or alcohol dependency.”
“Not many people in there,” I said. “Looks pretty small.”
“There’s a lot more to it than what you can see through the window,” he said. “They have a big dining room in back and a huge basement and courtyard down below. There might be fifty or a hundred people in there you can’t see from here.”
The young woman glanced up from her computer and studied the SUV stopped in front of the dayroom. She looked at me, then over at Roger, and her face broke into a smile of recognition. Even through the soot on the glass, I saw a pair of world-class dimples in her cheeks. She waved, then pushed back from the desk and came outside, leaning down to speak to Roger through my open window. She wore an ID badge with her picture, her name, and the letters VMC.
“Bill, this is Lisa; she runs the dayroom. Lisa, this is Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist from UT. He’s trying to identify a murder victim.” She reached through the window to shake my hand and flashed me the dimples on high beam. I nearly forgot the question I’d wanted to ask her.
“If one of these people went missing,” I finally said, gesturing toward the dayroom, “how likely is it they’d be missed?”
She didn’t have to think long. “You know that old saying about a tree falling in the forest—if nobody’s there to hear it, does it still make a sound? Most of these people don’t have anybody there to hear them if they fall. It’s when they’re not missing—when they’re out walking the streets, or sleeping under a bridge, or asking for money—that folks notice them. If some scruffy guy stops wandering past your downtown business or condo, you’re probably just grateful he’s moved on.” I nodded; she was probably expressing the sentiments of ninety-nine out of a hundred people. A car behind us honked, so we waved good-bye. She smiled one last time as she waved, and I guessed that her smile would be the brightest thing most people in the dayroom would see today. I found myself wanting to hang out in the dayroom awhile, just for the sake of that smile. But Roger was already pulling away from the curb.
He made a quick right at the corner of Jackson and Gay, taking us through a block of upscale lofts and condos tucked into high-ceilinged brick warehouses and retail stores dating from the early 1900s. Some of these stylish urban residences sold for half a million dollars or more, and I couldn’t help commenting on their ironic proximity to the dayroom and its homeless clientele.
“That’s not all,” said Roger, pointing to the building right on the corner. “Volunteer Ministry Center has sixteen apartments in this building”—transitional housing, he said, for people trying to get back on their feet. The rest of the block revolved around fancy condos, galleries, design firms, and a trendy sushi restaurant. I was guessing that the clientele for the businesses came from the lofts and condos, not the dayroom or the transitional housing.
“As you can see, there are two very different worlds here,” he said,
“and those worlds collide just about every day. The police get a lot of complaints from the merchants and residents in this block. Sometimes they’re legitimate—cars getting broken into, drunks wanting to use the bathroom or the telephone. But sometimes it’s just harassment—the haves wanting the have-nots chased away.”