The steam from the vent on Sansom Street rises wildly at night, arcing and then drifting hazily into a driveway that houses some abandoned furniture and a parked white van. Beyond the black gates of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Lexy, a homeless woman of 31 whose name has been changed, lies still on the ground, her face pressed to the warm metal bars of the vent.
Her body, turned on its right side with one bent leg stacked on the other, soaks up all the heat it can gather; holey grey socks meet her faded jeans midway up her shins. It is early February 2008 in West Philadelphia. Beneath the denim jacket that covers her face and torso, Lexy shifts position. As a gust of wind enters through the open ends of her jeans, she whimpers, “Can anyone spare any change, please?” She waits for a response, but is greeted only by silence. “Can anyone spare any change, please?”
Though winter has not quite reached its peak, for a woman struggling through her first years of homelessness, few things could seem worse. Lexy was adopted by a single mother and six brothers. She attended University City High School and worked a couple jobs until her mother passed away. With no friends or relatives able to take her in, she gathered what was left of her belongings and took to the streets.
Around 9 p.m. on a Friday night, this woman verbally pitches to passers-by on Sansom Row: “Can you spare any change?” I stop in my tracks and look left. Two eyes of a rather shriveled looking woman meet me in the darkness. “Don’t have change but going to get dinner,” I say. “Care to join?”
“You mean you gonna buy me somethin’ to eat?”
I nod. The woman takes a moment to look down both sides of the street before suddenly jumping up. “All right! Thank you!” She extends her right hand and I shake it.
“My name’s Lexy.”
Lexy, I say out loud, just to hear how it rings.
We make our way across 36th Street, and she asks for my name. When we hit 40th Street, we decide on “Mickey D’s” and walk in to join the end of a nine-person queue. To kill time, Lexy talks to a woman in front of us who has dreadlocks and a leopard-patterned coat. Four minutes later, Lexy’s still talking, but the woman’s stopped listening.
We move two steps forward. “I’m hungry. What are we going to get?”
I tell Lexy I think I’m ordering some chicken. She returns a confused look, surprised I didn’t consult her first, but smiles when she realizes we are getting two meals, not just sharing one. “I’m gonna go with the Big Mac!” she declares after some thought, and a couple heads in front turn to look back. Lexy chooses a table for us, climbs into a plastic booth and waits anxiously. As soon as I bring the tray with food and drinks, she opens the Big Mac box, scatters the fries along with four packets of sweet-and-sour and barbecue sauce, then takes large, hurried bites out of her burger.
We are quiet as we eat until seven high school kids stumble through the entrance, bringing in a cloud of chatter and laughter. I turn my head to look back and notice that three black men sitting at the tables on the other side have been staring at us, muttering and grinning among themselves. They look like they recognize Lexy, probably wondering how she figured this one out.
“I haven’t eaten in two days,” Lexy says near the home stretch of the meal. “I’m full now,” she adds, with her eyelids struggling to stay open. We group what is left of the fries, slide them into their original red container and leave sodas in hand. On our way back, we bump into one of her close friends: a man in a raincoat with pants that stop above his ankles, a hat and two stuffed UPenn Bookstore bags. She says something to him, but he doesn’t hear her. “Do you know his name?” I ask. “Nahhh.”
“You tight with street people?”
“Not really,” I say, quite truthfully.
When we reach the bookstore, I tell Lexy I’m headed the other way.
“Ok. Thanks for the food. Come visit us again some time.”
One Wednesday afternoon, Lexy sits outside the steps of the University City Housing company. Her back leans against the office’s white doors as she carefully counts some loose change in her palm.
Flipping her pennies, nickels and quarters one by one, she announces that she has a total of $2.20 when I arrive. That’s $7.80 short of what she needs to stay in for the week via an arrangement of her own, unaffiliated with the company behind her.
Her hand motions for me to sit down as she herself gets up to walk toward a man near his SUV. “Can you spare any change, please? I needa buy somethin’ to eat.”
The man looks blankly at her. After a certain degree of panic, he rushes to the sidewalk to assist his daughter into the car, closes his door and drives off.
Lexy returns to the steps, looking beat. As she sits back down, a pungent smell reeks from her, thick with the acidity of old urine and sweat. She comments on how badly she smells, but to me it seems no different from the way she smelled yesterday or the week before.
We sit silently as two college students walk by us, the shorter one detailing to his friend how little he ate that day. All he had was a banana, a walnut muffin and later some juice.
Lexy’s eyes turn to the street. The oversized blue hoodie, which she wears every day, is loose around her body. What staying clean really means for her, she tells me, is sneaking into Starbucks at the corner of Walnut and 34th streets when employees are too busy; is stocking up on tissues in the sandwich section of Wawa; is bathing the rare weeks she can scrape up $10 to pay for water, electricity and heat at a home with a single mother and her two kids. She suddenly interrupts herself. “Can you see what dey’re doin’??… Dey give me no money, but dey givin’ it to that man….” Her finger points to a young black man stooped on the pavement outside the Bubble House. Overhearing her comment, the man turns his stubborn head to stare at Lexy.
Several people walk by, many stealing a glance at Lexy. “This is the kind of thing when it’s just not worth livin’ anymore,” Lexy states, dropping her head to look at the ground. The hood of her sweater slides farther over her head and her body suddenly begins to tremble. It isn’t clear until soft sounds escape her that the trembling isn’t because of the cold. “I’m so depressed,” she says shaking her head. “I quit.”
“No one will find me here tomorrow,” she adds, sniffing. “Uh-uh… Well, I’ll be here, but I’ll be frozen. Someone’ll find me dead.”
Later that night, Lexy tells me to ask passers-by for some change while she takes a rest on the vent. For half an hour or so, I sit next to her and ask individuals who pass by on either side of the street if they can spare quarters for my friend.
No, no change.
A lady struggles in her heels to walk the extra distance around Lexy. A security guard turns the corner, two groups of lawyers step out of the White Dog Café and a young couple across the street laughs as they attempt yet another chest-bump.
Minutes pass by.
“Is there anyone around?”
“A few,” I reply.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Go ask them if they have any change or doggy bags. I’m hung-gry!”
I have food, I tell her, and pull out a Nutri-Grain bar, strawberry flavored. I ask Lexy to take it.
“No, you eat it. I’m too cold…”
I slip it under her jacket.
“I’m too cold to even open it…”
I take the bar and unwrap it. I add that she should at least be glad she doesn’t live farther up north, say in Boston. Where would she sleep if a storm piled a few feet of snow on the ground?
“I don’t care about Boston. I’m cold now.”
Her hand makes its way out of the jacket and gropes on the ground for the unwrapped bar. I push it closer to her. She takes it, and I hear her swallow every bite.
Many more minutes pass by. The cold becomes unbearable. For those who must rely on the vents to survive winter, passing the night becomes a cruel countdown. Each hour stretches over an eternity and it becomes a mental game that necessitates surviving five minutes, after five minutes, after five minutes — until at long last, dawn arrives.
“Are you still there?” Lexy asks, breaking a long period of silence.
I make a sound.
“You know havin’ company helps a lot. A lot. Stay just five more minutes.”
Not long after she says this, an old black man in a leather jacket quietly hands me a dollar. I tell Lexy. She lifts her head from the inside of her jacket to look for him, but he is already turning the corner. “Thank you!” she calls out to him, and with $5.60, not a shabby day, she stops asking for the night.
“Hey! Ya’ll! Where you been at?” A young white couple approaches, sporting athletic wear. Their Yorkshire terrier is six steps ahead, drawing near. “Hey, poo poo.”
The couple stops at the vent, and the woman hands Lexy a Target plastic bag, which contains two halves of a peanut butter and banana sandwich, and a couple quarters. The dog smells Lexy out, beginning with her boots and working his way up her leg. “Hey, you wanna smell my fries?” she asks him, opening a brown paper bag between her knees. “Now, you can smell me…” She leans forward to rub noses with the dog.
“Thank you, baby,” she says to the woman. “Now will ya help me out a bit?”
“Lexy, I just gave you a sandwich and all the change I have... Sorry!”
The man and woman stand silently for a moment, waiting for their dog to finish sniffing. They then say their goodbyes, turn around and head back to Domus, the luxury apartment complex behind Penn’s law school.
“How long have you known them for?” I ask after they leave.
“About the same amount of time I know you, boo boo,” she says musically, offering me half the sandwich.
Four days pass by, four days and nights of cold, misty drizzle, and there has been no sight of Lexy on the street. Walking down the block, I wonder if anyone else notices her absence. The vent seems empty without her. But soon enough, come one dry Wednesday night, she’s back sitting on the vent.
“Hey, boo boo...” She calls down the street, spotting me. She is sitting in her usual position, legs spread out in front and arms propped behind, supporting her upper body.
“Good to see you, Lexy,” I say.
“Yea...,” she says, sarcastically, looking the other way. She’s quiet for a while before suddenly turning her head, blurting, “Don’t you see I been somewhere? My clothes is changed!” She gives me a bewildered look.
“Oh, right,” I exclaim. But as I look down, it takes me some time to pinpoint what exactly has changed: same boots, same jeans, same jacket, but, oh yes, her shirt is different. It’s dark blue or green, maybe flannel.
“I found a house to stay in for a week…”
She leaves me to watch over her food, helping herself up by pushing against my crossed knee. She returns with more food: another doggy bag with cold fries. She had already feasted on a burger from Wawa earlier this afternoon, a $1.29 bite. She sits down, concentrating on her new box, rolling with the wave of what seems to be an abundance of food today.
“Which kind of passers-by do you dislike most?” I ask.
“The ones who say nuttin’ and keep on walkin.’”
“Can you spare any change?” she calls to a girl across the street. The girl doesn’t answer.
“Uh-huh….Okaaayyyy,” Lexy says, re-gearing. “Excuse me, miss! I said, ‘Can you spare any change?’”
“Sor-ry!” the girl calls back, without looking up from her cell phone.
Lexy keeps on eating.
Lexy is done with the fries. She inspects the inside corners of the box for any crumbs that might be stuck but without finding any, tilts one corner into her mouth, then lobs the box over her head. It lands about five feet behind us.
Her attention then turns to a tall man, left hand on paunch, just stepping out of the New Deck Tavern. “Do you have any change, sir?” The man doesn’t respond. He takes a drag from his half-smoked cigarette. “Then do you have another cigarette?”
He reaches into the deep pockets of his dark khaki pants, then replies “Yes, sir.”
Lexy gets up with haste to go get it. When she comes back, she announces the news, “I just got a cig,” and then the forecast, “So I’ll be asleep soon.” She kneels down to sit on the vent. “Thank you for the hat, love… I’m gonna put it on the vent, then when it’s hot, I’m gonna put it on my head, and with this cigarette, I am gonna go to sleep!”
The plan nearly goes through. She lies there, sideways now, parallel to the street. The jacket, which is literally carrying her through winter, is spread across her chest and arms. With Lexy lying down, her eyes at ground level, I look at her face, really looking for the first time, and notice that she has beautiful curly black eyelashes; big lips; and a small, round nose. Her hair has gotten long in the month or so I’ve known her, and bundles of stiff strands curl out from the rim of her hat. She lies there blinking, just watching her street, waiting peacefully to fall asleep.
A few minutes later, a father and son get into their Nissan SUV parked some feet away. “How come the little one drivin’? He look like he’s 12.”
Alert as a fox. Even when this woman is lying down, head on the vent, the one hundred pairs of eyes she has set out on Sansom Street are still working feverishly — watching, looking, waiting for the slightest vibration in her web.
“Lexy,” I utter, after what seems a century, but for the first time that night, she doesn’t reply — finally lost to dreams.
