Saving Dollars, Breaking Souls

Jimmy Breslin

April 20, 2003

In assiduously scouring the budget, somebody with two frigid eyes went to the bottom of the city to find the municipal rubble, that if not removed, can surely cause the metropolis to topple on its budget.

Sheri Jamison, 42, who earns $26,000 a year for working in the laundry room in the basement of the Greenpoint Men's Shelter, is losing her job. She thought she was a city worker for life and her city government thought she was piece of driftwood to be thrown out in the gutter.

To find her on Friday, you went along a path of broken cement that runs through the deserted old tan stone buildings of what was Greenpoint Hospital. The men's shelter is in the building over her head. It is a desperate place to work, but she likes it a lot. "I got a phobia about being on time. I never miss," she was saying. "That made it nice here. The supervisors were nice. I did my work. We send out the dirty laundry to Rikers Island and they ship back clean," she said. "Sometimes I be pulling garbage around here. I had something real good. Get paid every other week."

The city says she is being let go after nearly 14 years. A woman in the room with her also has been told she is out of a job. The woman didn't want to talk.

"Nobody sayin' not too much or nothin' on that particular subject," Sheri said. "Both of us gone. The manager here, she going to be workin' like an octopus."

She brings home $411 every other week. She lives with a 14-year-old daughter and her brother, Sean, a sanitation worker, in a $633 a month apartment in East New York. She has a problem common to people in East New York in handing out a home address. She has a son, 22, who is not living at home. "He's collecting dust."

"Is the father around?" she was asked.

"Better not be. I'd like to say he's buried out in the yard. No such luck."

Last Monday, Sheri was brought to the main office of Homeless Services at Beaver Street in Manhattan and told that her job ends in mid-May.

Then they drove her back to the Greenpoint shelter. "I cried the whole ride back," she was saying. She remembers that when she finished crying last week, a girlfriend came and took her to the movies. She saw "Anger Management" and "Dysfunktional Family." She liked both of them. They caused her to forget, for a couple of hours anyway, the one fear in her stomach that grows every day.

"There's nowhere I get a job. No jobs for nobody. I don't know what I am going to do."

While the savings the city gains by getting rid of her are certainly enormous, they are even more than appears on paper. She is being let go just short of her 14th year in city service. "You get some things for being here 14 years," she says. "Won't get nothing now."

She said she never has been on welfare or had food stamps or Medicaid and she doesn't want any of it. "I worked all my life. Don't need nothin' but a job."

Her voice dropped. "I got one thing I'm afraid of the most."

"What's that?"

"Bankruptcy. I got a few loans. I might have to file for bankruptcy. My brother and I was going to buy a house. Not now."

She said the biggest loan is from Beneficial Finance. Four thousand. They send a check in the mail and said just sign it and it's yours."

"What did you tell them when you put in for the loan?"

"I never saw them. The check just come in the mail. I let it around the house for a week. Then I cash it like a fool."

"How are we with the other loans?"

"I owe Municipal two thousand." She ran that up in trying to buy back two years on her pension for a reason I don't understand. "I owe nineteen hundred on MasterCard. The Beneficial is a hundred nineteen a month. They call up when I don't pay. I tell them when I save up a little extra I'll send it in with my next payment. Mostly they're nice. Some of them get fresh. MasterCard don't bother with you. They just charge you twenty five to thirty dollars, late payment, and then if you go over the limit for something they charge you another thirty dollars. That's sixty dollars for missing a payment."

She put on her black down jacket and signed out for the week on her job. While she was walking through the rock-strewn yard to get to the street, she defended her loans. "Why not? Send my daughter halfway decent to school. My son's girlfriend had a baby. That is my grandchild. I had to do something about that."

Sheri was pregnant in her last year of high school in Brooklyn. She had the baby and went right out to work. She had another baby with the same man. "I can prove that I lost my mind. I had two babies with him." She went right out to work again. Her employment record shows department store jobs. At each, she was in charge of taking back merchandise and accounting for funds at the end of the day.

If you spend even a short time with her, you know that any money that was supposed to go into the cash register was put right there.

She walked from the hospital to the Graham Avenue stop of the L line. She stopped for a Sprite and stood on the street sipping it. "I don't know what it's like to have no job. I never didn't have a job."

She went down the subway steps, by the great common sense of her city, she is a savior.