#ENDLESS BECOMING APARTMENT HOW TO#
He graduates from high school and has a lot of time he doesn’t know how to fill. Still gotta earn that paycheck, hourly,” he says. He gets a job working at the front desk of a hair salon in Manhattan and one night, after a messy breakup fight with his boyfriend, he arrives at Independence Inn after curfew. The former location of Independence Inn, in Williamsburg Brooklyn, where Shane Correia stayed while living homeless. He gets in because of that folder, with the immunizations you need to be considered for a bed. He ends up at Independence Inn, a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. You know, I went through so many psychological evaluations and physicals and blood tests and like… stuff.” “And you don’t know which one’s ultimately going to give you shelter. “It was like the worst kind of scavenger hunt, ‘cause you just have to go from place to place, and every place has different requirements,” he says. And that’s when he began to compile his folder. He stays with his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s mother but he knows that’s a temporary solution. Shane’s now homeless as a senior in high school. And they text me, ‘George says we can’t let you in’.” “My step-sisters are in the room next to the door, so I’m banging on the metal gate. He tries to unlock the door, but his key doesn’t work. On his 18th birthday, he comes home from a date with his boyfriend. He moved back to New York at age 13 to live with his father, who seemed initially OK with Shane’s sexuality, but then wasn’t. His parents split, he moved cross-country with his mother, his older sister and brother were both implicated in the murder of his sister’s mother-in-law, and he was bullied in school.Īnd when he came out to his mother, she completely shut him out. His childhood was, for lack of a better word, messy. “I’m really obsessed with dates in terms of my cataloguings,” he says.
It also meant that his family didn’t celebrate birthdays, so Shane estimates how old he was during certain life events. He was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, meaning his family would knock on doors and prosethelytize to others about the end of the world. Shane was born in the Bronx to parents from Guyana and lived in a brownstone near the projects. His life now is uncomplicated in a way his childhood was not. He lives in a tidy apartment with a few roommates and his turtle, Little Dude. Shane’s now 29 and lives in Washington Heights, near the A train, which is the longest train line in New York’s subway system. Shane weighed in on the thread, and it spoke to us because he was speaking from the point of view of someone who had lived in New York both homeless and as an employee at the Department of Homeless Services. There’s a spirited discussion on that thread on how to best help those who are homeless. We first found Shane’s story via /r/nyc, in a post titled Stop Giving Money to Panhandlers. This week on Endless Thread, we bring you the story of a man whose tenacity and hard work - and yes, his folder - got him out of chaos, and into some kind of normalcy. Shane’s story involves a grisly crime, Jehovah’s Witnesses, abuse, a locked door in his face - and escape. His folder of important papers is the only thing in his entire life story that has any level of order. (Ben Brock Johnson/WBUR)īecause when you’re homeless, you need to have documentation. Shane and his folder, which holds all of his life's important documents, from police reports to immunization proof requested by shelters.
“If there’s ever a fire, I’m grabbing this,” he says. Shane Correia calls it his “survival pack.” A folder that contains every document that matters in this man’s entire life - immunizations, passport, legal documents. This is a true story about one man and his folder.
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