KIPS BAY — This week is David Everitt-Carlson’s eighth as a homeless man in New York City.
The former advertising executive lives at the men’s shelter on First Avenue at East 30th Street, sharing a room with seven other men. Some are convicted murderers out on parole. Others are old and disabled.
Every day of his life is now a lesson in how the less fortunate live, and the only way Everitt-Carlson can stomach his current existence is to write about it on his blog, A Homeless Blogger in NYC.
“I may never get out of homeless 101,” said Everitt-Carlson, 55, about navigating the intricacies of the system. “It is so complex. It is so screwed up. It is so directed in the wrong way.”
In the past eight or so weeks of homelessness, the blog has become his release, his coping mechanism and his platform.
He uses it to frequently rail against the system he now inhabits. He hates that he has paid what he estimates is half-a-million dollars in taxes throughout his lifetime, and yet now, when he needs help, society treats him like a vagrant.
“The institutional logic here is plain and simple,” he wrote on his blog. “If you are homeless, there must be something wrong with you. Not with the system, not with the economy, not with the law.”
Everitt-Carlson jokes on his blog that he was born homeless. In a sense, that is true. He was born in a home for unwed mothers on the Upper East Side in 1956. He was adopted nine months later and grew up, for the most part, in a small town in Illinois.
He still has family in that part of the country, a sister and a father who is 82 years old. But living with them isn’t an option, he said.
“They live in the sticks. They live in very small towns. There’s no work for me,” Everitt-Carlson explained.
Everitt-Carlson’s work has always been in the advertising industry. He worked for the Leo Burnett company in Chicago and then in South Korea. He was an executive, with a hefty salary and a company car.
And he was married, too, for 15 years. But that relationship ended more than a decade ago. Although he didn’t see it coming, Everitt-Carlson doesn’t have any regrets about the way things turned out. His wife just wasn’t up for making a life in South Korea, he explained.
Everitt-Carlson eventually left Leo Burnett and started his own advertising and marketing business in South Korea. When that endeavor stalled, he moved to Vietnam and did freelance work for several years.
Everitt-Carlson found periodic work in Vietnam, but he decided to return to the States, taking advantage of the U.S. government's repatriation program to fund his ticket home.
“You’re essentially hitting up Hillary Clinton for a thousand bucks,” he said with a smile.
The program arranged his accommodation in advance of his arrival on Sept. 12, and he was collected from the airport and taken straight to the shelter. He's been homeless and jobless ever since. It took just four days for Everitt-Carlson to start the blog.
Everitt-Carlson smiles and laughs frequently. Finding the humor in his situation helps him cope with everything, he said.
He’s even written blog posts about the goofy moments he shares with his fellow residents at the shelter—including one day when he and a man named Marvin spontaneously burst into song. The tune was “Tomorrow” from the Broadway classic “Annie.”
When Everitt-Carlson isn’t laughing or blogging, he’s following the myriad rules and regulations that now govern his life.
“I am not bitter, but distrustful now, yes,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “I am monitored 24 hrs a day. There are guards in every building I inhabit—even my Back to Work program. I must account for every hour of my day…or, they kill my social programs.”
Everitt-Carlson has to be up and out the door every day by 8 a.m.
He gets $200 every month in food stamps and $45 in cash. He has a cell phone and buys $10 cards that afford him 30-cents-a-minute phone calls. He has a laptop and hunts down free wifi wherever he can.
The Starbucks on Second Avenue and East 32nd Street is a favorite spot. He blogs, trolls for job postings and takes advantage of 50-cent coffee refills.
For food, he’s a fan of one particular soup kitchen in Chelsea. The food’s better than at Bellevue, he says, but the staff is strict.
He’s not allowed to use his laptop at the table, and when he took too long to eat his food on a recent afternoon, he was asked to leave before his plate was clean.
Whatever happens throughout the day, Everitt-Carlson has to make it back to Kips Bay by 10 p.m. That’s the standing curfew at the shelter.
“There are people truly in need of help, and we treat them horribly as a society,” Everitt-Carlson said. “I’m treated like a criminal.”
While his first priority is sending out resumes or consulting with numerous counselors at a government back-to-work program, Everitt-Carlson is also spending a great deal of time hanging around the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Zuccotti Park, where he’s found a sense of community.
He’s the perfect face of a movement fed up with a broken system. He’s well-spoken and wears nice clothes. He’s the executive-turned-homeless man, a qualified applicant desperate for a job in a tough economy.
But Everitt-Carlson doesn’t want to be “the poster child for the homeless.”
“It’s not my job to fix [the problem],” he explained. “My job is to get a job.”
If employers find him through his blog, that would be great, Everitt-Carlson said. But for now, it's more a network of support, with comments coming in from old friends and new acquaintances with each fresh post.
"It's beautiful that you're able to give so much to society at large while you're going through this hardship," one commenter wrote recently. "And when you can breathe again, under the roof you can call your own, you'll know you've achieved something that opened quite a few people's eyes. I'll tell as many people as I can about what you're doing."
