by Jon Dainty Sr.

Created on: January 25, 2010

Larry was a statistic, a stereotype.  A rebellious child throughout his turbulent early years, he had watched his possibilities for advancement shrink little by little.  By his twenty-fourth birthday, he was homeless, unemployed, and hard-pressed to find a friend.

Most kids with whom he had grown up, smart or not, had wised up to the world’s realities:  give nothing, offer little, and receive the same.

He wasn’t embarrassed.  No one knew him well, and he didn’t hang out regularly with anyone.  But he began to realize that his life wasn’t working, and it made him uneasy in ways with which he had never become familiar.

Without skills, without friends or allies, what does a man do?  How does he pull himself out of the gutter?  Today, he guessed, he had to find out.  Was he scared?  Not really; if he really thought about it, he was unsure how to proceed.  He usually had little problem with authority figures other than how to avoid them.  This was shaping up to be different.

Social Services was a big gray block building, a large animal guarding the corner of two busy downtown streets.  Larry had never been through its doors voluntarily before.  The people inside had seemed like stuck-up do-gooders, acting as if they could be better than he ever wanted to be.

So he walked the cold five blocks to the county building.  As he struggled along, he tried to think of something to say, something that would avoid all the personal stuff.  He really felt he should avoid giving out information about himself that was too close to the truth.

How do you tell a well-fed government employee that you had eaten nothing today?  And there had been nothing yesterday.  He was almost to the point where he could truthfully say he was no longer hungry … almost.  A real man should be able to feed himself, so he intended to keep quiet about that subject.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done to push through the big glass entrance doors.  He wasn’t crazy about the way the guard looked at him, either.  But he let it slide, and kept on walking until he reached an information desk with a young blonde receptionist sitting behind it.

“May I help you?” she inquired.

“I … I need to talk to somebody,” he choked out.  Why did the receptionist have to be so young?  She looked like his sister.

“Have you been

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