This Friday we’ll get the latest statistics on the unemployed. Today I’d like to introduce you to one of the unemployables — Mark Lodger Ruane.
He lives on West 32nd Street in Manhattan. Not in an apartment — Ruane, 31, resides on the street under some scaffolding where 32nd meets Seventh Avenue. Ruane has a very short commute to where he panhandles one block east of home.
I’m not going to make you feel sorry for him. There are a lot of people in trouble these days — unable to pay their bills and either homeless or on the verge. Ruane has problems that he readily admits to — and, in a sense, some are of his own making.
I would, however, like you to feel a little guilty.
Mark, you see, is a veteran. He wasn’t a hero or anything like that. In fact, there’s a major dispute as to whether Mark ever saw wartime service. The Army confirms that Ruane served honorably and was discharged when his mother got sick. Along the way he even got some ordinary awards.
He admits that he was demoted late in his tour for being drunk on duty. He also says he has been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder and was probably bipolar even before he enlisted.
But Mark says he served in Iraq and has a full story to go with it.
He also has a gripe and that’s where the speck of guilt might be appropriate.
The government, he says, isn’t helping him or fellow vets take care of their problems. And Ruane is quick to complain that Veterans Affairs officials and doctors in Manhattan aren’t doing much to help treat his illnesses or find some way to get him off the street, where he has lived since May.
In fact, he says, doctors have taken him off medications that were helping. They apparently feared he’d become addicted to them. “They are not helping with anything,” Ruane complained matter-of-factly to me while he sat on his corner.
You’ve probably heard this all before, so excuse me for being repetitious. One report said that 13,000 ex-servicemen between the ages of 18 and 30 were living on the streets in 2010. At least 145,000 vets are estimated to have spent at least one night in emergency shelters or temporary housing.
The VA has blamed the bad economy. Those numbers will likely increase as more servicemen and women are discharged into a bad economy while the Middle East military actions (hopefully) decelerate.
So in a sense I’m giving you old news today. But I thought it would be appropriate to personalize one guy’s story of unemployment and financial hardship ahead the last bombardment of economic statistics before the election.
Both candidates, of course, will use Friday’s employment report for their own purposes. And people like me will dissect the stats for cheating and improbabilities. But that analysis can wait; this time I felt like talking about a real-life distress story.
Ruane was begging on his street corner when I asked about his sign: “18 months in Iraq. Sleeping on street. Thanks Veterans Affairs. Your swell!” I slipped him a couple of bucks, not knowing whether or not be was telling the truth. The Army confirmed the basics of his story.
On panhandling, he was pragmatic. “I don’t do it that much because it’s kinda embarrassing,” Ruane says. But he can pull in between $50 and $150 on a good day. Still, he says, he’d rather be working.
And here’s something you don’t hear too often nowadays. Ruane says things are looking up in the labor market, at least in the city.
“There are definitely more jobs now than there were a few years ago,” he says, adding that he looks for work every day and had just applied for a position at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. (The restaurant said it would call if something came up.)
New York, he says, “is flourishing better than a lot of places in this country.” (Well, yippee for us.)
Ruane has been here since 2008, but he grew up and went to community college for three years in Boston. He didn’t leave Boston for any particular reason, he says, except “I wanted a change of scenery. I love New York.”
By the very nature of living on the street, Ruane obviously doesn’t have a permanent address. And without somewhere to call home or any kind of up-to-date identification, it’s hard to get employment in a restaurant or anywhere else.
He does have a card from his days in the Army, which he attaches to his panhandler’s sign. And while that might give him some legitimacy for coin tossers, it’s not enough to get hired.
“It’s really tough to find work when you don’t have an address or ID,” he says, adding that it’s damned near impossible to get a city-issued identification card. “Not to mention (the police) arrest you when you don’t have an ID.”
He says he’s been picked up five times since he came to the city, taken to the local precinct and held in a crowded cell for several hours each time.
And this you’ll find hard to believe: Ruane considers himself lucky, at least compared with his “roommate,” another Army vet living with him under the scaffolding, who has cancer and emotional problems as well as hundreds of pieces of shrapnel that Ruane says, “I help him take out . . . of his leg every night.”
Here’s Ruane’s version of his Army career:
After he got out in 2002, he re-enlisted and was stationed in Georgia before going to Iraq. Then on March 29, 2003 he was supposed to be with his division in Baghdad when a homemade bomb went off and killed four of his buddies. That day he had been temporarily reassigned to drive a Bradley Fighting Vehicle because the regular driver had hurt his foot. “They got blown up by a suicide bomber who pulled up to a blockade.”
Ruane is very specific on the details and, personally, I can’t tell whether he’s fibbing or the Army just lost track of this guy.
OK, enough of that heart-rending stuff. Let’s get back to what is really important — the numbers.
Experts are predicting that the nation’s unemployment rate will rise a bit in Friday’s report.
Even though Ruane would qualify under the Labor Department’s guidelines — a person has to be actively looking for work to be counted as unemployed — guys who live on street corners under scaffolding could never be reached by government surveyors.
People like him don’t really count