Champagne and the police dog

In 2019, I had the misfortune of having to live for nine months at the Road Home homeless shelter in Salt Lake City, Utah. A massive old warehouse in the heart of the city’s first industrial center, the nearly 100-year-old building was a truly miserable place. Every day in the shelter officially began when the big fluorescent lights snapped on at 6 AM. At this time, men scrambled for a good position in line for bunk assignments for the night to come. Nobody got the same bunk twice in a row. This meant that the men in the surrounding bunks would usually be different the following night. You may or may not have gotten to know your neighbors, and you may or may not have gotten along. They could have been horrific snorers, drug users, thieves, schizophrenics, or men who neglected, for whatever reason, to bathe for weeks at a time. It was for these reasons among others that the men tended to try to group together in the bunk assignment line. This way that they were more likely to wind up being close to people that they could trust more or be less likely to have disagreements with. Those who were more concerned with avoiding the security patrols for whatever reason were fine with bringing up the end of the line. This meant that they would be located far to the back of dorm one, or in the smaller dorm two. These were the darkest areas of the shelter, where security feared to tread at night and basically anything went.