Author’s Note: Names and specific identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of those concerned.

I work for a homeless outreach coalition, in the same Appalachian town I’ve spent most of my life.  In many ways it’s an unremarkable place—the college kids annoy the ‘native’ residents, while the natives themselves try to balance the beam between shunning the college kids and courting their business into locally-owned stores; and the median income is just enough to have one new car sitting in the driveway, or two used ones.  But in many ways ours is a unique city: we’re at a geographic midpoint between two of the largest illegal drug distribution centers in America; and a democratic electorate, fed up at a staggering rise in crime because of this fact, recently elected its first republican mayor in many, many years.

My city is also a haven for the chronically-homeless: those individuals who have either been homeless for over two years, or who have experienced multiple bouts of homelessness over their lives.  The city is situated just on the edges of a large, major trade river, the banks of which provide ample cover from all but the worst weather; also, college students have proven to be easy sells for men and women asking for food and beer money in 33-cent increments.

The agency I work for pushes the Housing First model: for all the money cities spend on incarceration, emergency shelter and hospital visits for the homeless, it’s actually cheaper in the long run to just give these people their own apartments.  Regardless of the cost savings, it’s been a hard sell to a community too-conditioned in the many ways of saying, “Sorry, man—no change,” but that’s a different story.

This story is about a game of cornhole at an Independence Day picnic, and how the social divide between clients (read: chronically homeless people) and agency workers was, if only for a few hours one summer afternoon, bridged.

Next to the coalition headquarters is our main housing complex.  This complex is a spread of fifty-five efficiency-style apartments, built around an expansive courtyard.  On most major holidays, we try to organize some sort of get-together for the residents, so that, if only for the odd day here and there, they can temporarily forget whatever circumstances got them to where they are.

July 2nd, 2009, was a fairly pleasant summer day: a small cloud cover kept the temperature comfortable, without overtly threatening rain.  The coalition director and I were out in the courtyard, trying to get things set up for the picnic.  I was firing up two of the three charcoal grills, and scrubbing down the third.

The day shelter adjacent to the complex where the party was being held, where the majority of my workday takes place, closes at four in the afternoon, though things usually begin to wind down at around two—as most of our homeless clients begin seeking their nighttime shelter in the early afternoon. Some of our clients, though, will mingle about in the housing complex, hoping they can barter for a place to stay (usually through alcohol or marijuana).  One of these minglers is a man named Aaron.

Aaron, like most of our clients, is a single, white male in his mid-thirties who could easily pass for a decade or more older: having spent the majority of his adult years on the streets and in the grips of alcoholism, Aaron has not only the deeply lined face, leathery-looking skin and glassy eyes of a chronically-homeless person, but also the nihilistic, who-gives-a-damn attitude that so many of our clients eventually fall prey to. 

Most mornings when I come into work, Aaron is standing outside the shelter.  First he asks me for a dollar, and when I say no to that, he asks for a cigarette.  Usually, I oblige this request (I’m a bit of a pushover).  Following this cigarette exchange, I’m often treated to the latest chapter in the saga of how public assistance programs—those with which I am only tangentially affiliated—have him mired in a perpetual catch-22.

On the morning of July 2nd, I learned about Aaron’s attempts to get a new copy of his state-issued ID.  After a recent drunk-and-disorderly arrest, he had lost his ID, and was trying to get a bus ticket to our local DHHR center to get a new copy.  When Aaron asked his case worker for a bus ticket, the case worker suggested that since Aaron is so good at bumming beer money, maybe he should try to bum some bus money.  And though our clients have a tendency, sometimes, to exaggerate tales of poor treatment, I have been following complaints on this particular case worker long enough to be able to assume the relative truth of Aaron’s story.

I am not proud, nor am I ashamed, to say that though I made a note of Aaron’s complaint, his story did not stick with me in any meaningful way throughout the rest of the day.  When one of the biggest deterrents to our clients getting their lives back together are the case workers assigned to help them, dwelling on individual grievances is an easy way to go really crazy, really quickly.

And so Aaron was nowhere in my thoughts that afternoon while I was scrubbing the third charcoal grill.  Nothing, in fact, really occupied my thoughts, aside from cleaning out months and months of gunky build-up on the grill rack.

I had just gotten the grill serviceably clean, when two guys—one of them a resident of the housing complex, the other a stranger I did not know—emerged into the courtyard.  The man in front, the resident I knew, carried a handful of bean bags.  His buddy behind him, who got the raw end of the deal, was lugging two halves to a cornhole board.  Though most of the other residents and workers milling about simply paid the new cargo no mind, I grinned widely—I had been introduced to cornhole several months ago, while visiting some friends in Cincinnati.  Looking across the courtyard, I saw my boss, and noticed his eyes lighting up, as well.

The two men who brought the set-up dropped their gear unceremoniously, and then, oddly, abandoned it.  I watched the dropped cornhole gear for a few moments, wondering if what I was thinking would be inappropriate or not.  Finally deciding that it had been a long day, and I didn’t much care about appropriateness, I began walking toward the cornhole board.  I was met halfway across the courtyard by my boss and, with a knowing smile shared between us, we set up the board.

The party itself actually wasn’t scheduled to start for another half-hour, and so my boss and I decided that a quick one-on-one game would be a good way to pass a bit of time.  I got off to a quick 7-0 start.  After dropping one of my first four bags right into the hole, my boss said to me, “You’re supposed to let the guy who signs your paychecks win.”  I laughed, and the next round increased my lead to 9-0.

Four rounds in—my boss had cut my lead to 12-7—I heard a voice beside me.  “The hell are you guys doing?”

“Playing cornhole,” I said, without looking over.

My answer elicited gravelly-sounding giggles, and the voice said, “Cornhole?  This is called cornhole?”

“Yup,” I said, and finally looked over.  It was Aaron.  I smiled, and sighed: I could easily expect several crude jokes based around the name of the game, and a small portion of them would actually be funny.

My boss smiled at Aaron.  “Hey, there,” he said.

“I wanna play with the cornhole,” Aaron said in greeting.  The smell on his breath, coupled with his slurring, made it obvious he was drunk.  And Aaron was one of our clients who can get a little unruly when he’s been drinking.  My boss and I, after exchanging a quick glance, quietly agreed on the same tact: placate him for as long as we can, to put off inevitably having to throw him out when he does something we cannot ignore.

My boss stepped away from the board, saying he needed to go check on some chairs or something, and left me and Aaron alone at the board.  He asked me how to play, and I explained the rules, as best as I could.  When I was finished, Aaron said, “Sounds like horseshoes.”

I said, “You any good at horseshoes?”

“I suck,” he said.  We took our places, and then Aaron said, “You go first.  I wanna see how you do it.”

I took my toss, and landed 3 on the board.  Feeling pretty good about myself, I turned to Aaron and said, “Think you got it?”

He shrugged noncommittally.  “I’ll try.”

Aaron threw the first bag, and it sailed straight over the back end of the board.  I had to bite back my laughter.  And it’s a good thing I did, because the next three throws sailed perfect arcs through the air, and all landed in the hole.  He turned to me, flashed a sly smile.  “My math’s not too good, but I figure that’s seven points for me.”

The game began in earnest, then, and when Aaron had me at game point just three turns later—he was up 20-14—I happened to take a look around us, and saw that a small crowd had gathered.  Buoyed by the crowd, I began a slow, but methodical, comeback, and by the time I had brought my score up to nineteen, cheers and laughter were rippling through the crowd of twenty or so odd people.  Clients stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the same case workers and agency employees who had, no doubt, yelled at them that very week for taking too long in the bathrooms, for doing more than the allotted number of loads of laundry in the on-site facilities, and for panhandling for change outside the shelter doors.

It was a quiet, and more than a little sad, moment: as happy as I was for the two sides of our world to be together, cheering on the game, I was under no delusions that the camaraderie would last.  And, indeed, following the very next turn, when Aaron knocked my last bag off the board and took the victory, the clients and workers began looking at one another, and all seemed to realize that the short period of togetherness was over.

The crowd broke apart slowly, until it was just me and Aaron standing, side-by-side.  We walked across the courtyard to retrieve our bags, and he knelt down, picked one up, and began tossing it up into the air.  “You got another game in you?” he asked quietly.

“Nah,” I said.  “I should get back into the office.”

“Yeah,” he said.

If this were a better world, he would have thanked me for not taking it easy on him, for letting him compete like we truly were equals; or I would have stopped him, as he walked away, and promised to be more vigilant in helping him out with his caseworker.  But in fact, he just picked up his other three bags, and set them gently down on the side of the board.  Then he turned and walked away, toward one of the apartments where I knew he spent a good deal of time, drinking himself into oblivion.

After he had gone, I stayed behind, holding my bags, as if unsure what I was supposed to do with them.  My boss came up beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.  He couldn’t see what was going on in my mind, but he no doubt could guess and get pretty close to the truth.  “You can’t sweat it,” he said.

“I know,” I said.  “It’s just….”  But I let the thought trail off, and shrugged.  “I know,” I said again, but more quietly this time.

He removed his hand.  “We’re gonna change the world here,” he said.  “That’s a damn promise.  But we can only do it one game at a time.”  He knelt down, and picked up the four bags that Aaron had just set down before walking away.  Then he stood again to full height, and squared up with the board.  “One game at a time,” he said, in a murmur, and took his first toss.