Will Work For Food

Waiting for Nothing is real in that it challenges the stereotypes we tell ourselves about the homeless. I remember my mom giving one homeless man in our neighborhood bags of dried food when we passed the intersection where he lived, but warning me to never give homeless people money, “because you never know how they'll spend it.” Another common perception is that giving a homeless person money only worsens the situation, because they'll probably just spend it on drugs or alcohol. Or that they are mentally unstable and don't know how to help themselves, that they're beyond help, that if they really needed to, they could clean themselves up and get a job or go to a shelter.

Food: What would we do for it?

These are all stereotypes that we tell ourselves to ease our guilt about not giving. Of course, we can't give money or food to all of the homeless people that we pass on the street, so we make these mental justifications so that we can walk by with a full wallet, say sorry, and move on without having it weight on our conscience.

Tom Kromer's experience defies these justifications, however. He was not a drug addict or an alcoholic or mentally unequipped for normal life. He was a college educated man who just couldn't make ends meet. He doesn't resort to violence, even though he wishes he could. He remains humble and doesn't let his anger take a hold of him. He is, above all, an honest, decent, person who doesn't deserve to go hungry. Maybe that is why this book didn't see well in America. The public doesn't want to read something like this because it makes the homeless too real, makes it harder to justify not helping those in need.

This book is unique in that it also gives a glimpse of the bare essentials of life, living day to day in search of food, water, and shelter, all things that so many people in this country now, even in the midst of the recession, take for granted. The prose reflects this scarcity. There are no frills, no extra description. Just the facts. The punchy sentences can make it hard to read, but they fit the bare tone of the novel, which seeks only those essentials necessary to sustain human life.

It is also interesting that there is no love in the prose. The sexual acts that Kromer engages in are a necessity for survival, not a privilege or even a goal. When a person is hungry and in need of shelter, they will do to any length to attain those elements they need to survive. It's good to be reminded of that, at the very least, and although it sounds cheesy, because it makes us appreciate the fact that we don't have to go hungry. The knowledge that Kromer attempted suicide makes his tale of survival all the more thought provoking.

On a side note, I also wonder if there is a relation with the title to "Waiting for Godot" because they are both about people who are down on their luck, tramps or vagrants, who are waiting for something that never comes, or in this case, not waiting at all, simply trying to stay alive.