Lars Eighner's 1993 book Travels with Lizbeth traces his three-year journey as a homeless person scraping by with his dog, Lizbeth. In the following excerpt, Eighner has checked into a hospital for a pain in his leg and is visited by a social worker.

He came right to the point: "How many fifths do you drink a day?" I explained that if I drank a fifth of whiskey in a week I would be drunk the whole week. . . .

It would have been greatly to my advantage if I could have admitted to being an alcoholic or a drug addict. The social workers have no way of assisting someone who is sane and sober. My interview with the social worker made it clear that only three explanations of homelessness could be considered: drug addiction, alcoholism, and psychiatric disorder. The more successful I was in ruling out one of these explanations, the more certain the others would become. Professional people like to believe this. They like to believe that no misfortune could cause them to lose their own privileged places. They like to believe that homelessness is the fault of the homeless—that the homeless have special flaws not common to the human condition, or at least the homeless have flaws that professional people are immune to. They are glad to go through the motions of helping the homeless—and some, like the social workers, depend for their livelihood on there being homeless people to pretend to help—but on the ladder of being, homeless people are not quite up to the level of professional people.

The social worker had programs for alcoholics, programs for drug addicts, and programs for the insane. If I would admit to belonging to one of these categories . . . then something might be done for me. Unless I were a drug addict, an alcoholic, or a lunatic, the best he could offer me—if I would destroy my conscience to the extent necessary to participate in a religious organization that often refused to agree to principles of nondiscrimination—then he might obtain for me three nights' lodging at the Salvation Army.

Copyright ©1993 by Lars Eighner with permission of St. Martin's Press, New York.