The post-hurricane weather left Tuesday sunny and breezy. We casually strolled the streets, taking our time to reach the Food Stamp office off Franklin and Dekalb. In no way did that leisure-walk reflect what would encompass the next four hours of our lives.

Opening the door to the North Brooklyn Food Stamp Center was like opening the gate to Dante’s Purgatory Mountain, where people are judged not for their sins but lack of sufficiency. The air and light were replaced by yellow florescents and stale body odor. No one made direct eye contact as we entered, and a security guard’s limp arm motioned in the direction of a plastic, stantion-maze line. We passively followed but spent the next 20 minutes in the line wondering if we were in the wrong spot entirely. The line moved fast and the speed of it lifted our spirits slightly–maybe this will be easy on a Tuesday afternoon! we hoped.

The end of the line is where the confusion really started. A short woman with an ear-length bowl-cut weave asked us, in abbreviated sentences, what we were there for.

“Food stamps,” I said. “We live together but are applying separately.”

The short woman clicked her mouse and walked away. She came back with three sheets of paper. “Fifth floor.”

“Well, I also, um, had a question, uh, about..” my friend trailed, and I finished, “Rent assistance.”

“That’s public assistance. You want public assistance? You got food stamps. Why didn’t you say public assistance? You can get food stamps in public assistance but you can’t get public assistance through food stamps. That’s on the third floor.” She started clicking again.

“But we have the same papers, so we can’t be separated.”

“What do you want, public assistance? Do you see that line? You can bring back the papers for public assistance later.” She wasn’t exactly mean, but just so fast and impatient that we were struggling to comprehend even what public assistance meant.

“She’ll do public assistance and I’ll do food stamps.” More clicks, we had more sheets of paper with PA2101 and FS1906 printed on them. She pointed my friend to a waiting room, handed her a giant packet to fill-out and sent me to the fifth floor.

The papers recorded 1:16pm as our official sign-in time.

I made my way through narrow hallways trying to find stairs or an elevator. In the elevator bank I waited for 5 minutes, then decided to just take the stairs which were gray and had huge spit wads on some of the steps. My friend remained in the first circle of Purgatory–total welfare assistance–while I ascended to the terrace of EBT. The fifth floor stairwell door opened to a large, windowless room with cubicles on the left, a desk straight ahead, and about 50 multi-colored plastic chairs holding blank-faced people on the right. At first I moved to the chairs, then thought better of it and talked to the husky woman by the desk. I handed her my FS1906 paper.

“Where’s your partner?”

“Oh, uh, she’s doing public assistance.”

“It says you have a partner.”

“No, we’re doing it separately.” I originally had two sheets of paper, and the one she held did say “PARTNER” in bold. I handed her my other paper.

“Do you have another?”

“No, she must have taken it.”

“You need two of these.”

“Oh. Where do I…”

“Hold on, I’ll make a copy.” She gives the paper to a woman next to her to photocopy. She then writes my number on a long list attached to a clip board.

“Have a seat. It’ll be a few hours. You can apply online instead, it’s faster.”

I glanced back at the cluster of chairs in the corner and how tightly packed everyone sat. The promise of “easy” made my heart skip a beat.

“How long of a wait, do you think?”

“Four hours.” My photo copied paper came back and she handed it to me. “You can always just wait and then leave if you want, just let me know if you’re leaving.”

I waited for a whole five minutes before the hopeless frustration that filled the room threatened to suffocate me. I handed her my FS1906 and said I’d apply online. Walking back down the stairs I forgot to watch for the spit puddles and cursed myself as I almost slipped. I joined my friend in the larger, more comfortably half-filled waiting room on the first floor. She was bent over a large booklet, furiously writing with a Sharpie permanent-marker that bled through the thin pages.

“I didn’t have a pen. I asked a woman for a pen and she took both off her table and grabbed them like this,” she held her fist to her breast, “and said, ‘No, no, these are mine!’ How do I fill this out without a pen? I’m getting so frustrated. Luckily I found this Sharpie in my bag, I had forgot about it. The line seems to be moving fast though, I’m only six people away. They’re on PA2095″

“I’m back because they said the line would take four hours. I can’t wait four hours, so I’ll just hang out with you.”

We filled out the massive booklet which asked for a range of information, including birth-dates and work history of the people she lives with. It seemed bizarrely unnecessary if she was applying separately, but there didn’t seem a way to explain that. PA2101 was called after about ten minutes, and not long after she came back to me in the waiting room.

“I have to go to the third floor now.”

“What, really? Then what was that for?”

“She just put me in the system I think and now I have to take this to the third floor.” She had a new sheet of paper, this time with “HARRIS” written on it. We took the elevator to the third floor and it was filled with women joking around and laughing. We smiled too, and all exited to the same floor but went separate ways. The women went the the cubicles, and us to the desk and colored chairs. Above the cubicles hung a banner that read:

Home of the Engagement Warriors
Where Self-Sufficiency Conquers All

The man at the desk wore a bright blue, crisp button-down shirt and aviator sunglasses that were only slightly reflective but without any tint. He took her paper and we waited to be called.

We waited. And waited. And waited.

After two hours I started losing my mind, just like the forty or so other people in the room. There were kids running around, young women gossiping loudly, an adorable baby chewing on his index and middle fingers, an old man wearing a ball cap that had an American flag sticking four inches out the back, an over-weight woman in a tight white tube top that could barely contain her back-fat, an Hasidic Jewish family, a woman with an angry face, holding her cane in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other, complaining about her back pain, and a flamboyant young man with a half-weave and glittery eye-shadow, among others.

We were afraid to leave in case her name would be called. So we sat and waited. No names were called between 1:40pm and 3pm, other than “Randy Ellis” and two other indistinguishable names.

A woman woman with curly brown hair, a velvet blazer, and a flowing flower-print skirt came from the cubicles and read, “RELLISH” off her list. No one said a word but we all looked around for Mr. or Mrs. Rellish. “DANDY RELLISH,” the woman called again with the first name. What kind of a name was that? She walked away with her skirt swaying.

Twenty minutes later she was back. “RELLISH,” she called. “RELLISH.”

“Ain’t nobody named Rellish here. We can’t understand you. Say it again.”

She did not move like she had heard him, though the room was so small she must have. “RELLISH, DANDY RELLISH.” To make matters worse her R’s rolled like a Spanish speaker but she looked Russian. “Come on man,” someone said in the crowd. “Call another name! They’re not here!” The woman disappeared behind the mysterious cubicle wall, only to reappear again calling out, “RELLISH!”

The woman with an angry face and cane shuffled over to the social worker and looked at the list. “No, it’s Randy Ellis. Randy Ellis. Who here is Randy Ellis?” No one replied but we all gave frustrated grunts at the mispronunciation. How can we wait this long for one name when Randy probably isn’t here and he couldn’t even understand his name?

Closer to 3pm, she came back. “DANDY RELLISH, er, E-L-L-I-S!” A man in the back who had been sitting behind me the entire time stood up.

“Wait, Ellis? Randy Ellis?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s me.” He walks to the front of the seats and follows the flower-skirted woman to behind the wall.

We all watch him leave, his long dreds swaying on his back, and erupt with laughter. We glance at each other incredulously. Then the angry-faced woman starts telling the story of what just happened, and everyone continues to chuckle, though the volume dies down. She then retells the story with more enthusiasm. Someone nods angrily. This woman does not stop talking from this point until 5pm when we leave.

That hiccup in time was the only moment of joy. After 3pm the social workers began to realize they had better start moving through the line faster because 5pm was approaching and they had to finish the queue before they could leave. Someone muttered that they’d been waiting since 9am.

“I hope this is worth it,” my friend sighed.

At 3:45pm she was called, and at 4:45pm her interview was over.

“Yes! We can leave.”

“No, I have to go to the first floor and give this to someone.”

“Wait… what?”

“Yeah, there’s all this stuff I have to do. I don’t even need all of this. I have to go to this ‘job’ appointment everyday at 9am, have an interview next week, then they have to come to my apt for an interview, and then they still have 45 days to decide whether or not they’re going to help me. I could find a job by then, I just need help now. This is crazy. I’m so frustrated. They didn’t even listen to me.”

So we wait on the first floor, back to the original waiting room. We talk about how frustrated we are, how hungry we are, and what kind of pizza we should get on the way back. The woman to our left starts talking across the room to another man who is also expressing his frustration.

“They make you wait so long. But you know what? I do it because at the end of the day it’s money in your pocket. They give you so many Metro cards and stamps, that’s all I need. And I’ll do the job because after 45 days you can pick what you want. I’ll work for the parks, my uncle does that and you know, you’re taking home like 6 hunn’ed a week. For real.”

Almost four hours after we entered the building, we saw sunlight again. We left with only slightly more than we came in with: a few sheets of paper and a stack of ten metro cards. Deciding on buffalo-chicken pizza, we made our way to Luigi’s and unloaded our frustration on one another.

“And besides,” she said, “All the bills have to be in my name for it to count for public assistance.”

“But we all split them?”

“I know right! It’s like there is no room for leeway in the system. It’s not set up for different circumstances. Also, the internet bill doesn’t count.”

“Oh yeah, it’s extra right? Totally an unnecessary utility.” I paused and looked at my paper work which had “Apply online!” written at least five times.