Sarge’s Attic Dormitory

I slid through the backdoor of the coffee shop and found Sarge discussing the lease with four new guys — homeless veterans moving into the upstairs dormitory.

“And now we come to the most serious clause of this lease agreement,” he was saying. “Theft. I’m a real hard case about theft, and I have my own definition of it.”

He looked around the room and the guys were watching him warily.

“If you take a magazine off another guy’s dresser, read it and put it back, you’ve committed theft, in my eyes. Theft of trust. You do not touch another man’s stuff, ever.”

Half an hour later, we all piled out the back door to a rental truck full of furniture and hauled bed frames, mattresses, dressers, lamps, nightstands and large cartons up the narrow staircase.

Sarge stood at the top of the stairs like a drill instructor interior decorator, ordering the furniture placed in exact spots he’d marked out on the floor with blue duct tape. I popped open the boxes and the men took sheets, blankets, pillows and towel sets. In short order, the room was … beautiful. Three of them flopped onto their beds, groaning with comfort. One guy refused:

“I won’t touch it until I have a shower.” Sarge cocked his thumb at the bath at other end of the finished attic and the guy took off, cradling his armload of towels like they were gold.

Later, Sarge and I stood in the cold outside the back door, the first snowflakes of the next storm swirling around us. “I hope I selected right,” he said. “I originally thought I’d bring in six guys, but I wasn’t sure about two of them. These four seem like the best combination for success. I hope they get along.”

We heard thundering on the stairs as his formerly homeless renters came down to the kitchen to fix themselves some dinner. There was a lot of loud chattering — and laughter.

Sarge smiled.