alone in his hotel room at night. The particular stories weren’t as important to him as the way those stories are told. He isn’t the kind of person to switch on the television simply to escape into someone else’s narrative. Instead, he took note of each movie’s production strategies. He digested the lighting, the camera’s motion, the rhythm of the dialogue. He tried to measure the gaps between what a director might have envisioned and what the film turned out to be. After the movie was done, he would shower. Sleep. Wake up in the morning. Eat a bowl of cereal. Then, he would leave to look for work again. Emmett carried a stack of three-page resumes nearly everywhere he went, to hand out to prospective employers. In a letter on the final page, he wrote, “I plan to be available whenever the offer may become valuable for you. I shall respond upon notice at any time.” He took his desire to find a job more seriously than any other commitment; in a few months, he would go on to find work at a local steakhouse and as a personal assistant. “The person who has the company with the job is the most important person to me,” he said. “I know there’s bigger, better, brighter days out there. I just can’t let it get out of my mind or my sensibility.” His left knee trembled as he spoke, as if preparing to resume walking again at any moment. *** Cadwell often sits inside the front yard tent at the Amistad Catholic Worker, the free kitchen and gathering place that Colville and his wife Luz Catarineau have run for decades out of their own home. Cadwell lingers for hours. He likes to tell stories about his family. He calls his mom, who lives in senior housing in the town of Branford, every day. 42
“She’s my everything,” he said in March. “My best friend.” One day when he was 25, he recalled, his mother came to him, crying. He’d been raised as an only child, but his mom revealed that morning that he had a biological sister two years older than him, who had been given up for adoption. He met his sister for the first time in 2005. Every so often, she comes to visit. “We’re close, but not as close as I’d like us to be,” Cadwell said. His sister works in the Life Insurance industry. “She does really well for herself,” Cadwell said inside the Amistad Catholic Worker tent, as he ate from a paper plate of rice and sausage. “I’m proud of her.” She works remotely in a “beautiful” house on the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border. She cares for a number of pet spaniels and horses. “She’s got a trailer for the horses, and it’s got air-conditioning and everything.” After living outside for five years, Cadwell decided to sign up for a hotel room one frigid December day. Months later in March, he was still on the waitlist. (When I tried to reach him again in September, his cell number redirected to someone else's line.) “I respect what they’re doing with the hotel beds,” he said. A hotel room, he knew, would pose its own challenges. He’d heard of dozens of people getting thrown out for drug use. The curfews, the searches, the structure—it would all be unfamiliar for Cadwell, and probably difficult. “It would be hard for someone like me to adjust.” But it was freezing out, so he signed up anyway. Laura Glesby is a senior in Timothy Dwight College and a former Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.
ASIDES
EAST HADDAM
BY ELI MENNERICK
For our day trip, we drove to East Haddam—forty minutes from New Haven and home to the Devil’s Hopyard State Park. Supposedly, The Devil grows his hops there. We hiked around for a while—past a waterfall, over some boulders— without seeing anything very satanic. For lunch, we stopped at a café called Higher Grounds. Along with our fifteen-dollar breakfast burritos, the barista placed on our tray a fresh marijuana leaf. We sat out back at a damp picnic table; the other patrons sat in a circle and passed around a joint. Drew found a hair in his burrito, then a small, wiggling worm. None of us found the courage to ask for a refund.
FLOODS, SEPTEMBER 2021 BY ALEXANDRA GALLOWAY
From our fifth floor Davenport suite, we stick our heads out the window to feel the rain kiss our faces. We peel the red wax off all the Babybel cheese in our fridge. “Before it goes bad,” we say, eating it all. Below us, white tents in the courtyard sag and collapse, little empires going to shit. We can’t hear the alarms blaring, but we can see the white strobe flash through the windows of the library. Blinking, blinking, blinking, sending a futile Morse code as barefoot first-years and upperclassmen, brandishing flashlights, wander in the dark floodwaters. The start of the end, my suitemate muses.
T HE NEW JOUR NAL
