Word: sanderses
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After his "slipup," as Sanders calls it, he started attending drug treatment religiously. For three months he spent 16 hours a week doing custodial work in exchange for welfare. He still had trouble placating his five or six different "bosses," from parole to welfare to his mother. "I can do...
One day in August, he walked out of the shelter in a fit of frustration. His mother agreed to take him in temporarily. Soon afterward, a neighbor said Sanders could rent a 6-ft. by 12-ft. room with the $215 welfare check, if he would also help fix up...
Then came Sept. 11. Rolling black clouds of smoke and dust drifted over to his neighborhood in Brooklyn. Sanders, like people everywhere else, was depressed by the attacks. His problems and successes were dwarfed by their implications. Finding work got even harder. He had a second interview for a janitor...
And then for two weeks, Sanders stopped trying altogether. He went AWOL from his welfare-to-work job, from parole and even from his mother's church, which he'd been attending every Sunday since his release. "I just got under the covers and let the TV watch me," he...
On Nov. 7, just when Sanders had run out of ambition, the unimaginable happened: he was offered a job. The position, as a gas-station attendant in Far Rockaway, Queens, was 40 minutes from his home and paid $6 an hour. "I could just tell you a thousand stories in...