THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 19
The first-floor room where the Thurs-
day meeting takes place is decorated
with a plush rug and photographs of the
Castle from back when it was a Cath-
olic girls’ school, and a poster-size Times
article about the Fortune kitchen, which
has a reputation for seriously good cook-
ing. Week after week, the same seats are
almost always occupied by the same peo-
ple. A longtime resident called E., a for-
midable Jamaican with the voice, and
the authority, of Laurence Fishburne,
sits in the far-left corner. (“The com-
puter room is not a place to come to
hang out,” he announced as one meet-
ing began. “If that’s what you want, to
hang out—that’s not the place for that.”
After E. speaks, it would be a brave vis-
itor to the computer room who tried to
make it the place for that.) To the right,
a line of older residents, looking a little
worn out and a little wise, fill the chairs.
One Thursday, Shawnta Montgomery,
who loves to tease Rivera for his sincer-
ity and self-seriousness, was on the right,
too, closer up. An older resident, Ervin
Hunt, known to all as Easy, sat in the
rear, to the left. Lined up beside Rivera
at the front of the room, facing the res-
idents and guests, were Stanley Rich-
ards, the Fortune Society’s executive
vice-president, and David Rothenberg,
its eighty-seven-year-old founder. Up-
stairs, there are comfortable bedrooms
for more than eighty residents, but at
the moment they were, by the society’s
rule, empty. Everyone has to come to the
Thursday meeting.
The ostensible point of the meeting
is to share announcements, discuss the
events of the week, create new rules, and
greet new arrivals. But its real point, Ri-
vera confided, is “to conduct a group-
therapy session for seventy-five people,
which they say you can’t do.” His goal
was to get the people in the room, hav-
ing come home, to stay home.
Rivera can keep the room buoyant
with a joke—usually at the expense of
Rothenberg, who, as the household saint,
can afford to have a few jokes told at
his expense (and whose aura is very
different from Rivera’s: small, high-
strung, gay, and Jewish). Rivera and
Rothenberg were like a couple who had
been working in a hardware store for
too many decades; they enjoyed each
other and gibed at each other, and by
now the enjoyment had become the
gibing. “David’s idea of a whisper is put-
ting his hands over his mouth and then
yelling,” Rivera said in the middle of a
meeting, after Rothenberg, doing just
that, had urged him to move on from
some stalled subject. “My kids do that,”
Rivera said.
Rivera soberly restores order, often
in response to an excess of “poetry” that
the meeting has allowed itself. (“If you
call someone’s bullshit ‘poetry,’ they
won’t be that offended, even if you’re
telling them you don’t want to hear it.”)
On this evening, for instance, someone
used a formula familiar from twelve-
step programs: “You have to hit bot-
tom before you can come back up.” This
sentiment went around the room with
echoing fervor. But Rivera let twenty
minutes or so pass before he intervened.
“You know, I just want to come back
to something that the brother was say-
ing before,” he said. “About how you
have to hit bottom to come back up.
Now, I don’t believe that’s true. What’s
bottom? Where’s bottom? How do you
know you’ve hit bottom? There may be
a bottom below the bottom you’ve hit
already! There may be a thousand bot-
toms you could hit if you let yourself.
So—say that this, wherever you are, is
your bottom. You’re going to declare
that it’s as low as you’re going to let
yourself go. Then come back up. Don’t
wait to hit bottom before you start work-
ing your way back up. Call this bottom
the bottom.”
The crowd, including the original
speaker, laughed at Rivera’s earnest rep-
etition of “bottom,” but he had made
his point: they couldn’t afford the in-
dulgence of self-dramatization. Creat-
ing a certain kind of double rhythm was
essential to his work: a difficult truth
was followed by self-deprecating laugh-
ter. A balloon filled with the helium of
unrealistic hope was emptied, and then
refilled with the warm air of actuality.
On another occasion, Shawnta Mont-
gomery mentioned meeting someone
who had worked with Rivera in the past:
“He said, ‘Sam tried to fix me, but he
couldn’t.’ But he sends his regards.”
“I couldn’t fix him?” Rivera said, with
some vehemence. “I can’t fix him. I can’t
fix you. I can’t fix anyone. Nobody fixes
you but you. That’s why I say, If you’re
going around me—to smoke or get high
or whatever—you’re not fooling me. I’llaccept you any way you are. The only
person you’re fooling is you.” Rivera em-
phasizes that change happens only hour
by hour and day by day—and that, none-
theless, you can wake up one day and
find that the hours of work have accu-
mulated into months and then years.
“That’s the only way it happens. You’re
always coming home.”
He has a favorite aphorism about
those whom he always calls his “clients,”
which on another afternoon he stressed
more fiercely than his usually equable
tone allows. “The quote is mine, so I’m
gonna own it,” he said. “‘The crime is
not who you are, it’s what you did.’ David
said once, to a journalist who asked, ‘How
can you work with these violent crimi-
nals?,’ ‘Well, how would you like to be
identified for your entire life by the one
worst thing you’ve ever done? If your
editor made you put at the top of every
column you ever wrote, Written by Tom
the Bed-Wetter. Or by Tom, Who Drove
Under the Influence.’ I’ve worked in
D.C., where people identify themselves
by their degrees—‘I went to this school’—
and that’s what it’s about. And some-
times people of color introduce them-
selves that way—‘I was in prison.’ But
that’s not you! The crime is what you
did. The crime is not who you are.”L
ike anyone who is naturally good
at something, Sam Rivera got to be
naturally good at his work by thinking
constantly about his performance and
being acutely aware of what he is doing
as he does it.
“Part of what I have is the contra-
diction of my appearance,” he explained
one evening. “I’m a big man, and I can
look intimidating.” He crossed his arms
and looked out at an imagined audience.
“So, when I’m there, like this”—he be-
came the man he is in meetings, hands
relaxed by his sides, a half smile on his
face—“then I’m sending the message
that you can be both, a tough guy who
is open and not frightened. ‘If Sam is
like that, then I can be like that.’ It’s
about me taking control of what my
own experience is. I had a mentor once,
and I was telling him everything I was
doing, and he said, ‘Where is Sam in
this?’ That was hugely helpful to me.
Seeing yourself from outside.”
Rivera was sitting over dinner at
Trufa, an eclectic little restaurant at