Tales of Two Americas

by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)

  Feeling less like a silhouette did not always feel good. Despite the entropic costs of moving every few months, there is also something liberating about traveling light. I’d felt unmoored for a long time, but my rootlessness was always my choice. I crossed state lines and hopped continents, knowing that I had a sturdy net.

  Some of the older men I met in the shelter below our apartment also described themselves as inveterate wanderers. Even if they’d had the option, they said, they would not have wanted to settle down. Many of the younger campers I saw by the river that summer also seemed to be camping volitionally, smoking dope and sharing food and booze in the sunset. Some told me that they’d chosen to live outdoors, for a season or for a lifetime.

  But most of the people to whom I spoke on Barber Block did not strike me as people with choices.

  At night, in the starkly lit theater of the bank parking lot, the residents of Barber Block with south-facing windows often saw a stencil of a man, his age impossible to determine, dancing spastically while grunting and clapping his hands. It was like looking into hell. His moves were sugary, insane. He was still visible to the rest of us, but he was on the wrong side of the mirror now.

  And who did I mean by “us,” exactly? The domiciled? The lucid? The sober? The solvent? The lucky? The loved?

  ■ ■

  On my side of the window, I’d now been living in Portland for eight months. It was my longest stint in one place in many years. I felt so happy that my mail kept coming to the same address. I loved knowing that we owned the silverware in the drawers. I’d stand under the showerhead while my boyfriend cooked dinner, knowing that in a few hours we’d go to bed together, and wake up in the same place. Warm water hit my neck, my naked back, and a knowledge softly drilled its way into my body: I wanted to stay here. This was what it felt like to choose to live somewhere.

  “Ours” had become my favorite word. My boyfriend had become my fiancé. I had truly never known this kind of intimacy; I had never before been capable of sustaining it. To exist in an overlapping sphere, where everything was shared—I felt a joy I hadn’t known since early childhood. “Ours” thrilled me applied to anything. “Our” kitchen. “Our” shower liner. “Our” dubious Robo Taco leftovers.

  One day, I called the apartment “our home.”

  But pronouns can become exclusionary, gated communities. “We,” for example. “Us.”

  Grammar can erect a false wall. Look at how I keep falling into this trap, writing this piece. To refer to the thousands of diverse individuals with unique histories who are sleeping on the street tonight as “the homeless” certainly expedites a sentence. But it inadvertently reinforces an ugly and false idea, perhaps secretly consoling: that “the homeless” are a monolithic population, a different species of person from those of “us” lucky enough to have jobs and homes.

  How do we begin to bring down these walls—to create a more elastic “we”? For starters, I’d need to exhume and revise a largely unconscious assumption: that the audience of this piece will be primarily people “like me,” people reading by electric light indoors, people with the resources to buy a literary anthology and the space—literal and figurative—to read it at their leisure. That may well prove to be the case, but if I slip into writing for “us” about “them,” I’m certainly part of the problem, reinforcing the false wall. We all want a safe place to live in the future, wherever we presently bed down. We are all vulnerable. In fact, for an increasing number of people in America, the difference between living indoors and living on the street is an injury, an accident, a family emergency, a bad season, a month’s salary.

  “Us” versus “them,” that binary view, fails to recognize that sickness and health and solvency and bankruptcy are of course porous states; that sanity and insanity exist on a continuum; and that every house standing is a house of cards, be it a brick-and-mortar duplex or a human body. Some people have far more resources than others to rebuild with when disaster strikes. But nobody is indestructible.

  “Two missed paychecks,” one of the men outside the shelter told me. The condensed history of how he went from living indoors in Washington to sleeping in his van.

  Mike

  “I’d like to live in a tiny house.”

  Mike had a nose like a red pepper and extraordinarily luminous eyes, lake-water blue. He was a fixture on the corner, sitting in the shade for hours with his motorized wheelchair parked next to the shelter. Even in repose, his face had the angular integrity of origami, the creases sharpened by decades of smiling. He often volunteered at a senior center—Mike was a magician—where he bragged that he could make anyone laugh. A botched operation when he was an infant had severed a nerve and left him legally blind. He preempted all pity: “People feel sorry for me, but I tell them not to. For me, this is what is normal.”

  “I grew up living on a boat,” he said, “so I really don’t need much space at all.” He liked the idea of a little house, because he was tired of the shelter’s noise, the lack of privacy.

  “They want you to want what they want for you,” he explained. “But I want my own place.”

  I’d seen the tiny houses going up on Division. I asked Mike if he was working with the city, or perhaps a nonprofit.

  He shook his head. Then his voice dropped to a whisper, as if he did not want the other men to overhear the plan he’d hit on.

  “I got the Yellow Pages, and I called an architect.”

  I must have been silent a beat too long, because Mike’s voice lifted an octave:

  “He said he would try to help me. I need to call him again. I wanted to find a quiet place to call him today, but it’s too late now. He is expecting my call.”

  His hand swept his head, and his eyes followed the line of men moving into the shelter; now there was a hitch of anxiety when he spoke.

  “I just need to find a quiet place to call him.”

  ■ ■

  At the shelter next door to our apartment, dinner was served at five-thirty p.m., but somewhere between fifteen and forty people were always milling around outside the blue door. Across the Willamette River, on the other side of the bridge, people coagulated in slow, colorful clots around different entryways and arches: the Portland Rescue Mission, the Union Gospel Mission. It rained all January, and people were always smoking in the rain, sheltering small flames with their hands. Smoking kills, as the label warns, but I found myself admiring these smokers’ commitment to its ritualistic aspects, even in the bone-chilling damp. Their lit cigarettes looked like miniature scrolls to me, leaking blue prayers.

  I often found myself walking home at dusk with a bag of groceries, carrots leafing cartoonishly over the paper bag. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I murmured, wending through the men queued up for dinner service outside the shelter. Passersby could travel through this crowd like ghosts through walls. In their midst but also, somehow, by mutual agreement, invisible. I sometimes tried to make eye contact, but I often felt hot faced and flummoxed. I was very aware of my bags loaded down with fresh food, and of the safe, warm home waiting for me half a block away.

  Occasionally a phrase rattled in my ear, and there’s plenty more where that came from. A very American phrase, abundance leveraged like a threat. This experience of “plenty” should be available to everyone, as a basic right; who would disagree? But doesn’t that ambition sound Utopian—a word synonymous, by today’s definition, with “impossible,” “naïve”?

  Indicting our impoverished vision of paradise, Toni Morrison warned against our tendency to envision Eden as a private garden. A place where the abundance is inversely proportional to the number of inhabitants:

  “Plenty, in a world of excess and attending greed, which tilts resources to the rich and forces others to envy, is an almost obscene feature of a contemporary paradise. In this world of outrageous, shameless wealth squatting, hulking, preening before the dispossessed, the very i
dea of ‘plenty’ as Utopian ought to make us tremble. Plenty should not be understood as a paradise-only state but as normal, everyday, humane life.”

  In half a minute, I would be stepping over a disabled man zippered into a gray nylon bag to enter my home. On a cellular level, this felt entirely wrong. A fizzing pressure filled my chest, one like suppressed laughter but far more terrible. On more than one occasion, it turned out, the stranger in the doorway was awake, and we both apologized at the same moment; he moved to make a space for me, and I crossed the threshold with my overflowing bags of groceries. How did we let it come to this?

  ■ ■

  Hermit crabs were a popular pet when I was growing up in South Florida. At the pet store kiosk in the Dadeland Mall, some sadist had given the naked crabs no option but to choose from decidedly inappropriate housing: One crab was struggling around inside a Magic 8 Ball. Others had been forced to move into artificial shells painted like football helmets.

  In Portland, men and women without a roof or a room to call their own must improvise shelters out of salvage, the garbage of people living inside four walls. People who lack what the city has euphemistically named “indoor alternatives” build homes out of whatever raw materials are available to them. It is heartbreaking to see a medically or mentally frail person sleeping outside, on asphalt, under a tarp thinned to the violet transparency of a nail bed. But there are also cases where, whatever your perception of its inadequacy and shoddiness, the campsite you are looking at is very clearly somebody’s home. Filled with kitchenware and clothing and floral duvets and musical instruments. I have seen pup tents and plywood shacks and ancient dust-orange RVs that shelter whole families.

  I have been truly shocked by how many people can emerge from a single tent: one, two, three, four adults, the tent heaving like an overcrowded womb. Dogs, too, clicking around the bricks of rubble and foam. On numberless occasions in Portland, I’ve been humbled by the sight of an older camper stooping to feed her animals.

  I’ve also seen kids doing their homework on a dirty bean bag chair propped outside their camper, a toddler wandering unchaperoned around the clustered tents.

  Portland is also home to several self-organizing outdoor camps, like Dignity Village, Right 2 Dream Too, and Hazelnut Grove, where campers live by a code that includes no stealing, no weapons, and no drug use. These are laudable places and a sanctuary for many people. But most people without permanent homes, let’s assume, would really prefer an “indoor alternative.”

  According to the Oregonian, “A higher percentage of long-term homeless men and women sleep outside here than almost anywhere in the United States.”

  The sheer volume of campers means that we are becoming accustomed to the sight of men and women huddled under bright blue tarps, hidden in plain sight on the city steps. Hales’s “state of emergency” was intended in part to shine a light on the urgent and recurring needs of those experiencing homelessness; to remind those of us with homes that thousands of our neighbors are in crisis, even if, to passersby, these campers’ suffering is often dismissed as stasis. As their numbers climb, will the homeless camps become easier for everyone with a home to ignore? The danger, it seems to me, is that our “state of emergency” will again come to seem like a regular Wednesday; that many of us will exempt ourselves from working for change, lulled by a hopelessness, a false sense that the growth of the camps is both inevitable and irreversible.

  How do we continuously refresh our sense that Portland’s homeless city within the city is an emergency state, an inhumane state—that we cannot risk becoming inured to the suffering of our neighbors? How do you keep homeless camps in cities from becoming an ordinary sight, the status quo, while also welcoming people with nowhere else to go?

  American Mobility/Who Gets to Go Home?

  I’m going home, I’d sometimes think in the car. Just that one thought, looping like a song. Accelerating over the steel bridge, I felt the knowledge travel from my heels to my scalp. I felt it along the gumline, which was vibrating like a plucked string; I felt happy everywhere, even in my teeth. After a few months of this, the thought slid out of my consciousness. One day, I caught myself driving home on autopilot.

  By this time I’d come to the awestruck realization that this feeling of home was portable, transferrable to another space; somehow it had happened, a home had extended its awning over me and another human. We’d carry that invisible awning with us, I now believed, even if we moved. But I also knew that we owed a great debt to this first home in Southeast Portland, the room on Barber Block that physically housed us for those first fourteen months together, held us in space and time as we turned a fantasy blueprint of home into something shared and real.

  In April 2015, we began looking at houses. I loved the authorized trespassing that was the “open house.” Houses seemed like sentences to me—some had straightforward layouts, some kept subdividing and ramifying, spinning off stairways and corridors like a complex German syntax. You could move from clause to clause, imagining your own nouns and verbs animating the empty spaces. In the beginning, we loved touring homes; this was before we started placing offers, anteing with all the savings we had, and discovering that this was still not enough to purchase a home in the neighborhood we’d chosen, inner Southeast Portland.

  That spring, we learned that list prices meant nothing. We placed offers on seven houses; every one of them went to all-cash buyers who offered between $30,000 to $90,000 over the list price. We were competing with developers, new hires relocating to Portland, equity refugees from the Bay Area. We expanded our search. We toured a house where the selling feature was a building that looked like a torture shed in the backyard (“Accessory Dwelling Unit Potential!”). We placed an offer on a house in a nice neighborhood that sounded like the title of a seventies-era porno, Sullivan’s Gulch. The house fronted the I-84, which we’d convinced ourselves sounded almost like a rushing river. This house was sold to someone else, for nearly $100,000 over the asking price.

  We felt torn about how much to offer. We felt torn about what school district to choose, how much debt we could afford to take on. We felt torn about what compromises we were willing to make on things like bedrooms and street noise and commute time.

  Something occurred to me then, something so embarrassingly obvious that I’m reluctant to include it here:

  People with options feel torn. People with options feel pulled, tugged—people who can move in multiple directions. Whereas those without homes are often immobilized by illness and poverty and addiction. They lack stable shelter, a bed in which to dream. Without this most basic infrastructure, how does a person so much as imagine alternatives, let alone move toward them, inhabit them? Feeling “torn” is yet another luxury of the highly mobile. Feeling “torn” is a symptom of freedom.

  Homes and Sleep

  One of the greatest milestones of my adult life occurred on an arbitrary weekday, maybe fourteen months after moving to Portland: I slept straight through the night. I blinked awake into pale, natural light. I was astonished that its source was the sun and not the moon. I honestly could not remember when I’d last shut my eyes at midnight and woken with the sun.

  I felt so safe! It was a miracle. My body had slyly reset its default assumptions. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I regularly slept in darkness. Whenever I’d lived by myself, in various sublets, the place looked like a ship ablaze. I couldn’t fall asleep without the lights on. I’d wake at 2:00 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 4:00 a.m. I kept a journal of gibberish that I’d named “Night Thoughts.” It was an indescribable relief to turn that thinking off, and sleep until dawn.

  Of course, this also meant that I was now sleeping soundly through the cries of my neighbors outside the window.

  Mount Hood no longer surprised me, looming with its ghostly grandeur over the city; but neither did a catatonic teenager sitting on a horsehair blanket on the Burnside Bridge, holding up a sign
sun-faded to illegibility. Neither did the growls and sobs I heard inside of tents pitched near the elementary school on Stark; this was background music now, and I walked right past it.

  Geometries of Echoes

  When I moved to Portland, I wasn’t certain that I’d succeed at “putting down roots” or “making a home.” The only true home I’d ever known was in Florida, and it now existed only in my memory; it had been twice destroyed, once by Hurricane Andrew and, more finally, by its new owners’ bulldozers. Could I stay somewhere for two years, longer? And could that simple, static act make a city my home?

  It is hard to answer this question looking forward. Homes, after all, are places where the past collects in pockets, where a memory might ambush you at any tiled or carpeted coordinate. Until my family’s Miami home was destroyed, I’d walk into a closet, and 1985 would flash into view: my young father on a ladder, gushing sweat in December, getting down the artificial tree. Or I’d catch the septic whiff of low tide and remember, for some reason, my siblings and I burying our toothbrushes in the junglelike backyard. Time rippled into form, a menagerie of moments, antlered and feathered and scaly episodes, some welcome and domestic, some feral and terrifying, all arced inside that house.

  Home to me has also meant “family,” a metaphysical spandrel created by the close proximity of five consciousnesses (seven if you counted our fat, narcoleptic dogs). Home meant sleeping in the bedroom that I shared with my siblings, snugly centered in the familiar shadows, wishing to be nowhere else. The sight of orange blossoms in the driveway, blowing like Florida snow. The ocular ticklishness of staring into the red hibiscus flowers, with their furry orange pistils. Home was a hundred black ants crawling around inside our mailbox, as if the font of the catalogs had magically come to life. Home meant knowing which drawer to open. It meant not jumping at the sight of tiny lizards glued to the shower door. The ubiquitous smell of water—salt water, Miami weather. That smell of rain, recent and imminent. Home meant everyone in your family asleep under one roof. A terrific collective vulnerability, grouped within the same four walls. Family still means this to me.