by Brianna Karp
I returned to my mother’s house hours later. She was locked in her room, but Joe had taken some of the money from her and handed it to me. It was about $300. “You’ll need this. I was able to get you an extension. Five days. That’s how long you can stay here. After that, you need to make other arrangements.”
His jaw solidified in anger or anguish, I’m not sure which.
“Why, Bri? Why couldn’t you just agree to pay her the extra money?”
I was bowled over.
“But…I don’t owe her that money. I proved it. If she had needed money, she could have asked. You know I would have lent or even given it to her anyway. I always do. It was wrong of her to steal it, and to make up lies about the amount owed. And I’m not going to admit to lying or stealing just to placate her. You seriously want me to sell out and say in front of her, in front of you, ‘Yes, I’m a liar, and a thief, and I’m bailing on my debt to you,’ when that’s completely false? It’s wrong, Dad! Don’t you get that?!”
“Fine. I hope you’re happy. Sometimes you have to capitulate in order to keep the peace. You know what she’s like, and if you were smart you would have just forked over the money and kept your mouth shut.”
“Did you even hear the part where she said that I should shoot myself? She’s lucky I walked out. I don’t even know what I could have done to her right then, if I hadn’t walked out.”
“Well, now, that was uncalled for. She shouldn’t have said that. But still, you’ve brought this on yourself.”
I had never felt so alone or so aggravated. The veins in my head throbbed. I was so tired of crying and thinking and trying to wrap my head around the insane world of lies and power plays that my mother lived in, and the wimpy pacifier—even to the point of being stepped on and stolen from—that was Joe.
I snapped. “You know, Dad, you helped create this. You knew she was a monster, a sick person, and yet over and over you left us with her! You couldn’t stand to be with her yourself, you were so full of relief and calm and peace every time she threw you out, because you couldn’t stand to be with her, so why did you leave us with her? We were kids! And she abused me, abused us—Moll got to watch it all for years and deal with the guilt of letting her big sister fry, so why did you do it?”
He was caught. His jaw dropped open.
“I…I didn’t know. I wasn’t around when a lot of that stuff was happening. I only learned about it later.” He sounded subdued, tired, humbled. Guilty.
“You were around when plenty of it was happening. The school sent a goddamn social worker to the house because I had a lump on my head and left a pool of blood on my chair, bled straight through my pants, where she had lacerated my ass to fucking mincemeat! How could you leave us with that thing and still sleep at night?”
It was true. The overweight bottle-blonde had visited our home twice before, declaring my mother’s actions (the result of my lack of comprehension as she tried to explain my long division homework to me) a one-time slip and closing our case. Though a teacher had reported my state to the authorities, my parents blamed me and told me that now it was my fault they could never take in any foster children from the state, as they had hoped. Though I would twice be kicked out of my house at ages fifteen and seventeen—both times scooped up by Josh Bogy, a friend from high school, and put up for extended periods of time at the home of his best friend David Roth, another high school pal who is now a brilliant up-and-coming law student—and Troy High School would become aware of my abuse, no teacher or other authority figure would ever again rise to my defense by reporting this state of affairs to the police or Social Services. My mother’s reputation for wrath and threats preceded her and had become well-established with the school’s administrative staff, who were quite frankly exasperated by the entire situation and desperately wanted nothing more than to be kept out of the drama.
Like so many people in my life up until this point, Joe had no answer to my questions. I was no stranger to frustration with him, but now I wanted, for the first time ever, to hit him.
Chapter Six
I had only a small handful of close friends. Trusting people has been difficult for me for a very long time, so I tend to value quality over quantity. There wasn’t anybody who could take me in, and I knew it. The few people I knew either lived at home with their parents or with roommates, and had no spare space to take in an extra person, much less the inclination to harbor Fezzik as well.
Burdening others with my problems was one of the fears foremost in my mind. The 2008–2009 recession was in full force, and everyone’s world seemed to be crumbling around their ears. Many of my friends had lost their jobs as it was, or were struggling to hold onto their positions as their companies hinted at layoffs. None of us seemed to have the time, money or energy to spend with one another anymore; most of us kept in touch via Facebook status updates and semiannual emails. Relationships had been downsized, too, it seemed. All of us were simplifying our lives, stripping down to the barest necessities and going into survival mode, and I couldn’t blame anyone. I didn’t feel hurt that nobody was there to come through for me. I was in no position to expect something of that magnitude from them. They were wrapped up in their own problems and I knew that forcing one of them into a situation where they felt like a long-suffering schmuck and I felt like a selfish mooch wouldn’t help either one of us.
So I didn’t tell them what was about to happen. Some of my friends had known for years how things were with my mom; some had even witnessed her bad behavior, so they vaguely assumed that the situation of my living at my parents’ home was somewhat shaky, but when they heard I was leaving, most of them didn’t ask where I was going next, and I didn’t volunteer the information, except to my two closest friends. They assumed I’d be fine, and I felt I didn’t have the right to tell them otherwise, to put that kind of onus on them when they had so much on their plates already.
In those few days of panic, though, I realized what I did have. And I knew, almost as if by instinct, exactly what I needed to do.
Three days later, I made the 21/2-hour drive to Blythe, California. There, stored at a national park by the Colorado River, sat Bob’s 1984 thirty-foot Fan Coach travel trailer. I’d tracked down the storage location via the insurance policy, which had been among the vast amount of jumbled papers stuffed in Bob’s armoire drawer.
The park rangers were distressed to hear the news about Bob, as I produced the title transferred into my name. “Oh yeah, Bob. That’s such a shock. He used to come up here all the time,” said the mustachioed warden, shaking his head sadly. The bizarre thought occurred to me that somewhere, Bob had been liked. Even had friends.
The rangers gave me a set of spare keys and I entered the trailer. I was hit by the stench of rot and disease. It seemed to follow Bob wherever he went. I assumed that he must have done a lot of fishing and hunting up here at the park. Probably gutted and skinned the animals himself in the trailer. My kingdom for a can of Pine-Sol.
Junk piled high, filling the cabin. There was barely any walking room; tubs full of trash, coolers, spare accessories—an awning, a rusty old satellite dish—littered the floor. I was going to be carting all this out tonight, so that I could load up my own boxes.
The trailer, I had realized in a blinding epiphany, was probably my most likely asset as a source of shelter. I knew that I would have nowhere to go. There was no getting around it. Still, perhaps I didn’t have to sleep in my car.
“Can you please hitch it up to the truck for me, please? I don’t know how,” I implored, instantly switching into golly-gee-helpless-li’l-old-me mode. That occasionally came in handy, especially when I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.
“Aw, sure, little lady. Where you gonna put this thing?”
“Um…I’m going to take it to a trailer park near home,” I lied.
When you first find out that you’re going to be homeless, there’s a lot of initial prep work to be done—figuring out how to meet your barest, most essen
tial needs, and then going from there. Sleep is a pretty darn essential need—and perversely, sleeping in public is illegal just about everywhere. I mean, go figure, right? But there you go. There will always be NIMBYs calling cops, and there will always be cops telling homeless people, “It doesn’t matter where you go, but you can’t stay here.” Oh, they might sympathize, sure, but their need to follow the rules will generally win out over common sense, which dictates that a human being cannot control the need to sleep simply because she has no access to a place worth sleeping in.
It’s just as illegal to sleep in a car in public as it is to sleep on a park bench in public, but one is far less conspicuous than the other, doubles as shelter and transportation, and can be more easily hidden. Obviously, the best plan of attack, if I could manage it, was to stay under the radar in stealth mode, out of homeless shelters and off curb-sides/freeway underpasses and the like. I couldn’t believe it, but Bob’s death provided me with the Holy Grail of homelessness.
Yet where does a person put a thirty-foot travel trailer? It’s illegal to just park them on most public streets, especially overnight. I had considered a trailer park. Electricity and plumbing hookups? Yes, please. Except, I had only a few hundred dollars, and over $100 of it would go into the truck’s gas tank to get me to Blythe and back. Possibly more. The gas mileage would decrease dramatically with the heavy-ass trailer strapped onto the back, I knew. After that, I simply couldn’t afford the monthly expense of staying at a trailer park or campground. My unemployment benefits were running low and the possibility of an extension had not yet been mentioned. The price of a valid RV park—at $40 and up per day—would accumulate to nearly as much as steady rent in a cheap apartment. Which put me right back at square one. The chances that I could pull it off were slim, even without considering food and auto fuel.
I had spent two days browsing the internet frantically, googling “cheap RV campgrounds,” and then, “free RV campgrounds.” Sitting in a Starbucks with my laptop and my best friend Brandon Quan, frantically poring over alternatives, we stumbled across the Walmart policy.
For many years, Walmart has allowed traveling trailers and RVs to park in the stores’ private parking lots overnight. The practice was put into effect by Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart and an avid RVer himself. Policies varied a bit according to the individual store and local city ordinances, and store managers were allowed to interpret the rule loosely and set time limits and regulations if they wished. Still, it was a start.
I had phoned the closest Walmart store to my home, the Anaheim store. “No, sorry, we don’t allow that here. Anaheim city ordinance.”
Blegh.
I moved on to Brea Walmart. The girl who answered the phone wasn’t sure of the answers to my questions. I asked for the store manager. She transferred me to another woman. “This is Elizabeth. How may I help you?”
“Hi, Elizabeth. I was wondering if you allow trailers to park overnight in your lot. I read that a lot of Walmarts do it.”
“Yes, that’s right. You can park over in the corner, on the east side of the parking lot, at the intersection of Kramer and Imperial Highway. You’ll see the other trailers there.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I also need to know…is there a limit on the amount of time that I can stay? You see, I don’t really have anywhere to go at the moment and I may possibly be around for a while. I’m more than happy to buy my food and supplies at Walmart, of course, and give you my business. I’m just afraid of being towed or outstaying my welcome.”
She assured me that there was no reason to worry; store officials did not keep track of which RVs came and went, and as long as I stayed in the corner of the parking lot and didn’t bother customers or draw attention to myself, I could practically stay forever, if I wished.
I thanked her profusely, and hung up. I had my parking lot.
“You know,” Brandon mused thoughtfully, “you should totally start a blog or something about this.”
I scoffed. “Yeah, right. I haven’t written since my angst-filled, bad high school poetry days.”
It was true. Throughout junior high and high school I always kept a notebook with me, and would write constantly, stream-of-consciousness style. Sometimes it was completely nonsensical (but dark—ooh yes; dark, angry, Tim Burtonesque) poetry. Other times it was just rants on how much I hated my life, how alien and alone I felt at school, how much of a crush I had on that hot senior, Jason Mejia, how intense I imagined sex might actually be if only I weren’t a Jehovah’s Witness freak prohibited from having it…and so on and so on. By the time I was eighteen, I had amassed a tower of notebooks and bound journals that I hoped to look back on in a decade or so and laugh about, marvel at how far I’d hopefully come from that point. After leaving home, however, the products of my short life’s work were nowhere to be found when I unpacked. A year later, Molly would admit what I already suspected—that she and my mother had secretly gone through my moving boxes, removing items that Mom had wanted or felt entitled to. They had taken and read every one of my notebooks, then thrown them away. I was gutted. Everything I had ever thought and felt and painstakingly recorded—for a decade—was lost forever. Nothing was my own any longer, even my most private thoughts and moments. The betrayal and loss was overwhelming. I would not write again for the next six years.
“I’m not kidding,” Brandon went on. “You never know—people read this stuff.”
Laughter burst from me. One thing about Brandon, he’s always there for me, and he always knows just how to cheer me up with ridiculous ideas like that. We’d gone on a few dates back when we first met two years earlier, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I felt bad about it occasionally—if anybody would make the perfect boyfriend, it would be Brandon—but you just can’t force chemistry for whatever reason, and we ended up as best buddies instead. Oddly, it works out perfectly for us. He’s absolutely the greatest guy out there: quiet, sarcastic, highly intelligent and a film buff. We’ve watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall together more times than I can count. Plus, he holds the distinction of being the only 6-foot-6-inch Asian man I’ve ever met. If life were a movie, we’d be the two platonic confidantes who suddenly realize at the eleventh hour, after being screwed over by countless prospective jackass significant others, that we were meant to be together. But life isn’t a movie, and what we’ve got going now is just right.
Humorously going along with the joke, I opened my laptop right then and there, setting up a blogger account. “How about ‘The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness?’ Kind of like ‘The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing,’ but for women about to embark on life in a Walmart parking lot?” I stared at the screen, and then tapped out:
In three days, I will be homeless.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Brandon said, hugging me and rising from the Starbucks couch. “I gotta get home—work in the morning.”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow when I’m the world’s most famous homeless chick, all thanks to your brilliant blog idea,” I teased.
He left. I screwed my mouth sideways pensively, and then words began to pour out onto the screen, care of the anonymous pseudonym, ~B~. I liked the flourish of the framing tilde marks. In my mind, they gave me a dainty quirkiness I certainly was not feeling at the moment. Nobody would ever read this stuff anyway, and I had lost faith that I was ever any good at it in the first place. But I had forgotten how cathartic it felt to write.
In three days, I will be homeless.
This is not by choice (although many individuals before me have chosen this lifestyle and enjoyed the freedoms that it can offer, and if that’s what works for them, kudos!). Personally, I enjoy having a permanent residence and the sense of stability and security that it gives me. I look forward to living in an actual house again. However, it is what it is—in three days, I will be homeless. There are no caveats here, no ‘maybe’ or ‘unless’ or ‘possibly I can come up with something before then.’ Come Thursday, February 26, 2009, I will be making my way o
n the streets of Orange County as best I can, and I will be considered that most stigmatized of people—a homeless woman.
Initially, this idea terrified me. Here is a summary of the commentary that first ran through my head: This would never happen to me. I am not the kind of person who lives on the street. I have a life, I have friends, I have a dog, I have stable employment and a residential history, references, education, skills, talents—I have worked hard all my life to ensure stability for myself. How did this happen? HOW CAN I DO THIS?!?
So, I cried for a few hours. I cried and I let the panic run its course. Then, I started planning.
I wonder how many other people like me are out there. People who had the stereotypical idea of a homeless man or woman, who believed that it would not, could not, happen to them. The truth is, we never know the whole story. We don’t know other people’s circumstances. You can speculate that the wino sitting outside the 7-Eleven begging for change is there because he’s too lazy or stupid or uneducated or selfish or mentally ill. But will we ever truly know? Look at me. I’ve worked hard all my adult life (and throughout my adolescence), sought out a college education, worked for corporations and executives, built a life and a ‘secure’ foundation to fall back on. Yet, here I am. So, now what?
If you’re an individual in a similar situation (especially a single, vulnerable woman), I hope that by detailing my experiences in this blog, I may help you come up with tips and ideas for survival and safety for however long your present circumstances may last. Perhaps you didn’t choose for this to happen, but it is what it is. It is happening and you must stay strong and levelheaded, so that you can make opportunities happen for yourself and dig yourself out of this hole.