by Brianna Karp
Matt monitored keywords on Twitter. Any time the word homeless or homelessness was tweeted, his Google Reader picked up on it. He was sifting through that day, at the exact same moment I grumpily sent out my first tweet, and amid the myriad daily offerings of “If a turtle has no shell, is it homeless?” and “Oh my god, I just saw a homeless guy with a cell phone! How is that possible?!” he saw my tweet. After reading the few blog entries I had already posted, he began following me, and I gratefully returned the favor, feeling slightly less dumb now that I had my first Twitter pal.
“I read your work, and I really enjoyed it. I’d like to have you do a guest post or two on my site, if you’re willing, one of these days,” he wrote.
It was something to do, in between looking for work, and if he thought it could do anybody any good, I was happy to oblige. His site looked pretty great, too. I respected the concept of the work he was doing. The single photo of him on his profile page was a bit shadowy, but I saw that he was kind of cute, in a sad-eyed, resigned sort of way.
Matt and I exchanged email addresses so that we could correspond without the inconvenience of a 140-character limit. Although I eventually told him my real name, once we’d emailed enough to the point where I trusted him, he set up an anonymous bio for me at HomelessTales.com. He would soon publish my first piece for the site—an essay about bad choices versus just plain rotten luck when you’re homeless. It was mainly about how nobody is impervious to homelessness, how you don’t know a person’s backstory by looking at her or why she became homeless and the importance of withholding judgment as to which homeless people are “deserving” of help and which aren’t, including those who use drugs or may have made poor life choices previously.
The piece was far from Shakespeare. It was plenty flawed, and perhaps more than a little naïve in parts. But I felt there was much truth in it. And I did seem to make something of a splash among the more established authors on the site, who debated my ideas more fiercely than I’d expected. Some agreed with certain points I’d made; to others I was an inexperienced girl born with a silver spoon in my mouth, merely playing at homelessness. I hadn’t yet paid my dues. I knew nothing about the seamier side of things.
I think what they hadn’t expected was that I would agree with them. “You’re right. I am new at it. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m figuring it out as I go along, and I do have a lot of assets and advantages that many homeless people don’t have. But, then, isn’t that the point? We all have different pasts, but for whatever reason, we’re all homeless. There are as many perspectives on homelessness as there are people who are homeless. Mine is just another viewpoint on it, reflecting a particular set of circumstances. I’m here to make friends, learn from you and your stories, and contribute however I can.”
I meant it, too. I think my earnestness disarmed them. I figured out pretty quickly that I could hold my own there, and even befriended the ones who had been the most suspicious of me at the start.
Matt, I noticed, was normally very reserved and restrained when commenting on discussions and debates. He clearly considered himself a moderator first, and strove to remain as neutral and above the fray as possible. He always considered his words carefully and refrained from betraying emotion on his site. It wasn’t lost on me, then, that he was rather quick to jump to my defense when I was criticized. Occasionally I would consider for about a second and a half that he might be interested in me. But then I would laugh it off. It was a stupid premise. Clearly, he was just being kind and protective of the youngest writer on the site, the baby who couldn’t defend herself. It was sweet.
I’m still not quite sure how it started. Soon we were exchanging three to four emails a day, and suddenly, I was yearning for the next morsel of correspondence. If I only received three in a day from him, rather than four, I was disappointed. We connected over shared loves of architecture, literature, film…and also over our mutual traumas. I opened up bit by bit about my past, and so did he. He marveled at it.
“American girls aren’t supposed to be like you. You’re all supposed to be airheads over there. You’re not supposed to be interested in any of this stuff.” I would laugh, and tease him about his misconceptions.
He was thirty-six years old and divorced. He and his wife, Victoria, had been together for five years, and married for less than two, when he came home early from work one day, on the second anniversary of his proposing to her in Prague, and she announced that she wanted a divorce. It wasn’t him, it was her. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but she just felt as if she had married too young and had missed out on too many life experiences, so she’d like to get off the ride now, please. It was, he said, completely out of the blue and had set off the chain of events that made him homeless. She had moved out immediately, but sentimentally refused to consent to sell their house. He couldn’t afford to continue paying the mortgage on a single salary, and the bank soon started foreclosure proceedings.
He had fought to save the marriage, he said, but she refused to be moved. He didn’t handle the separation well at all. He would have breakdowns or sometimes even tantrums at work. His company soon put him on an extended leave of absence until he could pull himself together. He was diagnosed by a doctor with abnormally low serotonin levels, he explained to me, which not only wreaked havoc on his sleep schedule, but caused him to behave irrationally (basically, my trusty Google explained to me, it causes bipolar disorder symptoms), explaining the uncontrollable outbursts at work. The doctor put him on medication that gradually worked to even out the serotonin levels, but it would take a month before he was stabilized.
Out of his mind with grief and illness, Matt gave away almost all of his possessions to charity the week before the bank was set to evict him from his home. He packed a suitcase with an old laptop and a few other belongings, and walked out the door. For several months, he slept in the woods on some nights, in hostels on others.
A girl named Lori, whom he had met in the months between the breakup of his marriage and his becoming homeless, and who had a major crush on him, contacted him out of the blue to see how he was doing, and he explained some of the particulars of his situation. She was moving back to Peterhead, Scotland with her stepfather and offered for him to stay with them. He had nowhere to go, and he accepted. He stayed there for three weeks or so, and even halfheartedly began a romance with her, which she had hoped for all along. Still, he explained, he just wasn’t happy with her. He couldn’t bring himself to love her. She was incredibly dull and he couldn’t hold any kind of a serious conversation with her. It was like being in a relationship with a ten-year-old, he said. The house was also in a condemnable state, and he didn’t like her stepfather. After the three weeks were up, he told Lori he was sorry, but he just couldn’t see a future with her, and he felt that he needed to move on. He moved into temporary hostel accommodations before the local council offered him permanent housing in the small rural village of Huntly, fifty miles away. He accepted, and had been there for a month or two when we met.
March 6, my twenty-fourth birthday, I spent the day with Brandon at Disneyland—it was local and they had a “get in free on your birthday” program, which I intended to take full advantage of. Standing in line at the entry, I checked my email on my phone. Matt had emailed me a Happy Birthday wish, and a jpeg of a morning glory—my favorite flower. He signed it “Matt xx.” I spent the rest of the day on Splash Mountain and Space Mountain and the Matterhorn and Indiana Jones, trying to figure out what he meant by those two xs. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to seriously consider that, despite the secret schoolgirl crush I harbored on him, perhaps he might be interested in me as more than a contributor on his site. I was petrified. I was also too much of a wimp to ask him straight out. So I did what any wimp would do—continued our email correspondence as before, without referencing those two enigmatic electronic kisses.
Many people have questioned my responsibility and/or sanity for keeping an animal while homeless, especially
a giant dog like Fezzik. There were several reasons, though, that I wanted to at least try to keep Fezzik. First of all, I had a source of income. I was on extended unemployment for at least eight months, or until I found work, so I was, thus far, fully able to pay for my dog’s food, treats, toys and even vet bills, should the need arise. Second, I had shelter. Living out of a thirty-foot trailer is a luxury that many homeless people do not have. I did not keep Fezzik cramped up in a car, or on the side of the road on a leash. He had a crate as his den and a nice wide trailer to stretch his legs in. Third, the Brea Walmart is within walking distance of a tri-city park, a large, green expanse with a lake, where Fez and I would go walking every day. There were eight acres of trees and grass for him to sniff, ducks for him to look at and nice fishermen and children to pat his head.
“What a big, beautiful boy!” they exclaimed, and I beamed with pride.
I always knew, though, that were my situation ever to deteriorate and become more dire, I would contact the rescue from which I adopted Fezzik and make arrangements to return him. I love my dog. He is a source of companionship and comfort, and he is definitely a means of protection for a woman in a vulnerable state (people give me a wide berth on the sidewalk—you don’t want to mess with a dog that looks like Fez). But when it came down to it, I realized that I should and would send him back in a heartbeat if I couldn’t provide for his needs. So far, he had not had to endure a single day without food, water, exercise and love. I hoped that would always be the case.
The topic of homeless people and their pets is such a hot-button one that Matt asked me to write a column at HomelessTales.com about it. It was another controversial column and inspired a lot of discussion, which was what Matt had intended. For all my confidence, however, I knew that summer was rapidly approaching, and that in the deadly California heat, there would be no way I could continue leaving Fezzik alone in the trailer, especially all day while I worked. He would broil to death. I had a short reprieve, but I needed to get a job and get out of that parking lot fast, or else find somewhere else for my dog.
Around this time, I came home one night to a notice taped to the window of my trailer threatening to “evict” me:
WALMART DOES NOT ALLOW OVERNIGHT PARKING!!!
MOVE OR YOU WILL BE TOWED!!!
It turned out that a newer moron on the lot did some really stupid things, such as running his noisy generator around 1:00 a.m., littering all around his trailer and un-hooking his trailer from his vehicle and leaving it in the parking lot while driving around in his truck, thereby technically “abandoning” a vehicle. Not only did he do all this, but he did it while Walmart corporate executives were visiting the store, and they took notice.
Five or six RVs fled that night in search of greener pastures, with no idea where to go. A few other trailer dwellers and I stuck around, and two of us (myself and Pete, the “mayor” of the Walmart parking lot, who had lived there for four months and counting) went into Walmart in the morning to speak to the manager. I showered and put on a business suit before going in. Pete wore one of his limousine driver tuxedos, which I thought was a tad over the top, but he definitely didn’t “look” stereotypically homeless, that’s for sure.
The manager was the same woman I had spoken to over the phone in the first place, and she was nice enough. “Oh, wow. You don’t look homeless.”
That was kind of the point. “Corporate visited yesterday, that’s all. When they visit, they always send someone out to post those flyers on the RVs. Luckily they don’t even bother leaving notices for the homeless living out of cars and vans—just the trailers. It doesn’t mean much, we never actually tow anybody.”
For good measure, Pete showed the lady all the Walmart receipts he had accrued, demonstrating just how much business the store got from allowing him to stay. I explained that we were quiet and kept to ourselves, never littered and so on. I explained that I was not a “bum,” and that I, too, bought supplies from Walmart. I just needed a place to park while I transitioned out of this, and that was why I had called ahead to make sure that would be OK.
She told us that we seemed nice and respectful, and recommended that we just stay in the parking lot. She reiterated that the store managers would not call the police on us or have us towed—they didn’t want to have to pay hefty fees to tow giant RVs out, plus, they really had no problem with our being there as long as we didn’t draw attention to ourselves. It was just the corporate office’s beef, and they had left already. She said that if someone filed a complaint with the police, or the police came by of their own accord to speak to us, they would most likely only ask us to move, not ticket or tow us. She said that if that happened, she would recommend moving to another Walmart a few cities over, or to Sam’s Club, for a night or two. Then we could come back.
So we stayed, and there were no further problems or requests to leave. I felt terrible for the people they scared out of there with those mean flyers, though. I wondered where they went.
Sadly, the Lord of the Generator was not one of the ones that left. You’d think he could take a hint.
In early March, I was offered a position as an executive assistant at a small web design company of five people. The pay was nothing near what I had been making at KBB—the hiring manager blamed it on the recession, of course—but I didn’t care. I needed a job, and I was humble enough to take anything that paid more than unemployment.
I stopped filing for unemployment benefits as soon as I was hired, but I had yet to receive any of the checks for the previous several months for which I had filed claims—there were so many “unavoidable delays” and it was nearly impossible to get through via telephone with the swarms of unemployed people in California bogging down the lines. The Employee Development Department (EDD) also didn’t have an answering machine, or a Hold line: If you called while all the lines were busy, which they always were, they would ask you to hang up and please try again. After spending several hours straight hitting the Redial button and hoping for good luck, I gave up and resorted to contacting them via email about the problem, which often resulted in a canned response, bearing little to no relation to my problem, or no response at all.
I sighed it off. I would continue pursuing the EDD for all my back checks, but in the meantime, I had something. I had a job. There would be options for me very soon, in the future. Matt was the first person I emailed to share the news.
Brandon and my best female friend, Sonia, were the only two people in my life aware that I was living in a parking lot. Nobody else knew, not even my own family, who hadn’t given any further thought to where I was going next, after watching me trailer off bumpily into the sunset. Brandon and Sonia agreed that I could mention them in my blog, and I offered them their choice of pseudonym. Brandon chose “Dwight.”
“What, like Dwight from The Office?” I asked incredulously. He seemed wounded.
“No, like Dwight from Sin City!”
“Ah.” Brandon didn’t remotely resemble Clive Owen, even if Clive Owen had been Asian, but OK. Dwight it was.
Sonia couldn’t think up a pseudonym.
“Just call me whatever,” she said. She was too busy working on becoming the first Bangladeshi soldier in the U.S. Army to focus on trifling things like pseudonyms. We had known one another since junior high school, when her family had immigrated to California. Sonia is a tiny, delicate girl with lovely huge eyes and the longest, curliest, blackest hair you’ve ever seen. She looks like some kind of fairy-tale princess. I was scared to death for her, and begged her not to go into the military. I just knew they’d somehow break her in half with all that boot camp stuff. But she was bound and determined, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. She would be leaving for boot camp in May, so I had less than two months to spend with her. I decided to rechristen her on the blog after one of her favorite actresses, Aishwarya Rai.
“Oh my gosh, really? Stop insulting Aishwarya. I don’t look anything like her. Pick something more low key” is all she wou
ld say, eternally humble and self-disparaging.
On a whim, Sonia and I drove out to Hollywood one night to see the movie Sunshine Cleaners at the only California theater in which it was currently playing before going into wide release. The movie was great—touching and funny. I knew going in that it was a dramedy about sisters who start a crime scene cleanup business, and I figured that parts of it might remind me of recent events, but I hadn’t expected the opening sequence, in which a man walks into a sporting goods store, asks to see a .20 gauge shotgun, and promptly sticks it under his chin and blows his brains out right there. I suppose it hit a little bit too close to home for me.
Also hitting close to home was Amy Adams in a role that just wrenched my gut. At one point, she says, “I’m good at getting men to want me…not date me or marry me…but want me.” I wanted to start bawling right there. It was one of the rare public bouts of self-pity that I indulged in, and I went to Starbucks the next morning and wrote an in-depth blog about just how crummy it felt to wonder if it would ever be possible for anyone to love me.
Matt wrote me that evening, as usual.
“I read your latest blog post. It almost brought me to tears. It saddens me to know that you suffer such feelings. I can empathize to some extent, knowing what it feels like not to be loved back. Impossible to fully comprehend though what it must be like to endure it repetitively and exclusively. I know it sounds somewhat trite, but it really will happen for you someday. I realize I don’t know you that well, but I’ve seen enough to know that you have a great deal to offer and I have no doubt that sooner or later (and probably sooner) someone will discover your true worth.”