by Brianna Karp
“That’s not allowed?”
“Yeah. They’re not allowed to charge for their services. There are government programs that offer the same assistance for free. These homeowners are so desperate and ignorant, they’ll fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars to our clients, in exchange for a promise that they’ll talk to the homeowner’s bank and arrange a payment plan. Then they usually take the money and run.”
I was horrified.
“But…but we’re helping them!”
He shrugged.
“It’s not illegal to make a website. Sure, we know what it’s for, but they’re the ones actually running the scams. If you want to blame anyone, blame the dumbass homeowners who don’t do a little research and learn to protect themselves from being scammed.”
I couldn’t bring myself to accept it, though. The company I worked for was making money by helping scam artists fleece people who were about to lose their homes, like me. There were plenty of other, reputable industries out there that we could have focused on, but the company marketed its web design services to loan modification companies specifically. We were profiting, and not particularly indirectly, off others’ misery.
I wigged out and told Matt everything. I didn’t have another job lined up, but I didn’t want to stay. He was creeped out by the entire thing, too, but encouraged me to keep the job until I could find work elsewhere.
“It’s shady, but you can’t get in trouble with the law for it, and if you leave now, you’ll be out the paycheck, and you need it.”
Besides, he reminded me, I wasn’t doing any of the web design work myself. I was just the coffee-getter, the girl who submitted employees’ paperwork for their choice between Kaiser Permanente or Blue Cross health insurance and the one who tallied up and crunched the numbers at the end of the week.
It was true, but I still felt dirty.
Matt and I were still coming to terms with our burgeoning romance. We decided that maybe I’d travel to Scotland in September, if I could save up the money, and go on the homeless hike with him and Jon. Though we eventually let Jon in on the secret, after a few weeks, we decided not to make our relationship public yet. We knew we were in love, but we danced around the word—speaking in euphemisms for it. It didn’t feel right to say it to each other over a computer. We wanted to meet in person, to make sure everything we were feeling across a couple of computer screens was as real and powerful as we suspected.
As the weeks went by, we realized that there was no way we were going to last until September. It was crazy and rash and irrational, but we had to meet. Being apart was too difficult. I began scraping together whatever I could spare from my paychecks, and he from his benefit checks. Perhaps in a month or two we could make something happen.
Fezzik was not looking well. He was always very happy to see me, but he was also depressed and lethargic, and he’d lost a lot of weight, which was really bothering me. I asked the kennel to ramp up his feeding.
“Oh…so, you’re saying that you would rather we give him two feedings a day instead of one?” My brain promptly exploded in a series of cartoonish destruction flashes.
“How much have you been feeding him?”
I pressed the unenthusiastic kennel drone until she finally admitted…
“One cup a day.” That was all that Fezzik had been getting.
Just for reference, adult Neapolitan Mastiffs should be eating eight to ten cups of food each day. It was no wonder that Fezzik was rapidly skeletonizing, practically in front of my eyes. My dog was starving.
What kind of fucking morons were these people? And now they wanted to charge me extra for extra feeding—an extra dollar per cup. Wasn’t that why I was already paying so much more to board him than I would for a smaller dog?!
I pumped the pimply teenager at the desk for info like she was a terror suspect, tied to a chair and interrogated under a lightbulb. I learned that (contrary to what I had been told when checking Fezzik in) he was not being exercised daily. Apparently that would cost me extra, too, even though the other receptionist had told me when I first boarded him that it was included.
Fezzik was spending every day in a four-by-twelve-foot dog run, and his nights in a four-by-four-foot cage. At least with me, he had a thirty-foot trailer to roam in—more than twice the space he now had. He’d lost a ton of weight, was blowing coat and his nose was raw from rubbing it on his kennel door.
I cried for hours that evening. It made me so angry to see my dog rapidly decline like this. He was so much better off with me, and yet I was paying for them to starve him.
I didn’t want to make a scene, but I was livid. Ruefully, I forked over nearly all the cash I had on me for the extra feeding, and then immediately began looking for somewhere else to move Fezzik. Again.
Several of my blog followers put out a Twitter call for help for Fezzik. Eventually, a friend of a friend of a friend came up with a solution. I was on the verge of having a breakdown when the message arrived in my inbox. There was a woman who could board Fezzik for next to nothing. Her name was Maryse-Noelle Sage, though everybody called her just plain “Sage.” She was a warm, tiny, hippie-esque, New Age-y woman with waist-long blond hair. She was perhaps in her forties but looked much younger, due to her natural diet and the exercise that inevitably comes with constant dog/horse rescue. Sage ran her own photography and ad agency—sagency.net—lived on a quasi-rural lot in Riverside and would end up playing a very important role in Matt’s and my lives.
I didn’t realize this at the time, though. What I did learn on that first visit was that Fezzik will chase chickens. And horses (but only if they run). You’d think a few well-aimed kicks in the general region of his head would dissuade him, but nooooooo. He came running to me whining for about a second and a half before deciding to see if his next attempt would go any better.
Idiot dog. I love him so.
I filed the previous year’s tax return with H&R Block, rather than doing it myself and waiting eight weeks to receive my refund in the mail, for the simple reason of sheer fucking immediacy. I needed money now, and I’d rather H&R Block take a ridiculously high chunk of it and hand over the rest within twenty-four hours, than try to figure out how to survive on peanuts until my next paycheck. Part of the tax return money went into the “get together with Matt for sex” fund. Yes, it’s completely shallow, but along with being in love and all, I really wanted to get laid. Our increasingly frequent “frisky” gchats only made both of us hornier. There, I said it.
We had started speaking over the phone as well, when we could scrape up enough minutes. He’d heard my voice before, in the video interview, but I’d never heard his until now. He sounded younger than I had expected, and occasionally I had to struggle to understand him—the distortion of the phone connection, in addition to his Portsmouth accent, induced frequent and recurring exclamations of “I’m sorry, what?!” from me. We would then laugh nervously and he would repeat himself. The first phone conversation was the hardest and the most tense. We’d already spent upwards of a hundred hours in one another’s company online, but neither of us were “phone people.” I think we both also wondered whether the magic connection would hold up as well in person, and the phone was a precursor of that, a harbinger of things to come.
We were both so terrified at first. The conversation lasted for about ten minutes (I was on a break at work) and concluded with him saying quickly, “Well, it was nice to speak with you. Good bye.” It sounded so formal, and I briefly worried that that was it—he was having second thoughts. I hurried back to my work computer, where a gtalk message was waiting for me.
“Oh, my god, did I really just say, ‘Nice to speak with you?’ I’m so sorry, I feel like such an ass. I was just so nervous. I’m really not a phone person! I adore you. Get back to work! Talk tonight at Starbucks!”
I laughed, and everything went back to the way it had been before the phone call. Over time, we became just as comfortable over the phone as in person. Depending on o
ur finances at any given moment, we could talk for an hour or longer before grudgingly hanging up the phone.
“I don’t want to go. I want you to stay.”
“Me, too. When can I talk to you every day, without having to hang up? This sucks.”
“It does suck.”
It felt fantastic. If the two most antiphone people in the world could handle this, then there was no stopping us.
I was very good at keeping my homelessness a secret from people at work. I had opened a P.O. box and was using the post office address as my physical address for job-related paperwork, with the box number as my “apartment number.” The mail was delivered to the box just the same.
I had my routine down pat. Wake up early, shower at Planet Fitness, make it to work long before everybody else so that my hair had a chance to dry, do my job and head home. I kept my work life and my personal life very separate and didn’t usually bother making friends at work. At the end of the day, I wanted to switch off that part of my life. I wasn’t the type to go out for drinks after work with coworkers. There was only one occasion when I can remember my two lives bleeding into each other.
It was an employee’s birthday, so my boss took the staff out to a local Persian restaurant for some congratulatory falafel. Since the recession was such a popular topic at the time, the conversation soon took that turn. Before I knew what was happening, my boss’s partner exclaimed, “I just don’t get it! There’s absolutely no reason for anybody, even in this economy, to be homeless. I have lots of friends who’ve been laid off. They’re not homeless yet. They’re looking for new jobs. The only reason for anybody to be homeless, ever, is because they’re lazy.”
He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms smugly. I felt my blood begin to boil.
I cleared my throat. “I’m homeless. Do you think that I’m lazy?”
A hush swept across the table. Fuck, I was in for it now. But I didn’t care. Let them fire me. I couldn’t keep quiet while someone was slandering homeless people. Lazy? Why would a lazy person ever choose this life? You couldn’t be both lazy and homeless. You wouldn’t survive a week. I knew far lazier people who lived in mansions and thought work meant sitting in your office and playing solitaire while ripping off the ideas of younger, poorer, more talented underlings.
The pause seemed interminable. Then, the girl next to me, a coworker I’d spoken to maybe twice since starting, piped up, “My boyfriend and I lived out of our car for several months last year.”
The boss and his partner seemed shaken.
“You never told us that.”
“Of course not. Who hires a homeless person?”
“Right,” I agreed. “There’s such a stigma about it. You had such great things to say about my résumé and my cover letter when you called me in. You told me that I was far more coherent and articulate than hundreds of other applicants for the position, and that was why you wanted to hire me. But would you still have wanted to hire me if I came branded with the word homeless?”
I didn’t lose my job that day, as I’d feared. But it did set everyone at that table to thinking, and I was glad that I could at least do that. And they all wanted answers to the usual questions—how I came to work looking clean, looking normal. I’d allowed my coworkers to learn a little more about me, and I guess at least I was able to challenge the preconceived notions of a small group of people, made them question their initial perceptions.
Matt and I were also learning more and more about each other, opening up the darker sides of ourselves. We wanted each other to know all our flaws and weaknesses. I had plenty of skeletons in my closet, obviously. Besides “Oh, hey, I was a sexually and physically abused cult member for the first eighteen years of my life,” I also had to open up to him about the other traumatic events in my past.
I had been date-raped at nineteen, I explained to him when I felt ready. I thought back to the event. I had met the guy—little more than a kid—out swing-dancing with a friend in my performing swing troupe. The friend was blonde and gorgeous, used to soaking up attention from men everywhere she went. For some reason, though, this boy had kept coming back to me for more and more dances. I couldn’t fathom why he took an interest in me, but I agreed to go on a casual date with him the following week. We saw Spider-Man 2, and ended the evening with a chaste peck on the cheek and a handshake.
I didn’t expect to hear from him again, and was surprised when he texted me and invited me out to lunch at a nearby rib joint. I agreed, but over the meal explained that I didn’t feel ready for a relationship at the time, and hoped we could just be friends who hung out. He amiably agreed, and then invited me back to his apartment to watch a baseball game with his roommate. When we arrived at the apartment, the roommate was nowhere to be found. We watched the baseball game, and I stood up to go afterward. He stood up with me, grabbing me and roughly kissing me. I started to protest frantically and push him away. He was stronger, a former athlete in high school, and I found myself dragged into his room and pushed facedown onto the carpet as he pulled off my jeans and ran his fingers up the back of my legs, the softness of his caress in direct contrast to the other hand holding me down by the back of the neck in an iron grip. I began to cry, and he ripped off my purple lace underwear with pink edging. It was a cheap, ninety-nine-cent thong and the strings snapped like they were candy floss. I would never wear thongs again. He threw his entire weight onto me, thrusting roughly into me, and I began to scream, begging him to please stop.
The screaming rattled him, I think. He pulled out hastily, mumbling apologies and running into the bathroom, presumably to finish himself off. I scrambled to my feet, snot pouring from my face, and pulled my jeans on, stumbling toward the door. I bolted, jumping in the Honda Magna that I drove at the time and speeding away, never hearing from the guy again. I drove home, changed my clothes and then went to a swing dancing lesson with my performing troupe in the park, pushing the day’s occurrences deep down into some far corner of myself. We had a show coming up in a month and it was important that I be at practice and not let them down.
For months, I convinced myself that it was my fault. I didn’t go to the police because I had doubts as to whether what had happened even counted as rape, or was it just a matter of a dumb kid losing control and making a mistake? I had somehow led him on. Because of me, he had gotten carried away. He hadn’t meant to rape me; it had just happened. It was a holdover from the old Jehovah’s Witness implication that the woman is always asking for it. If a Jehovah’s Witness woman is raped and doesn’t scream, then the elders at the judicial committee must not count it as rape, but adultery, and the woman is considered to have consented. She is then held to be at fault just as much as if she had chosen the path of fornication, and she’s punished accordingly. I had screamed, true, but the dubious mentality still held. I was unsure as to whether I had screamed loud enough, or if putting myself in the situation of being alone with a “worldly” boy was, in itself, enough to condemn me. By the same token, I was afraid of condemning him, of being a female accuser pitting her word against a man’s. The submissive-to-all-males mind-set was—is—more deeply ingrained than I’d ever realized.
The other part of my past that I wanted Matt to know about, because it was something I was ashamed of—and I wanted him to know everything about me, to make sure he could really love me warts and all—was a threesome I had taken part in when I was twenty-one. I had spent a year and a half in North Carolina, desperately trying to escape my past. While there, I befriended a couple who, I later learned, were looking to experiment with their first ménage-à-trois. When they made the proposal to me, I laughed it off. Despite no longer being a virgin, I still held onto many vestiges of JW morality, plus there was no way I wanted to put myself into a can-of-worms situation like that. Besides, I had never been attracted to women, and the “girl-on-girl” scene just wasn’t my cup of tea. I was slowly overcoming the antihomosexual prejudices that the Watchtower Society had embedded in me from birth�
��even had a few gay friends—but the idea of the act itself was still repugnant and would take a couple more years to get over completely.
The couple did what any self-respecting couple would do, I guess. They smiled and said that they totally understood, no biggie, we could still hang out and be friends. Then, a few weeks later, I went through a bout of depression (rural North Carolina was absolutely the most isolating place I have ever lived, and it was taking its toll on my psyche). They invited me over to watch movies. We put on Cinema Paradiso and they plied me with Smirnoff Ice wine coolers. After four or five of them, I was feeling pretty happy. Before I realized fully what was happening, the man was grazing up against me, kissing my neck, stroking my body. The girl joined in, and I guess you could say the whole thing just sort of happened. I was lonely, I was isolated, I was unloved and suddenly there was some sort of human contact. No matter how much I objected to the form that human contact took, when it came down to it, I was simply incapable of refusing it at the time. I’m not proud of the frame of mind that led me to that point, but there you go. At the same time, I’m no longer ashamed of it. It was what it was—a lost kid experimenting a little. Hardly unique or earth-shattering.
A week later, the couple, who had been together for two years, broke up. I was miserable. I was sure that it was somehow all my fault. I felt I tainted everybody I came into contact with. I moved back to California soon afterward.
Now I was in therapy dealing with all the crap in my past as best I could. The clinic provided services on a sliding scale. I’d been seeing my therapist, Lindsay, since before I became homeless, but once I began living in a parking lot, my therapy sessions went from $20 an hour to free! Lindsay was remarkably nonjudgmental. I had been skeptical of therapy, but slowly I came out of my shell with her. I credit her with helping to mold me into a far better, stronger person. I’m in no way perfect, but I made tremendous strides under her guidance, and became far less of a blubbering, nervous wreck than when I had first entered counseling.