The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  I had never minded or even noticed our age gap before. If anything, it had unexpectedly ended up being preferable for me. My experience dating men my age had been abysmal. Most were still stuck in the noncommittal, loud, immature “frat boy” stage, and I found myself rolling my eyes far too often with them.

  I’d spent my formative years crushing on Alan Rickman while my sister and all of my school friends pined over Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. I didn’t want to swoon, I didn’t want somebody young and impulsive. I wanted literate. Cultured. Refined. Witty. Honorable. A conversationalist with the mind of a steel trap. Alan Rickman meets Atticus Finch meets Eddie Izzard meets Oscar Wilde (minus the gay part) is my ideal man. Or, you know, not. I’d be willing to settle, as long as the frat boy could at least wax philosophical about art or classic films while crushing the beer can against his forehead.

  One of the things I adored about Matt was that we were on the same level, at the same stage in our lives, and looking for nearly all the same things. Normally, I could tell how intelligent he thought I was. Normally, he was so sweet and careful about taking my feelings and input into consideration. But on this matter, it was as though he listened to everything I said, nodded his head, said, “Yes, dear,” and then went right ahead and did exactly what he was going to do anyway.

  And yet, I was afraid to push too hard, afraid to keep begging him to trust me, because then I would have been unsupportive. The last thing I wanted was to drive him away, to be a nagging shrew like my mother. So, again, I let it go. Eventually, I calmed down and my fears were allayed when he returned two weeks later. Our disagreements were rare and, when I let them go, I realized, he was apt to be more relaxed and more trusting. In hindsight, it was the right decision to back down and trust him to do the right thing. Trying so hard to be a strong woman all the time, and to set a good example for readers, occasionally made me feel tired and burned out. In every action Matt took, I knew that he sought to protect me, and it was freeing to occasionally hand over the reins every now and then to somebody else, so that I could finally allow my tensed muscles, eternally poised for fight-or-flight, to relax.

  Matt and I had picked out an engagement ring for me. It was beautiful, my dream ring, an antique, circa 1900. It straddled three of my favorite eras—Victorian, Edwardian and art nouveau. Two graceful arms set with tiny diamonds swirled around one another, meeting in the middle. We weren’t at a point where we could afford an engagement ring, but a sympathetic seller on the antiques website RubyLane.com, who was enamored of our story, offered us the pick of her shop for next to nothing. It was such a kind gesture that I wanted to weep at how good some people were.

  We weren’t required to pay anything for the ring except shipping, but I felt we should send the woman at least what we could, a small amount of money, the equivalent of four to five days’ work for me, as compensation for it. It didn’t seem like too much of a financial hit in exchange, and while I would have married Matt with a ring from a Cracker Jack box, or no ring at all, it was a nice feeling for us to have something official and traditional. I paid Victoria for the ring, since Matt wasn’t able to. I didn’t feel mooched or sponged off at all. He needed to save up for the baby and, besides, we were a team now. He was pulling his weight by helping other homeless people and promoting our sites. We’d also fallen in love with an old, Victorian fixer-upper in upstate New York that we saw online. We longed to try to purchase it one day, and if we ever got the house, we knew he’d probably be watching the kids and doing a ton of fix-it stuff while I went to work and pulled in the cash. That’s just how it is—you each bring your strengths to a relationship, and if it works for you, then fine. Sure, most people would consider it odd that I was the homeless one, yet I was the one contributing the biggest paycheck, but we found it funny. This wasn’t like Britney Spears buying her own engagement ring. This was just each of us doing what we could, doing what worked. Neither of us ever gave it a second thought.

  Matt told me to hold onto the ring and give it to him when he arrived in California. He’d keep it in its box until he was ready to ask me, officially, to marry him.

  There were a ton of paparazzi hanging around the international arrivals gate at LAX on the day that Matt came back to California—David Beckham was supposedly arriving on the same flight as Matt, one of the photographers told me, and I also saw Eric Dane (from Grey’s Anatomy) and Rebecca Gayheart (from Dead Like Me) get off while I was waiting. It was surreal, later, to see myself in the background of a tabloid paparazzi photo, but at the moment I was too excited to see Matt again to care about crossing paths with quasi-celebrities.

  I saw him first this time, and he looked up in panic to see a blurry ball of redhead bouncing at him. I screeched to a halt just before knocking him over at full speed, and then hurled myself into his arms. It was so much better now. The first time around, I had been too nervous about whether he’d like me as much in person, or whether I’d be invading his personal space. But this time, we both knew all signs were go, so we could sink into each other and kiss for what felt like hours, as the airport ground to a halt and faded around us.

  Matt and I sat in my car in the LAX parking garage, where we’d had our very first kiss before. He asked me if I had the ring box, and I pulled it out of the glove compartment and handed it to him. Unexpectedly, he opened the box and I watched, as if hovering far above us, as he slid it onto my finger. He didn’t want us to wait. He knew I was what he wanted. It was beautiful and, more important, he was beautiful and he loved me.

  The ring itself was lovely, but didn’t matter so much; it was the love obvious in the gesture that stuck with me. I was so completely certain that this was the man I wanted to spend my entire life with. I’d made plenty of fuckups in my life, but somehow I must have atoned for them, because I’d inexplicably gained this man in the end.

  I wanted a small wedding, and he was relieved by this. He’d had the grand two-hundred-person bash with his first wife and found himself swept away in the exorbitant cost and Bridezilla-ness of the entire thing. Before he’d realized what happened, he was knee-deep in about £40,000 (about $65,000) worth of debt. When I suggested that we have ten or so of our closest friends come and stand under a pretty tree somewhere while we exchanged vows, and then go have pizza and ice cream or something, he stared at me with wonder in his eyes.

  “I just can’t believe it. I don’t understand why I was lucky enough to find you. You’re amazing. I can just picture it—it’ll be beautiful. A gorgeous leafy spring day, you there in a simple dress, no frills. Just simple and perfect. All the excess junk stripped away.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, we don’t need any of that crazy, expensive stuff. I never got the point of it all. I don’t care about having chair covers, or linens to match the chair covers, or a DJ and an open bar and dancing and tons of people we barely know there. At the end of the day, all that stuff is gone and you’re still married. Isn’t that the important thing? Isn’t that what it’s all about? I just want to marry you, and to hell with the rest of it.” I meant it, too. He stared at me for so long and with so much love in his eyes that I actually felt a bit uncomfortable, blushed and looked down at my lap. He stroked my cheek and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck, pulling my head in to his chest. He held me there for a while, repeating over and over how wonderful I was, swearing that he would make me the happiest woman on earth for the rest of our lives.

  One prevalent attitude I’ve noticed toward the homeless: Many people expect them to give up every last indulgence and every last shred of fun. We should spend all our time looking for work (never mind if we already do work, or are looking for work), or perhaps standing on a freeway off-ramp begging for change, or sitting in a government aid office, hoping against hope for assistance. We should spend all our time doing this. After all, if we take any lighthearted time to ourselves at all, we must not really want to rehouse ourselves.

  I should either be working, searching for work or otherw
ise appropriately ragged, depressed and undignified, befitting my station, is that it? I should give up absolutely everything to prove just how much I deserve a home, and just how sorry I am for whatever I have done “wrong” that “made” me homeless in the first place.

  While I agree that it certainly behooves homeless people to spend their time and resources wisely, and set goals and priorities for themselves, there is an inherent human need for recreation, for relaxation, for fun. Everyone needs time to unwind, and that goes double for a homeless person, because there is little more stressful than this life. Priorities are individual, and I do not believe that the occasional bit of fun should be at the bottom of the heap for anybody, much less that homeless people should be judged harshly if they sometimes choose it.

  My fiancé was home again and I was thrilled, so I dragged him to a local Renaissance Faire for a day. Admission was cheap, and the proceeds benefited equine rescue, the local humane society and a nonprofit theater troupe—all causes I cared about. I got to gnaw on a freakishly large turkey leg and watch men in tights and armor joust on some lovely Percherons (rescued, of course). I also got to enjoy the supreme pleasure of watching Matt unwind and enjoy himself. He stifled his laughter at the overexaggerated British accents, but his (real) English accent clearly didn’t register with nearly anybody, and certainly didn’t seem to impress them.

  We were living practically on top of each other, and summer was in full force, but Matt and I were as much in love as ever. The heat occasionally made us testier with each other, but even on the rare occasions where we argued, we always fought fair. There was no hitting below the belt, we resolved things quickly and we understood each other, or at least strove to. Our fights were pretty constructive, never nasty. There was never even the slightest hint or suggestion between us of throwing in the towel. We understood that we loved each other, we were in it for the long haul and, dammit, we both wanted to make it work.

  One particularly excruciatingly hot day, we were both at our breaking point. We were stripped down to our underwear, lying spread-eagle on the mattress, sweating profusely and trying not to touch each other, lest our shared body heat turn into the straw that broke the camel’s back. Suddenly, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. I loved Matt so much, but hated the rest of it, hated not being able to take us straight from a trailer into at least a tiny apartment with working air-conditioning. I couldn’t bear to lie in the heat for a single second longer. If I stayed in this trailer, on this lot, for another second, I would scream until I collapsed.

  Without a word, I stood up and threw on the lightest clothes I could find.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to Starbucks. You can come, or you can stay, but I can’t handle this anymore. I hate it here. I hate it! I hate it!” I began to cry, and grabbed my laptop, running out of the trailer and jumping into the car. He followed.

  At Starbucks, it was so different. We picked out cushy chairs next to each other, and held hands affectionately as we continued working, until the sun went down and it was cool enough to return to the trailer.

  “I think we both needed that,” he said as he held me that night. “I feel just the way you do, you know. I’m so grateful that we have somewhere to go, but I can’t wait until we’re out of here and have someplace of our own. We can’t do this forever, can we?”

  From then on, whenever we were too hot or tired or stressed to deal with the trailer for another second, one of us would shout, “Starbucks break!” It was one of the very few ways that we could pretend that life was normal (and air-conditioned) for a little longer.

  Chapter Thirteen

  A writer with the local newspaper had heard about my story and expressed an interest in doing a piece on me. I met with her but declined to be interviewed for the piece when she made it clear that her editor would only run the article if she was allowed to use my full name. Matt didn’t mind one way or the other, but he was curious about my upbringing, and just why I was so determined to keep the blog anonymous and to avoid going public.

  It was hard for me to explain everything to him. I didn’t know where to begin. My family had no idea as to my whereabouts or my blog, and I still couldn’t bring myself to hurt them, even after all that they’d done to me. I just wasn’t ready to come out yet, I explained to Matt tearfully. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, and that would be inevitable if my name were made public.

  Blog readers had also started asking why I didn’t write more in-depth pieces about my past, why I was so vague about it all. I didn’t want to write about rape or molestation or my mother beating me. I did everything I could not to think about these things when I didn’t have to—therapy had been going so well and done so much to get me thinking more positively. I didn’t want to go back to that ugly place.

  He held me and ran his fingers through my hair soothingly until my strangled sobs subsided into tiny hiccups. He understood. If I didn’t believe I was up to going public about it, then by George, I shouldn’t, and that was all there was to it. It was another of those moments when I realized just how lucky I was. There had been times when I thought perhaps Matt couldn’t understand my more difficult issues, but at times like this, I was so glad to be proven wrong.

  For instance, I had tried to explain, in vain, why I was afraid of demons, even though I no longer believed they existed. Since childhood, I’d been taught that Satan and his demons were real—as real as any person walking down the street—and they were always watching me, even when I was naked in the shower, trying to trip me up. If I did anything occult-ish to invite them into my life, like use a Ouija board or even read a demonic book or watch a demonic movie, they could infiltrate my home, hold me down in my bed at night and rape me, push me into walls and beat me up, lift up furniture like couches and beds with me on it, high into the air, spinning them as I screamed. It had happened to people my mother knew—she swore it. At the first audience screening of The Exorcist, the theater screen had burst into flames. It was a scientific fact.

  The demons were so cagey, you could even pick one up without realizing it, by shopping at secondhand stores or garage sales. Demons loved to “attach themselves” to secondhand furniture or knickknacks, just waiting for a new, unsuspecting buyer to snap them up. There was no way of knowing what that item’s previous owner had been into—she could have been a witch or an occultist! Satan worshippers were everywhere, hiding among us, dripping black candles and pentagrams and altars smothered in goat’s blood in their basements.

  So even though I now knew this was all ridiculous, I flipped out if Matt wanted us to watch The Devil’s Advocate on YouTube. He just couldn’t grasp why it would bother me, if I didn’t believe in any of it anymore. It was completely irrational, of course. But I just wasn’t ready.

  Once, he asked me about the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ stand on refusing blood and blood transfusions. “But you eat meat. You do know that all meat has blood in it, right?”

  “What are you talking about? Not meat that’s properly bled before consumption.” I recited the official JW line unconsciously, without thinking.

  “Er…why do you think steak is red and juicy? That’s blood. If there was no blood in meat, it would be gray and disgusting and inedible.”

  “No, they told us that’s just meat juice. They inject food coloring into the meat so it looks nice and appetizing.”

  He started laughing at me, and I flushed red. “Meat juice? Oh, man. Now I’ve heard everything! You must realize that’s complete bullshit, right? It’s blood. It’s impossible to remove all blood from meat.”

  I was horrified. I had never really thought about it before. I’d been eating blood all my life, in trace amounts, and had clung to some ridiculous, hypocritical, spoon-fed dogma flat-out denying it, without grasping even the most basic of concepts. And here Matt was probably wondering how the woman he loved could be both so smart and so stupid simultaneously. The same way I felt about my sister. It was rather mortifying.

 
But there was more that he wanted to know. If our child was dying, and the doctors said that a blood transfusion was necessary, would I allow it? I hesitated. I could tell that the hesitation deeply, deeply disturbed him.

  “I want to say that yes, of course I would allow a blood transfusion. I’d do anything to save my child. I truly believe that I’d allow it, absolutely. I’m not hesitating because I’d take the Jehovah’s Witness stand. I’m hesitating because all my life, it’s been pounded into me that it’s disgusting, revolting to transfuse blood. Even if my mind knows that it’s just another medical procedure, my entire body is just going ‘ew!’ I just have to get used to it, is all.”

  It was like the homosexuality thing. Jehovah’s Witnesses believed it was a gross, disgusting sin—the epitome of nastiness. Even after I had close friends come out of the closet, and I realized that they were still exactly the same friends I’d always known, I loved them as much as ever and I had absolutely no interest in what they did in bed, it took a few more years of conscious effort to overcome the “ew” factor, the automatically triggered reaction that had been ingrained in me since childhood. I had finally gotten to the point where someone being gay didn’t bug me at all—it was just another quality about that person. Not good, not bad, simply that person. Like blue eyes or being left-handed.

  Racism has been similarly problematic for me. For instance, my mother does not consider herself racist. After all, she might say, I have ethnic friends and don’t use the volatile slurs nigger or spic, and I think the miniseries Roots was a moving and powerful cinematic experience.

  Invariably, though, my mother would home in on a Hispanic woman pushing a baby carriage down the street and scoff, “Pfft. Another Mexican pumping out welfare babies. Typical!” If the woman seemed young, then my mother would stage-whisper dramatically about how those slut Mexican girls couldn’t keep their legs closed; all of them got pregnant at fourteen. The term dirty Mexican was applied liberally and with abandon—not only to Mexicans, but to Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans, Cubans; anybody of Latino descent.