The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  “Mom!” I said in horror, “Stop it! You’re being rude!” She would roll her eyes and modulate her voice to clearly convey the absolute maximum amount of disgust and contempt with me.

  “Shut up, Brianna. She can’t hear me, anyway.” This was sometimes true, and sometimes not, but that wasn’t the point, I wanted to scream at her. Whether they can hear you or not, you said it! You thought it! At the time I couldn’t fully articulate rebuttals like You’re tarring one ethnic group with the same stereotypical brush or How do you know that sixteen-year-old girl isn’t babysitting her little brother? or Well, Samuel our landscaper is a Mexican immigrant, and a very kind, hard worker who labored for Grandpa for many years, and you don’t seem to have any compunction now about employing him to do your gardening for dismally low wages…. I may not have been able to formulate these vague thoughts into coherent arguments, but I instinctively felt unclean when she came out with these bigoted comments. I knew her words were rude and cruel; I just couldn’t put my finger on why.

  She is one of those people who believes the statement, “I’m not racist, but…” immediately cancels out any and all ensuing bigotry.

  “You know I’m not racist, and don’t ever repeat this, but Brother Knight really is the quintessential pompous, arrogant black man,” she would huff about a towering Southern congregation elder she disliked. “Thinks that he has to prove he’s smarter and better and more articulate than the white people in the congregation. The way he gets all loud and forceful sometimes from the platform, or keeps reminding us that he’s black, like a Baptist preacher or something.” Knight was not the only elder my mother had locked horns with in the past but, then, she had never referred to any of the others as “arrogant white men.” Why was the ubiquitous racial descriptor a necessity whenever Knight was discussed? I didn’t much like him, either, but my feelings had more to do with the fact that I distrusted elders in general, rather than because I thought he was an “uppity Negro,” who needed to be put in his place.

  Which isn’t to say that I didn’t absorb some of these tendencies and thinking patterns myself. I did, though I didn’t always recognize them as such. So did my sister. At twenty or twenty-one, Molly was pursued by Derrick, a gregarious, funny black man in the congregation. I met him a couple of times, and found him personable and charming. Moll clearly enjoyed his company, and considered him one of her best friends.

  “He knows how to take a joke and laugh at himself,” she told me. “We can rib him about liking watermelon and fried chicken, and he thinks it’s funny, instead of getting all PC and offended and playing the racism card! He even jokes about being ‘our nigga!’” However, she complained to me, she recognized that his interest in her was taking a turn for the romantic, and she wished that he would back off and just let them stay friends, “like brother and sister.”

  I was a bit confused, because Moll has always been hell-bent on marriage and babies ASAP. I didn’t think that she should settle for the first man who expressed an interest in her, but I must confess that, knowing her personality, I was a little surprised that she wasn’t gung-ho about Derrick.

  “I’m just curious, why don’t you go on a date or two with him? You already know that you like his personality and sense of humor, and it’s not like it could hurt, right? You never know: There could end up being a spark there. Besides, he’s a real cutie. If you don’t want him, can I have him?” I was being facetious about the last part, of course—there was nothing I wanted less than to date a Jehovah’s Witness—but the guy was a looker, and I am not immune to fantasizing about eye candy.

  She looked uncomfortable. “Jehovah says that we should only date to find a prospective marriage mate,” she recited robotically. “Don’t take this the wrong way—it’s not that I’m racist or anything—but I just can’t see myself marrying a black man. I’ve never found them physically attractive.”

  “Er…so you’re saying it’s not a racist thing, it’s an aesthetic thing?” I was incredulous.

  “Yes, exactly!” She beamed, relieved that I “under stood.”

  “But, what if someone has everything that you’re looking for, everything that you find important in a marriage mate, but then he just happens to be black?”

  The discomfort was back. “Bri, can we just drop it? He’s a great guy and I love him like a brother. Eventually, he’ll move on to somebody more appropriate for him, and forget about me. It’s not like I can control who I find attractive, is it?”

  I was seething with unexpressed frustration. But people you don’t initially find attractive can grow on you! Personality is what matters! And what’s so unattractive about being black, anyway? Have you ever seen Denzel Washington? At the time, I was dating a corpulently obese, heavily tattooed man three inches shorter than me with long, straggly hair and a micropenis. None of this jibed at all with my personal beauty ideals or my cravings for wildly experimental, flexible, swinging-from-the-chandeliers sex (we were limited to blow job, hand job, and girl-on-top, during which I could never tell if I was actually being penetrated or just giving a labial massage), but he was a relatively sweet man, good-natured and humorous, and an affectionate cuddler who was more than pleased to overcompensate for his physical shortcomings with admirable cunnilingus techniques. Within two dates, I was head-over-heels infatuated with him and never again gave his looks another thought. I just enjoyed being with him and that was that; to me he was handsome. So I was not in the mood to hear Molly complaining about her tall, dark, sexy and handsome would-be beau…especially when her only complaint was the “dark” part of it.

  Thus spurned, Derrick did eventually move on and married one of Molly’s friends, a Hispanic girl in the congregation named Elena. Moll was overtly and vocally relieved to be free of his chivalrous attentions, now directed toward a “more suitable” ethnic female. The happy couple, being young and unable to afford to rent a place of their own, moved in with Derrick’s parents and Elena became pregnant almost immediately. My mother and sister congratulated them loudly and sweetly to their face, cooed over the adorable baby when it was born and (true to form) tsk-tsk-ed behind their backs the entire time.

  “Derrick’s a nice and funny guy,” they confided to me. “We adore him to pieces, but he’s being such a typical black—too lazy to get a better job and support his wife when he can just mooch off his parents forever. And getting Elena knocked up right away!” My mom shook her head piously, apparently forgetting her own reproductive history. “It’s just so, so sad. But typical. It’s a cultural thing. Aren’t you glad you didn’t marry him, Molly?”

  Moll vigorously nodded. “Oh, yeah, I mean, just think about it! I feel so sorry for poor Elena. They’re going to have such a rough time in the future, you can already tell. And if I’d married him, that would have been me!” She shuddered, horrified at the vision of this alternate universe in which she married a black man.

  It therefore follows that it’s not been easy for me to adjust my filter on race and stereotyping. Even though I was by far the most PC of us, in that my family’s bigotry repulsed me and I considered it rude to make similar remarks either publicly or privately, there’s always been a silent war between what I believed and knew was right and how I was programmed to accept casual racism. In trying to disentangle my own cognitive dissonance, I noted that such thoughts cropped up in my brain far more often than I would have liked, even if only for a fraction of a second before I had to methodically and deliberately hit the Ignore button. Because that’s what it is. It would be dishonest of me to say that I’ve eradicated such thinking patterns from my mental vocabulary, when what I actually do is overrule my own learned responses.

  You throw a sponge into a sink full of dirty water and it’ll soak up several times its weight and hold onto it. Throw something less porous, like a stone, into a sink full of dirty water, and it’ll still get wet. Pull it out and it feels about the same, weighs about the same, but there’s a slight change in texture, a film over it, and droplets of wate
r are still settled into the minuscule pits and crevices of the stone. Even as a child, I recognized hypocrisy and prejudice at play, but I was also at my most impressionable and, inevitably, whether I liked it or not, I retained bits of it.

  I have friends of all races, I rooted for Obama to win the 2008 election, I am a firm believer that any person of any background and any race can do and be anything that he aspires to do and be, I have never made a racial slur and I am no longer afraid to speak out against intolerance and hatred. It bothers me—hell, it infuriates me. So, the million-dollar question: Am I racist? Because clearly, all the preceding means that I’m not racist, right? Except…that I am.

  I am racist, at least a little bit, in a knee-jerk fashion, and it’s only one of many things that horrify me about myself. I would give anything to be able to instantaneously rewire my programming, root out even the briefest flickers of stereotyping lurking in those tiny mental fissures. Just because I choose not to act on them, however, doesn’t mean that they’re not there. They are, and though the stone is slowly drying out and their impact has lessened dramatically, on occasion I still recognize them. I wish that they were nonexistent; I hope that eventually I won’t even have to overrule them; I hope that those microscopic synapses will simply one day refuse to fire, with no more fanfare or premeditation than a snuffed candle, just ceasing to exist.

  But it’s all such a damn process, isn’t it? Such a damn, arduous, fucking, lifelong process.

  So all of that, I tried to make Matt realize, was bouncing around in my brain day in and day out and I had to very consciously and deliberately make sense of it all, sorting out the difference between my ingrained responses and what I actually do or do not believe. But I hadn’t gotten around to taking on the blood and demon issues as much yet. I was tackling my neuroses and my terrors one by one, and it was painstaking. I wished so much that he would just understand and back me up and hold my hand through it.

  At moments like these, though, when he told me that he completely understood, that I could stay anonymous, that I didn’t have to put my face and my screwups and my neuroses out there, naked in front of the entire world—I realized that he was doing exactly that. There was good reason for me to trust this man, and put my life in his hands.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A few days later, on a Friday evening, I left work and met Matt at Starbucks. We stayed until they closed, so that he could get some social media work done, and then we headed back to the trailer for some well-earned sleep, hand in hand.

  We realized, as we neared the lot, that something didn’t look right. It looked like the other trailers in the lot had left. Everything was flat, open space. Where the hell was…?

  The truck and trailer were gone.

  Our home was gone.

  All my belongings, except what I had in my car, were gone.

  Panic.

  I frantically called the police department and was redirected to city towing. The dispatcher who answered the phone informed me that it was now the weekend and nobody could help me until Monday. We rented a hotel room for the weekend, and were told on Monday that it would cost in the vicinity of $1K to pick up the truck and trailer (they counted them as two separate vehicles). In addition, I would be charged an additional $80 per day that the vehicles were not picked up, plus a $70 DMV lien placed on each vehicle—since they hadn’t been picked up within seventy-two hours, despite the fact that I attempted to call over the weekend but was told there was nothing that could be done.

  I was livid, and also coming to terms with the fact that I’d likely never see again the few belongings that I still retained. My books. My clothes. My dishes and glassware (which, I assumed, were likely smashed to pieces now, as the trailer was not prepared to be moved and I had not tied down my boxes). I had recently reopened a checking account with my local credit union, and Matt and I were trying to sock away as much of my earnings from work as we could in order to try to get ourselves into an apartment, or perhaps even a house, as soon as possible, but we had nowhere near enough to pay the impound fees, much less continue living life afterwards until the next paycheck. We were, for lack of a gentler term, royally fucked.

  Sage, who was boarding Fezzik, invited us to come up to Riverside and stay on “the ranch,” until we figured things out. We were grateful and took her up on the offer immediately—we had no other choice. We simply couldn’t afford a motel long term.

  And so we found ourselves coasting into the small area of Riverside called Pedley. Matt hadn’t seen the ranch before, and he was as excited as a little kid. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t that kind of ranch, with the white picket fences and tall waving grasses and horses running free in paddocks, their manes waving in the wind. I don’t think he heard me. As we exited the freeway, he saw men riding their horses right there on the sidewalk, more horses tied up outside a liquor store, horses everywhere you turned on the street. Most cities in SoCal weren’t like this; he’d never seen horses on the streets here before. He bounced in his seat. “It’s like Texas or something!”

  “You’ve never seen Texas.”

  “I have in movies! They wear cowboy hats and ride horses down the streets, too!”

  He was really disappointed, as I suspected he would be, when we arrived at the ranch. It was basically a three-acre dirt lot with a small stucco house, a bunch of sheds and trailers, and the little grass to be found was brown and dead. He scuffed at the dirt with one foot.

  “You’re right, it’s not what I expected.” He sounded sad, cheated of his green Texas ranch.

  “Hey, it’s not a parking lot! We’ll have utility hookups!” I cried, and this seemed to perk him up a bit.

  Sage met us out front. She was so excited to finally meet Matt, and he found himself pleasantly surprised by her. When I explained to him that a woman who barely knew us had offered to let us live on the same lot as her, he was immediately on the defensive and suspicious.

  “Somebody you’ve only met once is willing to take in a couple of strangers? What if she’s part of some freaky cult or something? What if it’s like a compound where they’ll try to brainwash us and get us to shave our heads and wear robes or something?”

  It took a lot of convincing on my part to get him to acquiesce.

  “Don’t be silly. She’s a very sweet, genuine lady who just likes to help others, and the man who owns the property, Thurman, rents out trailers on the lot to a bunch of other homeless people for $450 a month. It’s even cheaper than a week at a motel, and unless you want to live out of the car, can you think of any better options? Besides, we’ll get to be close to Fezzik. You’ll finally get to meet him!”

  He finally acceded to my coaxing.

  Sage set us up in a trailer that had recently been vacated. The shower hardly worked, except for a trickle of water, and the swamp cooler was on its last legs and barely did anything at all to combat the heat, but we had lights and a sink and a working oven and microwave and stove! It was all the luxuries we’d never had in the Walmart parking lot, and thus a giant step up from what we’d gotten used to.

  Fezzik was thrilled to see me, and launched his entire self at me like a bomb. He had put on a ton of weight, and finally looked like a Neo Mastiff should, following his disastrous stint at the kennel. He also took quite the shine to Matt immediately, which relieved me. He loved all women and children, but men could be touch and go when I first got him. Now, though, Sage had socialized him so well that I never saw him get nervous around a man again. In fact, he seemed to decide very quickly that he loved Matt even more than he loved me. It wasn’t my imagination. I couldn’t find it in my heart to be jealous, though. Fezzik was our dog now. This was the way it should be.

  The following Monday, I was laid off from work. Again.

  I was the only one of the five of us laid off. The boss called me into his office and told me sadly that he had overestimated his budget; that he couldn’t afford an executive assistant. He asked if I’d be willing to stick around
and work about ten hours a week, at a pay cut that would have brought my wages lower than unemployment. I suppose he thought he was doing me a favor. I declined, and tried to look at it as an unexpected bonus—escape from earning my paycheck shilling for a company that built websites for scam artists.

  It did niggle a bit, though. I’d rather have quit on my own terms, with work at another company lined up. I couldn’t understand why a company would bother hiring new people and then lay them off after a couple of months, due to “the recession.” I figured that perhaps it was cheaper than paying a temp agency. But still, what a crappy thing to do to someone, after telling her that you were hiring her for a permanent position. Back to the drawing board.

  It was especially bad timing with the trailer problem. Walmart was giving me the runaround, ignoring my emails and voice-mail messages to their corporate headquarters, requesting an explanation and begging them to get my trailer out of impound, please. My supportive reader base was outraged, and many of them also wrote letters and phoned Walmart HQ, receiving only canned, stock reply emails in response. It was more than I had received. There was nothing but deafening silence from Walmart in response to my emails for the whole next month.

  I began applying for jobs again, and even picked up a few interview calls within the first couple of days, so Matt and I were optimistic. We still had a small cushion of a few hundred dollars from my previous job and the retroactive UI benefit checks. Sure, we’d hoped to save enough to get a real roof over our heads, but at least we had something to get by on now, and that’s what was important.