The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  Then my car broke down.

  As luck would have it, the turbocharger in my car decided to give out on the freeway on the way to a job interview. Karma dictated that the car would continue to run, albeit screeching in protest, until I got to the interview. Afterwards, I rushed to the nearest auto body shop I could find and was advised that the car “should make it home,” but not much further than that. The last seven miles of the way back, the car suddenly started making a grinding noise in addition to the high-pitched screaming whine of the shot turbocharger. By the time I arrived at my destination, blue smoke was billowing out of the exhaust pipe. I barely made it.

  The car was only four years old and had just 56,000 miles on it. Nothing, but nothing, should go wrong with a car that new and with that few miles on it, I ranted to Matt. Why? Why me? Why did everything have to go wrong (again) now?

  Thurman, who fixed up old cars himself, located a new turbocharger and offered to install it, as long as I paid him for labor. The part was very expensive, about $1,200, but still about half the cost the auto body shop wanted to charge. Matt and I had to make a decision between having the car repaired, or using our savings combined with my final paycheck, to try to get the trailer out of impound. We decided to go with the car. Without it, my options for potential work would be severely limited or curtailed completely.

  Our cushion vanished practically overnight, and we were back to basic barebones.

  We only managed to get by because my readers, vastly concerned for our welfare, took it upon themselves to donate nearly $300 to us via Matt’s PayPal account on Homeless Tales. I had turned down offers of assistance for so long. I didn’t want to be accused of sponging off anybody or e-panhandling. I cried at night, as Matt wrapped his arms around me and encouraged me to just let people help me, already, for once.

  “You’re strong and you’re beautiful, but we need help right now and your readers want to do this for you. They’re writing in to you every day insisting that you let them help you. So just learn that this is the moment to accept their help, and say ‘Thank you.’”

  “Fine. But I’m still not putting a donation button up on my site.”

  The $300 paid for nearly a month’s rent at the ranch. I was so grateful, but I couldn’t wait to get back to work so that I didn’t have to feel like a mooch.

  Chapter Fifteen

  And then came the event that changed everything. Monday, August 24, 2009. I was checking a new favorite site of mine, SaveTheAssistants.com. It was good for a laugh—the owner ran user-submitted horror stories that executive and personal assistants like me had to silently suffer through, plus there were job listings posted occasionally. It was the work I did, of course, so I wanted to leave no stone unturned.

  SaveTheAssistants.com was featuring an E. Jean Carroll column that they had stumbled over from nearly a month earlier. The headline proclaimed E. Jean their “hero of the week.” I perked up—Hey, it’s E. Jean! The one I wrote to all the way back, in April or May or something. How funny, what a coincidence! I continued to scan the post…and found myself reading my own story (albeit edited and reworded a bit to sound far better than anything I ever could have written):

  Dear E. Jean: I’m currently homeless and living in a Walmart parking lot. I’m educated, I have never done drugs and I am not mentally ill. I have a strong employment history and am a career executive assistant. The instability sucks, but I’m rocking it as best as I can. Recently, I stumbled across a job notice (a reality show casting call for executive assistants) and was intrigued enough to apply. It was a shot in the dark, and I assumed I’d never hear back. Surprise! I was called in this week! And I promptly bombed it. When I found out who was involved in the show I got kind of starstruck and completely froze up. My usual personality did not radiate. My question: How does one get another shot when one screws up a job interview?

  —Homeless, but Not Hopeless

  Miss Homeless, my dear: You don’t get another shot. You take it. Wear the new suit you get from Dress for Success (the fantastic organization that provides interview suits and career development guidance to low-income women, Dressforsuccess.org), find a company, a store, a business you admire, and show up ready to work. When you speak with the manager, don’t ask for a job. Simply introduce yourself, tell her why her company is brilliant, and give her three ways you can help her succeed. Follow up with a phone call, plus a visit the following week.

  Of course, the cleverest way to land a good job (and get an apartment) is to already have a good job/internship/volunteer position. This strategy permits you to impress the interviewers with the superhuman passion you have for your current projects.

  This is what you did with your letter: You knocked me out with your courage and spirit. I am therefore, Miss Not Hopeless, offering you a four-month internship. Of course, it’s the most hideously humdrum internship in America. You’ll be stuck with the tedious job of organizing research for my book, transcribing interviews and analyzing data from 1,800,000 pages (not a misprint) of a college sex survey I did on Facebook. I looked you up and discovered that you’re on the West Coast and that you write a highly entertaining blog. You possess a brain and access to a computer. Excellent! If you accept this internship, you’ll telecommute to my East Coast mountain office one hour a day, six days a week. At the end of the four months, if you don’t have a job and an awesome place to live, I will become your intern.

  I began to scream and flail wildly. Matt, snoozing beside me, jerked awake in terror. Murder? Rape? Giant furry spiders??? “Baby, look! Looklooklooklooklook!”

  I pushed my laptop toward him. He squinted at it blearily through sleep-filled eyes. He read it, but didn’t comprehend.

  “What is this?” He couldn’t grasp why I’d woken him up and shown him an advice column.

  “Read it again, honey! It’s me! It’s me. It’s my letter! I’ve been offered an internship with the advice columnist of ELLE magazine!!! Can you imagine what this will look like on my résumé?!?”

  I was still bouncing around, off and running, like a chicken with my head cut off, mind racing, and he was still blinking slowly, trying to clear the sleep fog from his mind, struggling to comprehend.

  “I don’t understand. When did you write this? You never told me anything about this. You wrote a letter? What?” More rapid, confused blinking.

  I hadn’t even thought to tell him. It was just a spur of the moment thing after I’d blown the Fremantle audition. I’d never dreamed she’d read it or care about it!

  “Oh, my god!” I’d just realized that the column was nearly a month old. Nobody had contacted or emailed me with the offer, and I’d been so busy with all the craziness going on that it had never occurred to me to check ELLE to see if the letter had ever made it through. I’d assumed that they’d notify you or something, if they were going to publish your letter. What if I was too late? What if she assumed I’d rejected her offer? What if it was off the table? Nooooooooooo!

  I jerked the laptop away from him and frantically started to type. I had to contact her and accept the internship, if I hadn’t already lost it. Terror overcame me all of a sudden. What if a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity had slipped through my fingers? It would just be the cherry on my crummy week sundae.

  Several hours of nail-biting later, E. Jean finally responded to me. Yes, the offer was still on the table, and my internship would start in a week, September 1. She gave me her direct phone number and told me to call her. I was shaking visibly as I dialed. Matt sat next to me, hand on my shoulder, trying to calm me.

  “Hellooooo, darling?” She sounded in person exactly the way she wrote in her columns. Like Gloria Swanson or someone else similarly glamorous and over the top. Like she wore a silk turban and lounged in front of an art deco vanity in a supple, shimmering robe and fuck-me pumps. Completely at ease in her own skin and completely confident in her own larger-than-life persona.

  Yet, surprisingly, completely easy to talk to—funny, charming and relatabl
e.

  Somehow, I managed to hold my own throughout the conversation without passing out from terror. I attribute it completely to her own conversational skills, by the way, not to mine. We spent twenty minutes or so getting to know each other, chatting about the internship and what would be expected of me, how I would telecommute… I can’t get too specific here, because I barely remember the conversation over the pounding of my own heart. The doors to my future were opening wide before me.

  Her cheery “Goodbyyyyye, darling!” still ringing in my ears, I turned to Matt.

  “She’s great. She’s awesome. She’s fantastic. She’s just really, really sweet. This is gonna be great, right?”

  He smiled and wrapped his arms around me. “You were no slouch yourself there on that telephone call. She’s lucky to have you. Now, I’m going to make love to you, and then we’re going to write an article about this.”

  “Really? You think you can spin it somehow?”

  “Oh, yes,” he murmured, his lips on my collarbone as he unhooked my bra with one hand. “This is exactly the sort of story that people love. I wouldn’t be surprised if it got the same kind of attention as the article about us.”

  “Really?” I was surprised. “I dunno, isn’t that sort of like lightning striking twice?”

  “Leave it to me.” He was nibbling my lobe, whispering darkly into my ear. “I know what I’m doing. You just keep being yourself and start your internship. I’ll do all the rest. Now, come and fuck me. I need you.”

  “I need you, too.”

  Matt was as good as his word, and his article about the homeless girl getting the internship skyrocketed to the front page of Digg.

  “Sweetie, the headline says that I won an internship with ELLE magazine. That’s not strictly accurate, you know. It’s with E. Jean. She’s the advice columnist for ELLE, but she also runs her own website—AskEJean.com. In fact, most of what I’ll be doing will probably focus on that.”

  “I know, honey, but you have to know what will catch the public’s attention. I explain all that in the article, but the headline needs to grab them, and ELLE magazine is instantly recognizable. It’s glamorous. It’s that rags-to-riches story everyone’s looking for.” We laughed together at this, because, after all, we were still living in a trailer.

  We both expected a bit of a hullaballoo like last time, but neither of us had any inkling of the kind of massive international interest this story would generate or how long it would run.

  The following morning, my inbox was crammed with thousands of emails, and my cell phone was ringing off the hook. Blearily, I picked it up and slurred, “Hello?”

  Pause.

  “Oh, my gosh. Yeah, um, just one second, another line is ringing, I’ll be right back…Hello? Er, wow…no, absolutely, I’m on another call, can I call you back? Sure, let me grab a pen….”

  I clutched the phone to my chest. Matt stirred and looked up at me.

  “Sweetie, I’ve got the Today show and a producer from Ellen DeGeneres on the line, and twelve voice mails yet to listen to.” His eyes flew wide open. “I have no idea how these people all got my phone number, but I think I might need you to wake up and help me figure out some stuff. We should probably call E. Jean and find out what to do next.”

  The Associated Press picked up the story, and once the AP article came out, it seemed as if every last news outlet ran with it. I was getting interview requests from just about every continent, and E. Jean and ELLE were kindly facilitating which TV outlet would get an exclusive interview with me.

  “I don’t know what your boyfriend did, but tell him to keep doing it! This is unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it!” E. Jean crowed into the phone. Matt beamed. I was so proud of him, and so glad to see him getting recognition. I wanted to tell everyone who would listen, and did, that most of the credit for all this madness went to him, the love of my life. I was so afraid that he would feel left out or forgotten, as if I didn’t fully appreciate him or realize how much hard work he had done to make this publicity happen, so that we could both bring attention to causes, solutions and stereotypes of homelessness—and also potentially climb out of it ourselves.

  I was trying to answer all the emails from homeless people first. It was exhausting, but I wanted so much to help them—most were far worse off than I was. If I didn’t know the answers to their questions, I asked around throughout the online homeless community until I found someone who could help them, or at least point them in the right direction.

  After a while, I quit reading the news articles and comments about me. Ninety-eight percent of them were positive, congratulatory, constructive and encouraging. But I’m only human, and the remaining 2 percent were what I sometimes took to heart. More the ones that attacked Matt, actually. I was less concerned about the ones attacking me.

  There were several people with ignorant gut reactions: “Real homeless people don’t have cell phones or laptops!” “If you live in a trailer or a vehicle, you’re not really homeless!” “Yeah, right, a homeless person who can afford air fare from another country—give me a break!” “Real homeless people don’t work or look for work! If you’re working, then there’s no reason for you to be homeless!” “All homeless people are lazy bums, just trying to mooch off the system!” “Those panhandlers you see on the street really make $80,000 a year each! I saw it on TV!”

  I was happy to respond to questions and disabuse people of misconceptions like these, if they were polite about it. I couldn’t blame them for their instinctive responses. I’d been just as ignorant about homelessness less than a year ago. It was exciting to have conversations about homeless stereotypes versus the realities and statistics of homelessness. I was eager and optimistic about making some kind of difference in public perception, no matter how small.

  There were the occasional low blows, however. One news website slammed me for talking about wanting to “put a human face to homelessness.” The media coverage was so pervasive that I’d lost track of who was writing about the story, and Matt kindly tried to keep the article from me, but one of my blog readers indignantly forwarded it to me. It was something to the effect of: “When she talks about putting a human face to homelessness, what she really means is the face of young, white privilege!” the writer snarled. “Nobody would care about this girl’s story if she were black, would they? She’s just another racist unaware of her own racism. She clearly believes that people like her, middle-class homeless affected by the recession, are the only ones who deserve help. She doesn’t believe that the mentally ill or drug addicts on the street are as deserving as her!”

  Wow. I paced up and down the trailer, waving my arms in the air, as Matt sat on the couch quietly, his computer on his lap.

  I had never said or implied anything like that. I don’t care whose face is put on homelessness. I don’t mean my face, I mean faces in general—black, white, green, whatever. I just wanted my readers to see that every single homeless person has a backstory, has a personality, is a human being. I’m just telling my story, and that’s all I can do, right? Tell my story from my perspective, and let others tell theirs. I want solutions for all homeless people. Saying that the mentally ill and those with drug problems don’t deserve help is ridiculous. All I’ve ever said from the very beginning is that I believe they are most in need of compassion and assistance—because, after all, I can pull myself up by my bootstraps, and they don’t have any bootstraps to pull themselves up by in the first place.

  It was so frustrating. These newspeople didn’t know me, and I was well aware that most of them were picking up and summarizing the story from various other outlets; most hadn’t even read any of my blog. If they did, I thought, they’d know that I haven’t applied for any government benefits since becoming homeless, except for unemployment insurance, because I don’t feel right taking already limited funds that could be helping people worse off than me. They’d know that I hadn’t made a dime from my blog; didn’t even run ads or have a Donate
button, because I didn’t want to be accused of e-panhandling. I wanted to prove that I could get out of this mess by myself.

  “Honey, I’ve said from the very beginning that I have it better than so many; that I’m luckier than so many! What’s the matter with these crazy people? GRAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!”

  He patted the couch, and I threw myself at him so hard, I nearly knocked him over. “It’s OK, baby. It’s OK. Nearly everyone else has good things to say. They’re all so proud of you. Look at what we’ve accomplished. You’ve had so many people write in to you to say that you’ve changed their perceptions. You are making a difference. There will always be crazy or unreasonable people you can’t please. But it’s rare to see a media response so overwhelmingly positive, especially to a controversial issue like homelessness.”

  I shook my head violently. “I didn’t accomplish this. You did. Barely anybody read my blog before. None of this would have happened if you hadn’t made it happen.”

  He chuckled. “That’s not entirely true. There’s something about you that people are connecting with.”

  “Maybe they’re right. What if it is just because I’m a young, white girl? The ‘face of privilege?’ Even if it is molested, abused, raped, fucked-up-behind-closed-doors privilege. I’m female and white and I’m relatively educated and articulate, and I used to have a good job.” My self-esteem was shot. I couldn’t see myself as a writer of any particular talent, or even as a writer at all—definitely not someone who deserved any of this crazy attention.

  “Even if that is part of the reason, so what? You know what you believe and what you want, and you believe that all homeless people should be treated with dignity and compassion, no matter what their race or background or social status. You want to break down barriers and stereotypes that have plagued the homeless for decades. Who cares why they’re listening to you? You’ve got fifteen minutes to make a difference and you’re seizing it.”