The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Today show had a car pick me up from the ranch and drive me to the airport. Upon landing in New York City, another car picked me up and drove me to my hotel, where E. Jean’s niece (an ELLE intern), Lauren, met me. She ordered up room service and handed me a bag of clothes that ELLE had sent over.

  In a panic, though, I realized that none of the clothes fit me. They were mainly slim, black sheath dresses from H&M. The labels bore my size, true, but it must have been one of those stores where the sizes run small, because I couldn’t fit anything over my hips. I was used to wearing fun vintage clothing mined from thrift stores, and had never bought a designer brand in my life, so it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about size differences. It was 11:00 at night and nothing was open.

  “It’s OK,” Lauren assured me nervously. “We’ll find…something. Somewhere. There’s got to be something still open.” She didn’t look particularly convinced, but she was determined, I’ll give her that.

  Lauren and I frantically scoured the next several blocks for an open store, any open store, that would carry something in my size, but it was futile. I thought New York was the city that never sleeps! I was due at the Today show studios in the morning around 9:00 for hair and makeup. There was no way that we’d find anything before then. Tears began to roll down my nose. Matt had started calling me Cinderella 2.0, but I didn’t feel like a princess at all. I felt like a giant, fat whale of a slob who didn’t belong on TV in New York. I wished I had brought some of my cuter vintage outfits from the trailer closet, but E. Jean said ELLE insisted that only they dress me for all TV appearances, from now on. It was clearly a great honor, and part of me had been looking forward to wearing girly, expensive stuff. I mean, when would I ever get the chance again, right? Vintage and affordable was my thing, and always would be, but the opportunity to dress up excited me.

  Poor Lauren comforted me as I tried to smile and choke back my sobs. I had a gray vest and a pair of gray pants in my suitcase, in case I needed to change into something businesslike for the meetings with literary agents later. Perhaps ELLE had a loose silk shirt or something I could wear under the vest in the morning, I suggested.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out. We’ll get you something,” she assured me before she left. “I’ll be here at 8:30 a.m. with something for you to wear. I don’t know what stores open that early, but I’ll find something.” She was so kind, and clearly the kind of intern who’d go the extra mile, or hundred miles. ELLE was lucky to have her, and I was so grateful for her help.

  I should have tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. I checked my laptop. Matt had emailed, saying that he missed me, and that Sage had lent him her phone, so that I could call him tonight if I wanted. It didn’t matter how late, or if I woke him up. He missed me so much and needed to hear my voice.

  So I called him, and we chatted for a couple of hours, Matt trying to assuage my nervousness, as I stared out the hotel window. St. Patrick’s Cathedral was directly across the street, all dark, twisted, gothic stone spires and gargoyles. He would have loved this. I curled up in bed with the phone to my ear, wishing he was next to me to share it.

  It was 8:45 a.m. and there was no sign of Lauren. I promptly began to freak out. I’d awakened early to shower, leaving my hair damp so they could style it at the Today studio. The studio was close, Lauren had said, only a couple of blocks away, but I had no idea where to go if she didn’t show up at the hotel. She had said she was meeting me at the hotel, right? Oh my gosh, what if I’d misunderstood? What if she meant for me to meet her at the Today show set?

  At 8:52 a.m., the concierge called my room, and asked if I would like to have a Miss Lauren Switzer buzzed up, Miss Karp?

  Miss Karp. Tee-hee.

  Lauren burst into the room with two shopping bags.

  “I’m sorry I’m late! I found a department store that opens at 7:30. Here, try these on!” She flung dresses at me, and we settled on one with a vintage-esque feel to it; a black bodice with a flared tulip skirt. It was a bit shorter than I generally went, and I would need stockings, she decided. She thrust a pair of sharp, pointy stilettos at me. It wasn’t the kind of heel I normally wore; I preferred retro, round-toed and peep toe, pinup-esque pumps. But this was no time to be picky! I slipped them on, and we dashed out the door. She would drop me at the Today show studio and then run out to a convenience store and grab some stockings.

  The studio guard let us in, and pointed us toward the waiting room. I recognized E. Jean immediately. She didn’t look nervous at all, waiting comfortably on a couch for me. She jumped up and we hugged, and she told me loudly how fabulous it was to meet me. She was every inch exactly what you’d expect. Somewhat wryly, I noticed that she had a perfect body and far more energy than me, even in her sixties. I tried to radiate confidence and enthusiasm; I wanted so much to gain her respect. Mostly, though, I think I just looked scared out of my wits and prepared to dive under the couch.

  E. Jean and the producer sat me down and did their best to calm my nerves, running through the list of expected interview questions. I forced myself to pry my wringing hands apart and place them in my lap. Scared? Me? Nah. Totally cool. The CNN interview hadn’t been as scary as I’d thought it would be, but that was because it was on my own turf, with nobody watching except Matt, and that had actually helped because he relaxed me and put me at ease. This was different, though. I was about to go out there live in front of millions of people. There was no editing to save me. No backsies. No rephrasing. Just two and a half minutes to try to fit in anything and everything about my story and about homelessness. No problem, right?

  “Now,” the producer explained, “these are the interview questions that we gave them to ask. But if you’ve ever watched the show before, you’ll know that they, er, don’t always stay on topic. Kathie Lee, especially, will sometimes go off and do or say her own thing. So don’t be nervous, and if she asks a question we didn’t go over with you, don’t panic. Just try to keep on topic and do your best to steer it back to the questions we’ve just talked about. OK? OK. You’ll do fine. And you’ve got E. Jean out there with you. She’s an old pro at this.”

  Hair and makeup whipped me and E. Jean into shape. I noticed in the mirror that there was another waiting guest who kept staring at me. It was a little unnerving. I wondered if I maybe had a booger hanging out of my nose or something. Matt would later tell me that he was a famous tennis player, John McEnroe. I didn’t know him, since I didn’t really follow tennis. Plus, I didn’t have my glasses on, so my vision was blurry. I kept trying to decide if he might be Billy Bob Thornton.

  Lauren came back with three pairs of stockings in varying shades. E. Jean picked black, and I sprinted to the restroom to put them on. Then the three of us, E. Jean, Lauren and I, were ushered up some stairs and down a corridor. I could hear Kathie Lee and Hoda interviewing some star chef woman, and oh my God, Al Roker just hurried past me in the corridor! Al Roker just smiled at me! My life is complete. I can die happy.

  We all stood watching as the cooking segment wrapped up, and the studio went to commercial. I now had five or six minutes before airtime. A bunch of techs jumped me and hooked me and E. Jean up to microphones, leading us to our chairs. Lauren stood back in the corner to watch the interview. Kathie Lee and Hoda came over and shook hands with us, settling into their chairs. We tried to make polite “Good morning, nice to meet you, how are you?” chitchat for the remaining few minutes.

  I was breathing deeply to calm myself. This would all be fine. It was two and a half minutes and then it would be over, barely a blip in my life. As long as I didn’t fuck up and say anything offensive on TV. Then, of course, I could never live it down. I tried to ignore the cameras pointing at me from every direction.

  “Sixty seconds, ladies!” cried a tech.

  Kathie Lee coolly nodded, then, I suppose attempting to make chitchat while waiting, turned her head and asked me, “So, do you really count as homeless? I mean, you live in a
trailer and all. So do you really believe that you qualify?”

  Everybody was looking at me, and they were counting down forty-five seconds. I launched, as smoothly as I could, into the automatic response that I gave whenever somebody emailed me to ask me this same question. It was a fair enough question, I supposed, but I was a bit unnerved, trying to answer it only moments before a live interview. I don’t know if my voice shook audibly, but it sure felt like it to me.

  “That’s a common misconception. In fact, the legal definition of homelessness covers all people without a home, including vehicle dwellers and couch-surfers. Obviously, there are different levels of homelessness, and I’ve been very lucky to have a lot of advantages, but I believe it’s important to debunk such stereotypes and misperceptions about what it means to be homeless.” Or something to that effect. For all I know, that may have been what I tried to say, but it came out sounding like the “wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-wah” teacher in the Peanuts cartoons.

  Fifteen seconds.

  E. Jean patted my shoulder.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  5…4…3…

  Hoda and Kathie Lee launched into their intro, reading off the teleprompter, and I tried my best to smile and refrain from hyperventilating. I really don’t remember much of what was said. E. Jean did her share of the talking, of course, which I was grateful for, and I’m pretty sure that they asked me how I colored my hair while homeless. I gritted my teeth; I had hoped to focus on the more serious issues of homeless stereotypes and misperceptions and myths, and how Matt and I were hoping to combat them. But I’m sure to them this was pretty much a fluff piece, one of the multitude of “filler” human interest stories that they see every day, so they wanted to know about how a person dyes her hair and meets boys while homeless. In any event, as far as I can tell, they were very friendly and did their best to put me at ease.

  I recounted a story about Mother’s Day 2009, when I had snuck a bottle of hair dye into the deserted Planet Fitness gym bathroom and crouched in the corner of the handicapped stall, allowing the harsh chemicals of the color to set as I pawed through my copy of Kyria Abrahams’s I’m Perfect, You’re Doomed: Tales from a Jehovah’s Witness Upbringing and holding my breath, squirming, when two lone women wandered through the bathroom and wondered aloud, “What’s that smell?” referring to the noxious fumes.

  It was a short segment, so there wasn’t much time for anything else besides that. Before I knew it, it was over, they were pulling the microphone off me, and Kathie Lee was off her chair and headed down to a different studio for the next segment. Hoda stopped to shake my hand warmly and wish me good luck, then she, too, was gone. The techs amiably offered to snap photos of me, E. Jean and Lauren on set with Lauren’s camera.

  We headed back to the waiting room for our purses, and everyone there, watching the mounted TVs airing the show in progress, collectively looked up at me and burst into applause. My eyes filled with grateful tears. I didn’t feel that I deserved anything of the sort, but it was such a kindly gesture. I turned red, ducked my head and tried to disappear into the wall. John McEnroe was on the TV screen above me, demonstrating Wii Fit Tennis with Kathie Lee and Hoda, who seemed to be having trouble grasping the concept.

  “Come on, come on, hurry up!” John McEnroe prodded them irritably. “We don’t have time to mess around. You’ve got another homeless blogger segment to do after this!”

  Lauren had to get to work at ELLE, and E. Jean and I had back-to-back meetings with agents to get to. She pulled me out into the street and we bolted for a few blocks before I realized that I’d never make it in these shoes. I was used to walking some distance in heels, but these pointy toes were killing me, and I hadn’t broken them in. I stopped, yanked them off, and took to the concrete in my laddering stockings. To hell with propriety. If we were ever going to make it on time, I needed my feet to be flat.

  I noted that E. Jean slipped dollar bills to all the homeless people we passed on the streets, including a man surrounded by seven kittens. It was very sweet of her, I thought. A nice touch.

  Matt was waiting up for my return from Ontario airport. It was nearly midnight, and he looked haggard, as though he’d barely slept since I left. He clung to me and said, “I thought I’d die without you.”

  “Ha. See? Nothing to it. Thirty-six hours. I’m back.”

  “The CNN interview aired around the same time as the Today show interview. It’s been playing throughout the day. The traffic has been massive. The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness was absolutely crushed by the traffic. Your server was down for a few hours. You were wonderful. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. I missed you. Let’s go to bed. We can talk about everything that happened in the morning. I’m not even going to look at my email inbox. I don’t want to know.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  CNN invited me to be on again, this time on a segment called Young People Rock, with Nicole Lapin. That was in LA, so Matt could come, though he still didn’t want to be on TV, no matter how much I coaxed.

  I continued posting blogs, doing my internship, doing phone and email interviews and answering emails. A couple of days later, a Brazilian TV news show called and invited to fly me back to New York City for another segment. I was willing to do it, if they’d fly Matt there, too, but they demurred, so I turned it down. We didn’t have much longer before he had to fly back to Scotland, and I wanted to spend every possible moment with him. I could tell that he was still a bit dejected about my trip to New York without him, even if he wasn’t talking about it. I didn’t want to give him anything else to take to heart.

  Walmart finally returned my calls and emails for the first time, after an entire month of ignoring my plight. They swore up and down that signs had been posted the day prior to towing. They hadn’t. There was no sign on my trailer. If there had been, I’d probably have moved it for a day or two to Sam’s Club, as I had before. Besides, I pressed, their own store manager told me to ignore any MOVE YOUR TRAILER OR BE TOWED signs. I gave them her name again. The corporate guy said he’d call me right back.

  Ten minutes later, we were on the phone again. “I’m sorry, Miss Karp, but there’s simply nothing we can do. I apologize for any inconvenience. It’s nothing personal. But it’s not our fault or our responsibility.”

  I began to sob angrily.

  “Look, don’t tell me you’re ‘sorry for the inconvenience.’ Maybe it’s not personal to you. But it’s personal to me. You’re not the one who’s just lost everything she owns in the world—I am. So save your apologies for somebody who cares!” I hung up the phone.

  Meanwhile, two friends of mine were calling Walmart corporate right about then. One was Tommy Christopher, a Mediaite reporter I’d done an interview with, and who’d apparently been impressed enough with me to take it upon himself to call and see what he could do. He told them to do a quick internet search of my name, and said that he could hear the line grow silent as they realized that they had just stepped into more of a PR nightmare than they’d realized.

  The other friend was Vicki Day, a follower of mine on Twitter who lived in London. I hadn’t realized it, but Vicki was a big shot in London, and ran her own PR company. I just thought of her as one of those nice people who followed my blog. But she knew the head of Asda (Walmart’s UK branch), and she was throwing all her weight into shaming him into calling up HQ and pulling some strings.

  A few hours later, Walmart corporate called back and told me that I could meet one of their managers at the impound lot the next day. He would bring the money to get my truck and trailer out. Over the month that it took to get any response from Walmart, the fee had ballooned to $3,500. Matt and I had no way of paying that fine, even early on, after my car had broken down. All our cushion money had gone into fixing it, so that I could keep going to job interviews. I was overjoyed.

  Twenty-four hours later, I had the Dodge Ram and my trailer back. Thurman offered to buy it from me for $2,000, so that
he could rent it out to more homeless people. I happily accepted, and moved my belongings out of it and into a storage shed. The same day, I received a call from a company I’d interviewed with a few months earlier. They offered me the job.

  The position was as executive assistant and office manager at a motorcycle company. The company hadn’t known that I was homeless when they hired me, and I did my best to keep it that way. I’d gotten the job on my own merits, and I was proud of that. It wasn’t very high-paying at all; in fact, they paid far lower than industry standard. But I hoped that it would look good on my résumé, and any work was good work, right?

  Unfortunately, it was also by far the most hellish place I’d ever worked. Though I didn’t know about all of the staff hanky-panky going on with the owner at the time, I did stumble across a litany of labor law violations, health code violations, employee abuse, discrimination, harassment and illegal/shady/unethical financial manipulations. As I was hired to facilitate Human Resources, payroll and all the other business functions, I called attention to all these issues and was promptly fired for whistle-blowing (though I threatened to report them, and my termination notice was hastily exchanged for layoff paperwork). Matt was actually glad that I got out of there. The round-trip commute to and from work every day totaled over one hundred miles in rush-hour traffic, and they often required excessive—and illegal—amounts of overtime and he was barely seeing me anymore.