The Girl's Guide to Homelessness (17 page)

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 water 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.

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.

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.