Home (not less) More

I suppose I should remember what kind of car it was … it was my home for a couple of months. The car belonged to a woman I met in a homeless shelter in Laguna Beach. Mary had been a display designer for a big department store in Southern California. She was working on a Christmas display when she fell two stories off a ladder. The store fought her disability claim for more than two years. Buried in mounds of red tape, Mary lost almost everything but her car and the few precious belongings she could fit in the trunk. Somehow she retained her sense of humor, sense of right and wrong, and an extraordinary amount of compassion for a woman in her circumstances. She was estranged from her family back in the Midwest, homeless, and in pain almost constantly, yet she went out of her way to help people in any way that she could. She helped me.

I was in my very early twenties and had ended up at the shelter after taking a wrong turn from the last house on the block. What is the opposite of proverbial? I made some wrong decisions for sure. I was twenty. It would have been unheard of for me not to. I’d moved to Southern California to live with my brother and his wife. That hadn’t worked out for long. I was crashing with various people when my brother and sister-in-law moved to Florida. I was determined not to reach out to my family back in Minnesota. They’d been bailing me out my whole life. This, I was going to do on my own. Sure I relied upon that old kindness of strangers bit. I crashed with friends for a while longer. I even had a sort-of-boyfriend for a blink-and-you-might-miss-it period of time. There was some fairly severe depression going on.

It was 1989 and I had been exposed to HIV. I was basically just waiting to test positive. My options were depression or obliviousness. I’ve never been terribly adept at the latter. Therefore the former and I became well-acquainted throughout my twenties. I did end up testing positive a couple of months after my twenty-second birthday, but that’s a different story entirely.

I had an agreement with a friend that I could crash with him indefinitely as long as I didn’t try to harm myself. That was, it turned out, a fool’s errand. I’d stayed there for less than a week when I overdosed on some prescription medication. It just being a huge cry for help, I called 9-1-1 before I lost consciousness. That was my only experience having my stomach pumped. To this day the sight of charcoal makes me queasy. The episode is what I referred to earlier as the “last house on the block.” I literally had nowhere else to go in California, nowhere anyway that didn’t involve some kind of exchange of sexual favors for a roof over my head. To the shelter I went!

I was there a couple of weeks before I broke some rule. Another lapse in memory precludes me from telling you what the rule was. I remember it seeming rather benign to me then. As a result, Mary and I took to her car: the year, make and model of which I couldn’t relay if my life depended on it. I’m actually not what you a call a car person, so that’s pretty in-character for me. There was a day or two (or ten) when Mary had to be elsewhere in her car, so I slept on the beach. Once a week, on Tuesdays, we’d rent a $20 hotel room right off the Pacific Coast Highway, so each of us could shower somewhere other than the YWCA and sleep in an actual bed. Anyone who knows me will not be at all surprised to learn the reason these very brief vacations from homelessness happened on Tuesdays.

That’s the night that Thirtysomething aired on ABC. For the few months all of this went on, I only missed one episode of the show. Mary watched Seinfeld. That came on right before Thirtysomething, usually while I was washing off a week’s worth of shame.

Many of those nights, Mary and I would sit on our single beds, facing each other, and talk. We talked about the Midwest mostly, her kids, my family, politics sometimes, my desire to write something other than poetry, her desire to be whole again. The facing each other part was novel at bedtime. The other nights we talked like a cab driver and her passenger.

There were food stamps back then. It was way before EBT. I panhandled a bit, but usually I was too shy to ask. I’d never do one of those signs. What if anyone actually knew I was in-need? A few times I shoplifted cigarettes from the Albertson’s in Laguna. I couldn’t even bum those properly. Every time I went back into the store when I had enough money and bought two packs of smokes and left one in the bagging area at the end of the checkout. I’d have to hightail it out of the store before the cashier realized I’d forgotten one of my purchases.

I think of those days quite often still. It’s been almost five years since I bought my condo. I became a homeowner pretty late in life. I was already in my forties when I decided to stop waiting around for a significant other to broach that one of life’s milestones with. Even with that, my dear friend Tonna worked tirelessly with me, for going on two years, to repair my credit enough to qualify for a first-time homeowner’s loan. I closed on the condo in what turned out to be twenty-one years to the month of when I stopped being homeless.

I ended up moving into a long-term shelter in June of 1989. From there, I found a roommate and a job managing a discount bookstore; and for a while stability and sanity seemed to coexist. That didn’t tend to last very long, ever, in my twenties. By March of 1990, I’d tested HIV positive and it was back to the crazy-races for me.

Now twenty-five years after that, my hold on sanity has been tight for some time, nearly two decades actually. Some may disagree with that personal assessment, but I promise none of those people “knew me when.” Barely a day goes by that I don’t look around my home and mouth the words thank you.

I was raised Catholic, but haven’t practiced any organized religion in years. Sometimes, though, I’m thanking God. Sometimes I’m thanking the Universe which I believe is a far more powerful force in my life. Sometimes I’m probably even mouthing the words to the dozens of people who have held me up in my life, from Mary, and before, all the way to Tonna who insisted I clean up my credit so that I could buy this condo. There have been so many beautiful friends before, during and after – far too many to count. My cup truly has run over in that department.   

It’s been amazing to have been able to help out a few people myself. Paying it forward should be as instinctive as breath if you ask me. As I sit here, life, at times, is still a struggle, nothing even in the same universe as what it was twenty-five and then some years ago. I don’t believe it’s designed to be easy. Where’s the fun in that? Still, I look around at the furniture that I own, the huge collection of movies and books, my two cats, both curled up sleeping. I look around and I am filled with gratitude. I can make anywhere home. There have been many, many places I have called that word. HOME. It really can be just a state of mind, a place you feel safe, if only for a moment. I stand at one end of this latest place I call “it,” or the other; and I remember Mary and the car with the burgundy fabric interior and I ponder.

It occurred to me that my parents created a home in which I lived for the first sixteen years of my life. That was home certainly. But it was not of my making. Sheer determination, and all evidence to the contrary, a strong will to live, better myself, and feather a nest lead me to create my very first home. That all was with a woman I lost contact with more than twenty years ago, in the backseat of a car I couldn’t point out in a line-up. That home was of my making. And so is this one. HOME – not less … MORE.

ALMOST HOME

I’m so excited to share a few things with you.  The first is that I have finished the first draft of my first novel.  A dear friend, in Australia, has just completed a beta read and the first basic edit, and I hope to have it to a professional editor by the second week of March.  My goal is to self-publish in May.  I want the release to coincide with another milestone, in my life, that I will tell you about in a moment. 

The novel, Almost Home is about Stephen Bennett, a thirty-two year old HIV positive man who has just lost his lover to the ravages of AIDS.  The couple have a fourteen year old son, Caden.  This all too common tragedy happens a mile above the Castro District, of San Francisco.  Convinced, as many were, in the 1990’s, that he would inevitably succumb to AIDS, Stephen must do something to ensure Caden is cared for.  Faced with his own mortality and confronted with a growing rift between himself and his teenage stepson, he decides to move them both, across the country, to Minnesota.  This is in an effort to reconnect with the family he’s been mostly estranged from, since he was just a half decade older than Caden.  Through relationships found or rediscovered, secrets are revealed.  Old resentments and new beginnings send Stephen and his extended family hurtling towards one shocking night, New Year’s Eve, 1993, when a heartbreaking act of violence threatens to shatter all of their worlds apart.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I have talked about writing, nearly, my entire life.  I started on a manual typewriter when I was twelve years old.  I didn’t know how to type, so I hunted and pecked away at the keys of that ancient machine.  To this day, I type with two fingers.  Teachers, in high school and college, attempted to break me of the habit, to absolutely to no avail.  For many years, I stopped with the typing altogether, handwriting poetry.  There were a couple of attempts at novels, but nothing like this.  I am so thrilled to have come this far. 

Now, about that second milestone, on March 8, 1989, I tested HIV positive.  In a couple of weeks, it will be twenty-five years.  The quarter of a century, now more than half of my life, that I have lived with HIV, has been challenging certainly, but mostly, it’s been rewarding.  I’ve been gifted with too many beautiful friendships to count.  I have been showered with support from family and friends.  Since 1990, I’ve participated in twenty AIDS Walks, in LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and now Minnesota.  This year, on Sunday, May 17^th, I challenge my friends and family to join me.  I’ve set a fundraising goal of $5000.  Personally, I hope to raise half of that.  Beyond that, if 20 friends each raise $100, we’re nearly all the way there. 

The novel is a reimagining of some parts of my journey.  I look back on the 1990’s, when I, too, felt there was no chance I’d survive the decade.  Almost constant battles with drug changes and the nagging side effects that accompany each change have certainly challenged me and those I love and work for, and with.  I’m very happy to be able to tell the story of a man and his extended family facing similar struggles, apart and, hopefully, together.  It seems apropos to combine the publication of my first novel, with the 25^th anniversary of my testing positive, and the AIDS Walk, immediately following that milestone.  The book is called Almost Home, so I’ve started a team for the Walk, by the same name.  You can register to walk at www.mnaidswalk.org  Choose to join a team and find Almost Home.  You can pledge me, personally, or the team, by going here: http://mnaidswalk.org/kev1229#.VNz8huk5CUk

It has been the biggest pleasure to take this journey with all of you.  Expect the launch of a personal website within the next month, where you can follow the progress of both projects.  Again, I hope to have the book, in at least Kindle and paperback form, available for purchase on Amazon, in May.

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!