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.
