Days pass and my trajectory becomes mercifully blurred. I move from Santa Monica, to Hollywood, to Venice. I find places to crash: lobby sofas in college dorms, laundry rooms in apartment complexes, meeting rooms in libraries, campgrounds, hiking trails, beaches. I find food in trash cans or abandoned on trays at mall food courts. Bathrooms are always a safe choice and I can spend hours in a stall: at a gas station, in a library, at a bar or a busy restaurant. One in particular at a beach bar in Venice is beautiful, with Jimi Hendrix posters and palm plants, and I sit on the mosaic tile floor and rest my head against the wall, fall in and out of sleep and dream that I live there, in a beautiful bathroom on the beach.
The most important thing is that I keep moving so homelessness can’t catch me. If I focus on a goal, if I always have somewhere to be, I am not homeless. I am not anything. I am just between things, a passenger traveling between one life and the next—the past, like a train still roaring in my ears, and the future, on the other side of the tracks, if I can just get there.
The worst days are when I can tell people mistake me for a person suffering from homelessness, which doesn’t make sense—why should things be worse because someone else thinks it? But their thoughts are contagious, the way they look at me, the way they move away, like I am bad meat sidling up beside them, and for a moment the spell breaks and I see things clearly.
When a hand covers a mouth when I’m stopped on the corner, waiting for the crossing light to change.
When someone gasps at me darting onto the street to collect three pennies.
When a woman passes and says in a high thread of a voice, so quiet it’s like she’s reeling it in as she gives it out, “Don’t let it bring you down.”
I do work here and there but it’s very hard to get paid for it. I work a whole week at a hot dog stand in Venice but am asked to leave when they discover I lied about having insurance. I should have insurance. I qualify, but my dad messed something up when I was a kid and now I am forever blacklisted. There is nothing I can do. I’m not authorized to change this, when nobody is. And I am so tired now, so tired all the time that everything feels shifty and illusory.
I get to know people on the streets, and they get to know me. Michael under the 101 below Franklin, who catcalled me five or six times before he realized what I was and stopped.
I get to know territories that were invisible to me before. It’s like a secret second world rises up before my eyes.
The tent community that lives on the turf islands in the LA River.
The meth heads on the sofas in the bushes outside the Franklin Community Center.
The swap-meet-style grottoes beneath the 101 freeway.
All my life I have avoided looking at people suffering from homelessness, and it is freeing, thrilling, to look. At the artful arrangements of reclaimed furniture, the cozy wall-less living rooms, the collected items on shelves that look like shops, the art, the wooden boxes of donated orange peppers.
There is a style to the streets that is part lost boy, part art college. Bare-chested men swaddled in tattered blankets charging back and forth beneath the freeway, traffic be damned, always mysteriously in a hurry, only to be pinballed back across the road. A woman in a spaghetti-strap tank top on the corner of Sunset and Gower singing to passersby. “You have one eyebrow—you look like a damn fool! Your dress is too short—you are a damn slut!”
Most people are nice on the streets. More, I think, than in the other world. Even people with severe mental health problems who rant and rave and scream don’t want to hurt you. Mostly, I think they just want to be seen. All people do, but it’s harder for some than it is for others.
I keep walking, not realizing that I am sinking into the world I’m seeing, pinballing across LA just like the men beneath the freeway, singing mean songs to myself about all the rich people who pass. Assholes, jerks, monsters. Not realizing that I am only seeing this new world because I am a part of it. I am a player in their game.
It’s my body that finally stops me. A long-running cold burns into a fever. I walk too much and I don’t eat enough and my body can’t fix itself.
My dad died of bronchitis. It’s in my blood to cough myself to death.
I am shivering in sixty-degree weather. I am struggling to put one foot in front of the other. It’s like my body isn’t mine anymore; it’s just a deadweight that’s tied to me, and it just wants to lie down. I need to lie down.
I am afraid of exposure, afraid of being caught out alone. I need a fortress to protect me. But I can’t afford a wall of stone or wood or plaster or whatever it is that makes a house. All I can afford is a wall of people.
I pass the tent city underneath the 101. Michael is there sweeping the sidewalk, a tattered blanket hung over his shoulders, and he says, “You again.”
And I say, “I need to lie down, please. Is there anywhere I can just lie down?”
He chews it over for a second, eyes wide. “Martin’s been gone awhile. His tent’s empty—but I don’t know when he’s coming back. He might crawl in on top of you.” This sounds horrible but I can’t keep walking. My body aches. My brain is shutting down. I imagine Martin crawling in over my corpse and I think, In this nightmare, at least I’m dead.
And I nod and say, “Where is it?”
The tent is in a crevice in the freeway tunnel, on top of a pebbled floor the city installed to keep people from sleeping there. It smells of piss until I start to sweat; then it smells of me and that’s worse: thick, cloying, hard to breathe through. I imagine myself dying a hundred times, burning in a fire I am powerless to put out.
Time shifts. The light outside the tent flares in and out. Voices assemble and disassemble. Cars rush overhead like racing thoughts, plowing through me.
Then I wake up in the middle of the night. The fever has dissipated, taking its magic visions with it. Leaving only cold reality.
I am in a tent spattered with blood and shit under a freeway. Beyond the thin material, people are talking about Jesus.
I wake up homeless.
DEMI
I find an organization that gives tents to people suffering from homelessness. They give one to me. I stay in the tent city under the 101. I still walk, but not as much. Mostly, I stay in my tent and pretend I am not there. My tent is like a shield. It’s just a tarp between me and reality but it’s enough. I come out only at night, when fewer people see me and the camp is relatively quiet.
In spite of this, I absorb people. I feel shrouded in community.
One little group gathers by the southbound exit for meetings with religious undertones. They draw symbols on the ground with spray paint and talk about conspiracy theories: 9-11, the coronavirus, lizard people.
Some people take drugs but usually in secret, so they don’t have to share. People have hopes and dreams and families. People believe in their own talents. People are upset about their daughters’ behavior. People give knowing, smug advice. People are gluten free, vegan or plant based. They refuse fast-food handouts and list the preservatives in treats from 7-Eleven. They argue about the president. They teach one another things.
Everyone talks about astrology. This is LA, after all.
I watch, always keeping myself slightly apart, away from everybody. Sometimes I feel ashamed about it, but other times I think it’s the only way I will ever recover from this, the only way to keep me from suffering from homelessness for the rest of my life. To think of myself as separate, observing. Not superior but separate. This is what I tell myself.
I am struggling with homelessness but it is temporary. I have a cold that won’t go away, a fever that drifts in and out of consciousness. No matter how many times I wash my hands, they are always sticky, but I am not going to be like this forever.
* * *
ONE NIGHT I am the only one awake after dark. This is my favorite time, when the entire camp looks like an oasis in the desert, surreal. When I can be alone and flex the world, make it into something manageable, even beautiful.
I gaze down the street, toward Hollywood, and watch the traffic lights change, watch the people pass at a distance, so few and far between.