When things broke in our house, it was permanent. We couldn’t afford to fix them. To his credit, Dad didn’t seem pleased about this new challenge, but he also refused to demand, even beg, that the woman pay for the repairs.
So we pissed in a bucket and poured it down the sink, or we crapped in the toilet and used that same bucket and water from the bath—carefully applied—to activate the suction to flush it down. We did that for the rest of my life in that apartment.
That was the night I became poor. Because poverty is not just not having money. It’s the way you see the world. It’s out of your control.
There were people I knew with less money than me who somehow never believed they were poor. For example, my dad was never poor, but I was. We lived in the same house, ate the same food, suffered from the lack of the same things, but only I was poor.
I think about that woman in the silver gown all the time. I rage and obsess. Her dress that night was worth ten times what it would have cost to fix that toilet. It drives me crazy that a person like that can just drift into your fragile world and break it and never look back. I know it was an accident. I know she wasn’t the real culprit—poverty was. Accidents happened all the time to everyone. But I still hate her.
People never understand, God, what it feels like from your side. That you are like the ghosts in that movie; you forget you’re dead until someone tells you, until someone laughs at you, until someone says, You have only one cup? That’s your only jacket? You don’t have a car? You never had your own apartment? Like you are a magic trick: impossible.
DEMI
The sun has set by the time I leave the helping hands office. I am on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys, and I gaze down it, one way and then the other. Then I start walking.
It’s a strange feeling, knowing I have nowhere to go. I can’t quite believe it. I still imagine my dad’s apartment sometimes, shimmering in the distance, beyond the horizon. That if I walk far enough and fast enough, I can get home.
My feet ache but I won’t stop. I have to keep going; that’s the only way to win the game. Or at least to avoid losing.
I may be poor. It may be a stain that will never go away, but I am not homeless. I have lived for years in other people’s houses. I have never technically had my own home, but that doesn’t make me homeless, in the same way my dad was never poor.
I won’t do it. I will find a way out. Even if I have to walk all night, walk for a week. I will not be homeless.
* * *
IT’S NOT AS hard as it seems to walk all night. At least it’s always been easy for me. You just need to give yourself a destination—far but not so far it feels unattainable—and then you walk there. Once you arrive, you hover around for a minute: Maybe it’s a park and you sit on a bench. Maybe it’s a mall and you look at the storefronts. Maybe it’s a beach and you stick your toes in the sand. And then, just as you are starting to deflate, at the exact moment before that deflation transforms to inertia, you give yourself a new place to go.
That night, after I walk from Van Nuys to Glendale, I continue toward The Grove in West Hollywood. It’s closed, but I tell myself I’ve never seen it at night, and that’s enough of a goal.
Once I arrive, it’s locked up like a fortress and I tell myself, Well, now you know they close it up at night, and I decide to head to the beach to catch the sunrise. This is where I sleep, on my backpack on the sand, like a traveling dilettante. I just flew in from Poland! Who doesn’t sleep on the beach?
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.