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.