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.
I see a woman stumble. She is wearing a big black coat and painful-looking black heels. She is headed in my direction. I am tempted to hide in my tent, not wanting to be seen, but I remind myself that I am invisible to her. And I’m fascinated.
You rarely see rich people up close—I mean, really rich: two-thousand-dollar-T-shirt, thirty-thousand-dollar-bag rich. They shuttle in expensive cars to places we can’t afford where they pay to be surrounded only by one another.
Apart from that woman in the silver gown who broke our toilet, I don’t know that I have ever seen a rich person up close. Until now.
I can tell this woman is rich even a block away. Her coat gleams like it is made of ebony. The bottoms of her black shoes are bright red. Her skin glows like something alien. Her body is sculpted, tight and organized.
She pats herself down wearily, halfheartedly searching for something she has looked for before. Then she sighs, this big, demonstrative sigh, like she lives to be seen. Then she stamps toward me.
She passes under the bright lights beneath the freeway. They throw her black coat into relief. It’s long, swollen in bunches like a ski jacket. The collar is fur. Her heels are leather. Her tights don’t have a single tear. I watch her, thinking she won’t see me, thinking she can’t see me, when her eyes dart down, when they meet mine.
She swoops in, so fully in control of herself and her presence that I feel myself cowering like a light has shined inside my shell, revealing I was always small, hidden.
“Excuse me? Can I borrow your phone?” Is she kidding?
“I—I dead.” I haven’t talked in so long, I’ve forgotten how. “I mean, my phone is dead.” It’s like a bad reading of a basic line. I sound so strange to myself. I haven’t used my phone in weeks. But I know where it is, in my backpack, with everything I own.
“Ugh, I need an Uber. I live, like, a mile from here. Can I ask you a question?” She wobbles suddenly, standing over me with her legs set a little too wide, and I realize she is drunk. Everything about her is so expensive—the peach-tinted gold in her hair, the liner around her eyes, the cashmere turtleneck—that it’s hard to see beyond that. “Do you know anyone who sells heroin?” She breaks into a scattered, victorious laugh, like she has tricked herself. “Or Oxy,” she adds when I don’t respond. “Damn, I’d take fenty. I would call my dealer, but the phone is an issue. I have cash, though. Some fucker stole my phone. Or I dropped it in the toilet.” She sighs, like it’s too heavy to remember.