I went back, you know – though I promised myself I never would. Nine years later. The overpass looked cleaner – less cluttered. No bedding piled in the wet shadows. No people either. Maybe it had been abandoned – I don’t know. It’s possible. San Jose was cleaned up by then. The whole downtown looked as it used to back in the ‘60’s – restaurants, theatre district - brand, spanking and new. No animal bodies in the street or on the sidewalks, no empty cans of sterno littering shit filled alleys. So maybe no one slept under that particular underpass any more. If so, that would be a good thing. When I was there – people were dying – or at least that was the rumor. One of the old guys – the regulars – told me. Said I should find somewhere else to spend the night – that it was too dangerous for a girl on her own. I believed him. So I moved further in – more towards the downtown. Not that it felt any safer – especially at night.
The shelter looked better too – no filthy drunk guys leaning against the jams, serving sentinel for those of us with nowhere to go. "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". Very, very true. It was hard standing in front of those doors, lemme tell ya. Memories can be such a bitch. Just being there triggered a panic attack. The world got very small and my lungs began to seize up. I had to close my eyes for a few moments and just breathe. At least the stink was gone. Years of accumulated urine washed away with a daub of fresh paint. Even the concrete stoop looked as if it had been scrubbed or replaced. I didn’t go inside. I couldn’t. I knew it would be dark. It always was. I think the building used to be a bomb shelter - the walls were adobe-thick. They blanketed the sound - until you opened the doors, that is. Then it washed over you like the pong off some fetid swamp. I hated going through those doors. I’d have to steel myself. It was like entering hell.
I cracked the door and listened, but couldn’t hear anything. I doubt the place was deserted. Warehouses for the homeless always seem to be needed, worse luck. Maybe it was just too early in the day. I’d never gone near the shelter till sunset before. No use turning up earlier. No one’d be there. It was, for all intents and purposes, closed. Shelter’s today are no comparison – not really. Back then they were little more than flop houses – repositories for loony bin dumps, addicts or down-on-their-luckers. You came in to avoid bad weather or achieve some modicum of safety – nothing else. Food, clothes, help – not available – not here, at any rate. Not much of anywhere, to be frank. Not in 1980. I was well and truly on my own.
So at sunset I’d make sure to be waiting at the door. 6:30 on the dot they opened it – the Salvation Army people. Punctual and precise. We all waited till the doors were completely open before surging inside. There was a kind of sign-in sheet, a way of tracking who was in the building. We’d line up, waiting to be handed a pen. Take it, sign your name, give it back. The same woman every time, her unsmiling face an impenetrable mask. She certainly had the ‘Army’ part right. They all did. I almost envied them - so fresh in their crisp, clean uniforms. I would have given anything for a change of clothes. I’d always thought of the Salvation Army as like those characters in "Guys and Dolls". Gruff and loveable – their shelters hangouts for Harry the Horse or Sky Masterson. Not these folks. Grim, I’d call them. They never looked anyone in the eye, either. Or maybe it was me. I was so ashamed of myself I almost crouched. Looking people in the eyes was hard. You never knew what you’d see: anger, disgust, evaluation – sexual interest if it was a man – never pity, though. No one ever pities the homeless. They always assume it’s somehow our fault – that we deserved our fate. There but for the grace of god, buddy.
M’Lady Grimm was keeper of the keys too. If you had a couple of bucks you could sleep in a room with a door (there were about three or four of these). Unfortunately, I rarely had the couple of bucks. When I did (someone came up and handed me a fiver once) - I made sure I got back to the shelter early enough to defend my claim. Two bucks bought you that key. I saw fights over keys – real bloody ones. Everyone wanted a key. The rooms were filthy, but those doors had locks. Not that that always protected you. The crazies would beat on them, pounding and screaming. It was impossible to sleep. No one ventured out to put a stop to it either. They just let the poor sods pound themselves into exhaustion. I literally stepped over people in the morning. They’d fall asleep, their backs against the door they’d been beating on all night. It was creepy as hell.
I was told that sometimes the doors didn’t hold. I’d think of that, huddled in my corner, watching the wood bend in with every hard slam – a little more each time. It was weird. I’d sit up all night, my eyes on that wood, willing it to hold. God knows what would have happened if it gave way. I never saw the monster on the other end – not really. I just heard him – a different ‘him’ every night. Passed out the next morning they seemed so harmless. It’s hard to put a face on terror. One guy scared the pants off me though. He’d found out my name. He crooned it against the door, like some horror film bad guy – "Baaby - come out to plaaay!" I called him Jack Nicholson, ‘cause that’s the face I imagined every time I’d hear his nails scratching. Jack Nicholson on a rat’s body – like a chimera. He wheezed – this deep, hacking sound. Liquid. You cannot imagine what that sounded like. It still haunts my nightmares. My husband will wake me up, tell me I was screaming. I’ll look up at him and not know who he is. Needless to say, the man has learned not to lean in too close.
No families lived in the shelter when I was there – no little kids. Good thing too. Drunks, meth addicts, needle junkies – downtown San Jose in 1980 was one hell of a place to be. Reagan’s stewardship had left California bankrupt and a mess – pretty much as he left the country, actually. San Jose was particularly bad. The recession had drained it dry. Downtown was a war zone. And to think, not three years earlier I’d had a nice little apartment just 10 blocks over – right down from the college. It was hard to reconcile those two lives. I’d often find myself over there, haunting my old neighborhood - especially if I didn’t have any interviews. It hadn’t really changed all that much. A little shabbier, perhaps – but then all of downtown San Jose was shabby. I’d stand in front of my old building and wonder: Did the same asshole live in the apartment next door? He used to bang his girlfriends on the couch in his living room. You could hear everything. It was so funny. My then husband and I would laugh. And what about that woman who left her kids alone all day and night? Or the little handicapped boy? Did any part of the old me still exist? I just stood there – staring at the building. People would stop, ask if I needed help. I looked so out of place – worn around the edges like my shoes. One woman brought her child inside as I passed – as if homelessness was contagious.
I got up at crack of dawn every day, looking for work – that and it made sense to be out early. Some of the drunks would get the DT’s after being dry all night. They needed alcohol, but didn’t have the money to buy it. So the drunk wagon stopped by every morning around seven, collecting the really bad ones – the ones who could barely walk. If you got on the wagon, you were three days in the tank. I knew this from being forced to bail my own brother out time and time again when I was a kid. Back then, the drunk tank was in the same building as the morgue (one of them, anyway). I’d actually worked in the morgue once to get college money. I kept the records. That’s how I found out my brother was a heroin addict as well as a drunk. I looked him up. I found out a lot of other things as well – that he purposefully shot himself in the foot to avoid being sent to Vietnam, that he was a thief and a sadist as well as a bald-faced liar (though that I knew first-hand).
Point is - I didn’t want to watch them loading the drunks (too many bad memories) so I’d hustle my ass out the moment the front doors were unlocked. Everyone was shooed out by nine anyway – so it’s not like I’d gain anything by hanging around. If I was really tired, I make my way out to the Rose Garden over on Naglee. That’s where Pat Tillman was honored. It was one of my special places. I’d gone there since I was a kid – The Rose Garden, Kelley Park and the Rosicrucian Museum. Little oasis’ in a world gone mad. I’d sit, I’d nap – I felt safe, you see. In spring and summer, the perfume of the roses was calming, and in the winter, its very emptiness helped fill the hole being frightened and alone made in my heart. I sit and imagine them in bloom. And the thorns were pretty – pink/red against the green stalks. I’d come away with a sense of calm.
It was out of my way, though – so I’d only go if I didn’t have any interviews scheduled. I’d always try to schedule the interviews beginning around 9 (if I could). That depended on how far I had to go, of course. San Jose was and is a really big city. There was nothing to be had downtown (I looked too grungy to be even considered for waitress work) – so if I wanted a job, I had to look in the ‘burbs. Distance became an issue. Usually I’d walk. Not out of preference – because the bus cost 50 cents. That’s a lot of money when you count it by pennies. To save a bit, I’d scrounge the ground for used transfers. The drivers wouldn’t take them if they were punched – so finding a good one was like finding gold in the streets. Purple got you as far as Almaden. Without it, you walked, baby - 10 miles one way. I know ‘cause I walked it – and more than once. There and back. Walked it often enough to have worn holes in one shoe. Lots of industrial buildings out that way, though. Almost any business or corporation had its offices in Almaden (7-11, Stop-N-Go). That’s where the interviews were. If you wanted decent work – you had to travel.
It’s amazing how many services exist now – clothing, transportation, job fairs. In 1980 I had nothing. Nada. A phone call was a dime. That’s each call, mind you. And those dimes added up. No matter how you sliced it, 10 calls cost a buck. And you’d have to call first to see if the company was even hiring. There were no free phone banks, no charities willing to set the appointment up for you. Oh - a person could go down to the unemployment office and look on the bulletin board – but most of those jobs were old and out of date. I just opened up the phone book, offered up a short prayer and cold called. I used a public phone. Finding one with an intact phone book took some looking – most had been ripped off. I had to be careful with the money too. No calling cool sounding companies angling for dream jobs I wasn’t likely to get. And I couldn’t do office work – I didn’t have the wardrobe. No - whatever I got had to last long enough to pull me out of the gutter – no part time or piece work. That meant companies like ‘Manpower’ were out. This had to be a regular, full time job that would last. I could shop around for something more suitable later. This was down and dirty time. I was prepared to take the first thing offered.
Planning was important. I had only $20 to last the entire three months I lived in the shelter – so my search had to be judicious. I got that $20 from my father. He stuffed it into my hand the day my mother turned me away from the house. She said I had gotten myself into this circumstance – so it was up to me to bail my own sorry ass out. Nice, huh? The woman was nothing if not righteous. Never mind my alcoholic, drug addict of a brother had essentially been allowed to set up shop in the spare bedroom. Nope - no room for me. My then husband’s parents said pretty much the same thing. I could store a few items in their garage – but that was all. Their son was given shelter – I was not. He left to join the military; I wandered the streets of downtown San Jose, wondering what had become of my life. My mother agreed to shelter my cats. I’d have done better turning them into the SPCA. She had my brother dump them. Her way of ‘helping me out’ she said. I should worry about my self. Pets were ‘unimportant’. I wept for a week when I found out what she’d done. One more consequence to becoming homeless. I truly had hit rock bottom.
But back to that 20 bucks. It had to last. No more would be forthcoming. My father only defied my mother on rare occasion, and only then when he was sure he wouldn’t get caught. So that 20 was the only lifeline I could expect to see. I had to spend it wisely. That meant walking instead of riding on the bus; though I’d have to pop for one on occasion – no matter the expense. There were days my feet stung like a son of a bitch from all the blisters. It just hurt too damn bad to walk anywhere. I still have the scars, you know – places where the skin on the soles of my feet is burned dark red. Blisters on top of blisters. Nothing to soak my feet in, either – no salve, no relief. I’d just shove on extra socks, grin and bear it. All I had was what was on my back. The small bag I’d carried had disappeared the very first night. I was damn lucky it was California. Even in winter the weather was bearable. And I was young – not yet 25. I can’t imagine what it would be like now. That’s why you don’t really see any old homeless people. It’s just too damn hard a life. After 40 the survival rate drops. Back then my main discomfort was always feeling grubby. The rest I could survive. And I did. After all - I’m here now.
I really missed having a change of clothes, though. The Salvation Army store down the street had clothing – but none of it really fit, and besides - it stank of other people’s perspiration. I just kept mine on, washing them in the bathroom sink with a little hand soap whenever necessary. Ever used bar soap to wash your hair? It sucks. Your hair dries out – getting all brittle and funny looking. And there’s no brush or towel – so it dries as it lies. You end up looking like a bird nested on your head. I’m surprised anyone hired me at all, considering. I really looked a fright. But Stop-‘n-Go took me on as a night manager, thank the lord. I’ve written elsewhere about that experience – suffice it to say I was damned grateful. Within a month I’d saved enough money for the deposit on a tiny apartment. Bye, bye shelter. I have to say I avoided that part of town afterward. My one trip back was the first time I could bring myself to go look. I just couldn’t bear being reminded. But then everything reminds me. Katrina was devastating. I had nightmares for months. And those times I’ve not been able to make my mortgage payment? Panic attack time. The fear of ending up on the street was almost suffocating.
You know – every choice I have made in my life since that point sprang from the experience of living in that shelter. Like Scarlet before me, I vowed I would never be homeless again. Some of you reading this may think homelessness is not that big a deal. You’ve been out camping with friends or family for a week and thought it was great. Maybe you had to sleep in your car a night or two waiting to get concert tickets when you were in college, or sacked out on a friends couch whilst between apartments. Well it isn’t the same. Not by a long shot. I would do anything – ANYTHING - to never face that fear ever again. For me – homelessness = terror. I am dead afraid of it ever happening again. Men who have come home from war say that death has its own smell. They say once you’ve smelled it, its something that you never can forget. Well homelessness has a smell too – one I never will forget. The acrid stench of urine and perspiration; rotted garbage mixed with old, decomposing meat. Spilled alcohol and that whiff of ammonia that sterno gives off. Filth. Homelessness smells like accumulated filth. I cannot drive past garbage of any kind without thinking of that shelter and its god-awful stench.
We all have reasons why we write, or why we’re politically active. This is one of mine. My personal cause, if you will. This is why we need government. To help when and where help is needed. No one did anything for me. I pulled myself up out of that gutter – and I’m proud of it – but it nearly killed me in the process. I call my 25th year the year of my epiphany. Everything changed – from how I looked at the world, to how I looked at myself. It was all-encompassing – each day informing the next – but the apex stands out in sharp relief. That one crystalline moment when black shifted to white. I sat - three in the morning, in a vacant apartment – staring at a half-empty gallon of cheap wine and two dozen sleeping pills – all spread out on the floor in front of me. It was crunch time. Do I stay, or do I go. Something had to change – and that something was me. Right then, right there – I changed me – all of me – from how I looked, to how I felt, thought and behaved. If ever I was a romantic – that singular experience burnt it out of me. There is no romance in being hungry and alone. And I made a promise to myself. I was never going back into a shelter again – not ever – so help me god.
Cross-posted in all the usual places