Houseless, not Homeless

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Addiction, Affordable housing, Homeless, Homelessness, living on the street, Poverty

Once when I was part of an effort to end homelessness in our community, one of the participants who had himself been homeless objected to the term. “We’re houseless, not homeless,” he insisted. Unfortunately his preferred term never caught on. I understood what he meant though. It was more than the fact that many people without housing live in cars or campers, or take up residence in empty buildings, or crude shacks built in remote areas.

It was the realization that all of us share a home on Mother Earth that may or may not include four walls and a roof. I remembered how Jesus once lamented that birds have nests, and squirrels have burrows, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head. Yet we never think of Jesus as having been homeless. Nor do we think of our nomadic ancestors as having been homeless. There was always a sense that people were at “home” in their own bodies, in their natural environment, and in the communities of those they identified with.

This realization struck me on a deeper level years later when I went to pick up someone who had been living a nomadic “houseless” existence for long stretches of time when he could not find nor afford a drug treatment program that could take him in. After living that way all summer and most of the fall, I went to bring him to a place where it would be safer and warmer to wait for a bed to open up.

He had me drive him to a parking lot near the beach so he could hike back into the sand dunes to collect his gear.

I offered to go with him and help carry it back, but he said no. It was too far, and the most direct route would have us climbing up and sliding down huge dunes. So I took a walk along the beach while awaiting his return.

The weather had been stormy for the last few days and the morning sky was a molten sheen of silver as the sun tried to burst through. The tide was out and tiny rivulets of water had formed between the ripples of wet sand, reflecting the bright sky. Dozens of sand dollars in all sizes had been washed up on the beach, most of them perfectly whole, and I collected my share. Hundreds of tiny sea birds hunted among the puddles and shallow waves. Among them gulls flew in and out, and one long-legged white heron tip-toed among its cousins.

It was breathtakingly beautiful and peaceful. I imagined him up there, all alone among the sand dunes at night, peeking up at the bright expanse of stars, hearing the hum of the breaking waves, breathing in its salty breath.

Camping out it might have been called–once upon a time in a land far away.

But when he returned with his gear I found out it wasn’t that way at all. The dunes where he slept were full of fellow travelers. As we were driving away he had me pull over so he could hail down a man on a bicycle packed tight with tent poles and back packs and what looked to be a small camp stove.

“Tell Josh I left the tent and blankets he loaned me out there for him.”

Josh was a young man living in the dunes with his girlfriend. They had grown up “houseless” and now were living a”houseless” life together.

Many people like them and the bike rider lived back there, and the place where he had slept would not remain empty long. The secure burrow deep beneath a sage bush had been dug by another, inhabited and abandoned time and time again.

But that’s not the half of it, he told me. Many have lived out there so long and had become so adept at doing so, they had tapped into the electric grid and had TV, computers, and electric lights.

This was true back in the canyons far from the beach as well. There a whole community of “homeless” residents lived, having dug caves and elaborate tunnels into the hillsides, and built tree houses for lookouts to guard against intruders. Hundreds lived back there, he said, in relative luxury, since they too had found ways to plug into the electric grid. The homeless 1%, I suppose.

This is not to make light of, nor to romanticize the plight of people who lack mainstream housing. There is no question that for some this is a lifestyle choice.

But for the vast majority who live on the streets or in the dunes and canyons, they do so because they have no other options. They are there because poor health and medical bills left them bankrupt and houseless. They are there because a lost job, a string of bad luck, addiction, mental illness, and an array of other similar calamities left them no choice but to try to find a way to exist without a house to live in.

Sadly, we’ve make outcasts and outlaws of the poor and sick and struggling. We’ve banished them to live outside the norms of society and forced them to create counter communities at the fringes of society.

We call them homeless, when in truth we all share one home. We’ve simply failed to provide for our own. We’ve failed to create the kind of safeguards and services that would keep all of us safely housed.

“When Things Go Missing,” Piecing the Puzzle Together

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Addiction, Families, fiction, Online Writing, Relationships, short story, Short Story Month, writing

Short stories are getting a lot of love lately. May has been proclaimed National Short Story Month. Others have dubbed 2013 as the “Year of the Short Story”. Either way, for those who write short stories or love to read them, this is a reason to celebrate.

So I was pleased when my short story “When Things Go Missing” was published in the newest issue of Unchartered Frontier, an online literary journal. The story is actually an excerpt from a novel that I’m writing. Here’s the synopsis.

One day Fran heads toward the grocery store and keeps on going till she reaches the tip of South America. Meanwhile she leaves behind an empty hole in the lives of her family, an insecure daughter trying to cope with the rigors of graduate school and lackluster love life, a son strung out on heroin, filled with self-pity and rage, and a husband who plots her course across the continent with push pins on a map as he pays her credit card bills. How they cope with her mysterious disappearance and the cryptic phone messages and photographs she sends them, as well as rediscover each other and forge new relationships in her absence, creates the heart of this novel.

The Prodigal Son by Rodin

The novel is written from the perspectives of three main characters, the daughter Kay, the son Cal, and the husband. The short story is Cal’s first chapter (adapted to stand-alone). His story is particularly difficult to write (and perhaps read) because many readers will not find him sympathetic at the beginning. For others who have experience with addiction, ADHD, or love-hate parental relationships, his story may be painful and heartbreaking, and might hit a little too close to home.

But for those who love a good “prodigal son” story, or like rooting for the underdog–cheering for Rocky Balboa when he ran up those stairs, or rooting for Bradley Cooper’s character in the recent film Silver Linings Playbook–I’m hoping they will cut Cal a bit of slack.

A lot of things are missing or perceived missing in Cal’s life, as the title “When Things Go Missing” indicates. It’s interesting how so much of who we are is shaped by the things missing or absent in our lives–as much as, or more so perhaps, than what’s actually there. The whole premise of the novel is how the mother’s absence shapes the lives of those left behind, as well as how they come to “re-see” her in light of her absence.

From the film Silver Linings Playbook

But it’s also about how we struggle to make sense of our lives, struggle to piece things together when so much seems missing.  Especially since how often these puzzles are pieced together from scraps of memories, misperceptions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, misinformation, as well as our own prejudices and preferences, which often blind us to what actually is. Those missing pieces come to shape how we see each other as much as what’s actually there. In some ways, none of us are really what we are perceived to be by others. We are all the unreliable narrators of our own stories.

The miracle, perhaps, is how we connect at all. How despite all that would seem to conspire to keep us apart, we come together nonetheless.

If this sort of thing interests you, you can read “When Things Go Missing” online in Chartered Frontier. You can also download the journal for free in a number of forms.

Here’s the opening of the story to get you started:

Cal stands on the front stoop of his parent’s home with a cold breeze swirling around him, liking the damp chill seeping into his skin, goosing it up. The sun is almost gone, a faint, dull glow smeared along the horizon. Dusk settles like ashes over the neighborhood rooftops. He watches his sister backing her Volvo down the driveway, heading off to Northridge or Norwalk or wherever the hell she’s living these days. She’d come home looking for a little comfort since mom had gone missing. Fat chance of that. But he’s sorry now that she’s gone, sorry he hadn’t at least said he loved her, or asked her for a loan, and missing her even before she disappears around the corner. He takes a long last drag on his cigarette, squeezes the tip, and drops what’s left into his shirt pocket to save for later.

It feels weird walking into his parents’ house without knocking, even though he’d grown up here, been living here since his last stint in county jail, and off and on over the past ten years. He’s acutely conscious that this is not his home and never really had been, not even when he was a kid. He sucks on the fact like a sore tooth, teasing it, testing it with his tongue. It’s like he’d been born homeless. Like from the day he was born they were all just waiting for him to move out again. The thought fills him with a strange sense of satisfaction: Cal didn’t need a home. Didn’t need anything, anyone. Ever.

I hope a few of you will take the time to read this and let me know what you think. It would mean a lot.

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“Rider on the Storm” – My Wild Child, My Son

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Addiction, Body art, Family, Heroes journey, Homelessness, living on the street, Parenting, Recovery, Riders of the Storm, Survival, Tattoos, Wild Child

Recently I posted a tribute to my daughter on her wedding day, and as I wrote it, I wondered about the tribute I might pay to my son, whom I love equally, but whose life journey, even while raised so similarly, led him down a very different path, often heartbreakingly so.

It always amazed me as my children were growing up how they had come to be, in some uncanny way, the embodiment of very different parts of my psyche.  My daughter was growing up to be the woman I had always wanted to be—beautiful, brave, strong, independent and self-confident.  While my son was turning out to be the kind of boy that I and so many young women were drawn too——wild and reckless, handsome and charming, sweet and funny, willful and stubborn—a born rebel, who cherished his freedom, testing limits and bending rules.  Living with him was like living on a roller-coaster ride, full of thrills and chills that never seemed to let up.

Almost from the day he was born he was a handful. I would ruefully tell other mothers how he entered the terrible twos when he was one and never grew out of it. At the tender age of two he ran away from home–twice.  Once to visit his grandma five blocks away.  Another to buy candy.  A policeman brought him home that day when he was trying to cross a busy street with a nickel in his pocket.  I installed locks on all the doors and gates after that.

Yet he was a loving child, a sweet child, popular with other kids and his teachers, even while he spent much of his early grade school days in the principal’s office. Not because he was a bully, but because he refused to be bullied, or see those he cared about bullied.

When he was 11, we moved on our boat La Gitana in Ventura Harbor.  He immediately took up surfing, and learned to row and sail a dinghy. He became an avid sport fisherman, making all his own lures and rigging his own poles.

When we finally did take off on our journey there was always a line in the water and he supplied most of the fish we dined on. He could free dive to depths of 20 or more feet to spear a grouper or capture a lobster.

He made friends easily with other sailors and fishermen who were impressed by his skill and knowledge.  He became a certified scuba diver at the age of twelve.  He was a true Pisces—at home in the ocean he loved.

Trying to home school him was a challenge, but once I enrolled him in a self-paced program where we mailed his work back to a teacher for grading and feedback, it went better.  Not that we didn’t have our moments.

By the time we reached Australia, he was 16-years-old and didn’t want to leave. In Australia at the time, many children that age left formal schooling to learn a trade.  Often they lived on their own, helped out by the government, or boarded with those who were teaching them a trade.  Chris was invited by a boat-builder to join his crew.  When it was time for us to leave Australia, he begged me to let him.  It was his dream to become the captain of a sports fishing boat, and this seemed like an opportunity for him to pursue that goal. I interceded on his behalf with his father, who, against his better judgment, allowed him to stay.

I’ll never forget the day we sailed away, leaving our son behind in Australia.  I felt like the worst of all mothers, like I was abandoning him.  And something in his eyes made me wonder if he was thinking the same thing.

At the same time, I felt like I was giving him an opportunity to be the man he wanted to be, to live the kind of life he wanted to live.

I had read books of young 16-year-old boys taking off on their own from Ireland to seek their fortunes in America, how difficult it had been for them, but how they had thrived.  It’s what I had hoped for him. I trusted that he had what it takes to make it on his own.  To this day, I don’t know if I made the right decision.

He spent two years on his own in Australia.  We exchanged letters and talked to each other as much as we were able.  Always I asked if he was ready to come back on the boat, or go home to stay with his grandparents.  Always he said no, he was fine.  But I never really knew.  I learned later that the old guy he had gone to work for was hospitalized and eventually died.  I heard tales about him drifting around working as a carny, and later for a Mafia-type family who owned a string of Italian restaurants.  He’s very tight-lipped about those days, and I do not press him.

He came home at age 18 around the same time we returned from our travels, and he was tall and handsome and had an Aussie accent.  He seemed happy and confident.   He spent some time with his grandfather, going mountain climbing and obtaining his GED.  Eventually he became a commercial diver, working on the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

Then he moved to New Orleans.  Two years later when he returned home to California he was a heroin addict.

That’s when the roller-coaster ride became a nightmare.  He couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t stay clean.  He spent years on the street, in and out of rehab, in and out of jail and prison, in and out of hospitals when he overdosed.  We took him in when we could, until we couldn’t anymore.  On more than one occasion I moved out with him, thinking hands-on mom-care would help.  It didn’t.

The worst part was when I didn’t know where he was.  I didn’t know if he was sleeping on a park bench or was rolled up on someone’s couch, or lying in a ditch somewhere.  When he was in jail, or even in the hospital, there was always hope.  He was safe, for now.  And maybe at last he’d hit bottom.  Maybe this time he would begin to turn his life around.

Yet even in the midst of all this he showed strength and resilience, street-wise resourcefulness, and a basic goodness that would inspire him to share the little he had with those who had less.

He saw himself as a “Rider on the Storm,” riding a long wild wave that would surely crash him on the rocks unless he could hold on tight and ride it out, and manage to turn it at just the right moment.  He couldn’t control it, and he couldn’t stop it, but he could perhaps outlast it. And he did.

He claims now I helped save his life. And sometimes I believe him.  My love for him was so strong, my prayers so constant, my will so fierce, nothing could make me let go, nothing could tear him away from me.   That’s how I saw it, willed it, demanded that it should be.  But I know better.  A mother’s love isn’t enough to keep a child safe.  Yet still, still, we would so believe.

Sometimes I think he’s the bravest person I’ve ever known.  No one else that I know could survive what he’s survived.  I know I wouldn’t.  Even his father, strong as he is, would not have survived that craziness.  Few do, I’m told.  Only fifty percent of heroin addicts survive their habit, and only half of those who do eventually lead drug-free lives.

I’m proud of him for being a fighter, a survivor, for not giving up, for having the stamina and courage to start over again and again and again—with nothing, no job, no money, no prospects.

I’m proud of him for winning the heart of the woman he now loves, for helping to bring their child into the world and raising her together, for caring for this child with such love and tenderness. For becoming the Father, the rule-maker rather than the rule-breaker, the Authority Figure in his young one’s life, someone she will look up to, and trust to care for her and keep her safe.

I think of those fairy tales and journeys heroes take, how they go into the dark, scary places of the world, do impossible deeds, overcome unimaginable challenges, fight off terrifying monsters, then save the princess and ride away with her on a white horse.  To some degree, in some measure, he’s done all that.

I see him as the warrior turned woodsman who has built a home on the edge of the forest.  All the scary things are still out there, but now he’s a seasoned fighter, and he has something other than himself to protect and keep safe.  He’s guarding hearth and home, this dragon-slayer, demon-hunter, who has lived with and among dragons and demons for so long.

His body art tells the story of his survival and his path to recovery.  Draped along his upper chest are the words “Riders on the Storm” to remind him where he’s been.  On his shoulders and across his back are nautical stars and a compass rose to guide him through the storm.

On his arm is an anchor with the word “Family” wrapped around it, to help keep him grounded and remind him of what’s he’s fighting for.  Beneath his heart are the infant footprints of a son he almost lost and is seeking to regain.  Soon to come, he tells me, are the fingerprints of his tiny daughter whose hold on his heart is so fierce.

Perhaps we all live at the edge of a dark forest, at the edge of the wild, with the dark scary things we fear forever yawning at our backs—addiction, disease, poverty, financial ruin, failure, loss of loved ones, war, famine, even enslavement for some.   Perhaps our life journey is to keep ourselves strong enough to survive the darkness, and bright enough to face the light and keep walking toward it.

I trust we all shall continue doing so.