The Girl's Guide to Homelessness (12 page)

I wasn't ashamed. I was simply concerned for my safety. Matt, too, was angered by the man's refusal to back down, and refused to communicate with him or promote any more of his work. After a few days stewing, I decided to shrug it off and let it go. The video did indeed send several viewers to my site, which was fine, but I would never
again like or trust that man. The whole thing served only to make me more guarded about the people I was willing to speak to.

I didn't know it at the time, but Matt spent hours painstakingly downloading the video interview on his incredibly slow, rural internet connection. I would later learn that he watched it over and over again, learning my mannerisms, the inflections of my voice, my nervous laugh. It made me all the more real to him. He noted that, at one point, I mentioned writing for his site, and when I spoke his name, an uncontrollable smile spread across my face. It was true. I couldn't help myself. There was so little to be happy about in my current predicament. His friendship and support were among the few rays of light that kept me going.

 

One night I received a text message from Pete in the Walmart lot. Some kids apparently were teasing Fezzik through the trailer window while I was at work and he started going insane barking (thus breaking that cardinal rule of “Ye must not attract any attention”). So, the other RVers asked me to move for a while, and I understood, of course. I felt terrible.

I moved the trailer to Sam's Club a few miles away and texted Sonia, who told me to call her in the morning and she'd take me back to Walmart to pick up my car.

Big mistake.

First of all, the lot at Sam's Club, while pretty much completely deserted at night (unlike Walmart), is located in a much crummier part of town. And it's situated right by train tracks. This loud train came through honking its horn, all night long…waking me up about every hour and a half. Then, around 4:00 a.m., Fezzik started barking nonstop and I couldn't figure out why, because he's never
been much of a barker unless he thinks that a strange man might hurt me.

I finally got up, stepped outside and found myself facing about fifty Mexican immigrants gathered around my trailer, cooking breakfast on a portable grill and appraising me confusedly. Apparently, I had chosen to camp out in the spot where they stand around all day waiting for under-the-table work.

Well, fuck.

So Fezzik was, of course, going nuts because he didn't like all the strange men hanging around my trailer. But then, the only other option was going back to Walmart, and I figured I couldn't show my face back there for a while, until I found somewhere else for Fezzik.

 

I decided that I had no choice but to board Fezzik. I didn't want to stay in the Sam's Club parking lot. Pete mentioned that he had sent another RVer out there to drive by and see if I made it OK, and he had seen all the day workers hanging around my trailer and was concerned. Walmart was a much safer option, and I was touched to learn that the other members of my little RV community cared enough to drive by Sam's Club and watch out for me.

Brandon fronted me the money for one month of boarding, until I got my paycheck from work. It would stretch my finances a bit, I knew, and probably even prolong my homelessness, but Fezzik has always been worth every bit of it.

 

Matt talked me through my despair over the Fezzik situation. He had to give up his two cats when he lost his home and he mourned their loss. He recognized that I would give up Fezzik if I absolutely had to, and became
unable to care for him, but I wanted at all costs to exhaust every option before that was necessary. I still hoped that I wouldn't be homeless for too much longer, even with the added expense.

 

I wasn't much of a fan of the boarding facility. They didn't allow the dogs to play together, they said, so I told them I wanted to come and take Fezzik out to the dog park on weekends.

“You
can,
” said the nebbishy lady at the desk reluctantly, “but we discourage it. It'll just depress him. They get all excited and happy about seeing you, and then they get sad again when you bring 'em back.”

I was seriously starting to doubt how much better this boarding thing could possibly be for Fezzik. It sounded to me like he'd be getting less exercise and absolutely no interaction with other animals. Plegh.

She slipped a flimsy little string lead over his neck to take him back to the room. I offered the woman his Halti nose lead, since he was used to it and it kept him awesomely under control. Just a little tug and he's putty in your hands, since, like all dogs, he follows the direction of his nose. She said no, took it off, gave it to me and led him to the back room.

I signed the last form and turned to leave. All of a sudden, commotion, and then Fezzik came hurtling madly out from the back room, dragging the hapless receptionist behind him.

She silently took the Halti from me with as much wounded dignity as she could muster, and this time he went along meekly. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

 

It was around this time that Matt and I finally got down to brass tacks and figured out just how much we meant to
one another. For some reason, a Hotmail glitch randomly and suddenly prevented his account from receiving my emails and stuck my IP address on the “automatic spam” list. Likewise, his emails to me vanished in a cyberspace vapor, never arriving in my inbox. I became alarmed when he didn't respond to any of my emails for several days, although he was still posting articles on Homeless Tales. Perhaps he was just busy, I rationalized. Too busy to talk to me. Or perhaps our increasingly flirtatious emails had scared him off. Perhaps he realized that my feelings for him were starting to become rather strong, and I was mistaken in thinking he could feel the same way.

A week went by with nothing from him. I was devastated. I had somehow scared off my friend. I later learned that on the other side of the world, he was an equally nervous wreck. He couldn't figure out why I was ignoring his emails. He had never believed that he could love anybody again after his wife left him, and now foolishly he had allowed himself to hope. He was angry with himself, and as hurt as I was.

We finally figured out what had happened when I had an instant message conversation with a mutual friend and homeless activist, Jon, also known as “Beat on the Street” in homeless circles. Jon was from Ireland and as crazy as…well, an Irishman. He was also hilariously good-natured and proactive, and Matt's best friend these days, although they had never met in person. They were currently working together on a “homeless hike” in the UK, planned for September, in which they would camp wherever they could find for two weeks or so across Scotland, from Inverness to Edinburgh. The hike would be sponsored and filmed to raise awareness of homelessness, and the proceeds would benefit homeless charities in Scotland and Ireland.

As Jon and I chatted, he explained that he was also chatting with Matt, who was online on gtalk.

“Oh?” I spoke cautiously, probing. “Is he very busy? I haven't heard from him in a week, I guess he hasn't had a lot of time to answer any of my emails….”

Jon pinged Matt.

“Hey, bro, I've got our friend, Bri, in another window. She's wondering about you.”

Matt responded in a decidedly dejected manner.

“If she wanted to talk to me, she'd answer my emails.” Jon was confused.

“I dunno. She says she hasn't heard from you in a week. She really does seem like she wants to talk to you. Just send her a chat invite already!”

In that way, Matt and I connected via gtalk, and soon figured out the Hotmail glitch. He had to do some digging around to determine what had happened, and change a few settings to begin getting my emails again. But that one horrible week had made both of us realize just how much we meant to one another. I found myself repressing hysterical sobs in the middle of Starbucks as I typed.

“We could have never figured it out. We could have gone on forever thinking that we hated each other for some reason. It's so scary.” He agreed, shakily. The shock of how close we had come to losing whatever it was that we had sent us reeling to our cores, and seemingly before we knew it, we were spending every day after I got off work at the web design company, and all day on the weekends, chatting together. We were spending upwards of ten hours a day with each other, and we both realized very quickly what it had become. And it terrified the hell out of both of us.

Love.

A
few months after I started blogging, a web developer named Adam wrote in and offered to buy me my own web domain and host my site for free. So, I became
www.girlsguidetohomelessness.com,
and I was no longer simply a free blog, but a true-blue
website
.

I tried to focus on my happiness about the dot-com development, but I was too busy missing Fezzik. I missed having his huge oafish self around to hug and cuddle, and I also missed how protective he was of me. Every time I entered my trailer late at night, I was now superparanoid about opening the door; there was always the possibility that somebody had broken in and was lying in wait. I always held my keys in a fist, pointy ends poking out through my knuckles, just in case.

 

Working for the web design company was starting to wear on my moral compass as well. I hadn't realized, when I'd taken the job, the nature of our clientele.

There were only five employees, including me. The life of an executive assistant isn't particularly glamorous
or exciting. It mainly involves being at the computer for long stretches of time, drafting correspondence of Excel spreadsheets, Human Resources paperwork, fiddling with accounting and payroll, and occasionally picking up lunch and coffee for the boss. Boring stuff. Essential, but boring. So I focused more on the administrative side of things. I was managing the money coming in, but it took a couple of months before I realized exactly where it was coming from, what kind of websites we were selling and building—loan modification websites, for mortgage scammers masquerading as legitimate foreclosure assistance programs.

It first clicked when, within the span of a week, several of our clients across the United States were arrested and shut down by the government. It was apparently rather publicly handled, and our company started receiving a lot of hate mail for being willing to work with that kind of scum. I was in charge of sorting incoming emails, so I was perplexed at the sudden onslaught of threatening letters. When I asked one of the web designers about it, he laughed.

“I hate to be the one to tell you this, but nearly all of our clients are scam artists. They're our bread and butter. There are so many loan mod companies springing up now, offering to help homeowners in foreclosure, for a fee, and the government's going through a major crackdown right now on it.”

“That's not allowed?”

“Yeah. They're not allowed to charge for their services. There are government programs that offer the same assistance for free. These homeowners are so desperate and ignorant, they'll fork over hundreds or thousands of dollars to our clients, in exchange for a promise that they'll talk to
the homeowner's bank and arrange a payment plan. Then they usually take the money and run.”

I was horrified.

“But…but we're
helping
them!”

He shrugged.

“It's not illegal to make a website. Sure, we know what it's for, but
they're
the ones actually running the scams. If you want to blame anyone, blame the dumbass homeowners who don't do a little research and learn to protect themselves from being scammed.”

I couldn't bring myself to accept it, though. The company I worked for was making money by helping scam artists fleece people who were about to lose their homes, like me. There were plenty of other, reputable industries out there that we could have focused on, but the company marketed its web design services to loan modification companies specifically. We were profiting, and not particularly indirectly, off others' misery.

I wigged out and told Matt everything. I didn't have another job lined up, but I didn't want to stay. He was creeped out by the entire thing, too, but encouraged me to keep the job until I could find work elsewhere.

“It's shady, but you can't get in trouble with the law for it, and if you leave now, you'll be out the paycheck, and you need it.”

Besides, he reminded me, I wasn't doing any of the web design work myself. I was just the coffee-getter, the girl who submitted employees' paperwork for their choice between Kaiser Permanente or Blue Cross health insurance and the one who tallied up and crunched the numbers at the end of the week.

It was true, but I still felt dirty.

 

Matt and I were still coming to terms with our burgeoning romance. We decided that maybe I'd travel to Scotland in September, if I could save up the money, and go on the homeless hike with him and Jon. Though we eventually let Jon in on the secret, after a few weeks, we decided not to make our relationship public yet. We knew we were in love, but we danced around the word—speaking in euphemisms for it. It didn't feel right to say it to each other over a computer. We wanted to meet in person, to make sure everything we were feeling across a couple of computer screens was as real and powerful as we suspected.

As the weeks went by, we realized that there was no way we were going to last until September. It was crazy and rash and irrational, but we had to meet. Being apart was too difficult. I began scraping together whatever I could spare from my paychecks, and he from his benefit checks. Perhaps in a month or two we could make something happen.

 

Fezzik was not looking well. He was always very happy to see me, but he was also depressed and lethargic, and he'd lost a lot of weight, which was really bothering me. I asked the kennel to ramp up his feeding.

“Oh…so, you're saying that you would rather we give him two feedings a day instead of one?” My brain promptly exploded in a series of cartoonish destruction flashes.

“How much have you been feeding him?”

I pressed the unenthusiastic kennel drone until she finally admitted…

“One cup a day.” That was
all
that Fezzik had been getting.

Just for reference, adult Neapolitan Mastiffs should be eating eight to ten cups of food each day. It was no wonder that Fezzik was rapidly skeletonizing, practically in front of my eyes. My dog was starving.

What kind of fucking morons
were
these people? And now they wanted to charge me extra for extra feeding—an extra dollar per cup. Wasn't that why I was
already
paying so much more to board him than I would for a smaller dog?!

I pumped the pimply teenager at the desk for info like she was a terror suspect, tied to a chair and interrogated under a lightbulb. I learned that (contrary to what I had been told when checking Fezzik in) he was not being exercised daily. Apparently that would cost me extra, too, even though the other receptionist had told me when I first boarded him that it was included.

Fezzik was spending every day in a four-by-twelve-foot dog run, and his nights in a four-by-four-foot cage. At least with me, he had a thirty-foot trailer to roam in—more than twice the space he now had. He'd lost a ton of weight, was blowing coat and his nose was raw from rubbing it on his kennel door.

I cried for hours that evening. It made me so angry to see my dog rapidly decline like this. He was
so
much better off with me, and yet I was paying for them to starve him.

I didn't want to make a scene, but I was livid. Ruefully, I forked over nearly all the cash I had on me for the extra feeding, and then immediately began looking for somewhere else to move Fezzik. Again.

 

Several of my blog followers put out a Twitter call for help for Fezzik. Eventually, a friend of a friend of a friend
came up with a solution. I was on the verge of having a breakdown when the message arrived in my inbox. There was a woman who could board Fezzik for next to nothing. Her name was Maryse-Noelle Sage, though everybody called her just plain “Sage.” She was a warm, tiny, hippie-esque, New Age-y woman with waist-long blond hair. She was perhaps in her forties but looked much younger, due to her natural diet and the exercise that inevitably comes with constant dog/horse rescue. Sage ran her own photography and ad agency—sagency.net—lived on a quasi-rural lot in Riverside and would end up playing a very important role in Matt's and my lives.

I didn't realize this at the time, though. What I did learn on that first visit was that Fezzik
will
chase chickens. And horses (but only if they run). You'd think a few well-aimed kicks in the general region of his head would dissuade him, but nooooooo. He came running to me whining for about a second and a half before deciding to see if his next attempt would go any better.

Idiot dog. I love him so.

 

I filed the previous year's tax return with H&R Block, rather than doing it myself and waiting eight weeks to receive my refund in the mail, for the simple reason of
sheer fucking immediacy
. I needed money
now,
and I'd rather H&R Block take a ridiculously high chunk of it and hand over the rest within twenty-four hours, than try to figure out how to survive on peanuts until my next paycheck. Part of the tax return money went into the “get together with Matt for sex” fund. Yes, it's completely shallow, but along with being in love and all, I really wanted to get laid. Our increasingly frequent “frisky” gchats only made both of us hornier. There, I said it.

We had started speaking over the phone as well, when we could scrape up enough minutes. He'd heard my voice before, in the video interview, but I'd never heard his until now. He sounded younger than I had expected, and occasionally I had to struggle to understand him—the distortion of the phone connection, in addition to his Portsmouth accent, induced frequent and recurring exclamations of “I'm sorry, what?!” from me. We would then laugh nervously and he would repeat himself. The first phone conversation was the hardest and the most tense. We'd already spent upwards of a hundred hours in one another's company online, but neither of us were “phone people.” I think we both also wondered whether the magic connection would hold up as well in person, and the phone was a precursor of that, a harbinger of things to come.

We were both so terrified at first. The conversation lasted for about ten minutes (I was on a break at work) and concluded with him saying quickly, “Well, it was nice to speak with you. Good bye.” It sounded so formal, and I briefly worried that that was it—he was having second thoughts. I hurried back to my work computer, where a gtalk message was waiting for me.

“Oh, my god, did I really just say, ‘Nice to speak with you?' I'm so sorry, I feel like such an ass. I was just so nervous. I'm
really
not a phone person! I adore you. Get back to work! Talk tonight at Starbucks!”

I laughed, and everything went back to the way it had been before the phone call. Over time, we became just as comfortable over the phone as in person. Depending on our finances at any given moment, we could talk for an hour or longer before grudgingly hanging up the phone.

“I don't want to go. I want you to stay.”

“Me, too. When can I talk to you every day, without having to hang up? This sucks.”

“It does suck.”

It felt fantastic. If the two most antiphone people in the world could handle this, then there was no stopping us.

 

I was very good at keeping my homelessness a secret from people at work. I had opened a P.O. box and was using the post office address as my physical address for job-related paperwork, with the box number as my “apartment number.” The mail was delivered to the box just the same.

I had my routine down pat. Wake up early, shower at Planet Fitness, make it to work long before everybody else so that my hair had a chance to dry, do my job and head home. I kept my work life and my personal life very separate and didn't usually bother making friends at work. At the end of the day, I wanted to switch off that part of my life. I wasn't the type to go out for drinks after work with coworkers. There was only one occasion when I can remember my two lives bleeding into each other.

It was an employee's birthday, so my boss took the staff out to a local Persian restaurant for some congratulatory falafel. Since the recession was such a popular topic at the time, the conversation soon took that turn. Before I knew what was happening, my boss's partner exclaimed, “I just don't get it! There's absolutely no reason for
anybody,
even in this economy, to be homeless. I have
lots
of friends who've been laid off.
They're
not homeless yet. They're looking for new jobs. The only reason for
anybody
to be homeless,
ever,
is because they're lazy.”

He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms smugly. I felt my blood begin to boil.

I cleared my throat. “
I'm
homeless. Do you think that
I'm
lazy?”

A hush swept across the table. Fuck, I was in for it now. But I didn't care. Let them fire me. I couldn't keep quiet while someone was slandering homeless people. Lazy? Why would a lazy person ever choose this life? You couldn't be both lazy and homeless. You wouldn't survive a week. I knew far lazier people who lived in mansions and thought
work
meant sitting in your office and playing solitaire while ripping off the ideas of younger, poorer, more talented underlings.

The pause seemed interminable. Then, the girl next to me, a coworker I'd spoken to maybe twice since starting, piped up, “My boyfriend and I lived out of our car for several months last year.”

The boss and his partner seemed shaken.

“You never told us that.”

“Of course not. Who hires a homeless person?”

“Right,” I agreed. “There's such a stigma about it. You had such great things to say about my résumé and my cover letter when you called me in. You told me that I was far more coherent and articulate than hundreds of other applicants for the position, and that was why you wanted to hire me. But would you still have wanted to hire me if I came branded with the word
homeless?
”