The Inventor

Between my job and new projects and a hundred other things... I think it is time to end Inventor.  The quality of the writing is suffering, I'm not enjoying it anymore and though I've started certain portions of the ending, what comes first is proving difficult to write.  I plan to write it one day, probably in novel form, but not now.

I'm also uncomfortable with the feminist angle the story is taking.  I am absolutely a feminist, but I don't feel it's right to defy the expectations I've laid down thus far and turn the story into a fictional manifesto on sexual assault and equality.  Perhaps if I'd known that was going to happen, I would have addressed the beginning of the story differently, but it's too late to go back now.

So I'm putting a synopsis of the ending after the cut.  It was going to tie things up relatively neatly.

As my palate expanded, so did my waistline. I was pulling food out of the trash on a regular basis now, and though I wasn't immune to the stares that I got sometimes, I was happier, too. No longer did I spend my entire day trying to scrounge up enough money to eat, or worrying that I wouldn't be able to. I still went hungry sometimes, but the acquisition of food had gotten easier. Less stressful. My worries moved on to other things.

Like, what the hell was I going to do, long-term? One day I counted on my fingers and realized that I'd been screwing around in the city for ten months. It felt like both an absolute eternity and a series of fleeting moments at the same time. I had lived in the Financial District, Daly City, Haight Ashbury and the Tenderloin, had been through so much, known so many people and at the end of it I had little to show except better-honed street smarts and a parade of traumatic experiences to revisit at night. I had lost almost a year of school. I had been one of the youngest kids in my grade, and now - if I even managed to go back in September - I would be one of the oldest, still in the tenth grade and watching my former peers graduate a year ahead of me. I vaguely wanted to do something about it, but the entire situation was too enormous and too fraught with uncertainty to make any action seem like a reasonable option. I could find Derek and ask him to help me, but the county would throw me into a foster family or worse, send me back where I belonged. What school would I go to? What freedoms would I lose?

I stayed up at night worrying about wandering thugs and how old I was going to be when I graduated high school. If I had had the ability to appreciate the humor in that back then, I'm sure I would have laughed.

I had been begging for awhile and hunger was eating away at my sides, sucking my flesh in until I could lift up my shirt and count my ribs. Suddenly showers at the Y didn't seem so important anymore. I spent every penny I had on food - day-old pastries at Specialty's, cheap coffee with lots of cream and sugar, food off the dollar menu at McDonald's, cheese sticks from the grocery store. I sat on the benches at Market and Battery one day and watched a seagull pick apart a dead pigeon, and my stomach growled. I remembered that people sold them to eat in Chinatown. If I had a way to make a fire, I thought - and I shut my eyes against the evening breeze and tried not to think about it.

Life went on in the city. One Sunday morning I was surprised by a bright parade making its way down Market Street. "It's the Pride parade," someone told me, and when I asked what they were proud of I got a scoff in return, but soon I figured it out. These were the first gay people I'd ever seen, I thought, and I watched, fascinated, as they went by in outrageous costumes, leather and feathers and painted faces. I wondered where they went during the day.

Blue skies and fierce wind welcomed me to the Financial District that Wednesday evening, and when I finally got there - "home" - the YMCA was closed and I had to look for a place to sleep. A security guard stood outside the garage on Drumm Street that I'd slept in before, and anyway, I had no desire to be monitored by Beth. I'd knocked on her door desperate for help only sixteen hours before, but the shock and the fear had dulled. I could still take care of myself.

Being in a familiar area was nice, but I traveled farther afield, to a little dead-end alley off Grant Street where the lee side of the dumpsters was unoccupied and quiet. Everyone had gone home for the evening and the streets slowly emptied as people left restaurants. I leaned against the dumpster and closed my eyes, exhausted but wary; I hadn't slept alone in a new place in quite some time, and I couldn't help but worry that what had happened to me the night before would happen again.

To my surprise, I had no nightmares, though my sleep was constantly interrupted by passing sirens and nearby footsteps.

Early that morning I walked all the way to the one place I felt safe: The top of the cliff at Sutro Heights Park. I fell asleep, aching and throbbing, and was awakened a few hours later by a dog. It sniffed at the back of my neck and I could feel it prancing around in the sand. Blearily I mistook it for Leon, but when I opened my eyes I saw a black lab looking down at me with concern. It whined and wagged its tail once, uncertainly.

I felt like hell. I sat up and pushed the dog away, but it leaned forward on my hand to sniff my face. "No," I said, and shoved at it again. It turned and left the little clearing. Something hung in the edge of my vision, in the periphery of my attention, and without thinking I reached to rub it away.

A catalog of my injuries would be a fitting addition to the narrative, and yet I did not have a chance to examine myself for some time afterward. Without having stopped to take a full accounting, all I knew for sure was that I hurt all over. The obvious had happened, of course, and what was worse, he had not stopped at satisfying himself, but had taken pains to ensure that it was as horrible an experience as possible for me. I was running. Upon further reflection I would realize that he had let me go, but a rush of adrenaline spurred me forward: Run. Run. Run. He might have been chasing me, for all I knew; I was certain if I stopped I would be retrieved and killed, and though every breath and every bump brought agonizing pain to my chest, I kept running. I tripped over a sleeping bum at one point, who might have been a help, but I couldn't think of anything but getting away. I finally staggered to a stop, choking and coughing, at the 8^th Street entrance to the park, looking out on Inner Richmond and down wide, bright Fulton Street. It was four o'clock in the morning.

I went at night. When everyone was asleep, even the dog, I got up and stepped over the bodies, some of them curled up together, some of them alone. I considered taking Leon but he was more their dog than mine now, and I thought he might wake them up, so I crept away without him.

I am not sure my mother ever really loved me, but she spent my childhood helping me to develop tools that would spare me from the situation in which I found myself. It was the single most loving thing she ever did for me. "It is never your fault," she said. "Not if you were drunk. Not if you said no and then gave in. Not if you were dressed with your skirt up to here and nothing on your shoulders, not if you were walking in a bad part of town." You are not property, she said, no matter what anyone else may tell you, and I rolled my eyes, not wanting to hear it. It would never happen to me.

What she failed to cover was the topic of blame, how sweet and cathartic it feels to take responsibility for something that's happened to you. People have done it for thousands of years. Their sins explained away floods and earthquakes and stillborn children. Sodom and Gomorrah had it coming. The poor were slovenly, immoral people and deserved their millions of babies and the squalor in which they lived. It reassured the survivors: It will never happen to us. It calmed the victims: Next time we will try harder to be good.

I tried harder to be good.

Ivan took me to the house south of the Panhandle again on Monday. I enjoyed spending time with them all, but he was a favorite. He was cool in some indescribable way, and the attention with which he graced me was so appealing that once summoned, I dropped what I was doing and followed him immediately. His backpack, again heavy with something, sagged on his shoulders.

We had followed a conversation about the spirit of Haight-Ashbury to its natural conclusion and had been maintaining an easy silence during the walk down Oak Street. I was desperate for Ivan to see me as cool, too, and was trying to think of some clever conversation starter that might impress him.

Instead I said, "What is that house, anyway?"

The group absorbed me without remark and life got so easy that I wondered why I'd never sought out other homeless youth before. My troubles didn't end - I still went hungry now and then, and the nights were cold and the police more hostile than had been my experience - but they receded, and most importantly, I felt safer than I had in awhile.

Part of the fun of belonging was the power I gained by proximity. I was the most junior member of the group and possibly less intimidating than even Logan, but when I lounged with the others on a street corner, leaned up against the brick wall while Francesca and Ivan dozed in the sunlight, I noticed that the people passing us by had a different flavor to their step: They were not merely annoyed, as they were when I panhandled alone. They were afraid.

"I want to fuckin' go to Santa Cruz," Ivan said from a supine position, his head on his lumpy duffel. A slouch hat he wore sometimes lay tipped over his eyes, its brim shadowing the bridge of his nose. He spoke blindly into the midday sun. "They got the best shit out there. Go up in the mountains and find some old guy in his log cabin and fuckin' inherit his acres and acres of weed and just smoke all day until the end of time. Maybe in fifty years I find some little asshole and take him in and leave everything to him."