November 2009 Archives

Derek's visit was no doubt intended to help, but I left his car deeply shaken that morning, my tentative shelter irrevocably violated. It was tainted with discovery and pity, and the smell and the shame of it hung heavy and rank over the parking garage. I didn't go back. I found another dumpster to cuddle up to, this time on California Street, and while this time I enjoyed the sweet calm of experience... well, all things are relative. It rained on Thanksgiving night and I huddled wide awake in a doorway, awaiting discovery that never came.

It is Thanksgiving, less than a week before my fourth birthday, and I am in the care of strangers.

The thing about being my mom's kid is that I'm always in the care of strangers. Zachary is sixteen and too irresponsible to even take a damn shower, as she puts it, so when Mom is at work I usually spend the day with her upstairs neighbor, an older lady who eats cough drops like candy and takes little interest in me. I am well-versed in Leeza and Geraldo, and I have a healthy fear of small dogs with underbites. Sometimes, when the neighbor is too busy, Mom takes me to the drop-in center near where she works, which is staffed by a revolving door of immigrant women and young, optimistic, overprivileged girls who are learning about child development in the local community college. None of us are regulars. Mostly I dig snake paths in the sandbox and stay out of the way of the other children, and when Mom comes she takes my hand and wordlessly pulls me out to the car.

That she would leave for a holiday, however, is unprecedented. She may have to work; I'm not sure. At any rate, my Thanksgivings thus far have been less than memorable - Zachary will tell me later that they involve the three of us sitting at the kitchen table eating a roast chicken, and that's not exactly different from most nights - and I don't yet understand the concepts of "family togetherness" and "holiday" well enough to feel like I'm missing anything. Zachary is off with a friend, and understandably, the friend's family doesn't want a preschooler underfoot. So I'm here. I'm not sure exactly where "here" is, or who is supposed to be my guardian for the evening; I have been introduced to her, but a lot of the women look the same and I can't remember what she's wearing.

I am in the dining room and the adults are taking forever to get things going. I bend my legs, lean forward and jump as far as I can toward the door to the den, and then I jump again, and again, until I'm in the doorway. I press myself up against the doorjamb and watch the boys lost in their video games.

Derek pulled up outside a diner on Union Square, and our morning jumped a notch closer to the point at which a decision would have to be made. My stomach had been empty for hours, but I had grown somewhat used to ignoring its complaints; I was in no hurry to get out of the car and propel myself closer to breakfast, and closer to whatever surprise lurked at the moment we parted company.

He was waiting at my window. I opened the door, reluctant, and got out, clutching my backpack in one hand and the rolled-up towel under an arm. Clothes threatened to spill out either end. "No," he said, "leave it here."

"Everything?"

He paused, as if he didn't know what I meant. "Yeah. It's a police car, kid. Don't worry about it."

I didn't want to do it, but I set the bundle of clothes and my backpack gently on the passenger side floor, and then Derek shut the door. I wondered if he had done it on purpose, as assurance that I wouldn't go anywhere. Every movement seemed to be choreographed to both prevent my departure and avoid piquing my ire: The subtle way he put his fingertips on my back as we went into the diner, the way he stood so close, the way he made sure that he took the seat at the booth that put him between me and the door. He needn't have worried.

It wasn't that simple, of course, but that wouldn't occur to me for a long time. Instead I lay in the dark with a delicious chill, Bill's absence quickly banished to the back burner of real-world problems. It was like a sniper in Sarajevo. Better yet, H. H. Holmes. Jack the Ripper. For a teenage girl who craved adventure, the misdeeds of a serial killer, and the thrill of becoming wrapped up in them, were irresistible.

It did not escape me, however, that I had already embarked upon my own adventure; I was just waiting for the story to begin. I had left home, come to the city, lost everything, been assaulted, been abandoned, and now, in the depths of my despair, the real plot would begin, my once upon a time in the city by the bay. Maybe this was where it got interesting.

The static hiss and squeal of a two-way radio shot like a needle into the gentle peace of sleep. The first thing I noticed was that my neck hurt. The second thing I noticed was flashing lights atop a Crown Victoria, and the third thing was the man crouched near me, clean-shaven, smelling of expensive cologne and way too close for comfort. I was awake, but the scene before me had yet to make sense. I was up in a flash, kicking backward at my pile of clothes until I felt my back pressed into the corner and there was nowhere else to go. In a moment, I had it. I had overslept. Someone had seen me here. Someone had called the cops.

The days grew colder and shrank to nothing, and the nights encroached on the city, bringing with them bracing winds and the promise of winter rain. I became an authority on all things warm and dry, from rough woolen sweaters at the Salvation Army to the fattening, energy-dense properties of peanut butter. I ate it from the jar with a plastic spoon on days I hadn't had the money to buy real food.

The forty dollars went fast. It had bought me shoes, as my benefactor suggested, and also a brown sweater knit for a large man, that was deliciously warm and blanket-like in the cold evenings. I almost never took it off. I bought myself another backpack too, a simple used one, and filled it with a selection of extra clothes - underwear, socks, another shirt. Just in case. I carried around Beth's shampoo and soap, and tried to wash my hair every couple of days, though for the most part I could keep it out of the way, under my hat, where it wouldn't bother me. I was wrapped up at all times but instead of feeling bound and suffocated, I was constantly reminded of my ingenuity, and marveled at the adaptations I had made.

That is not to say that I lived happily ever after in the city streets, a cheery little gamine with a permanent, hopeful smile and a voice for Broadway. Now and then, reality penetrated my cozy little world: Something would remind me of my mother, or my home, or the boys who had cornered me on Halloween night. At the library I punctuated my recreational reading with studies of books on survival and self-defense - deeply interesting, as I could imagine myself in every conceivable scenario they threw my way (even if I wasn't strictly convinced that I was in danger of living them), but deeply depressing, as well. I would go home (to my garage) feeling like resourceful, dissembling Lyra from The Golden Compass, but unable to resist jumping at shadows and at pigeons flying overhead.

I hadn't intended to lie. The magnitude of my situation demanded the truth, and it seemed to me that the time for playing games had passed. I slouched at the table and looked out of the window, trying to identify a point from which to start the story. It was a long story, too, and I only had bits and pieces of it, that I had arranged, mentally, into the patchy whole that seemed to make the most sense.

So I decided to start at the end, with what I knew for sure.

It was getting too cold to sleep with only a pile of clothes for protection. It had drizzled, finally autumn-cold (or what passed for it), and now there was a new enemy to contend with: the concrete floor of the parking garage. It bled the heat from my body, and I couldn't cover myself sufficiently. When I managed to insulate myself from the floor, there wasn't much left to huddle under, and, swathed fully-clothed in my jacket, the hood up, several socks on and with Beth's towel pulled over the top of me, I still shivered well into the night.

In the morning I would wake desperately cold but loath to move, for what heat I had ended half a centimeter beyond the limits of my body, and the feel of that cold cloth on my arms and legs was too much to bear. I was not yet fifteen, but my knees had begun to ache from being bent all night as I balled up for warmth, and my hands and feet were perpetually cold. I began to see why Bill went around without having showers - in this weather it was hard enough to wake up and stagger to the bathroom, let alone wet a cloth and give yourself a bath. I wore the same clothes three and four days in a row without washing myself, and as long as I tried to avoid sweating, I could keep the uncomfortable, cold baths to a minimum.

This week it was different.

This uncertainty continued well into the week. I began to suffer from a physiological inertia - I didn't want to go anywhere or do anything besides lie in bed (or what passed for it). Life was boring and unbearable even after my timely discovery of the Chinatown Branch Library, and even the books failed to hold my interest.

I do not think that this was entirely due to the monsters I had encountered on Halloween, though I hesitate to downplay my reaction to it. It had been coming for some time regardless. No matter how much I worked or how safe or well-fed I felt, the truth of it was that life on the streets was difficult. It was lonely, for one, and stressful, and I couldn't count on it not to get worse.

It's still difficult for me, years later, to put into words how that Saturday night affected me; it was near impossible in the weeks immediately following. It seems trite to say so, but it changed me, and what's more, that change surprised me.

I had never thought about assault before. I certainly knew it existed, but it wasn't a topic that ever held my interest, and I admit (though I hesitate to do so) that I wondered what was so horrific about it. But there I was, huddled, cold, on the floor of my garage, and I was having more trouble sleeping than I had had even on my first night in the city. Compounding that was the confusion of adolescence and my own inexperience with self-analysis. My inability to stop thinking about it was maddening; why couldn't I get over it, already, and get on with life? I hadn't been harmed; in fact, the more I thought about it, the more I doubted that I would have suffered injury had my assailant followed through on his wishes - so what made it so traumatic?

Obviously these were questions I would have to answer later, when I had the frontal lobe development to facilitate further exploration. In the meantime, confused and angry, I hit the streets as the sun came up on a beautiful, warm Tuesday morning. I had spent the two days prior panhandling, and had enough money for a few days, so I sat at the tables behind the Ferry Building today, listening to the ever-present percussionist play in the street outside, and the squawks of birds foraging in the palm trees.