December 2009 Archives

You're okay. You're okay. He didn't hurt you. Huddled in a dark doorway, I tried to reason the waves of horror and emotion away. I had been more prepared for what had happened in that hotel room than I had been for its aftermath. I sat with my back pressed into the corner, hugging my knees, feeling the same sort of violation I had felt from being shouted at or criticized on the street, only the injury was a thousand times worse. There was no explaining the why, and no rationalizing the bad feelings away; it just was, and I had to sit here and ride it out.

Having been brought up with a sound education on sexual assault, I had no illusions about what had happened or who was to blame for the less-than-satisfactory conclusion to our encounter. The knowledge that I could have him in jail in less than ten minutes by summoning a police officer made me smile grimly as the tears streamed down my cheeks and landed on my knees. I wouldn't, of course - doing so would limit my freedom as well as his, and potentially put me in an even worse situation. I had read White Oleander. I knew about foster homes and how horrible they could be, and the thought of going back to my mother now, even if she'd have me, was too ludicrous an idea to entertain, however briefly.

But enough logic. I was in a minimum of physical pain; the emotional pain, however, was immense. I wanted to curl up in this corner and hide forever, but I knew myself well enough to recognize that I needed some validation, or at the very least some sympathetic companionship. Somewhere I could feel safe. Beth and Derek sprang immediately to mind, but there would be questions - what happened, why didn't I have shoes, where was my jacket and all my stuff. Derek would see this as a violation of his conditions for leaving me alone, and I would find myself in a worse situation that I was right now.

Shifting on the concrete, I felt a lump in my back pocket, where I was unaccustomed to feeling lumps. I knew at once what it was, and I pulled it out. The guy from the Ferry Building - Theodore Russell Dunn - looked miserably out at me from his driver's license photo. I removed the license from its little plastic sleeve and looked at it closely. He was thirty-two years old and would turn thirty-three on March 4th, was just under six feet tall, had blue eyes and dark brown hair, and had the little pink sticker on his license that meant he was an organ donor. He was also from Daly City.

I leaned back against the brick edifice and wiped my face dry. That wasn't far from here - in fact, I knew it was only a few miles south, though I'd never been. I clutched the little card to my chest and looked out over the street, wondering if I dared try to return it this evening. I really had no excuse to hang onto it for any longer; something had to be done about it tonight. If it was me, I thought, I would be relieved to know that no one was playing with my credit cards or spending my money. And then I remembered that I had spent his money and reached into my pocket, selected a twenty from my earnings, and made myself the appropriate change from his wallet. There.

The address on his driver's license made little sense to me, but I supposed I would figure it out eventually. I got up and walked down Hyde Street to a BART station I had come across before, and consulted the map before taking the stairs down to buy myself a ticket. There was a Daly City stop, and that must be the one I wanted; I could ask for directions when I got there.

The second thing happened many hours later, in a dark hotel room in the Tenderloin.

I lay supine on a queen bed, my back pressing into the cold, rough quilted bedspread. It was bigger than any bed I had ever laid on before, and my back ached as my spine slid into the proper alignment, well-supported by the mattress. I was reflecting upon three months spent on the street, or nearly, and the sort of awful things that sleeping on that concrete floor must have done to my spine, at what cost came the ergonomically awkward positions I assumed at night in the pursuit of the retention of warmth. The ache was a good, healing kind of ache, and I closed my eyes to better feel it radiate through the muscles in my back.

Gray clouds hung low and heavy over the waterfront, and the city, still dressed for Christmas, bustled with the excitement of another long weekend and another party. The morning was infused with expectation: Something was going to happen today. Something exciting. Things were going to change.

As it turned out, they did. Three things happened to me on the 31st of December.

Maybe I had wanted to hurt. Suffering was one of the few comforts available to me at the time, and Pollyanna I was not - life seemed to go on just as hopeless and miserable as the day before. By the end of Christmas Day, my hopes had been incinerated as inevitably as the Gävle goat and I was left hurt, hungry and exhausted in my customary corner after the sun had set. That evening, Graham showed up for the first time in a long time, but he was little comfort; I needed a real person. Maybe I had outgrown him. I rested my forehead against a pair of T-shirts rolled up to approximate the side of a sleeping form, and awoke feeling no better (and in fact feeling somewhat stupid) to another busy Saturday in the city.

The morning brought an abrupt end to any pleasant holiday cheer I had been fostering, and dumped me back into the day-to-day of being homeless and on the streets. This time around, it was harder. I had exhausted my only means of income, at least if Derek's words were to be heeded, and food was difficult to come by; if I wanted to avoid starving to death, I would have to find another way.

Enter Savannah. I walked away from that conversation shaken; it had been information-gathering, I told myself, and nothing more. There was no way for me to justify doing such a thing - it was simply out of the question. I was too young to have sex, prostitution had a stigma attached to it that I wanted no part of (though, interestingly, the labels of "homeless" and "thief" bothered me very little), and I was a virgin. My first time was supposed to be special.

As I shivered under my clothes that evening, out of the rain, it occurred to me that if this kept up, I would be lucky to reach the point of even having a first time.

Screeching tires announce the arrival of a car, the angle so bad that one of the wheels butts up against the curb, itching to mount it. Inside, a voice lifted in anger batters the insides of the windows, and then escapes when the passenger door is shoved open.

"...think you can try that shit on, you got another think coming, you lousy piece of crap. Christmas was yesterday, asshole." The words fall off the painted lips of the woman who climbs out of the car and into the rain. She stumbles between the gutter and the sidewalk, wrangling coat and bag and tugging her short, faux-leather skirt down. With a huff, she spins on one tall heel so she can use the other foot to slam the door closed, spitting at the driver, "And it's my real hair!"

The hair in question is ash blonde and streaked with candy pink, darkening with rain and tossed over her shoulder as she turns away from the car. Behind her, shouts are throttled inside the vehicle as gears crunch in a furious search for first. However, the man and his car have ceased to exist for her as she fumbles in her bag for her umbrella.

Instead, her gaze runs over the pale streak of a girl standing in the lee of a building nearby.
"You got a light?"

The girl doesn't answer, not even when the umbrella snaps open, a prong whipping out just inches from her cheek. Heels tick on the sidewalk as the new arrival steps closer and holds the handle out towards her. "Hold this for me, will'ya? C'mon, help a girl out."

With the umbrella out of her hands, she huddles under it and struggles into her coat, somehow without dropping her bag. What should be a fluffy fur collar is stuck down with water, but she flicks it up anyway, in case it might catch the drips trying to work their way down the back of her neck. She loops the bag's strap over her shoulder and immediately dips a hand into it to fetch a battered pack of cigarettes.

All the while, her gaze considers this quiet girl holding her umbrella. She'd be unremarkable if she wasn't so pale. She looks washed-out, as if she has been standing in this rain so long all her color has drained away.

"I'm Savannah," the painted lips announce around the butt of a cigarette. She fumbles for the lighter eluding her at the bottom of her bag. "What's your name?"

I slept for a long time. The garage was so rarely unoccupied, and I was so tired, that I didn't have to suffer through the misery of waking halfway through the night. I was dead cold when I finally opened my eyes, but I still felt so tired that it was almost bearable; and anyway, moving would expose me to the cold winter air, even if it was a necessary step on the way to warmth. I imagined the Prius turning the corner and Beth having the satisfaction of, maybe, taking a filthy, ragged child in and drawing it a bath and feeding it roasted marshmallows and apple cider. For her I stayed in the corner, staring at the wall, half-asleep for hours. Charity was supposed to feel good; that would be my gift to her, if I could be quite so self-serving, I thought. Give her the sense of having saved someone who would be forever grateful.

After a long time I got up and, shivering, cleaned myself up as best I could in the cold water in the bathroom, and put on clean clothes like it was any other day. The elevators weren't working, so I walked up the ramp and into the morning sunlight, amid a handful of homeless in the park and the shouts and laughter of a group of families on the ice rink. I was surprised to see anyone out today. A quick scan of the streets brought no police car or green Prius to my eyes; reasoning that I shouldn't venture far, I stuck my hands in my pockets and wandered past Vaillancourt Fountain to find two young, rosy-cheeked families cavorting on the slick manufactured ice. I found a place on a bench under the palm trees and watched them from Embarcadero, joking and laughing and encouraging each other, and helping each other up. They looked so happy to be together, on this day, of all days, that it brought tears of envy to my eyes. I wondered how much of what they had they took for granted.

"Totally lame, huh?" I looked up time to catch the eyeroll that accompanied the scoff. She was sixteen or seventeen, too thin but in a fashionable way, dressed in a jacket and jeans and wearing a thin scarf that probably wasn't doing her much good. "I wanted to stay home and play with my new computer, but they all had to come out here and play on the ice skating rink." She sat down next to me with a huff and shook her head.

"Yeah," I said. "It sucks." I glanced back at the skaters. "Which one is yours?"

"The one with the lame-ass ten-year-old brother." She gestured so I could better identify them, and I looked just in time to see the mother bend over to help up a little boy who had sprawled prone on the ice. Before letting him go she hugged him, which he submitted to with good-natured patience.

"What's so bad about him?" I said.

"Let me guess, you don't have a little brother." She had pulled out a cell phone and was leaning forward, pressing buttons rapidly. "He's so obnoxious. He tries to talk to me about stupid shit all the time."

"That sucks," I agreed. I looked at the family with the lame-ass ten-year-old brother again, so happy to be together, and this girl sitting on the sidelines who could be a part of it but chose not to. She was throwing it all away, and I wanted to shove her off the bench.

"He thinks I care. And my stupid parents are always catering to him. Stupid kid still believes in Santa, can you believe that?"

"Huh."

"Where's yours?" she said at last, after she'd finished sending her text message.

"Oh," I said. "You know. Tucson."

The girl paused and looked at me. "Without you?"

"Yeah, well, you know." I had planned to go on a tirade touching upon the unbearable unfairness of the girl's rejection of her family when others had none, and not even any place to go or any new computers and nothing for breakfast or lunch, but the wells of words ran dry and I looked at her, pointedly and wordlessly. I didn't want to be a cautionary tale, but there was little I could do about it now. I felt like some functional character in a made-for-TV Christmas special, only for me the message was not one of hope or holiday spirit. I wasn't getting a happy ending. "If you decide you're that sick of them," I said, "I'll trade you places.  You can have my spot in the corner of the parking garage."

The expression on her face held horror and revulsion, as if I was some hideous abortion of society. With great care, she backed away from me and then turned and walked away. She had been ill-equipped not for the message I sent her but for the vehicle in which it was delivered; for the first time I had a taste of what it felt like to have something outwardly wrong with me, so wrong that rather than respond appropriately, or even inappropriately, people would choose to avoid me. The teenage girl might have learned a lesson this morning, but so had I, and my lesson was far harsher. I watched her approach the ice rink and lean over the side, and once, just once, she turned back to look at me, and after that it was like I wasn't even there.

Childhood is the time of Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, of the hope of world peace and the belief that your parents are omniscient and infallible. The teenage years find one with a little more incredulity. At my age, I knew how the world worked and had expectations of it that were more or less realistic, but like any teenager with a hope, I was a master at convincing myself that things were not as they seemed.

What Derek had said to me on Sunday, or what I wanted him to have said, stayed with me for the entire week, simply because it was harder to imagine Christmas alone than to convince myself otherwise. Of course they would find me and whisk me away to their comfortable little apartment, where they'd make a fire and we'd have hot chocolate and we'd watch Annie or Christmas Vacation. Who would leave a homeless kid on the street for Christmas? No one would, and as the days trudged past and I grew ever hungrier and colder, I had a bright light on the horizon to look forward to. When would it be? Christmas Eve? Christmas morning? I would retire to the parking garage as early on the 24th as possible. Just in case.

There was an undercurrent of unbearable sadness that I couldn't begin to examine, because the rational, logical, grown-up part of my mind didn't expect them to show up at all. To keep those thoughts at bay (or perhaps in spite of them) I kept myself busy that week; I read three books, wandered around the Ferry Building and the park, tried without success to tempt a Christmas-colored wild parrot onto my hand with the leftover crumbs of a sandwich and, on the Wednesday, waited out the back of the docks to see if the man I had met there would make an appearance (he did not). I thought about what I would buy my new friends if I had the money, and fell asleep to daydreams of lavish gift-giving, of lottery wins and the bounty of belonging.

The clock tower rang five; the sun had since set over the downtown skyscrapers and sunk below the western side of Twin Peaks, casting the city into a festive darkness lit by the tip of the Transamerica Building and the thick, bright outlines of the Embarcadero Center. Ice skaters still spun and fell on the rink in the red brick plaza, and cars were backed up on Embarcadero, though on this day, there were fewer of them than usual. I shivered in my jacket. My hands and feet were cold though I had eaten some cookies only an hour before, and I wasn't looking forward to my wait in the parking garage. I had come to dread the long, cold nights, especially those early mornings where I would wake up with no real sense of what time it was, only that it was too early to go anywhere, but in the hard, hard place of being unable to fall back asleep because I would be shivering so violently. This was a problem no matter how many layers I wore. The steady issue from my nose was another problem. While, during the day, I could blow my nose and apply a protective layer of lip balm to my nose against the rough tissues I used, it became an ordeal at night when reaching for a Kleenex, which, no matter how I placed the package, required me to maneuver outside the bounds of my tiny bubble of relative warmth.

I did not want to miss Derek and Beth, however; and anyway, if I went to bed earlier, maybe that would give me time to manufacture a bigger bubble with which to keep myself warm. I got up and, finding the garage empty, arranged myself in my usual corner, lying down under layers of clothes, wearing some, some piled atop me, and hoped to wake to the electric hum of a green Prius.

"Don't you go to school?"

A pair of legs in blue jeans had stopped where I sat on the dock, watching the ferries roll in (and, I thought, with some measure of annoyance - the song had appeared unsolicited in my head - watching them roll away again). Backlit by the sun, their owner was difficult to identify.

"I get homeschooled."

"By your evil aunt?"

This rang a bell. This sounded like a story I had concocted in a moment of desperation. "It's called the library."

"I see. That would be the do-it-yourself Montessori method, then?"

I didn't know what that meant. I looked up at him again and shaded my eyes. He was the man I had annoyed that day at the back of the Ferry Building - the man who had dragged me to my feet at the moment of my mother's abandonment and bought me a hot chocolate. "Oh," I said. "Hi."

The heady scent of decaying seaweed met me at the crest of Balboa and 48th. I knew what it was immediately, as if some olfactory instinct bestowed upon me by some Aran ancestor had switched on - flick - in order to introduce me to the majestic, gray beast that lay not a mile away, licking the Outer Richmond sand. I had caught glimpses farther off, and of course I'd seen the ocean in books and movies, but now it lay in front of me, thousands of miles of it, so heavy that the horizon sank beneath its weight.

It got dark, and Beth came home late. Derek met her at the top of the stairs, kissed her and left for work. It was the first time I had ever seen them together. I was huddled on the couch beneath an electric blanket in the dim light, too warm but reluctant to leave its embrace. She dropped her purse and her laptop on a chair and came into the room and put the light on, and I blinked, bleary-eyed despite not having slept in some time.

We drove down Geary Street for miles, until we turned off and hit a quiet, sparsely-planted neighborhood stacked with row houses and apartment buildings. To the west, the crest of the hill partially obscured a gray horizon. Beth parked on the street and I got out of the car, hugging my bare arms for warmth. She opened the hatch and pulled out the garbage bag and my backpack.

"Is that the ocean?" I said.

She had to look. "What? Yes. Come on, let's get out of the rain."

I hesitated. I supposed I would see it later, though, and after a moment I followed Beth through a security gate into a dark entranceway. She pulled it shut behind us and unlocked her front door.

I wasn't especially devastated by Bill's death. He wasn't a close friend, and he wasn't even fantastic company; rather than sad, I was frightened. He had been fine the last I'd seen him, the other day, and sometime in the night he had died - of what, I didn't know, and that was the worst part. I had a crazy idea that he had frozen to death due to giving me his coat, but that couldn't be possible. I had never heard of anyone dying in forty-degree weather.

I went to the YMCA and parted with a few more panhandled dollars, and got myself a warm shower and changed to a clean pair of clothes. The dirty clothes, the ones that I'd been wearing last night, ended up at the bottom of my backpack so I wouldn't have to smell them. It was like poor Bill's ghost was lingering in my belongings, and while I wasn't unhappy about having him along, I wished he'd chosen a less malodorous memento.

As it turned out, it wasn't the only thing he gave me to remember him by, but I wouldn't figure that out for awhile. The week passed, threatening more rain, and then on Friday it came again, so cold that it felt like ice on the back of my neck. I hadn't ever really warmed up from my adventure, not even in the shower, and the misery of being cold and feeling unsafe all the time had begun to take its toll. I suffered from the beginnings of a cold - I could tell - and so on Friday afternoon I moved back to the garage, even though it was not yet one o'clock and the cars were still packed in, more than usual today, thanks to the weather. I needed a bathroom and an assurance of a place to sleep, and in my former home I found the safety I had been missing, if not the warmth.

If I had been a better person, it could have been a touching moment, but I was not. My first thought upon waking was not anything to do with gratitude for Bill's having given up his coat on such a cold night, and perhaps rescued my obnoxious, stupid self from death. It was more like, Ew. And then, Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. I scrambled to my feet with a revolted moan, shoving the coat off in the process, and it landed at a heap in the spot I'd been sleeping. I'd backpedaled three or four feet into the alley, and I could still smell it. Bill hadn't had a shower in ages, and the odor from his coat had soaked into my clothes.

He slept through all of this, thank god.

I stood in the half-light watching him sleep, his hat pulled down over his eyes. Bill deserved better than my disgust, even if he did smell like urine right now. I held my breath and picked his coat up, and tucked it gently around his shoulders. As I was adjusting it, I noticed that he was moving oddly - not like he was just sleeping, but like he was fully conscious and he was tensing his muscles, all at once. His head seemed to move with his body, as though he wore a neck brace; he was stiff and wooden-feeling, and I was put in mind of a dried-up bug with its legs crossed underneath it.

Like most teenagers, I had a knack for memorizing lyrics and a particular fondness for those that inspired angst. I had plenty to feel sorry for myself over, and rightfully so - here I was, friendless, hundreds of miles from my family, living in the street and subject to the dangers that entailed. And it was cold. But in true adolescent fashion, I felt the need to probe further, to figure out how truly terrible it could be, and so late Sunday night I found myself wandering Chinatown in the rain, an entirely appropriate song from Les Miserables playing in my head. And now I'm all alone again / Nowhere to go, no one to turn to.... And the song, which is undoubtedly the whiniest in an entire musical of occasionally valid sorrows, goes on to summarize the evening of a destitute 16-year-old with a crush, who walks the streets of Paris describing how she pretends that he's by her side.

You had to draw certain parallels.

"Adele!"

I found him on the corner of Battery and Jackson, sitting outside a bus shelter, and was so relieved I could have hugged him. Since our last meeting, I had grown more comfortable with the odor of other unwashed people; being denied the luxury of a shower had the effect of making one less ashamed when in the company of similarly-underprivileged individuals.

There seemed to be a wall around Bill, however. Or maybe I was just burdened with the uncomfortable memory of our last meeting, when I had shouted at him and run away. I tempered the smile on my face. "Hi, Bill," I said.