Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story (19 page)

The next day my rent was due. We had a very nice landlord, but had been late so often with my rent that he said he would have to ask us to move out if we didn’t start to pay on time. I always struggled to make rent. All my money went to paying it. I would steal toilet paper from public bathrooms and bum food off friends who worked in restaurants. Often the last few dollars of rent money was paid in change, as I was scrounging to get by. I walked in my boss’s office that day and cheerfully said, “Good morning. Just came in for my paycheck. My rent is due today and my landlord is busting my chops.” My boss didn’t look up from the papers he was working on. I waited a second to let him finish, but he never looked up. “Um, hello? I just came by for my check.” He acted like I was a ghost he could not see or hear. I stood there awhile as he kept on quietly working. I broke out in a sweat. I was powerless and humiliated. I had no idea what to do. What recourse does a person with no education and no resources have? I walked out of his office and out the front door and sat in my car for a long time. I felt hopeless and doomed. I would never make it in the world. My only value seemed to be in men’s perverted interest in sex. I felt hollow, worthless, and incapable. I drove home slowly, still in shock, knowing full well that we would be kicked out of where we were living. I would be letting my mom down. She was depending on me to pay rent. Where would we go?

I pulled up to the house and found my mom in her room and I started crying. I told her I’d been fired for not sleeping with my boss, and that our landlord was going to evict us. I expected panic and tears on her end, but her reaction was just the opposite. She got very calm, and said, “Well, let’s move into our cars. That should take the stress level down a bit. Yeah, why not?” At first I thought she had temporarily lost her mind, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it did solve a lot of
problems. I had no money for a deposit on a new apartment, even a modest one. I could live in my car for a few months, get a new job, and with no overhead I could save up the money for a deposit and get back on my feet. San Diego was perfect for living in a car—heck, having a car to myself in a lovely climate was nowhere near as rough as living in Alaska, in an unheated saddle barn, sharing a room with two brothers. It might even be fun!

I went about another round of getting rid of everything that didn’t fit into a backpack. I had continued with my drawing and had begun my angel series in the Poway house. Angels in blue jeans who were topless, wearing pearls and with dark blank faces. My drawing has always been a deep reflection of things I’m struggling with internally. I think of Interlochen as my skeleton-alien phase—so much self-loathing and pain in my body. Boulder was about studying those near to me, like Andrea. In Poway I tried to find innocence and intrinsic worth within myself. I tried to learn how to have something other than poverty in my life, without trading nudity for worldly possessions. I also wrote lots of songs. “Innocence Maintained” was one that I started there. Another was “1000 Miles Away,” where my little green car has a starring role.

Being properly out of financial recourse, I had taken a Zen approach to mechanics, hoping that if I somehow fixed myself, the universe would reward me with a car that actually turned over when I started it. I saw parallels between my car and me:
a little run down, a little beat up, maybe just a little green. Maybe it’s my battery, maybe it’s my starter, maybe my heart’s too weak.
When I got sick or when something was not going well in my life, it was always my fault. In a way, that was a beautiful point of view, because the only person each of us can control is ourself, so I took every responsibility on myself, in hopes I could change everything if I just tried hard enough. What no one told me is that everything is not my fault. It does not signify anything about our morality that bad things happen to
us. When bad things happen, all we can control is how we respond to them. That’s a much healthier and more productive mind-set to have, because a sense of shame is not initiated each time something bad happens. I was a long way from understanding this though; it was just not how I was raised. My mom taught me that every single thing that happened to me was a reflection of my own thoughts—I was responsible for everything, all the time, and it was exhausting. Most parents take their children to the doctor when they are sick. My mom told me to sit and meditate it away. She did the same thing. She never went to a real doctor that I’m aware of for her heart problems. She would shut herself away and meditate more. She seemed to be doing fine, so I tasked myself to try harder, always harder. I would be sick and shivering and feverish, with no idea that letting unbearable pain go untreated meant I could become septic from blood poisoning when my kidneys shut down.

It was around this time that I almost died in the parking lot of a hospital. A kidney infection had not been mitigated with cranberry juice and wishful thinking. My mom drove me to the emergency room but no one would see me without an insurance card. I sat in my car, throwing up all over myself, when thankfully a doctor who had seen me get turned away tapped on my window and gave me some free antibiotics and his card. He said he would treat me for free, and did so for many years. After my career took off it felt good to be able to pay him. He was another angel in my life.

I was so earnest and eager to please, and my mom seemed to know this about me. What often seemed like deeply spiritual and even supportive advice always seemed to serve her best. Instead of going back to live with a parent after high school while I figured things out, I was paying rent on a house I could not afford, and after a few months of living in our cars, she went back to Alaska and left me in San Diego, where I fended for myself.

But none of this seemed weird. It was just my life. My mom seemed so caring to me, or at least I needed to believe so. I had no contact with my dad at this point. I was by myself, living in a car that broke down all the time. I was hitchhiking to get spare tires when one busted. I was often sick and couldn’t afford antibiotics. While I was able to find a few jobs, I lost them quickly by taking too many sick days, which I spent alone in my car waiting out yet another infection. I became agoraphobic and was gripped by terror if I tried to leave my car. I was absolutely convinced that if I stepped foot outside my car I would be seized by illness. It was irrational and totally paralyzing. I had never been afraid of being out in the world, and yet here I was with agoraphobia. It was debilitating. I rarely left my car, and when I did, it was to pee in someone’s yard or behind a bush, or to shoplift food.

The stealing began again with carrots, which apparently are the gateway vegetable, because soon it led to all manner of produce theft. I had quit stealing for a while, but now the need seemed to be back in full force. I was able to limit it to food until one day I saw a sundress that I really coveted. It was frilly and girly and I wanted it so badly. I went in the dressing room of the store to try it on, thinking about the best way to go about stealing it, but instead a strange thing happened.

I tried the dress on. It was ivory with forest green flowers and vines all over it, and smelled new and clean, like someone else’s life. Someone’s life that I wanted. I wanted to feel clean and new. If I could get it for myself, it would help me deny that I was destitute, in such dire straits that I could hardly eat, much less wash my clothes. I looked in the mirror, happily turning this way and that—the key to these things is not to think too much. Just do it. For some reason I looked at the price tag. Why on earth did I do that? If you’re stealing something, it doesn’t exactly matter what it costs. But I looked down at my grubby little hand wrapped around the pristine price tag and saw that the dress cost $39.99. I don’t know what it
was about that moment, but a bolt of lightning hit me. When had I lost faith in myself? I looked in the mirror, the ridiculous frilly shoulder straps puffing up around my face, my stringy hair falling loosely over them. My proud Alaskan body and tan skin and biker boots underneath this white summer dress. I looked like a dog wearing pajamas. The dress wasn’t even me. I looked straight into my own eyes and stared. I had once been so confident. I had believed I could do anything I put my mind to. Hell, I had two jobs and paid rent at age fifteen. I put myself through private school and traveled around the country. When had I stopped thinking I could earn forty dollars for myself? I had never thought of stealing as being hurtful to anyone. It felt like getting even with life. It felt like I was in control, doing for myself what fate seemed always to leave out for me. It made me feel taken care of, to provide myself food or something nice to wear. But suddenly I saw that the only person I was cheating was me. I was showing a complete, utter, and total lack of faith in myself. I stared in that mirror, embarrassed, my pants half pulled up around the dress I was attempting to cover up with my clothes. I had been lying to myself. Stealing was not about evening the score—it was about the fear that I would never be enough or have enough. And it was a total stress response. I can look back at every time in my life that I stole (because the times came and went) and it was always directly related to a feeling of extreme duress.

My little green car had been recently stolen, my guitar and all my belongings along with it, which sucked. But at least I hadn’t been in it. I was faced with sleeping on the beach or crashing at people’s houses as I met them. One guy at a coffee shop said I was welcome to shower at his place while he was at work. He gave me a key and seemed nice enough. I made sure he told me where he worked and what his hours were. I stopped by his job, which was walking distance, just to make sure he was there when he said he was. After a few weeks of showering at beach rest stops, a
proper hot shower called to me. I took the key and went to the address he had given me. I let myself inside and saw that I was not alone after all. There were several women in the living room of his tiny apartment. After a slightly awkward hello, one of them asked if I was waiting for a job. No, I said, just here to shower, and walked briskly to the bathroom. I looked around the place for any cameras. None that I could see. As I undressed and bathed I kept wondering what she had meant. I washed out my underwear in the shower homestead-style, dried it with a hair dryer, put on my dirty clothes again, and went out and struck up a conversation with the girls. They were older than me, in their early twenties. One was lying on the couch hardly moving, complaining that she felt like a tractor was parked on her chest. I learned she had just gotten a boob job and came back here to recover from surgery. Another girl was waiting for a call. Apparently this kind stranger ran an escort service on the side. Ah. It was all coming together now. One of the girls asked if I danced. I said I had studied in high school, though I knew that wasn’t what she meant. They danced at a local gentlemen’s club as well and said that it was great money and I should try it. The girl with the imaginary tractor on her chest said she wasn’t going to do it forever, just until she got through school. I asked how much they made. A thousand a week. Gosh. A thousand a week sounded good. And easy. I just could not imagine dancing onstage in my skivvies.

I loved talking with the girls about what their lives were like when I came by to shower—they were generous in sharing the details of their work with me, and I listened to them like a writer does, paying attention to the details, without judgment, but I did not listen like an apprentice. I had seen girls my whole life who gave up just a little of themselves only to see it was a slippery slope—the line they said they would never cross kept moving farther and farther away until they hardly recognized themselves. I sensed this would happen to me if I gave up that little piece of
myself. It felt dangerous, not that I didn’t consider it. It was an option. But for whatever reason there was something in me that just would not bend on this subject.

In the dressing room, I had to face myself. No more kidding myself. This was not an amazing adventure. I was not doing well. The terror and hopelessness were going to drown me. Jail, disease, or death were certainly in my future if I did not get a grip, get serious, and turn things around for myself. I looked back down at my hands, that forty-dollar price tag still clutched between my fingers. I looked back at the mirror.

“What are you afraid of?” I asked myself.

I answered. “That I’m always going to be alone.”

I choked back silent sobs. What else? That I don’t know how to take care of myself. What do you know how to do? Write. And learn. Do that then, until you know what else to do. Remember, do no harm. Hard wood grows slowly. No shortcuts. Fear exists in your mind. Master your mind. It’s all you can do. It’s literally all you have. I took the dress off, hung it back on its hanger. I was shaking with fear. It was as if only at that moment the reality of all I was facing actually hit me.

Unsure what else to do with myself, I walked to the public library and thumbed through Plato’s allegory of the cave, one of my favorite works. It invited me to engage my imagination, intellect, and creativity in understanding my world and my perceptions. It felt comforting. I remembered what Buddha said: Happiness does not rely on what you have or who you are. It relies on what you think. If this was true, then what did I think? On the outside, I was a fairly optimistic kid. If you met me on the street, you would never know I was homeless, really. If you met me on the street, you’d think I was upbeat, outgoing, and friendly, with a smile on my face. But the anxiety and fear that seemed to be controlling my inner life and thus my actions became untenable.

Again I looked back through all my journals to get a better picture of
what my real feelings and thoughts were. My journals were my prize possessions, and the only things I had managed to hang on to over the years. I carried them in my tattered backpack everywhere I went. I wrote my poetry, thoughts, feelings, and lyrics in them. I opened the cover of one I’d finished recently to see my familiar dyslexic scribble, as thoughts tended to pour out faster than I could write. I was shocked by the pattern I could see laid out there clearly in black and white. I was not an upbeat, optimistic kid. I was deeply negative. I was living in the past and projecting it all on my future and I was being completely robbed of the opportunity that lies in the now. Even in my honest writing, I wasn’t being honest with myself. I had hidden my terror. Every action I took—writing and stealing alike—was for the sake of avoiding reality. Where my feelings were, I was not.