The Girl's Guide to Homelessness (16 page)

I wanted a small wedding, and he was relieved by this. He'd had the grand two-hundred-person bash with his first wife and found himself swept away in the exorbitant cost and Bridezilla-ness of the entire thing. Before he'd realized what happened, he was knee-deep in about £40,000 (about $65,000) worth of debt. When I suggested that we have ten or so of our closest friends come and stand under a pretty tree somewhere while we exchanged vows, and then go have pizza and ice cream or something, he stared at me with wonder in his eyes.

“I just can't believe it. I don't understand why I was lucky enough to find you. You're amazing. I can just picture it—it'll be beautiful. A gorgeous leafy spring day, you there in a simple dress, no frills. Just simple and perfect. All the excess junk stripped away.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, we don't need any of that crazy, expensive stuff. I never got the point of it all. I don't care about having chair covers, or linens to match the chair covers, or
a DJ and an open bar and dancing and tons of people we barely know there. At the end of the day, all that stuff is gone and you're still married. Isn't that the important thing? Isn't that what it's all about? I just want to marry
you,
and to hell with the rest of it.” I meant it, too. He stared at me for so long and with so much love in his eyes that I actually felt a bit uncomfortable, blushed and looked down at my lap. He stroked my cheek and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck, pulling my head in to his chest. He held me there for a while, repeating over and over how wonderful I was, swearing that he would make me the happiest woman on earth for the rest of our lives.

 

One prevalent attitude I've noticed toward the homeless: Many people expect them to give up every last indulgence and every last shred of fun. We should spend all our time looking for work (never mind if we already
do
work, or
are
looking for work), or perhaps standing on a freeway off-ramp begging for change, or sitting in a government aid office, hoping against hope for assistance. We should spend
all
our time doing this. After all, if we take any lighthearted time to ourselves at all, we must not
really
want to rehouse ourselves.

I should either be working, searching for work or otherwise appropriately ragged, depressed and undignified, befitting my station, is that it? I should give up absolutely everything to prove just how much I deserve a home, and just how sorry I am for whatever I have done “wrong” that “made” me homeless in the first place.

While I agree that it certainly behooves homeless people to spend their time and resources wisely, and set goals and priorities for themselves, there is an inherent human need for recreation, for relaxation, for fun. Everyone needs time
to unwind, and that goes double for a homeless person, because there is little more stressful than this life. Priorities are individual, and I do not believe that the occasional bit of fun should be at the bottom of the heap for anybody, much less that homeless people should be judged harshly if they sometimes choose it.

My fiancé was home again and I was thrilled, so I dragged him to a local Renaissance Faire for a day. Admission was cheap, and the proceeds benefited equine rescue, the local humane society and a nonprofit theater troupe—all causes I cared about. I got to gnaw on a freakishly large turkey leg and watch men in tights and armor joust on some lovely Percherons (rescued, of course). I also got to enjoy the supreme pleasure of watching Matt unwind and enjoy himself. He stifled his laughter at the overexaggerated British accents, but his (real) English accent clearly didn't register with nearly anybody, and certainly didn't seem to impress them.

 

We were living practically on top of each other, and summer was in full force, but Matt and I were as much in love as ever. The heat occasionally made us testier with each other, but even on the rare occasions where we argued, we always fought fair. There was no hitting below the belt, we resolved things quickly and we understood each other, or at least strove to. Our fights were pretty constructive, never nasty. There was never even the slightest hint or suggestion between us of throwing in the towel. We understood that we loved each other, we were in it for the long haul and, dammit, we both wanted to make it work.

One particularly excruciatingly hot day, we were both at our breaking point. We were stripped down to our underwear, lying spread-eagle on the mattress, sweating
profusely and trying not to touch each other, lest our shared body heat turn into the straw that broke the camel's back. Suddenly, I just couldn't stand it anymore. I loved Matt so much, but hated the rest of it, hated not being able to take us straight from a trailer into at least a tiny apartment with working air-conditioning. I couldn't bear to lie in the heat for a single second longer. If I stayed in this trailer, on this lot, for another second, I would scream until I collapsed.

Without a word, I stood up and threw on the lightest clothes I could find.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm going to Starbucks. You can come, or you can stay, but I can't handle this anymore. I hate it here. I hate it! I hate it!” I began to cry, and grabbed my laptop, running out of the trailer and jumping into the car. He followed.

At Starbucks, it was so different. We picked out cushy chairs next to each other, and held hands affectionately as we continued working, until the sun went down and it was cool enough to return to the trailer.

“I think we both needed that,” he said as he held me that night. “I feel just the way you do, you know. I'm so grateful that we have somewhere to go, but I can't wait until we're out of here and have someplace of our own. We can't do this forever, can we?”

From then on, whenever we were too hot or tired or stressed to deal with the trailer for another second, one of us would shout, “Starbucks break!” It was one of the very few ways that we could pretend that life was normal (and air-conditioned) for a little longer.

A
writer with the local newspaper had heard about my story and expressed an interest in doing a piece on me. I met with her but declined to be interviewed for the piece when she made it clear that her editor would only run the article if she was allowed to use my full name. Matt didn't mind one way or the other, but he was curious about my upbringing, and just why I was so determined to keep the blog anonymous and to avoid going public.

It was hard for me to explain everything to him. I didn't know where to begin. My family had no idea as to my whereabouts or my blog, and I still couldn't bring myself to hurt them, even after all that they'd done to me. I just wasn't ready to come out yet, I explained to Matt tearfully. I didn't want to hurt
anybody
, and that would be inevitable if my name were made public.

Blog readers had also started asking why I didn't write more in-depth pieces about my past, why I was so vague about it all. I didn't
want
to write about rape or molestation or my mother beating me. I did everything I could not to think about these things when I didn't have to—therapy had
been going so well and done so much to get me thinking more positively. I didn't want to go back to that ugly place.

He held me and ran his fingers through my hair soothingly until my strangled sobs subsided into tiny hiccups. He understood. If I didn't believe I was up to going public about it, then by George, I shouldn't, and that was all there was to it. It was another of those moments when I realized just how lucky I was. There had been times when I thought perhaps Matt couldn't understand my more difficult issues, but at times like this, I was so glad to be proven wrong.

For instance, I had tried to explain, in vain, why I was afraid of demons, even though I no longer believed they existed. Since childhood, I'd been taught that Satan and his demons were real—as real as any person walking down the street—and they were always watching me, even when I was naked in the shower, trying to trip me up. If I did anything occult-ish to invite them into my life, like use a Ouija board or even read a demonic book or watch a demonic movie, they could infiltrate my home, hold me down in my bed at night and rape me, push me into walls and beat me up, lift up furniture like couches and beds with me on it, high into the air, spinning them as I screamed. It had happened to people my mother knew—she swore it. At the first audience screening of
The Exorcist,
the theater screen had burst into flames. It was a scientific
fact
.

The demons were so cagey, you could even pick one up without realizing it, by shopping at secondhand stores or garage sales. Demons
loved
to “attach themselves” to secondhand furniture or knickknacks, just waiting for a new, unsuspecting buyer to snap them up. There was no way of knowing what that item's previous owner had been into—she could have been a witch or an occultist! Satan
worshippers were everywhere, hiding among us, dripping black candles and pentagrams and altars smothered in goat's blood in their basements.

So even though I now knew this was all ridiculous, I flipped out if Matt wanted us to watch
The Devil's Advocate
on YouTube. He just couldn't grasp why it would bother me, if I didn't believe in any of it anymore. It was completely irrational, of course. But I just wasn't ready.

Once, he asked me about the Jehovah's Witnesses' stand on refusing blood and blood transfusions. “But you eat meat. You
do
know that all meat has blood in it, right?”

“What are you talking about? Not meat that's properly bled before consumption.” I recited the official JW line unconsciously, without thinking.

“Er…why do you think steak is red and juicy? That's blood. If there was no blood in meat, it would be gray and disgusting and inedible.”

“No, they told us that's just meat juice. They inject food coloring into the meat so it looks nice and appetizing.”

He started laughing at me, and I flushed red. “
Meat juice?
Oh, man. Now I've heard everything! You must realize that's complete bullshit, right? It's blood. It's impossible to remove all blood from meat.”

I was horrified. I had never really thought about it before. I'd been eating blood all my life, in trace amounts, and had clung to some ridiculous, hypocritical, spoon-fed dogma flat-out denying it, without grasping even the most basic of concepts. And here Matt was probably wondering how the woman he loved could be both so smart and so stupid simultaneously. The same way I felt about my sister. It was rather mortifying.

But there was more that he wanted to know. If our child was dying, and the doctors said that a blood transfusion
was necessary, would I allow it? I hesitated. I could tell that the hesitation deeply, deeply disturbed him.

“I want to say that yes,
of course
I would allow a blood transfusion. I'd do anything to save my child. I truly believe that I'd allow it, absolutely. I'm not hesitating because I'd take the Jehovah's Witness stand. I'm hesitating because all my life, it's been pounded into me that it's disgusting, revolting to transfuse blood. Even if my mind knows that it's just another medical procedure, my entire body is just going ‘
ew!'
I just have to get used to it, is all.”

It was like the homosexuality thing. Jehovah's Witnesses believed it was a gross, disgusting sin—the epitome of nastiness. Even after I had close friends come out of the closet, and I realized that they were still exactly the same friends I'd always known, I loved them as much as ever and I had absolutely no interest in what they did in bed, it took a few more years of conscious effort to overcome the “ew” factor, the automatically triggered reaction that had been ingrained in me since childhood. I had finally gotten to the point where someone being gay didn't bug me at all—it was just another quality about that person. Not good, not bad, simply
that person.
Like blue eyes or being left-handed.

Racism has been similarly problematic for me. For instance, my mother does not consider herself racist.
After all,
she might say,
I have ethnic friends and don't use the volatile slurs
nigger
or
spic,
and I think the miniseries
Roots
was a moving and powerful cinematic experience.

Invariably, though, my mother would home in on a Hispanic woman pushing a baby carriage down the street and scoff, “Pfft. Another Mexican pumping out welfare babies. Typical!” If the woman seemed young, then my mother would stage-whisper dramatically about how those
slut Mexican girls couldn't keep their legs closed; all of them got pregnant at fourteen. The term
dirty Mexican
was applied liberally and with abandon—not only to Mexicans, but to Puerto Ricans, Costa Ricans, Cubans; anybody of Latino descent.

“
Mom!
” I said in horror, “
Stop
it! You're being
rude!
” She would roll her eyes and modulate her voice to clearly convey the absolute maximum amount of disgust and contempt with me.

“Shut up, Brianna. She can't hear me, anyway.” This was sometimes true, and sometimes not, but that wasn't the
point,
I wanted to scream at her. Whether they can hear you or not, you
said
it! You
thought
it! At the time I couldn't fully articulate rebuttals like
You're tarring one ethnic group with the same stereotypical brush
or
How do you know that sixteen-year-old girl isn't babysitting her little brother?
or
Well, Samuel our landscaper is a Mexican immigrant, and a very kind, hard worker who labored for Grandpa for many years, and you don't seem to have any compunction now about employing him to do your gardening for dismally low wages….
I may not have been able to formulate these vague thoughts into coherent arguments, but I instinctively felt unclean when she came out with these bigoted comments. I knew her words were rude and cruel; I just couldn't put my finger on why.

She is one of those people who believes the statement, “I'm not racist, but…” immediately cancels out any and all ensuing bigotry.

“You know I'm not racist, and don't ever repeat this, but Brother Knight really is the quintessential pompous, arrogant black man,” she would huff about a towering Southern congregation elder she disliked. “Thinks that he has to prove he's smarter and better and more articulate than the white people in the congregation. The way he
gets all loud and forceful sometimes from the platform, or keeps reminding us that he's black, like a Baptist preacher or something.” Knight was not the only elder my mother had locked horns with in the past but, then, she had never referred to any of the others as “arrogant white men.” Why was the ubiquitous racial descriptor a necessity whenever Knight was discussed? I didn't much like him, either, but my feelings had more to do with the fact that I distrusted elders in general, rather than because I thought he was an “uppity Negro,” who needed to be put in his place.

Which isn't to say that I didn't absorb some of these tendencies and thinking patterns myself. I did, though I didn't always recognize them as such. So did my sister. At twenty or twenty-one, Molly was pursued by Derrick, a gregarious, funny black man in the congregation. I met him a couple of times, and found him personable and charming. Moll clearly enjoyed his company, and considered him one of her best friends.

“He knows how to take a joke and laugh at himself,” she told me. “We can rib him about liking watermelon and fried chicken, and he thinks it's funny, instead of getting all PC and offended and playing the racism card! He even jokes about being ‘our nigga!'” However, she complained to me, she recognized that his interest in her was taking a turn for the romantic, and she wished that he would back off and just let them stay friends, “like brother and sister.”

I was a bit confused, because Moll has always been hell-bent on marriage and babies ASAP. I didn't think that she
should
settle for the first man who expressed an interest in her, but I must confess that, knowing her personality, I was a little surprised that she
wasn't
gung-ho about Derrick.

“I'm just curious, why
don't
you go on a date or two with him? You already know that you like his personality
and sense of humor, and it's not like it could hurt, right? You never know: There could end up being a spark there. Besides, he's a real cutie. If you don't want him, can I have him?” I was being facetious about the last part, of course—there was nothing I wanted less than to date a Jehovah's Witness—but the guy
was
a looker, and I am not immune to fantasizing about eye candy.

She looked uncomfortable. “Jehovah says that we should only date to find a prospective marriage mate,” she recited robotically. “Don't take this the wrong way—it's not that I'm racist or anything—but I just can't see myself marrying a black man. I've never found them physically attractive.”

“Er…so you're saying it's not a racist thing, it's an
aesthetic
thing?” I was incredulous.

“Yes, exactly!” She beamed, relieved that I “under stood.”

“But, what if someone has everything that you're looking for, everything that you find important in a marriage mate, but then he just happens to be black?”

The discomfort was back. “Bri, can we just drop it? He's a great guy and I love him like a brother. Eventually, he'll move on to somebody more appropriate for him, and forget about me. It's not like I can
control
who I find attractive, is it?”

I was seething with unexpressed frustration.
But people you don't initially find attractive can grow on you! Personality is what matters! And what's so unattractive about being black, anyway? Have you ever
seen
Denzel Washington?
At the time, I was dating a corpulently obese, heavily tattooed man three inches shorter than me with long, straggly hair and a micropenis. None of this jibed at all with my personal beauty ideals or my cravings for wildly experimental, flexible, swinging-from-the-chandeliers sex (we were limited to blow job, hand job, and girl-on-top, during which I
could never tell if I was actually being penetrated or just giving a labial massage), but he was a relatively sweet man, good-natured and humorous, and an affectionate cuddler who was more than pleased to overcompensate for his physical shortcomings with admirable cunnilingus techniques. Within two dates, I was head-over-heels infatuated with him and never again gave his looks another thought. I just enjoyed being with him and that was that; to me he
was
handsome. So I was
not
in the mood to hear Molly complaining about her tall, dark, sexy and handsome would-be beau…especially when her only complaint was the “dark” part of it.

Thus spurned, Derrick did eventually move on and married one of Molly's friends, a Hispanic girl in the congregation named Elena. Moll was overtly and vocally relieved to be free of his chivalrous attentions, now directed toward a “more suitable” ethnic female. The happy couple, being young and unable to afford to rent a place of their own, moved in with Derrick's parents and Elena became pregnant almost immediately. My mother and sister congratulated them loudly and sweetly to their face, cooed over the adorable baby when it was born and (true to form) tsk-tsk-ed behind their backs the entire time.

“Derrick's a nice and funny guy,” they confided to me. “We adore him to pieces, but he's being such a typical black—too lazy to get a better job and support his wife when he can just mooch off his parents forever. And getting Elena
knocked up right away!
” My mom shook her head piously, apparently forgetting her own reproductive history. “It's just so, so sad. But typical. It's a cultural thing. Aren't you glad you didn't marry him, Molly?”