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by Staff Writer
Born into poverty
3 generations of poor women
consumed by marginalization
3 generations of women destroyed by subjugation.
3 women
Not resisting
just existing.
me - child of a mixed race mama
she-orphaned as a child- tortured as a child
she-born of a another tortured woman beaten by a man...
a man who had a plan to use and abuse until there was no more left to have
auntie with no teeth..no hope
lost to dpression and cigarettes
bearing more tortured children more tortured women who did not eat - who did speak
who harm each other and themselves cause there are no more tears to grieve.
these women’s lives
are inter-twined
with the oppressor,
the oppressor’s name is Shame
Shame tells them it is wrong to be poor,
it is your fault
and whatever you do -
don’t ask for a hand-out
starve your child
consume that wine
sleep on the street
you’ll be fine
but don’t ask for help
these women believe the oppressor as tho he is the lover they will never keep-they
starve their children in honor of shame, they remain homeless in honor of shame-
they lose their soul... in honor of shame
Shame is the name of the new colonizers, the gentrifying landlords, the policy
makers, the presidents
3 generations of poor women destroyed by margin-a-lization
Not resisting..Just existing
I am born of these women - I am born of this pain ...of the impossible relationship with
the new lover- shame-
at a young age I give up - unable to change - unable to save - ready to die, dead from
too many reasons to cry -
but wait there is a happy ending... No not happy... just angry... but anger has hope -
anger has possiblitites anger has names like Dorothy Allison, Shange, Toni Morrison,
And Zora Neal Hurston -
anger has clarity and words like resistance and struggle
survival and organize
so now the story can read
3 generations of poor women fighting back-
3 generations of women.... Healing not Grieving -
Resisting.....
Not
just Existing
Chapter 1
Sidewalks
"I can't breathe here…"
These were the largest sidewalk squares I’d ever seen. My mother and I were stranded on one, holding on to each other for dear life. I was eleven years old. We were in downtown Los Angeles — the Rampart district, on the edge of the Crenshaw area, famous for gang activity, drive-by shootings and opaque landscapes filled with giant alabaster apartment buildings, immense streets and sidewalks.
"I can't take that job. . . . I can't breathe here. . . . I've got to get out of here," her words came out in tense clumps.
I couldn’t stop myself from focusing on the size of each cement square. As she spoke, they got larger, and the thick concrete foundation at the base of the apartment building in front of us seemed to stretch and bend, curling around us. I only heard parts of her words, and after several minutes it was just the consonants jumping up and down in the atmosphere, smashing into my ears, fighting to get in.
"But couldn't you just try it for one week?" I begged, trying to appear nonchalant, my desperation dangling in the silent, white-brown afternoon air. I looked up, hoping for some sky, some hint of blue or a tip of cloud, but I found only the usual diffused almost-air and omnipresent glare, a sky color specific to Los Angeles, generated by reflections off of windshields, chrome bumpers, sunglasses, apartment windows, billboards and the bottoms of planes.
I continued, "You need this job, it might be the last one you get." While she pondered this momentarily, the parts of my stomach that were drowning in an admixture of adrenaline and acid came up for air. "We' re not going to make it without that job. We have no savings, what about the rent?" fear was seeping into my voice.
"But you know I can't breathe in this smog. I just don't know. . . ."
My whole body searched for something else to say, knowing so well, so perfectly clearly that if she did not take this job, if she did not get out of the house now, get back to normal immediately, then life would change for good, not partially or just for a while, but completely, irreversibly, and forever.
"Lisa, I don't know what to do. Maybe I can get a job in Santa Monica. The air will be better there. I know jobs are competitive in West LA, but . . .”
As she spoke, we both continued to shrink, hovering together on the sidewalk while an exhaust-filled breeze began to circle and expand above us, swaying the fronds of the dusty palm trees.
That day was the end of things previously lived: innocence, goofiness, dumb ideas, eleven-year-old-ness. That day was the end of life as I knew it, but in actuality it was the beginning. The beginning of crisis, terror, impossibility, extreme poverty and vicious cycles. Yet, as is often the case, beginnings are never very clear and endings are even fuzzier, so we went home to begin what became an odd sort of schedule, a schedule to change things, an impotent form of desperate networking with no network.
Even when my mom was working things hadn’t been "normal", from a conventional American perspective, i.e., two parents, a stable home, steady job, etcetera. My father had divorced my mother when I was four years old threatening my mother with a custody battle if she ever demanded child support, so we were always poor. My mother struggled constantly with the isolation and desperation of being a very low-income single parent. Still, I thought she was an excellent mom, one who protected me, taught me and mentored me. I was always included in the complex discussions and strategies necessary to keep both of us alive, which I loved. We were completely entwined co-conspirators, conspiring….. to stay alive.
One of our most hopeful times had been when my mother got the job she had for two years, the one she had lost a few months ago due to a loss of funding . She had been a social worker/case manager in a catholic group home for emotionally disturbed adolescent girls. My mother was an excellent therapist—she "got" people from just the sound of their voice or a twitch of their eyelids. She always attributed this to a "psychic ability" she’d inherited from my Irish grandmother, but in the end I think, that like all good therapists, she could feel things more intensely than most people and she listened to everything very carefully.
My mother got this job because of a government job creation grant. The nuns took a "chance " on my mom, a newly minted social worker (MSW) with no work experience. After one year there my mother became highly respected for her innovative techniques at what is now referred to as "family restoration"- ie. She attempted to keep each family she worked with together with a team approach including extensive advocacy and support. By her third and final year there, she had become a team leader of teachers, therapists and house managers. Six months after she was laid off, she was physically ill, emotionally terrified and unable to reenter any kind of workplace, caught in a complex web of phobia, conflict and poverty .
Chapter 2
Vine and Melrose
We lived in a dilapidated apartment building located on the edge of Hollywood, barely touching the border of Hancock Park, a remnant of old money and Hollywood glamour. As you stepped onto Rossmore Street — what Vine became once you crossed Melrose — you entered a lush, green, oak tree-lined, non-Los Angeles peace that filled your nostrils and chilled your eyelids. If you didn't look back, you could imagine you were on a street in some wealthy gated community. But if you turned the other way, you were on the corner of Melrose and Vine, the nexus of Hollywood, hopes, terror, and desperation.
I straddled these two disparate worlds with a daily visit to Winchell's Donuts, located at the corner of Melrose and Vine. Back when my life had made sense, I went by Winchell's on my way to school, taking a quick detour to acquire a plain old-fashioned, enjoying the hustle and excitement of being a kid in a city too large and tense to notice you. After my mother got laid off and I no longer went to school, my visits to Winchell's became one of a series of patterns that I established in my attempt to hold on to some semblance of order. I wasn't familiar yet with the notion of reading newspapers or even buying coffee, but I was able to go there and buy something, to be out of my house and partake in some sort of normalcy.
Our apartment was art-deco-huge, with incredibly high ceilings. The whole apartment was filled with wall-to-wall 100% wool carpeting and floor-to-ceiling cream-colored silk drapes. Our landlord, who also owned the Rossmore Hotel which had housed none other than Mae West herself, explained to us that Errol Flynn had had our apartment built for his girlfriend, and so we were really lucky to get it at only $390 per month. I didn't know who Errol Flynn was, but I hoped it would rival my friend Cindy McCoy's status of living in the building where the Hillside Strangler used to rent an apartment.
One day when my mother was still working, we bought a small orange cat at the local pet store. It was a special pet store that catered to the wealthy people in Hancock Park, which meant that all the kittens had pink noses and pink inside of their ears and thick shiny fur with pastel paw bottoms. Orange cat was indeed a model petizen. Whenever he got a new toy he would play with it in all the proper ways, just like the frolicking example-cats pictured on the side of the box. He was not a finicky eater, nor was he skittish, shy, or neurotic. My mom, orange cat, and I lived happily ever after until my mother stopped working, at which time a lethal admixture of orange cat dander, 100% wool carpet and smog began to slowly suffocate her, causing her anxiety to be compounded with the onset of asthmatic symptoms.
Chapter 3
Two Lips That Lied
"A blossom fell and very soon I saw you kissing someone beneath the moon. . . ."
Ever since my mother had bought the Nat King Cole tape she’d stopped playing the Artie Shaw tape. Now she played Nat eight hours a day. His buttery voice coated the screaming that emanated from our apartment.
"Lisa, you have to help me get out of here!" That's how it would begin, and then she'd hand me enlarged handwriting thrown across a lined piece of paper, "Call them."
Sometimes I’d sneak out to the fake balcony/fire escape that extended delicately by peeling wrought iron tendrils over the five-lane intersection at Melrose and Vine. I watched people going to and from things. They seemed to be things with a beginning and an end, 9:00 to 3:00, 8:00 to 5:00
"But what about going to school today?" I would sometimes ask.
"You can't go today. You can't leave me alone. . . . You've got to help me get out of here!"
"Here" was an amorphous concept, depending on her level of depression that day or week. Sometimes it meant the actual apartment — it had been ten months since she’d lost her job and three months since she’d been out of the house. But more often “here” meant the whole city of Los Angeles, or even the entire continent.
"If I could get out of this place, maybe I could get a job, maybe I could breathe. . . . Lisa, you've got to find me a therapist. . . . What if we move to Mexico, will there be medical care there?"
Different calls were always on the list depending upon her focus that day — to get employed again, maybe volunteer, to try school, to become less isolated. But almost consistently the quest for a therapist would be part of the plan. We had no money except her meager unemployment check that would run out very soon, and there was no free therapy available, so this, the most important of needs, was always left unmet.
The Reverend Jim Bond of the Peace and Freedom Church would appear on the list at least twice a week. He had shaken our hands once at a seminar called Becoming At One With Your Political Correctness.
"Hi, I'm Jim Bond. Welcome. Here's our program."
My mother believed that if someone acted helpful you should take him or her seriously, take them up on their implied hospitality.
11:22 am Tuesday:
"Hi Reverend Bond, it's Lisa. Just calling to check if you know of any low-cost therapy resources in the area?"
"Therapists?" an audible gulp.
"Yeah, for my mother"
"Oh."
11:40 am Thursday:
"Hi Reverend Bond, it’s Lisa. Just calling to check if you know of any graduate schools in the Seattle area? My mother wants to go back to school."
11:37 am Monday:
"I thought you loved me, you said you loved me...we planned together...to dream forever..." Nat was whispering in the background.
"Hi Reverend Bond, it's Lisa. Do you know of any good volunteer resources in the Canada area?"
"The dream has ended, for true love died …"
"Also, are there any free therapists in that area?”
"Lisa, can I ask you a question?"
"Yeah, sure."
"How old are you?"
"Eleven"
"Aren't you supposed to be in school right now?"
"Oh nooo, school's already over for me. You see my school starts at 6:00 am and it’s over by 11:00."
"That night a blossom fell and touched two lips that lied . . ."
Chapter 4
Before
Life was never easy for my mother and me. My father left us when I was four, but he really left before I was born, venturing into the night to consume large amounts of alcohol and drugs, preparing for his future role as a disillusioned, wealthy psychiatrist. White man extraordinaire, he was the great-great-great-grandson of colonial politicians, son of a frustrated Hemingway-wannabe capitalist entrepreneur and an intellectual suffragette. His was a life of extreme privilege and extreme insanity, one common to rich intellectual American bohemians, living out their eccentricities in private beachfront mansions with the brutal crash of nature pounding at their front door.
Into this strange American family walked my mother, a sexy, mixed-race “exotic,” the embodiment of all that was cool, tough, and exciting. A poor girl from Philly, she had reinvented herself into one of the "beautiful people" when she shipped out west to Pasadena, losing all that was Philly in dress and speak, but never her soul, never her soul.
They dated. She was happy with him because he was brilliant, as well as "three inches taller and three years older," the edict set down by appropriated Pasadena sorority standards. He was happy with her because she was everything he could never understand, the exotic other with a great body.
But my mother's story didn't really begin there. It began with the systematic torture of a mixed-race orphan girl in a series of foster homes, one so horrific that she suffers from severe post-traumatic stress syndrome to this day. My grandmother gave her away because she was an illegitimate love child, product of her liaison with a African Puerto Rican high stakes gambler. My grandmother, a fifteen-year-old Irish immigrant from Liverpool who thought she was coming to America to become an actress, was too poor and too ashamed to care for her illegitimate daughter. My mother's poverty, my mother's mother’s poverty and my poverty, an unending chain of isolated poor women with no resources, no family, no support, and no luck.
Chapter 5
The Origin story; Helen Josephine
Helen Josephine wasn’t sure what pan to use – they were all there, lined up so neatly.
“ You stupid Mic, have you burned my dinner again?” her husbands fury crawled down the dark narrow victorian hall, reaching out to her like the sharp claws of a dead ly animal…Since her husband lost all his money in the “crash” of ‘29, he forebade the use of any electricity in the house. After dark the only light in the house was a buttery glimmer emanating from a lone streetlight outside the kitchen window.
She watched the line of pots sway –the bright copper glistening in the darkness …On her 15th birthday when they were just married, her mother-in law brought them to the house and proclaimed loudly, “I hope you’ll be able to use them dear – I know you aren’t used to such nice things – I know your family barely had any indoor appliances.. ”
“You are so ignorant – ya goddam mick.. how hard is it to make dinner ? his voice shoved her tired mind back to the moment ,“If your head wasn’t on your shoulders, you’d lose it” The screams of a thousand fights crushed through her skull like falling steel.
The sound of his feet shook the floor. His feet like his body was wide. His head and face was long, pulled toward the ground by an endless grasp of gravity , topped off by a solid brush of dark red hair. Every feature in his face seemed larger than life, monster-like. His nose, eyes and mouth forming one large vacuum of fury “get out of here you idiot” – his huge hand crashed down on her skull- throwing her to the side of the room – “you can’t do anything.. why did I get stuck with an ignorant mick like you for a wife”
She tasted the warm redness in her mouth– her hands shook as she reached for the pan, Her thin fingers trembling over the velvety smooth metal
He was coming at her again “do you think I am going to stand for this? – I can send you back to that hole you came from- with all the rest of your ignorant mick relations”
She held on tight – it would have to be now, if he comes any closer
“Aah what the hell – I am too tired to deal with the likes of you tonite”
He turned and lumbered out, the floor beneath resuming its foreboding quake.,
Her head began to throb. She clutched the thick handle and began to stand up - carefully –moving very slowly –it was heavy – she needed two hands – the base was heavier copper and stainless steel – she walked through the shiny hardwood floors that she had spent endless hours polishing to a high shine yesterday.
“You stupid bitch, you think this is clean?” and then a clenched fist crashed into her skull and then another and another and…. Hours later she awoke slumped over in a pool of her own blood in the darkened hallway
She stepped slowly out of her slippers – feeling the floor with her toes. Another memory flashed through her mind – yet it was so fast she couldn’t even touch it – merely a bit of something else – something other than pain, or fear, perhaps it was disappointment.
When Helen Josephine Elizabeth McMurphey was 13 – something happened- – it was never clear what, maybe rape, maybe just the violence of poverty. She was the eldest of 11 children in a poor Irish family living in the Irish ghetto of Liverpool in London. And if it was rape her father couldn't have helped – well-known only for his cruel act of killing her cat with his shellalegh (walking stick) in front of her eyes.
As was the custom in those days poor Irish Catholic girls who were pregnant, or at-risk of pregnancy, like Helen Josephine who happened to be bestowed with a size 42 breast cup size at a very young age were sent away by their families to a convent presumably to work for God and absolve their sins, for as long as it took – probably their entire life.
Once in the convent Helen Jo's families’ plan for abolishment was oddly foiled, the nuns were captivated by the tiny girl with the hourglass figure, the Dark Black hair and wide eyes the color of fresh coal, (her family was known as being one of The Black Irish) they took her under their wing and painstakingly taught her the "kings English", working for hours with her on elocution and the proper pronunciation of her consonants
“It is time, Helen Jo, you must go ,” After two years at the convent, the nuns told her to pack her bag and get ready to "go out on her own". She walked slowly into the nuns’ office with all her belongings stuffed into one small suitcase. “Come here dear”, Sr Maria caressed the young Helen’s soft face like a lover saying farewell to their sweetheart, “you must fulfill god’s destiny for you, to become someone very special, bring your beauty to many…just be careful and work hard and you can become anything you want”
“but I don’t think I am ready Sister…” Helen jo whispered
“We can’t keep you here any longer, my dear," with those idealistic words they handed Helen a small purse filled with a tiny bit of money and her birth certificate. It was unclear where she would go, but many times the sisters had mentioned that she had great beauty and talents befitting a Shakespearean actress, "who could work on the stage".
The day she left she only had the one pair of lace up boots she had on her feet and the dark stiff woolen coat she wore on her back. “goodbye dear…”
Sr. Maria walked her slowly to the massive front doors of the convent, locked with a huge steel bolt she opened it slowly , and gave a little shove to Helen jo, “goodbye” The large door swung closed behind her with a deep hurumph
*After Helen Jo left the convent she did manage to make it to New York, "to be on the stage," like she would always say. The contents of the nuns coin purse just covered her boat fare. Within two days of her arrival in Manhatten she met up with the man who would change her plans forever
Chapter 6
Liverpool
“ Helen Josephine we can’t help you – you need to be with your family, your husband – that’s where you belong” as the words of her family floated through the air -her face was a vice, locking in place a river of tears which could not spill onto her mothers threadbare dining room carpet
“All men are difficult, think how your father was…. you must go home, that’s where you belong” Her aunt, mother and sisters looked at her, their heads moving up and down, almost in unison.
“ Mama..Mama.it will be ok…….” only a glimmer of her eldest daughter’s golden hair flickered down the ship ‘s hallway on the journey back to New York.
The mother and daughter had made a secret trip home to her family in England in search of something – they weren’t sure what – maybe a place to go – maybe support – maybe just a kind word.
They stayed for 3 days .
The trip home from Mary josephine’s mother’s home in the Irish ghetto of Liverpool, England back to America was on the Queen Mary, it lasted 14 days and nights but all she could remember was her eldest daughter trying with all her might to escape her endless tears.
Chapter 7
Tonite
The steel and copper’s edges felt solid in her hands- she caressed each crack and crevasse- she loved its sharp corners
It would be tonite- it must be tonite- now – while things are quiet, …. She sunk to the floor, her heart collapsed inward- she swallowed screams, Please someone help me – good god what am I to do
“You are a stupid mi… – like your mothe.. ..” he was drunk by now so his insults grew in volume dropping consonants from every other word like dry leaves. Soon he would rise pounding the floor with his girth to deliver another beating on her like he did every night. Every night she told herself to “just bear her curse” after all what other choices did she, a poor irish girl have?
And then she felt the metal leave her hand. And then there was no sound, the voices left her…. He was quiet … only a faint whisper from the gramophone…. “It had to be you…it had to be you….wonderful you….i wandered around and finally found somebody who…….
The three children found their father the next day slumped over in his favorite chair. Baby Kay, the youngest daughter, wondered why the largest copper soup pan was rolling back and forth on the wood floors under the chair…..
“Pick up the pot, stupid, that’s daddy’s favorite pot, what are you waiting for?”
Little Patty – the oldest daughter slapped baby Kay and made her cry….
“Mommy’s gone……” Little earl, the only son ran into the room crying
The snowflakes whispered through the winter sky outside their home
Chapter 8
The Bus
The seats of the bus tore into her legs- the wind whipped up and through her like small airborne daggers.
Miss , are you cold, would you like to wear my coat..
“Ooh that’s all right I’m fine”
“What’s a pretty little lady like you doing out alone at night?
He was tall and thin, with curly black-brown hair, skin and eyes, like a smooth piece of tinted suede and even in the cramped, freezing Philadelphia bound bus he seemed to swagger to and fro as he looked deep into Helen Josephine’s eyes. He started talking to her as soon as she ran breathlessly onto the bus her own–long black hair strands like small birds taking flight from her head….His voice was smooth like butter in a warm pan – inching into her ears soothing her fear – answering her questions and his with its sureness – making plans with its absoluteness.
“Where are you headed…. Little lady?” he began to inquire. This question caused a tremor in her heart – she had No-where to go and no-one she could tell . Her husband never allowed her to have any friends or money – she had never had a job in the US- and he never signed the papers to finalize her citizenship. There were no battered women shelters that existed. No safe homes, no welfare.
“ you know I am a professional singer and I am on way to the top – I’d love to take a beautiful little lady like your self with me – “ His voice rolled back into her head “Well sweetie, this is my stop…. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll set you up in a nice little room out of this cold”
She nodded and followed him down the dark street – he walked fast almost as though he was running from someone – he grasped her hand tightly pulling her along with him, “Get your troubles C'mon get happy – a honey glazed tenor rolled from his mouth spreading slowly across the bitter night sky. He sang as he walked each step – crunching down into the thick snow
“Get your troubles – c’mon get happy get ready for another day…Hallelujah C'mon get happy get ready for the judgement day”
Chapter 9
A Dark corner
She lived with the honey voiced man for several months in a dark corner room of an old hotel in downtown Philadelphia. She awoke each day alternately overwhelmed by his sweeping charm and terrified by being there at all. He would leave each morning as the sky was just getting acquainted with the sun after a soft kiss to her forehead. After he left she would circle the room in a thick haze wondering where she was and how she could leave. Sometimes she would walk outside and get lost in all the moving people, loud cars and towering cement. The only thing that seemed normal were her moments with St Patrick and Jesus. She sat with the small ceramic sculptures of the deities in a tiny altar she had built in secret behind the dresser – each day as she walked the streets she would pick up some little thing – a flower – a piece of shiny glass – to place at the tender feet of her minute St Patrick statue. and an even smaller likeness of Jesus on the cross – it was from her mothers house and the red blood stains were very brown by now As she did this she would pray for forgiveness – there were so many things she had done wrong – so many things she must do to absolve her sins – so many it terrified her to think of them
Sometimes he would be gone overnight, sometimes only for a few hours When he came home - He would sail into the room bringing flowers and candy and promises of million dollar singing contracts.
Eventually she began to feel a life growing inside of her. She said nothing – and as she became bigger and weaker she stopped eating. She needed to punish herself –she needed to suffer for her sins- One day as she knelt at the alter to St Patrick asking for forgiveness she collapsed.
She awoke up in a hospital several days later – he was kneeling over her – “Honey, baby why didn’t you tell me – that’s so beautiful we have a little child – you know I’ll do the right thing – let’s get married – we’ll have a big wedding – my family will love you – everything will be fine- he held her close to his chest – she felt him breathe in and out- for a second she lost herself in his dream .
She shook her head quietly from side to side-“No” she said, “she could not marry him or anyone else for that matter”
“but honey what do you mean…” a rush of words flowed from his mouth. She watched his lips contort and move and his eyes plead, she nodded her head absently until he finally stopped
They returned silently to their small room two days later with a tiny infant. girl She put the baby in a small wooden bassinet and then laid on her bed, without saying a word. He changed his shirt and within minutes he was gone. She shuddered as the door clamped shut behind him. Within minutes of his departure the baby began to cry
One beam of darkened sunlight formed a tremulous dagger that flickered over her thin frame under the blankets. Hours turned into days, but she refused to move. The baby cried and cried – but she never stood up to give it any care He came home to find the baby almost blue. “oh my god, she’s almost dead, honey what’s wrong?”
But Helen Josephine gave no reply- only staring ahead blankly. He picked up the baby and rushed it to the hospital
A week later he returned with the infant and a very small old man. “Let me see my little daughter in law”, the old man proclaimed loudly in a voice thick with other worlds.
A tiny old man barely larger than Helen Josephine limped into the room. He was wearing a camel’s hair full length coat which trailed on the ground at his feet- his shoes were old and scuffed and his hat was larger than his head. He walked over to Helen Josephine – his eyes, two shining black puddles peering out from under his folds of dark brown skin and black fedora. “Pobrecita, let me see if I can help”, he murmured.
After that day – the old man came over everyday with a bag of groceries – he warmed the milk and prepared the bottles – he rocked the baby to sleep bathed her and changed her diapers. He cooked meals for the young mother and told her stories about his struggle to come here from Puerto Rico as a poor immigrant with nothing – he complained about his “ingrate sons” Once in awhile he would stop to ask a question – usually about her family, sometimes something simple like was she hungry –but she never responded, continuing to stare straight ahead or act as though she was sleeping. His son rarely stayed there anymore, and eventually he just stopped coming by at all.
After almost a year had passed, Helen Josephine got up from her bed one morning very early, looked around the room as if she was seeing it for the first time, got dressed and walked out the door. As the door shut the baby began to cry – letting out a scream that woke the entire building . The landlady of the building came in to see what was wrong. She found the little baby and carried it downstairs with her.
Two full days later Helen Josephine returned to the room with a new hat and a job.“ I got a job” she told the old man as he stood at the sink washing the baby. “I got a job, so now everything will be ok”
“really, well that’s a relief”, the old man chuckled, we thought you were dead..”
From that day on Helen Josephine awoke before the sun was up, got ready for work, took the baby downstairs to the landlady who agreed to watch her in the mornings for a few cents a week and went to work.
The old man would come in everyday at 1:00 and pick up the child and take care of her until 6:00 pm when Helen Josephine would return. At precisely 6:05 pm he would boil a pot of loose tea for both of them and stare carefully into his teacup in preparation for a “reading” by Helen Josephine .
“you know Helen, you are really good at this, I know a lot of people who would like to know their future… it might be worth a few bucks!”
Eventually more people started to come into their little room – “ to hear their fortunes” told by Helen Josephine. When she was only 15, she always said, an Irish girrrl told her that she had the “gift” promptly teaching her the mechanics of levitation, tarot cards and tea leaves.
On any given night there would be up to ten people crouched together around a very small dark brown linoleum table wedged tightly into the middle of the room. The bed, stove and sink were barely an inch from each table corner All the attendees were mostly older well-dressed men who had foregone depression era inspired suicide for the magic of the spirit world, Sons of immigrants all, born in red-lined, Irish Italian, Puerto Rican and Jewish ghettos –not so far from their indigenous roots to believe in magic but far enough to worry about the future of the stock market in the rapidly dying Capitalism of the day. Several of them would blur the lines of psychic and mistress, looking lasciviously at the attractive unmarried single mother Helen Josephine who held two full-time jobs and still barely had enough money to buy groceries - including Maxi Rosenburg, who also had a penchant for little girls and would come by at 4:30 each day sending the old man home so he could molest little Mary Jo under the guise of “helping out with child care”
On cue the room would grow dark, the room’s one light bulb was unscrewed for the séance, “ ahem”, one of the men let out a nervous cough
“I must have silence or my Indian spirit guide will not help us through this journey” Helen Josephine demanded in a newly deepened voice
Chapter 10
The first Foster Home
One day the old man became ill – when Helen Josephine came home the baby wasn’t in the room – only a befuddled and partially dressed Maxi Rosenburg laying alone under the covers
“Where’s my baby, and why are you half dressed?” she screamed
“ I don’t know sweetheart – I don’t know anything anymore” Maxi answered blankly
“Where’s my baby?” Helen banged on the landlady’s door
“ The old man never came to pick her up – I had to miss work because of you - I can’t take care of this child – Helen – you are going to have to put her in a home if you can’t find someone to watch her – but its not me – I have enough things on my plate, you should of thought of that before you spread your legs for every Tom, Dick or Harry you meet”
There was no-one who could watch the small girl – and so after two days missed at both jobs Helen Jo was fired.
Within a few days, a one and half year old Mary Jo was shipped off to her first foster home.
Chapter 11
Marguerite
Sheets of silent white powder blanketed a Bing Crosby forest. Snow so soft and smooth -it appeared almost warm. Stone craftsmen cottages with golden blurry insideness glowed in the clear black sky. Out of the shadows …a petite woman with long flowing black hair raced up a thin brick walkway dragging a very small child behind her
The door was thick and heavy – their small hands pounded together - but no noise registered – finally the woman reached up to a shiny gold knocker attached to the door – clack clack clunk.
“May we help you?” The door swung wide open, the shadow of a towering female figure draped in dark red and navy blue velvet gown inquired in a deep New England drawl
“Are you Mrs. Marguerite Leland,” , her mother didn’t wait for reply as she continued breathlessly, “I need to leave my daughter with you …I can’t keep her anymore, I have to work…I have nowhere else to take her….I can pay five dollars a month as soon as I find a job – please….”
The large woman towered in front of them, huge green eyes glaring out of a wide white face, “what is your name?”
“Helen Josephine Mctigue and this is little Mary jo” she called out, taking special care with all of her consonants.
“Irish eh?”, The tall woman threw her thick silver hair back and laughed out loud, “…well, deeeeah I’m not a charity – so if you can’t pay she’ll have to work, these are hard times, everyone is having trouble… oh and please ..call me Marguerite”
The little girl and her mother walked through the mountainous walnut doors slowly . The mother had gone dress shopping to find the perfect dress to present little Mary Jo to this, her most recent foster home . In the last five years little Mary jo had been sent to three different families – they always started out nice but inevitably something would always go wrong. The last family, little Mary’s favorite seemed like it would last forever and then one day the eldest daughter who was 24 but had the intellect of a four year old decided she wanted to perform the same sexual act on little Mary that she had experienced when she was raped by the “hertie Gertie man” . Little Mary, only 3 years old at the time almost died of asphyxiation under the sheer weight of the massive girl. Before Mary jo was completely suffocated, the girls mother came in and found them, and within days she was gone from that beautiful farmhouse which always swayed and swished with the sounds of laughter and happiness.
Chapter 12
The First six Months
In the first six months of her stay with Marguerite Leland everything was wonderful, Marguerite bought little Mary dresses and all the fancy shoes she could ever want. A week didn’t pass without a trip to an exotic place, a beach, a park , candy, cakes, birthday parties for birthdays she didn’t even have yet,….And then one day without warning – things began to unravel like a loose skein of yarn.
When Little Mary jo came there to live it was to join a “family” . She was to be the perfect little girl of Marguerite and Johnny Leland. To that end Marguerite used to dress up Little Helen in beautiful outfits and take her along on weekend trips to the Everglades, to the Rockies, to Niagara Falls. In every picture they were the idealized American family; Little Mary jo in Shirley Temple curls,, Johnny Leland in a tan gabardine suit and Marguerite dressed in some flowing 40’s floral print dress, a foreboding scowl dancing at the corners of her dark red lips.
“Get down, (POP POP POP) GET DOWN!!!” One morning as mary Jo came downstairs for breakfast, Marguerite was hiding behind a couch to avoid gun shots flying through the room. “johnny’s shooting at me”, Marguerite whispered to her from clenched teeth and then grabbed Helen jo by the hair, pulling her down so tightly, it almost hurt.
In twenty minutes it was over. The house fell into a deep silence. Johnny stood up, tucked his gun in his jacket, put on his hat and walked out the front door. Marguerite and Mary jo watched him out the window as he strolled down the long walkway to the front gate. He opened and closed the small white picket fence door that stood at the edge of Marguerites property without looking back or even turning his head .
Marguerite refused to leave her room for several weeks after Johnny Leland left the house. There were no more dresses, Shirley temple curls, trips or even report card reviews. The family was over as quickly as it began, and Mary Jo’s role as pretend daughter was no longer needed.
Or maybe it was the day that marguerite asked Helen josephine whether she could adopt mary jo “so she could have a real mother”
To which Helen Josephine replied, No thanks ma’am, she has a mother, things will get better for me very soon, I know”
Or maybe… it was something else… .
One dark grey winter day a month after Johnny Leland shot his way out of the house. Marguerite walked mary through the entire property and surrounding acres of land as if it was the first time mary had ever seen it, while shouting out one line of explanation in a dark unattached voice. “Your mother hasn’t sent any money for your board and I can’t afford to keep you for free, you have to earn your keep if you are to stay here anymore”, with that said, Marguerite began to read off the assignment of a series of chores, strenuous tasks far beyond the ability of a five year old girl, “Marble staircases must shine like glass, all hardwood floors need to be polished until their reflections rival that of the best mirror. Pots, Sinks, walls, windows, “fine china” and drawer after drawer of heavy silverware need to be washed, scrubbed, dried, shined, and polished. Flowers, trees, and all of the grass need to be mowed, picked, pruned, scored and cut, and you must start today”
If any of these tasks were not finished or not accomplished to Marguerite’s standard of excellence, mary was beaten on her head, back, neck and legs with a 2x4 board until she bled. Most days of all weeks of each year, there was some task not done “just right”. Most days the whoosh-whack sound of a 2x4 board hitting flesh and the subsequent sound of a small child crying could be heard throughout the large house
A few days after the tour of the property food just stopped being available. No plate was ever set for mary jo. Elaborate meals were served for all of Marguerites many guests. Breakfasts with sausage, rolls and toast, Lunches with sandwiches piled high with meat, cheese and lettuce. Dinners of pasta, chicken, pot roast, vegetables and salad, but nothing for mary. To stay alive she stole the cats’ food. When she could
Eventually mary learned it wasn’t safe to ask for things, to hope that life would change or even to think much at all. In fact the only safe thing to do after you finished the chores and got your beating was to sit for hours in one place and rock back and forth.
Four years passed filled with days spent just sitting alone on the back step all day and into the night. It was easier to stay there quietly without moving or thinking. Way after dark, Mrs. Bones, an elderly woman who wore the same dress every day of her life and rented a room at the top of the stairs, would open the back door and whisper out to Mary jo, “come to bed”, sometimes slipping her a piece of dry bread.
Chapter 13
Annie Louise
“Yahoooooooooooooo!!!!” One morning a thundering childsqueal shook the tired house. It was as if a vial of pure child was poured into that dry foreboding space. It woke up the tired walls, brightened the empty hallways, smiled at the sullen drapes and danced on the lonely floors.
“This is annie-louise and she will be living here for awhile.” Marguerite tiredly introduced the plump red-headed girl with the sparkling green eyes to a cowering mary jo,
“Cmon, let’s gooooooooooooooo”, with that minute-long shriek the houses’ oppressive silence was shattered forever. Mary louise was like micky roony,shirly temple and muhammed ali all rolled into one. Every moment was wasted in mary louises mind if it wasn’t utilized for some mischief or at the very least ; FUN!!!.
“What’s wrong with you mary Jo?” she would squeal and then grab a terrorized and catatonic mary jo and swing her through the entire house, sliding down the polished staircases, swinging from the velvet drapes, skating over the shiny floors.
After two weeks of concerted prodding, teasing dragging and punching,lil mary jo would still not stop rocking on the back step after chores, refusing to play or even acknowledge annie-louise. That’s when annie-louise decided to tried pins. For six hours straight annie- louise stuck little mary jo on all parts of her body with straight pins – when she started on her face, mary jo snapped. Suddenly a high- pitched shriek emanated from mary jo’s mouth., “ GET OFF MEEEEEEEEEEEE” with that, she sprung up and lunged at annie- louise’s neck wrestling mary into a near death choke hold. Annie barely managed to save her life under the superhuman strength of little mary jo’s concentrated fury birthed out of years of fear and pain.
The two girls punched, kicked and spit back and forth until annie- louise screamed, “lord have mercy the girl is alive” and with that she began a chortle,that turned into a thunderous glass shattering laugh that didn’t stop for several seconds at which point, mary jo joined in and the two girls continued together on the floor, squealing, screaming and guffawing with every ounce of their bodies for what seemed like hours.
The end of her days at Marguerites’ house was murky and unclear, the two girls becoming eventually too incorrigible for even the formidable Marguerite to handle, culminating in a visit from a county social worker who caught both girls in a rather big act of delinquency which involved the theft of several hundred precious roses from a neighboring garden. After the contraband flowers were acquired the two girls presented them to their teacher who was on the brink of suspending both girls for never showing up to class.
Three days later mary jo’s mother come to pick her up, for good. The departure was on a quiet winter day.
When she went back to her mothers apartment – neighbors and friends clicked their teeth at the tiny girl for many days. "She looks like she's been starved, what is wrong with that woman not feeding her child…"
“Your child is severely anemic, Miss Mctigue, we need to talk in private” the doctor spoke to Mary jo’s mother through clenched teeth in the next room after her first examination, “she’s severely malnourished, what happened to this child?" he pleaded angrily. After many hours of tests- he sent the mother and daughter home with vials and vials of vitamins and syrup - all meant to help mary jo regain her health. Unfortunately, four years of starvation and neglect took their toll on her small body in ways she wouldn’t know about for many years
Chapter 14
The Orphanage
“It will be five dollars a month, paid on the first – Don’t EVER be late Miss. Mctigue, otherwise we’ll have to turn your child back over to the State, do you understand this requirement Miss. Mctigue?”
Mary jo gazed up at her mother’s tired face as she pulled up the corners of her mouth and reached deep into her throat for her best appropriated “kings English” accent masking the clipped Liverpudlian Irish inflection that lay below, “Yes, of course, I understand dear, I will never be late – I have two jobs now and I am also working for the landlord to keep the rent down. You are all wonderful people to take my little girl and I won’t let you down..’ , she continued with an endless string of promises of how much integrity she had, and how amazing these very wealthy pilgrims were to run this orphanage and take in poor girls like mary jo – and how she was so impressed with them and all their kind hearts.
As Helen Jo sat with the Director of the Philadelphia Home for Needy Girls, in front of that large walnut table barely able to see above its massive surface, she knew that this fine upstanding woman could not think badly of her for being a poor Irish immigrant woman with a bastard child and no family, because after all she didn’t speak like a poor Irish girl. She spoke with the Kings English like the nuns taught her. She spoke with grace. She enunciated her words properly. She was well-spoken.
Chapter 15
A mixed race child
A mixed race Child – that’s how each sentence began and ended when the social workers at the orphanage described my mother in their reports. A mixed race child –mary Jo is always hungry, she could be anemic – Mary Jo, a mixed race child – was asking for shoes again today. When her mother, Helen Josephine, visits she doesn’t display very much affection to little mary Jo….
Little Mary jo began her stay at the orphanage in a trash can. After her mother finished the appointment with the director, she buttoned lil Mary jo’s coat and said, “I’ll see you as soon as I can.” She left her daughter on the street in front of the Home and walked quickly into the afternoon sunset.
Little Mary jo watched with terror as the 5 foot tall woman scurried away into the darkening afternoon sky.. After her mother left, a group of children found her, “hey little girl, are you the new orphan…are you the new orphan?” Hey little girl…. cat’s got your tongue…can’t you talk…I think she’s deaf…maybe she’s dumb…she sure is funny lookin – like a little nigger- Nigger lips Nigger lips … can you speak… can you fight…”
“Cmon, little girl get up….poor little deaf and dumb orphan girl can’t speak..can’t move” and then they started circling around her until one of the boys stepped foreward and proclaimed, “I think we need to help her cause she can’t move herself”, Mary jo catatonic with fear and too many silent screams in her head from the abuse by Marguerite Leland mouthed the words, “please don’t” but no-one could hear.
After a few more minutes of yelling, squealing and circling they picked up Mary jo and carried her onto the playground and put her in an empty trashcan. Later that night the janitor found her in the tall aluminum can, afraid to move a muscle in case someone would hear her.
Chapter 16
Chores
190 feet of shining steel, copper and glass bubbled on every surface in the cavernous kitchen. Whips of blue, gold and red fire licked and bit at the base of each boiling pot. The sound and steam emanating from hundreds of gallons of boiling water rose up and circled around the eyes and nostrils of 10 tiny girls on kitchen duty at The Philadelphia Home for Needy Girls.
It was 6:00 am on Mary Jo’s week for kitchen clean-up. Every girl had a series of difficult chores before and after school befitting an army drill sergeant and kitchen duty was by far the hardest of them all. Mary Jo stood beneath the10’ deep sink filled to the top with 2 gallon steel pots. She stood on her toes to reach the edges of each pan and strained to see through the steam that rose from the scalding hot water used to clean and sterilize them. Hours seemed to pass before she was done with all her chores and trudging through powdery snow for three miles to reach her destination of school at 8:00 am sharp.
The Philadelphia Home For Needy girls was a study in early philanthropy. Hundreds of acres of beautiful, fertile farm land in the Pennsylvania countryside originally belonging to a “trolley magnate” who endowed the 5 million dollar estate to run an orphanage for white “parentless” girls (perhaps this was the reason for the constant reminder to my mothers “mixed race” status in her reports) The institution was re-known for its supposedly “progressive education” practices, run by a former settlement worker who trained under Maria Montessori herself. They purported to connect school and home in a way never done before by any educational institution. In fact, what was most significant was the largess of the work required from each child who lived in the home.
Each day at the orphanage began with a rooster,a bell and a hundred chores; There were everyday chores; washing, dusting, polishing, scrubbing and shining, once a week chores; margerine making ,bread kneading, egg collecting, cow milking, butter churning and baking everything from cakes to bread….. and then there were seasonal chores….
Chestnuts roasting by the fire, marshmallows toasting, pumpkin, yam, apple, cherry, blueberry, lemon, key lime and peach pies baking. Winters and anything close to the holidays were filled with every imaginable type of roasting, toasting, baking and broasting. While one pie would bake, another crust would be rolling out. Sixteen girls alone would be mixing and whipping chiffon and fresh cream to top the bread pudding and apple crisps, Another group of girls would be skinning, dicing and washing all the fruit and piling it into big pots for the pie maker. Apples would be pressed and boiled into cider, cinnamon sticks boiled and crushed for fresh spice.
The desperately hot summer months were filled with hours and hours of sweat-filled “canning” production Peaches, pears, peas, apricots, apples, blueberries, strawberries, rhubarb, and then was jam making, pumpkin drying, ice cream made from pure cream and flavoring
All in all, the home produced almost everything its residents consumed, wore and slept on by converting the large “student” body into a highly productive, well organized machine. The only intangible, it seems, was the highly coveted and much maligned “shoes”
September 24,
Mary Josephine, a mixed race child, came back from a visit with her mother with two pair of shoes, one lace-up for school and one pair of patent leather Mary Janes. After being told several times by staff to keep them in the house, she has hidden the school shoes again. When asked by this counselor where she hid them, she replied, “in the forest”
May 7,
Mary Josephine, a mixed race child, has “hid” her 5th pair of shoes this year. When she was asked why, she replied, “they are ugly”
May 20
Mary Josephine’s mother visited today and was unable to make her $5.00 dollars again this month. She also said she has no more money to buy any shoes.
Nativity plays, Easter services, church choirs, dancing around the maypoles, costumes, parties and holidays that would rival the best Bing Crosby movies, all prepared the little girls for the perfect Amerikkan dream. Candy coated, lollipop laden, and syrup dripping hyperreal dreams left floating forever in the evolving minds of the poor parentless girls. Were the dreams so powerful that they came true or rather were they in fact more an impossible dream.
Its only a paper moon , floating under a cardboard star and its only make believe when you believe
She lasted four years in the Orphanage – a four years that she remembers fondly. Notwithstanding the intense labor required of the girls, and ongoing discrimination from three racist staff members, she remains an advocate of well-run non-punitive institutions for kids rather than unchecked, abusive foster homes.
She eventually was ousted from the Orphanage for unclear reasons, the most probable cause though was a vague claim by two of the staff that she was “acting” like a lesbian, by putting on full productions of fifties musicals and acting as the “boy” lead in all her productions, specifically, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.
But maybe its just because Helen Jo missed one too many monthly payments.
When my mother left the orphanage she bounced around to a few more foster homes and then even lived with her mother again in Helen Jo's tiny apartment in North Philadelphia, where she fueled her love of Hollywood movies.
After sort of pretending to go to school everyday, ( My grandmother didn't have the time to check up on her as she barely held down two jobs) my mom would hop on the streetcar to go see a movie while having near brushes with the neighborhood pedophiles as she gazed the wonderfulness of MGM 50's musicals.
One day one of the pedophiles almost whisked my mom away, but for the watchful eye of the "village" i.e., the red-lined neighborhood of African Descendent, Irish, Puerto Rican and Polish families who all took part in "raising" the neighborhood kids, who interceded by physically grabbing my mom and taking her home and severely beating up the pedophile who had almost successfully lured my mom back to his apartment with promises of candy and comic books.
After that incident she was shipped off to more foster homes and more abuse until she turned 14 when she ran away for good. She landed back on my grandmothers doorstep where she began to "hang" with a group of, "bad" kids who spent their days sitting in a broke-down car and drinking.
It was this last foray into "trouble" that made my grandmother decide to send her "out west" where she ended up living in Pasadena, California,
Upon her arrival in the extremely wealthy Pasadena, she took up residence with the recently reunited eldest daughter of my grandmothers, a hard-working, single mother of two, who lived on the outskirts of the town but was able to enroll my mother in the extremely white, extremely wealthy Pasadena school system.
My mother was adept at "fitting in". Too adept. Week after week day after day she appropriated her classmates realities, clothes, lifestyles and attitudes so well in fact that six months after leaving Philly, a "bastard" with a thick accent and rolled-up sleeves of a "rocker" she metamorphosed into a prep who hung with all the beautiful people. It was then that she became “Debbie”, shedding the poor Irish immigrant moniker of Mary Jo and birthing what she envisioned as a new “white” middle-class self, with nary a trace of her thick Philly accent left on her palate.
Chapter 17
A Very Young Tiny
We lived at the edge of the ocean, my father, .mother, and I. My memories of that time are always at night, backlit by fog, tinted by rays of moonglow. Our 19th-century Victorian sat on a hill above a crashing sea. The house tilted precariously on the edge of a little patch of grass and a maze of gnarled ice plants. It seemed to reach out like a finger over the glimmering waves.
My room was small but tall like a distorted corner in an Alice in Wonderland story. The walls and the curved Victorian windows seemed to reach up into the sky beyond where my four year old eyes could see. Every night before I went to bed in my room I would peek at the sea which always seemed to be busy doing so much — waves crashed to meet their shore deadlines, the phosphorescence busily recreating itself, the lobsters and clams, sea-anemones and sharks all caught up in their complicated ocean schedules. I was always afraid to gaze too long for fear that one of the ocean people would notice and become angry with me for spying and decide to kill me so that I wouldn't reveal their secrets.
But it’s not the ocean or my room with the large cartoon-like monsters who convened in the uppermost corner of my ceiling — I had a scratchy blanket to take care of them. It’s a filmy memory of the nights that were played out downstairs between my perpetually wet-suited dad and my increasingly desperate mom.
It all began when we moved there. My mother had taught herself to be the perfect wife: dinner was on the table at precisely 6 pm, a juicy rare roast beef, boiled potatoes, green salad, and a bright green or dark red vegetable, things that I’ve never forgotten because I couldn't have any of them. For the first three years of my life I had horrible food allergies and was relegated to a nauseatingly watery rice cereal, delicately served in a beautiful antique bowl with a large silver spoon. I never understood in my two-year-old head why I was only allowed the rice cereal soup while my mother and father delighted in bloody carnivorous feasts.
At that time my father was slowly but surely going insane. He hadn't really wanted to be a psychiatrist. His real love was reading and writing, and he’d wanted to be an English professor, but that was not the will of his parents who had made it very clear what they expected of him which was to attain power and money preferably through a career in medicine.
To this end they "accepted" my mother, though they thought she was trash and wouldn't let her mother, my grandmother, enter through the front door of their palatial beachfront house because she was "shanty Irish" unworthy of anything more than the servant's entrance (she was a maid). But they realized that my mother was willing to devote herself unconditionally to the whims of my very odd, almost catatonic, handsome surfer father and facilitate his successful graduation from seven grueling years of medical school.
It was a good plan from their perspective. The fact that it almost killed my mother was a minor detail . You see, in an endless series of stoic attempts to prove that he didn't need financial help from anyone, least of all his parents, my father tried to get through medical school existing on "nothing.” This meant surviving on 12 cents a day, eating only fried soybeans for a year, living in an unheated room in the basement of a building in the middle of a St. Louis snowstorm, and countless other strange encounters of the "appropriated poverty" kind. But of course, to all concerned — except perhaps my mother — product was more important than process,
.
Immediately after finishing medical school, he began a successful private practice in Redondo Beach California, chosen for its good surf and proximity to all of Los Angeles.
Back then my cousin Annie was always present at our dinner table, another example of the generations of very poor women in my family. She was there because she and my mother loved each other dearly, and of course, because there was always a good meal, and Annie was always hungry. Annie was pretty in a small brown animal sort of way. She was all of 92 pounds, and this was not because she was anorexic. Rather, she had been starved as a child due to the severe neglect of her poor, withdrawn mother, my aunt Jan
Annie's mother would disappear for several days at a time when Annie and her younger sister were growing up. Jan would leave the girls in an assortment of mid-California micro-shacks that were endemic to areas like Pomona, City of Industry, and San Bernardino. The paint was perpetually peeling, and there was never any furniture, but the worst thing was that there was rarely any food in the house. In good times Jan and her little sister would construct food simulations like “Vinegar sandwiches” which consisted of a two pieces of wonder bread drenched with vinegar, or if they were lucky enough to have some ketchup in the house, the delicacy of a “ketchup sandwich”. A lot of the time there was no wonder bread. In spite of all this, everyone loved Annie's mother. Sometimes the most harmful people can also be the most charming, and Jan never meant any harm. She absolutely loved babies and was nice to everyone she met. She just couldn't stand to become dependent on anyone or anything, and saw it as the utmost form of failure to "receive a hand-out" ie welfare or food stamps. Jan had been beautiful once, but she’d lost her teeth before she turned 21, which meant she always had to hide her mouth when she talked. She never had much use for food herself and survived on a steady diet of cigarettes and coffee, which colored her thin face a pale yellowish gray.
Annie was always happy to be at our dinner table. She was in awe of my father, the handsome, rich doctor, who was always "accidentally" getting out of the shower whenever Annie happened to be using the toilet. This furthered Annie's admiration of my father, as he was apparently well endowed, and Annie was somewhat obsessed by the size of a man's penis.
As the years passed, basic niceties between my father and mother were replaced by furtive glances, loud clanks of dishes, whispers behind doors and subsequent slams until the house became permanently divided. The division was realized through music. My father was a fan of Don McLean, Bob Dylan and any other pseudo-intellectual folk singer type, while my mother favored rock-and-roll, rhythm-and-blues, and disco of the Sly and the Family Stone or Animals variety. These musical camps were blasted at each other across the house in place of words or normal conversation. My mother, who had given up dancing due to my father's disdain for it, began to take it up again with a new vengeance. My father, on the other hand, began what he and his equally insane friend called "rescue operations" of large luxury boats (sailing for dinner cruises and the like) that didn't want or need "rescuing," which didn't seem to matter to my father. He would leave the house for his self-appointed harbor duty to the tune of some plaintive Bob Dylan or Don McLean ballad, with a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea-like set of harpoons, goggles, and fish tackle, murmuring, "Godspeed."
"Don't think twice, it's all right."
One memory that floats through my head in a swirl of black night and wet fog is the night my father left us, fortified by several kinds of barbiturates and alcohol. Every vein was distended in his ashen-white hands as he held a small wad of cotton underwear, a crunched fabric ball of the remnants of his life held tightly in one pale hand. He was wearing his wet suit—the one with the sporty yellow embossed zippers and dangling ID tags—a full-body wet suit of the deep-sea variety. The long muscles of his silver-blond calves quivered where they emerged from the bottom of the suit.
So many crazy things after that only come back in micro-flashes. I was never clear on what exactly was “the last straw for either of them or if there was one, only that things grew more hateful, more violent and more tense with each passing day, culminating in a huge fight where in which my father broke my mothers arm and then suddenly the My father had FBI-quality tracking devices in an attempt to catch my mother in the act of cheating on him while they were separated. This was a precursor to his case against her in the extremely painful and bizarre divorce proceeding where he brought in her dressmaker to testify that she was having miniskirts made, which proved her status as an unfit mother.
My father didn’t actually want to have custody of me, but he was determined to get as much revenge as possible against my mother while also avoiding any alimony or child support payments. This experience was terrifying for my mother, and she was really no match for my father's heavy-handed tactics and high-priced attorneys. He knew the worst thing he could do to her was to take me away from her, and so he set about doing that at all costs. In the end, some of my mother's friends testified on her behalf and she was awarded custody, but she was left with a bleeding ulcer, a minimal child support settlement, an order to sell the house for almost nothing, and a fear of ever entering the courts again.
The mini-chapter of privilege and comfort was over in my mother's life, and in its place a bloody wound of pain, betrayal, and fear opened, one that would never properly heal.
Chapter 18
The Boat
With very little transition time, my mother rented a broken-down houseboat for us to move into. It was all she could afford with the very meager child support check issued by the court and no job or other source of support. It was an ancient two-story houseboat that seemed like it had been built in the time of the Swiss Family Robinson, with a massive, rusty mast, creaky stairs, a broken toilet, and a foot of water in the hull which we had to drain with a saucepan each morning so as to be sure we wouldn't sink. But of course, these things didn’t seem like problems to my five-year-old mind. I thought the boat was the most wonderful place in the world, and what an amazing mother I had that had brought us from that odd house we’d been shipwrecked in to this amazing house that swayed with the tide and communed with the fish, algae, and riptides.
My days were spent commanding a troupe of fellow harbor kids. I was the leader in a complex game that began with the creation of a story and always included a search-and-destroy mission, mystery, spy plan, or some other exciting kid process that made absolutely no sense at all. It was one of the best times of my life, spent in the pursuit of sheer fun.
Each after-school adventure began with me perched on the top of one of the square fire extinguisher boxes which sat at the end of each slip, concocting that day's story while I spoke to the core group of the team, three five-to-six year olds soiled with the sheen of sweat and the film of school dust, their eyes shining with the endless possibilities of our next "mission.” There was Bobby Sandler, whose dad was an alcoholic fisherman who always supplied us with endless stories of when he was a fisherman in the Sahara. Most nights of the week he would stagger home at 3:00 am from The Dock of the Bay Bar and Grill with a different woman each night, promising that she was the one he’d been looking for all along to be a mom for his son. Felicite Marcus was a Haitian girl whose parents, a beautiful French-African mother and a green-eyed fisherman father, had been married and divorced six times and had traveled several times around the world. They fought daily about whether to stay or to leave for France, yelling about which one of them would kill the other and what weapon they would use. And finally there was my best, saddest friend, Cindy, who lived with her father on a boat littered with used Budweiser cans, with no refrigerator and a barely working toilet. Her mismatched clothes were always soiled and/or torn and her shoes never fit right. Cindy was always slightly afraid and maintained an expressionless gaze, frequently asking me if I thought her mother would ever come back.
"The people at the end of this dock who live in the yacht are actually the owners of the whole world, and they’re planning to blow up the harbor tonight before they leave because they don't want anyone to know who they are or what they do. You see, there was a crash last week in the middle of the ocean and everyone thought it was a storm but it was actually a bomb they planted in the hull of another yacht that was trying to get their power. And they didn’t just hurt all the members of the crew and the other rich people, they hurt all the fish and animals with that bomb." I whispered the last sentence for effect.
"Ooh," the team let out a thrilled sigh.
"So what are we going to do?"
"We have to sabotage their plans."
"What if we get caught?" Cindy whispered. She was always afraid of getting caught.
"Cindy, you know we never get caught."
Nights (before my strictly enforced 9:00 pm bedtime) were a silly blur, filled with my mother’s series of disgruntled but hilarious English rocker-style boyfriends who were constantly "fixing" the boat—one could always be found dangling precariously over the bow in full mod attire, swearing and spitting in a proper cockney accent. I wasn’t sure if my mom was having as much fun as I was, but I didn’t think about it very much really, since I was only five years old.
The bizarre and wonderful boat that went nowhere only lasted for one summer, ending in what would become historically known as Dee and Tiny’s first eviction. We were evicted from a yacht harbor because our boat wasn’t “new” enough to be docked there, one of several evictions issued that summer to old houseboats that belonged to poor people with nowhere else to go. It seemed that "live-aboards" didn’t create the proper environment for the Kennedy-sailor-class the harbor was hoping to attract.
Chapter 19
After the boat;
After the Boat we moved to a small stucco duplex in lower Redondo Beach. Redondo Beach is a solidly lower middle class town in the South Bay of Los angeles known for its plethora of functioning oil rigs and the perpetual stink of natural gas emanating from one of the largest virtually unregulated Power Plants that exist in Southern California.
The duplex was painted a dark-brown mustard color. I always wondered who actually chose that color? The small dark building sat forlornly on a cul de sac that wasn’t even a bona fide cul de sac, it looked like a corner of a larger street that was accidentally lopped off and then the city planners attempted a low-level cover-up by naming it a cul de sac. There were exactly six things on that street; an oil rig that perpetually rocked up and down, in and out, of the tired earth, three po white houses, with weak-eyed underfed dogs, and weak-eyed under-weight kids, two poor Latino family houses, with brightly dressed, perfectly coifed children and the sweet odor of tamales fluttering out the broken screen doors, an old man house, with an old knarled man who never seemed to leave his dusty window, except to threaten the neighborhood kids with his “12 gauge shot-gun” a tiny elementary school with a cracked asphalt playground and a mortuary.
The nicest thing on the street was the mortuary, placed delicately at the tip of the cul-de-sac, with white plantation shutters, two big chimneys, fluffy silken drapes with three layers of different colored ruffles and a massive red and gold door with a special brocade doorknob. It almost seemed ghostly like it didn’t belong on our street or even in Redondo beach at all. There never seemed to be anyone come in or out of it and I never saw any gardeners or maintenance men working on it and yet it always stayed in complete perfect condition as though it was frozen in time.
I later learned that my mother had her first bout with Agoraphobia in that house. Everyday when I came home from the little elementary school’s meager first grade, she was there, not there like a stay-at-home mom might be there but there like she was stuck. Intertwined in the threads of the mustard-green acrylic shag carpet, unable even to dance her way out.
Dancing had always carried my mother and I in and out of happiness. All my life, I was schooled in dance at the wild heels of my mother. My dance "lessons" began when we started living here. Each day when I came home from school I witnessed my mother performing a fascinating mix of body contortions to an extremely loud recording of Little Richard, moving across our living room floor. She never explained her daily dance sessions, which I ran home to as soon as the afternoon bell rang, she just did them, as one would perform a sacred unspoken ritual. And no matter how depressed or hopeless she was, for that magical hour as Little Richard, Sly and the Family Stone, Donna Summer, and other driving rhythms played on the stereo, her life and problems, reality and desperation melted away into a beautiful world of blood boiling, heart racing, old-school rhythm-and-blues, gospel, rock-and-roll, and disco.
At this point Czatar Rudolph (aka Rudy) entered her life. Rudy was a “refugee” from communist Hungary but Rudy wasn’t one of those privileged Europeans; educated, sophisticated, scholarly. Rudy was definitely “Eastern European-ghettocommunist; 99cent store shoppin’,petty crime doing,domestic violence perpetratin’ and full-on big pimpin circa 1975– platform heels, big flared bell-bottom jeans, shiny shirts and a big golden fro. I suppose in that day he would have been considered a “fox” . but I just thought he was mean and stupid partly because he was, but mostly because he represented competition for my mothers affection or more importantly to me; her attention. I was 6 years old and wanted to be the only thing in her world.
My cousin Annie was holed up in the back house of the duplex in the throes of her own version of agoraphobia, “I’m not leaving the house til my hair grows long hun” she would say in her most seductive little girl voice. She lived on free cheese and “the kindness of strangers.” Or to be exact the kindness of ron Schultz, her long-suffering, endlessly annoyed, boyfriend, who put up with her endless affairs and flirtations because he was thrilled to get to spend so much time next to such a pretty girl. Her house-let faced a very large yard, filled with yellowish broken grass, bits of chicken wire and fragments of dented car parts. The ground below thumped every five seconds when the oil rig that shadowed the yard would enter its well.
In the beginning of our residence there it was wonderful between those two but eventually my mother became completely dependent on Annie to get through days and nights of darkening depression
Our stay at that strange house ended one terrible day. I came home from school to find my cousin screaming at the top of her lungs in a shrill bloodcurdling tone, “get away from me Debbie, geeeeet Awaaay, Her lips were pursed over tightly clenched teeth, accompanied by a low menacing growl. The scream and the growel was specific to all the overworked and overwrought women in my family, prone to extreme bouts of dark anger calling forth in those moments all their collective years of pain and torture. I was never sure what really went wrong but I assumed that the eventually my moms dependence overwhelemed Annie who had no reserves of strength to care for anyone because of her own bereft life
We left a couple of months later – after a deafening silence filled with unspoken vows of revenge struck between my mother and Annie.
Chapter 20
Fresno
My mom spirited away on an Angela Davis fro, hand sewn, hand-dyed Dashiki-esque, dresses and a cosmetically distributed tan. The effect was devastating, she looked like a mixed race queen, rocking fierce tropical colors and revolutionary possibilities, the only problem, she was from LA where it was enough to look like a revolutionary- you didn’t actually have to be one.
In this cloud of appropriated radicalism, we landed in Fresno. After a while her sheer desperation in Redondo Beach was transformed into a determined focus. She decided she would finally finish school,after 10 years of serial drop-outs and false starts, get her MSW against all odds and look Fine in the process. So while the destructive Rudy scenario played out against the backdrop of annie’s rejection she busily applied to graduate schools and voila! Six months later just in the nick of time and with some resourceful storytelling she managed to finesse an acceptance into a graduate program in social work sans the math part of the GRE at Fresno state university
“you’re passing” no girl you got to be passing” Her plan only had one misstep. In Fresno you couldn’t really rock the “sort-of revolutionary” thing. Fresno was a place that was all about “blending-in”, if you were of color. Fresno was a hick town with a hick college thrown in the middle and the only radicalism that existed was in the U nited Farm workers movement, and brown power/black power was only just getting realized. No, in the whole San Jouquin valley dripping with the fresh juice of Uvas( Grapes), the luscious omnipresent scent of apples, apricots, alfalfa, cherries and lettuce took things in “due time” and the rest of the world would just have to wait – it may be the mid-seventies and the world was blowing itself up – but so what, there were crops to burn and mini-malls to build and besides, how much could you really think about in 106 degree weather anyway .Consequently, the two African descendent radicals that went to school there, resented her for what they perceived as her attempt to “pass” as a white person when it was clear to them that not only was she of color, she was, Black. and then the white people were nervous around her because she was clearly only half-white and identifying with a radical like Angela Davis, well that was just Crazy.
Suffice to say she toned everything down within about five months there, not because she was intimidated to by the cool response- that would be giving up, and my mom never gave up –even if it would have been easier or more pleasureable. to do so. No, it was because she couldn’t “work” the fro, do her homework, handwash the dashikis AND get to an eight o’clock class. On time
Eventually, she actually managed to do some amazing in-school work with the UFW movement, befitting her as yet unidentified raza soul. And began to collaborate with a very sweet African descendent Church-going man who used to invite us to a tiny one room church in the countryside of Modesto, ( a Fresno-ish town even more hick-like and farm-filled) where my mother could fulfill her need for some of the best down-home gospel that ever lived.’
“Her parents are D-I-V-O-R-C-E-D” My life in Fresno, at least for the first six months was another kind of hell. My parents were divorced, a fact that meant little or nothing in Los Angeles where almost ALL of my friends parents were divorced, or for that matter had never even married. But in Fresno, every introduction, every conversation, or casual exchange among acquantences began with the announcement to all that I was the child of divorced parents, proving that somehow I was surely strange. In Fresno and in fact in the whole San Jouquin Valley, it seemed that everyone was married. It didn’t matter that most of these married people were rather frightening, in their extreme “conventionality” or front of extreme conventionality. Replete with bubble hairdos and polyester matching suits for both men and women , the bottam line is they WERE Married and therefore had a church-sanctioned family in the eyes of God, and therefore in the limited logic of kids were ok.
But of course,in the end we were kids and divorced or not, I was 6 and they were 6 and so we had fun but in Fresno this meant a new kind of fun, a variety of which I never had before or since; This was Country fun. Trees, rivers, streams, farm animals, fields, meadows, straw, and lakes of all shapes and sizes – hot nights with micro – flies filling your nostrils and three thousand gallons of lemonade always pouring.
We only lasted two years there- just long enough for my very bored mom to get her masters degree – make some real and lasting friendships and throw it all away to go back to the exciting , dangerous and vindictive Czatar Rudolph waiting – always waiting and cheating in the smog-filled cavern that is LA.
This time we made it back – but not really, there was something new and lost about my mom in this time. The roots of all difficult lives are in the bad choices – because most of the time you can’t get them back – they just happen and permanently ruin your life. Coming back to LA then was a very bad choice for my mom – she had a chance in Fresno to take control of her life – to make everything great – to be a different person with different futures. But those didn’t happen. And the roots of the unraveling of everything happened then.
Chapter 21
The San Fernando Valley
Whitsett Boulevard was smack dab in the middle of the brown-gray, suburb called the, San Fernando Valley. A place to the north of Hollywood, designed to be the bedroom community for the stars but left many years ago, like a one night stand
That year was all about After School. I was the Original Latchkeykid; 3:00 pm on the nose I would run home with my two best friends. Make a short stop at the nearby jewish bakery filled with fresh baked homentashin and cheese danishes to die for. Swirling cheese swimming in a baked pool of some kind of cheese juice. Still crisp . Still warm.
Our apartment complex was a study in soiled pastel stucco. Like a giant slice of stale birthday cake that sat for too long in a bakers window, its’ soft greens , pinks and yellows were covered with dust, smog, and soot and its long ago landscaped hedges were filled with weeds, used paper cups, cigarette buts and dried snail tracks. The slatted windows were distorted with layers of mineral deposits and grease.
It bordered a wealthier part of the valley filled with mid-sized tree-lined homes with nary a sidewalk in sight. In LA they measured the wealth of the neighborhood by the existence of a sidewalk. For some reason the richer the area the more sparse the sidewalks. It had something to do with cars, garages and lawns. Suffice to say every area we lived in had plenty of sidewalks, no lawns, hardly any trees and a lot of alleys. But it did have delis of all cultures, styles and communities. Vietnamese, Cambodian, Greek, Italian, and some of the best Jewish delis anywhere.
So home I ran with my luscious cheese Danish embued with great plans of strange urban games I invented to play with my strange urban friends. All my friends were nerdy smart kids who were the sons and daughters of poor immigrants. They all had big plans to go to college and lift their families out of poverty.
One of the games was called steps and it entailed walking slowly up the side of the Safeway delivery ramp and then running down the other side of course in this and all the games there was the requisite paroxysms of laughter, common to silly 8 year olds.
The other games were all about me and my cat and the radio. I loved all afternoon talk radio shows cause it meant the apartment wasn’t quiet. I was terrified of silence. My games were elaborate tableaus involving the live elements of my cat, the houseplants all inanimate objects that were around and my mom wouldn’t miss and a variation on a concept involving me as the Head administrator of a large agency or advocate for many people in need
That one short year in that extremely unattractive apartment complex was one of the best years of my life. My mother was having a horrible abusive relationship with Rudy and barely surviving on the meager $300 dollars child support from my dad and what she could get from Rudy once in awhile. Her position as a marginalized, unsupported and apolitical single mother fully locked in place culminating when she had to apply for welfare and was put through all kind of drama from that “sys” who made her feel worthless and “undeserving” of any public assistance, and yet she loved me, got me food, paid the meager rent( I guessed) and appeared as though all was well.
We had a cat then, his name was BIG Cat One and unlike orange cat, he was not a model petizen. In fact, he barely fulfilled his normal cat duties. Rarely wanting to go out, never wanting to roam, spray or mate, he was, I was convinced, a phobic cat, only wanting to be at home on the couch. But whenever I was afraid or lonely cause my mom wasn’t home yet from Rudy’s BIG Cat One was always there with heavy purr and a head ready to be stroked.
One night that will live in infamy, I became phobic of Charleston Heston. On this night I could not have survived, without the undying fur love of BIG cat One. It was 11:00 pm, my latest possible bedtime and my mom was having a particularly bad fight with Rudy so she didn’t come home all night. The only television on this late night was some ancient re-run of a Hollywood religious movie starring Charleston Heston, I only know that because they put his weird old man name in big gold letters in the beginning and end of the movie. The 3D letters were so big and our little broke down Good Will-purchased TV screen was so small that it covered the entire frame. I hated Charleston Heston because his characterization of Abraham (or someone like that) was so over-done, and layered with way too much over-bright “Technicolor”. Whenever he spoke they had a deep echo added under his voice – when he parted a “body of water” – the obvious paper layers of water fluttered up. “I will take this staff and…" to this day I shudder at the recollection of a tall white bearded man in a flowing white dress plagued by crude 50’s special effects courtesy of MGM.
At the end of the year we left North Hollywood and Cztzar Rudolph in a flurry of possibilities. My mom had gotten a JOB!!! Everything was great. My mother wouldn’t have to worry anymore, or more importantly, she wouldn’t have to take all that shit from the welfare worker anymore. Of course I acted real sad to leave all my friends, especially the wealthy ones who had decided by the end of the year that I was the only poor white shiksa that was “fun” enough to invite to all the coolest parties. All the ones catered by Baskin Robbins and other tasty corporate logos. Their faux friendships which inspired me to lie about my poor single mother and that I lived where I did to the extent of inventing Brady Bunch moms who made me birthday cakes and picked me up after school were filled with the promise of future Bat Mitzvah invitations (when they turned 13) and most importantly more free food.
By the time I left “the valley” I had learned most of what I needed to know about LA party skills. Fake laugh, i.e., triangle mouth suspended in a perpetual state of mid-laugh, superfluous conversations that held little content and rarely were finished and of course the compliments that meant little and were spoken as fast as the mouth could humanly move.
Chapter 22
Mexico
"Lisa, I think we might be able to survive longer if we move to Mexico. We only have $2,000 left. But that's also why I don't know if we should make the trip, it’s a big risk…."
"Of course we should," I chimed in quickly, "and besides, it's a lot cheaper to live there, and maybe you could get a job easier in Mexico."
"But what if we don't make it?" she asked, the pen hovering over the lined paper as she considered the priority of today's calls.
"What have we got to lose? We might as well take the chance,” I replied.
Somewhere between completely giving up and extreme desperation, my mother had started to believe that we could hold on a little longer on the tiny bit of money we had left if we went to Mexico. Being poor in a third world country seemed to make more sense for two people who were completely alone, and more importantly, it was easier to think about trips across the continent than it was to drive across town for extreme agoraphobics like my mother. I happily agreed, thinking anything was better than this and that maybe my mother would meet a boyfriend, which would make everything easier.
We pondered every possible hostel, school program and employment opportunity in cities from Oaxaca to the Yucatan, until my mother was finally convinced that maybe we would try to go.
"Call United, Continental, TWA, Aero Mexico, reserve every afternoon and evening flight for the next five weeks, to Mexico City, Guadalajara and Mazatlan." The concept behind my mother's multiple reservation program was that because it was so difficult for her to make a trip at all with her fluctuating health—sometimes her asthma was so bad that she couldn’t breathe—compounded by the difficulty she had in getting anywhere on time, that if we booked every possible flight, we were bound to make one of them.
After several days of making reservations, I developed a travel-agent voice, simple and to the point without the use of gratuitous prepositions or adjectives. "One adult, one child, round trip to Mexico on flight 234." I usually got travel-agent discounts, or at the very least, was spoken to as an adult.
Somewhere between the fourth and fifth week of this, we gingerly boarded flight 164 at 6:00 pm to Guadalajara, Mexico.
Chapter 23
Los Ojos de Betty Davis
“She‘ll thrill you and she’ll kill you. . . . She’s got Betty Davis eyes . . .”
I could barely see through the thick sheets of sticky rain streaming across our windshield as decade-old American hits blasted from the radio. It was our first night in Guadalajara and my mother had rented a small red car with our last remaining shred of credit. We circled the city what seemed like a thousand times, joyously confused by jet lag, hunger, and excitement, surrounded by the tall caramel and taupe buildings that seemed to be in an odd state of complete decay and antiquated perfection.
We halfway looked for street signs (there were none) and sort of glanced at a map—both of us aware that at the moment we stopped being lost we would have to face reality and the moment of pure magic would end. The tiny car swayed in the hard rain and our tires barely tasted the road. The buildings seemed to curve and sway in sync with the music, acting as our muscular dance partners on the glimmering asphalt.
"Guadalajara . . . Guadalajara . . . Guada . . . la . . . jar. . . a"
" Tiene cansada?"
We were in a 1969 Chevy Camaro going 92 miles an hour on our way to three wedding parties (the favorite Saturday night entertainment), when my mother began to ask Isaias, Roberto, Miguel and Diego, our newfound friends, whether or not they were cansado (tired) which we were gringo-certain meant “to be married” (casado), to which each and every hombre strenuously replied, "NO!”
We squealed in reckless abandon when Isaias accelerated the shining red machine, and we got quiet when he slowed down to a cruise, our hungry faces kissing the warm night air of the wondrous state of Jalisco.
My first crush had walked toward me down the street one day in the Zona Rosa district of Chapalita. I had a pink mohawk, which no one in Mexico understood or wanted to understand, with many an hombre telling me, even though I was only 11 years old, that if I changed my hair to something normal they would love to marry me—my mother fended off the multitude of contingent marriage proposals with stories of my future plans to join the convent, when my first crush walked down the street with a jump in his step, studded leather jacket and three earrings. I fell in love, and seven hours later my mother and I were in our first club, listening to extremely loud, rock en español, punk rock, new wave, and banda music .
At approximately 1:00 am, the crush, whose name was Miguel, and his family strolled into the club. From young niños to the abuelo and abuelita, each family member twinkled with an imminent group laughter. They took turns loving each other with their eyes, teasing each other with their comments, easy jokes, and implicit support. My mother and I tasted their family-ness like a forbidden piece of chocolate cake, drank its nectar like alcoholics in the middle of prohibition. We sat on the edge of their group joy and felt, for brief luxurious moments, like we were part of them.
At 2:00 am the family' s band, “Sombrero Verde” went onstage.
"That's what I like about you. . . .”
The rhythm and the possibilities coursed through my head. My feet, which lived to move to a beat, any beat, propelled me toward the dance floor, lighter than they had ever been before or since. I was lifted off into a world of sound and heat existing just above the neon-lit floor squares. I danced my Billy Idol-like solos to every tune Sombrero Verde played. The music was goofy hotel-rock, but it didn't matter—we were a family now, you don't judge your family. Everything was okay.
"You’re such a great dancer."
"You should perform with us."
"Where are you going to stay tonight?"
"Tiene cansado?" my mother asked weakly, still not completely sure of the Spanish syntax.
At 4 a.m. we reluctantly said our last star-struck adioses and walked the two blocks to our hotel, filled with the dreams of our newfound family and the hope that maybe, just maybe, if we didn't think about it too much, our years of isolation, fear, and aloneness might be over.
The next day I began to explore Guadalajara on my own, having determined that I must learn Spanish so that we could live here forever. I snuck out into the morning-ness of fresh-cut guajaba's, piña, warm corn pounded into breakfast, dust, and diesel fuel with just a hint of jasmine. The morning in a semi-tropical climate is always the best time because all the smells move inside a small breeze attached to a delicate coolness, while the sky ponders its final cloud formations.
I stood on the corner waiting for a bus for almost an hour, as one after another tilted, coughing bus, bulbous with the overload of human cargo, passed the bus-stop without stopping. Actually, they did stop, but it took me a while to catch on to the odd boarding method, which included holding onto the bumper, climbing in one of the windows, or running behind the bus while it was moving and jumping on.
After six unsuccessful tries, I finally boarded by jumping onto the door and holding on to the rubber window seams with splayed arms. As my fingers clutched at the edges, coursing with the adrenaline of extreme joy and danger, I looked up; the sky had settled on a river of blue-tinted clouds parting the bright azure background. A portable radio blasted the sweet sounds of Los Tres Aces in perfect harmony with the cacophony of humans and small animals as the sputtering engine tentatively accelerated and inched away from the curb.
Having been well-indoctrinated into American-ness, my first destination was Gigante, the local supermercado, a tribute to all that is western, large and facile—although I was confused by just how super that super was. They had everything from pigs’ feet to underwear, with bright fluorescent labels. I was determined to purchase something, I just wasn't sure what. Eventually I settled on a banana. At the checkout counter I nervously employed my "fake Spanish," that is, very little vocabulary with a determined Spanish feeling. All the clerks humored me—I guess cause I was a kid. I paid 5 pesos for my banana and trotted out feeling very proud and capable.
After my success in the supermercado, I felt I could take on all challenges. I went to the outdoor market, the drug stores, taquerias, and my favorite place, the car dealerships, piled high with ancient American cars, reeking of “I Love Lucy” reruns and Elvis Presley songs. At 1:00 p.m. everyday, no matter where I was, I started running. I had to get back to the hotel by 1:30, or else! My mother must never know about my morning activities—to her, I would have been taking way too many chances, putting our already precarious situation in danger of getting more dire. At 1:30 p.m. when I would casually re-enter the hotel, my mother would awaken and we would continue our quixotic attempt at "getting established" in Guadalajara.
We spoke almost every day about how much money we had left.
"Lisa, I'm not sure what we're going to do, we only have enough to last us one more week."
My mother had been to at least six job interviews. I was so proud of her— she was freed-up emotionally and almost never yelled at me or got upset. A look of dazed relaxation had settled on her face, and even these normally terrified discussions were carried on in an atmosphere of odd weightlessness, softened by the intermittent clouds and light tropical rain.
One particularly warm night, Isaias picked us up in the Camaro. "Tonight we will go salsa dancing,” he proclaimed. I didn’t listen, not really, unclear what that even meant, but determined not to miss this adventure. We drove to a new club where the willow trees that surrounded the building swished and swayed to a light sound that emanated from within. In the parking lot, whispering drum beats slow-danced with palm fronds. Small white lights flickered in the blackness, paper fans clicked against the sky.
We entered a dark room lit only by the glittering stage; the rhythm moved the room as I stood in the elaborate doorway arch. A very short boy, probably 12 years old, inched up behind me. "Baile?" he held his hand out to me, his face wide and filled by a smile with tiny black eyes peering out. He was wearing an extremely bright pink polyester suit, and his head was crowned with a circle-puff of black hair which combined to make him look like an overdressed squirrel, but he was a ticket to that sound and fury, so I quickly took his hand, entering that mythical space of movement and light.
That night, guided by the insistent thighs and hot breath of a wannabe man, I learned to dance to the beautiful voices of Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Benny Velarde, and many more. I was forever changed by that sound, forever unable to think or feel the same way. To this day, when I hear salsa, afro-cuban, charanga, or merengue, I am calmed, a smile illuminates my mind, and I am taken away.
Chapter 24
Adios
One day as I was making my morning exodus, I discovered a small note that had been folded and slipped under our door. On the outside of it was written one word: Oficina. It was only one simple noun, and yet I knew it marked "The End." It was as if someone had delicately typed "murder" across the embossed hotel stationary. I guess they had put it there while we slept—that’s when most atrocities are committed, while people are sleeping. I didn’t know what to do. I felt a small pit begining to form in the center of my gut and I couldn’t leave the room. I knew this was serious and I was too terrified to leave. I wasn’t a late sleeper—I was always up at 6:00 or 7:00 a.m.—so going back to sleep was out of the question, and because the room was always kept very dark until my mother was ready to get up, reading was not a possibility. The thought of just laying in that room doing nothing for hours was dreadful, but I knew that, no matter what, I couldn't go anywhere until my mom woke up and we began to strategize our next move.
"What's this?" my mother yelled from the door.
I guess I had fallen asleep. My mother was up now, and had discovered the note. Her voice barely registered fear, and I knew she was only slightly aware of its possible contents.
"Have you been downstairs yet?"
"No. I was sort of afraid to."
"Well, I can't read it until I've been outside. Who knows what it might say?"
"Yeah, but Mom, we've got to read it, it might be —"
"Well, you read it then, but don't tell me what it says."
"Okay." I opened it slowly, unable to focus for a while on any of the words on the carefully typed page.
Please come downstairs, there is a problem with your credit card.
I didn't need to read the actual words; I felt them burning the page, singeing my hands, my trembling fingers. I stayed near the door as my mother took a shower, fixed her hair and make-up, and pretended that she didn't know what I knew.
An hour later we marched downstairs, our heads held as high as possible. It was a beautiful day, the light shining through the lobby’s stained glass, a muzak derivative of Guadalajara playing on an endless tape loop that streamed from the speakers. A small fountain babbled gently. We approached the front desk. They all had their best front-desk faces on, masks of discomfort and the result of customer-service training manuals.
"May I help you?" as though they didn't know that "we were the ones," and of course in these situations my mother employed her best, off-the-street-corner-meets-Sigmund-Freud, "Do you have a problem?" voice and demeanor, which comes off like an over-enunciated James Cagney: "You said there was a problem with my credit card? What's the problem?"
With barely a blink of his eyes, the man behind the desk proceeded to tell us that we had to leave the hotel that day if we could not give him another form of payment immediately. His mouth barely moved as he spoke, and he kept his small watery eyes from focusing on us as he spoke. He finished with the requisite," I'm afraid there is nothing we can do."
"Well, I need to use a phone. We’re going to call our bank manager, and he will extend our credit."
The man with no facial expression seemed startled, obviously thinking, “No bank managers are going to speak to bums like you.”
"Did you hear me? Get me to a phone down here and I'll straighten this whole thing out!"
My mother was quickly led to a small glass-enclosed room, not as much to accommodate her request as to get her ever-increasing volume out of the lobby and its reign of sacrosanct "quiet-noise." I watched her as she curled into the phone and launched into a beg-and-plead-fest with our local "bank manager," actually, the customer service supervisor. She did this very carefully so as not to seem like she was begging and pleading, but in fact just asking for what she had a perfect right to ask for: access to a very small savings account that we were not supposed to touch for another six months, and a wire transfer to Mexico. Today.
After two hours she emerged, visibly worn down. Apparently she was able to get our $200 savings account balance wired to the hotel, which would allow us just enough to pay our old bill and leave the next morning. No, she was not able to get any credit extended, and in fact they were going to destroy our credit card, which the officious desk clerk then carried out with one vicious snip of an oversized pair of scissors.
My mother and I wandered around the lobby for hours discussing our current lack of options.
"What are we going to do?"
"We could stay with Miguel and his family."
"Yes, I'm sure we could, but we have absolutely no more money. We can't be here with no money."
"Well, we can go back home and sell our car and stereo and come right back. We found that cute little apartment for only $150.00 a month, and you said you almost got a job."
"Yes, but leaving means we have to get back; it was so hard to even get here."
"But what else do we have?
We walked all around the city that night, pondering and re-pondering our impossible situation until we finally settled on a plan, and yet we both secretly knew there was no hope. Travel itself was too hard, everydayness was too hard.
The ride to the airport was quiet. We’d told no one of our departure, since it seemed that telling anyone would seal our fate completely. No addresses were exchanged, no promises made, no commitments adhered to. I watched the dramatic semi-tropical sky dance with the sun one last time, my eyes filled with the tears of punctured dreams and lost possibilities.
The return home was horrific. It was like we had been traveling in space—only two months had passed, and yet we had both been changed forever, as though years had gone by. We got to work as quickly as possible, proceeding as planned. We tried to sell our old car for what it was worth, $1500. Six weeks later we were happy to get $600. We hastily purchased our tickets and made a series of reservations once again. No notes were written, hardly a word was spoken between us. Our moments were filled with the almost-ness of everything.
It was September in LA, and the smog and dusty heat were piling up, distributed by the Santa Ana winds. The sky was a perpetual brown-yellow glare and the trees took on their sickest droop. My mother was having asthma attacks every day, and the countdown to our departure became more and more desperate. Three more days . . . we had to go . . . it was like we were both praying to not have a crisis, we couldn't afford one wrong move.
And then the day arrived. Our plane left at 4:00 p.m., at the height of rush hour traffic. The cab arrived, and my mother could barely get a breath. We drove silently to the airport.
"I feel really sick, Lisa."
The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.
Airport announcements filled the atmosphere. Exhaust spewed from a multitude of idling vehicles. People with tense, scared faces ran to and fro, filled with the unbridled tension that pulls at travelers gathered at any point of departure. We were a part of that mini-terror, and the air was a custard of imminent doom.
The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only. No parking.
"That'll be $32.00."
"Can you please move this cab now?"
" Lisa, I feel really sick."
"Sir, you have to move NOW!"
"Can't you see I have customers unloading?"
"I don't care if you have horses unloading—if you don't move now I'm going to cite you."
"Mom, we've got to get out of here — "
"Don't you think I know that?"
The cabdriver slammed the trunk defiantly as the airport police officer hovered over us with his citation pad.
"Thank you so much, I'm sorry there's not more of a tip—that's all I have."
"That's okay, miss."
"Goodbye."
"Get moving!"
"I heard you, man!"
"Then go, already!”
"Fuck you!"
“Okay, that's it . . . "
I tried to follow their voices as far as the moving sidewalk would let me. The flight gates were ahead of us, but we had at least forty minutes of requisite confusion before we actually boarded. People and things passed us like thin strands of hair. Excitement, joy, and sorrow filtered through the air: "I love you"; “I'm going to miss you"; “I’ll call you"; "Write me, please don't forget"; Say hello to Dad"; " I'm so glad he finally left". . . .
"Lisa, give me the pack. I'm really getting sick. This isn't good."
AeroMexico Flight Number 164 for Guadalajara is now boarding. Please line up at Gate 5.
"Okay Mom, it’s time to board."
"Get the pack. Can you get my water bottle? I'm having trouble walking." Her breathing was coming in short, clipped spasms.
"It's okay, take it slow, we'll make it.”
The man directly behind us in the boarding line started to stare. At first it wasn't obvious or done with any intent to humiliate, just a focused conspicuous look. He progressed to an unmoving, fixed gaze, hardly bothering to look away when we looked back, projecting an intentional hostility born of his disgust with our cheap duffel bags and non-Armani aesthetic, our poor-single-mother-and-child-on-welfare-ness and inevitable economy class tickets. We were everything that he was not, and everything he despised. Who knew? Perhaps at any moment we might try using food stamps instead of plane tickets or ask him for spare change.
"Your tickets, please. . . . miss?" The stewardess taking tickets was tall, with long legs. Her deep brown hair was set in large sweeping curls, and her bright white teeth were frozen in a smile of impatience.
"Here,” I shoved the boarding passes into her hands. Her fingernails were long and shiny, like ten delicately polished daggers.
It all happened in a matter of seconds, the way most horrific events are meted out, swiftly and without a second to think. We were beginning the descent down the carpeted walkway, the temporary walls were shuddering with gusts of aeronautic wind, the floors registered a hollow echo with each step. My mother held onto my arm. Her hands were cold, and I couldn't hear her breathing. Suddenly, she clutched at me tightly, "I'm going to faint, Lisa, get me out of here.” An ashen color filled my mother's face while her eyes registered a blank gaze. I screamed to the ticket lady, but she couldn't hear me, only the man who hated us heard, and he quickly passed our crumbling forms, pushing to get past us in the small walkway. And then everything stopped, all the ambient jet noise was shut out as the lady with the red fingernails shouted into her walkie talkie and ran to where we were. As she ran towards us, the light rose up behind her body, while the jet exhaust blew through her long silky hair. She looked like some kind of Charlie’s Angel apparition, running in a wind machine in filmic slow motion. Our dreams had ended in twenty-five seconds, and it all seemed like a really bad seventies movie.
Chapter 25
Estados Unidos
I can't describe the drive home from LAX that day because it's too dangerous to remember—shattered glass, dark black corners of sharp-edged buildings, skies and clouds with viscious teeth descended, attacked and bludgeoned our confused limbs. Nights and days to come tore at my mind, and sadness . . . an unruly, treacherous, impossible sorrow cut large incisions in my skin. On that drive home my heart and mind plunged together off of a cliff in a suicidal drag race. For the first time, I was truly without hope.
We were never okay after that experience. It was our last chance at “making it” and we had failed. Fallout characteristics began to occur from that day on in both of us—eruptions and cysts on our personalities that even if "things got better" would never really go away.
Not long after our return, my mother instituted a daily 3-hour walk to and from the Larchmont district, a bite-size enclave of old-money-meets-small –own simulacrum. My mother loved it because it "had everything" and it made her feel like the brief years she’d spent with my father, swathed in the privilege of being a doctor's wife. We embarked on our silent journeys in the dead center of each smog-filled day. We walked through those infinitely quiet streets that exist in the middle of every California city, even one as big as LA, a silence which gave the odd impression that all humans had died suddenly or had been captured by aliens.
Time stood still for us in those days—there was no morning or midday or afternoon, just the time between light and dark, the time when things were not as bad as the other time. The walk was always preceded by a lengthy process of getting ready, a scream-fest or some other desperate emotional struggle. When our situation was at its most dire we would argue in a mind-crunching violent way which anyone hearing would probably assume would be the death of either one, or both of us. Somehow we lived through each horrible argument to survive until the next one. Somehow.
Chapter 26
"Rent-Starter"
"You’re a great therapist, and you will find work again. It's not going to be that hard get a job — think of all the great work you did for the girls at the convent — you were meant to be a therapist."
"I can't apply for a job when I’m feeling this way."
" Well, that's why you need to get into counseling and go back to school."
In the spaces between our desperate tussles, I had begun to develop elaborate inspirational speeches and lawyer-style arguments about why my mother should go on, have hope, and wake up the next day. On one hand, this gave me an oversized sense of myself as the hero and savior, and on the other, it birthed a deep anxiety I have to this day because I could never seem to completely convince her that things would really be okay.
I had also developed an intense longing and obsession for school. It had become more and more clear to me that I would never go back, and I began to believe that everything important, sane, or joyous was related to school. This obsession, as with all the best obsessions, started to destroy me.
"We have to get out of this smog, and if we can't afford anything else, maybe we need to try Santa Monica."
"How can we afford Santa Monica?"
After several weeks of list-writing, phone-calling, and ponder-talking, with intermittent bouts of severe asthma, we tentatively embarked on the Santa Monica apartment search. But after three months of relentless looking, we’d found that every place was either too expensive, required perfect credit, or the impossible, "No kids allowed."
Finally, I devised what I thought was a foolproof plan: I would fabricate a guaranteed identity, i.e., a person so completely perfect that they couldn't possibly reject her application, and thus, my first survival persona as "Rent-Starter" was formally launched.
My mother and I went to Bullock’s in Westwood and began to scout for the perfect rent-starter outfit, the look that would convince the prospective landlord that I was "the one," the perfect tenant who would cause no problems, pay my rent on time, and not bother the landlord with any annoying repair problems. To create this perfect cocktail one had to affect an odd admixture of sincerity, strength, and extreme sycophantism.
I was always a friendly person with a tendency to act silly whenever possible—my favorite thing was to laugh too loud over things that weren't that funny to anyone but me. I always attempted to get along with everyone and was devastated if people didn't like me or love me more than anyone else. I was schooled in the scholarship of partying, a canon born of extended residence in LA and an endless attempt to be accepted by the "in" crowd. These attributes, along with some very creative character development enabled me to secure housing for my mother and myself when we were essentially homeless, jobless, and without a reference to our name.
Chapter 27
Santa Monica
It was a sunny day, framed by an unusually blue and glistening sky. The day before, the Los Angeles basin had experienced the rare occurrence of a heavy rain that had washed the air and wrung out all the soot and old smog. I climbed onto the bus to Santa Monica wearing my recently purchased suit, feeling extremely proud even though I stumbled in my Payless mini-heels and accidentally scratched a hole in my cheap nylons. My mother and I had been unable to afford the suit at Bullock’s, but it had given us big ideas which we’d happily translated to K-mart, and we felt quite satisfied with what we’d acquired. My mother always said, "Anybody can look good in expensive clothes, but it's something else entirely to look good in cheap clothes."
The suit was made of simulated-wool polyester that was the color of rusty nails with a shiny nylon lining that crinkled and crunched when I walked. When I sat down on the bus, I wasn't sure how to hold my legs, continually crossing and uncrossing them until I became dizzy with the tension of possible protocol infractions.
"You have great legs."
"Huh?"
"You have great legs," his voice was low and strange, like every child molestor/rapist I’d been warned about, those scratchy yet whiny tones reserved for obscene phone calls and horror movies.
“Thanks," I looked up and down, unsure where to place my eyes for fear he would feel “encouraged," the worst thing to do when encountering a child molestor/rapist type.
"On your way to Santa Monica?"
"Yeah," I tried to mumble a non-answer while also answering nicely because I was trained to be polite.
"Oh really? Where are you heading?"
Now I started to get really nervous. I had a whole hour’s ride ahead of me. What should I say?
Of course part of the problem was that nobody in Los Angeles except really messed-up individuals and kids use the bus system. Anyone barely sane or somewhat alive has a car, and it has nothing to do with poverty, because in LA no matter how poor you are, you still manage to get some funky vehicle to pollute the air and call your own, and if you are any kind of self-respecting drug dealer, pimp, or underground economic expert, you simply must drive in LA.
This minimal demographic left me with my new buddy, pasty of skin, small of eyes, with sparse, shoe-black, greasy hair strands draped across an oily forehead. But did I get up? Did I move? Did I tell him that I didn't want to talk? No, I tried desperately to appease this person I didn't know, didn’t like, and was increasingly afraid of.
"I'm Rick by the way. What's your name?"
"Legs, shmegs! You and your kind will be doomed till death. There’s no hope for the rot that makes up your mind, or the life that you’re part of. You are evil incarnate, and I DON"T GOT MILK. . . ."
At first I only saw the wig, it was large and shiny and twisted on the top into a lopsided partial beehive. He was about 6'5”, and while screaming a breathless rant he was standing in the aisle nudging my rapist buddy to move over.
Unbeknownst to me, he was sort of stalking "Rick," and while Rick was trying to make time with me, the wig-man had been organizing his assorted plastic bags so they’d be a little more portable, to make sure that I didn't interfere with his chances to get Rick.
"And I'm not a man, I'm not a transsexual, and I'm not a drag queen. I want you to love me for who I am."
"Fuck-off," Rick spat.
"How dare you talk to me like that! Don't try to impress this whore you insist on fraternizing with. I know you, and I love you for who you are, not who I want you to be. She doesn't care about you, and besides—"
"Oh for Christ sakes!" Rick lurched from his seat, yelled over his shoulder at me, "Nice talking to you," and ran to the exit door.
"See? You're trying to impress her again. I know your type, and I know where you live . . . and besides I DON"T JUST DO IT," and here the wig-man broke into a sort of aria-like song which I assumed was in response to the Nike campaign, and he ran off the bus after Rick.
The rest of the trip was uneventful, peaceful even, with strip malls passing by the bus window. The majority of LA architecture consists of low-slung strip malls filled with taquerias, small dress shops, photo developers, KFC's, AM/PM's and 7-11's, with new types of strip malls being built every day. I looked at the taupe, off-white, gray, and light yellow structures fronted by the regulation six-to-ten asphalt car slots bordered in bright white painted lines with a quiet appreciation. I had never expected anything beautiful or dazzling and it was comforting not to be shocked or shown otherwise; the ever-changing, never-changing order of ugliness made me feel safe.
"San-taaaa Mon-icaaaaaaa," the bus driver sang me out of a semi-trance.
I’d arrived. The light was different, brighter than Hollywood, the streets were wider and quieter. I thought I had experienced quiet in midday Hollywood, but this was a deafening silence, and it pinged against a crisp-cool sky, which due to Santa Monica's proximity to the ocean felt fresh and tight and in collaboration with the silence.
I wasn't sure where to go, but it only took a second to configure my location. Everything in Santa Monica is arranged at right angles, numbered streets and simple square blocks. I took one left turn from my bus stop and I was on the right street. I walked down a short block from Wilshire to14th street and I had reached my final destination. It was too easy somehow, and the simplicity of it all frightened me.
It was a short building, two stories at most, made into the best neo-geo 60's-70's style you could hope for, and it was solid mustard. The purest, ugliest color of mustard ever developed in an exterior paint tone. I was standing in front of a giant jar of Gulden's shaped into an apartment complex. I knew this was a bad sign.
One weak tree stood squarely in the middle of the manicured grass plot in front of the building. The grass started precisely where the sidewalk ended, proving that the gardeners had used their edging tool almost daily to ensure that not a drop of excess grass would litter the tidy cement. These sidewalks were new and sharp with the cement makers’ corporation names still vividly etched in the corners, and though each square was not as big as the cement squares in Hollywood, these were flatter and whiter and much more terrifying.
I stood for a moment in the silence, hoping to hear some form of life, a car, or a voice, or a clomp of footsteps. Then I heard a scream, not a bad scream or a scream of distress, but the scream of a child, a child playing, a squeal really, a beautiful, happy, amazing squeal. I knew that sound could be coming from only one place, a playground, a playground in a school. Oh my god. . . . There was a school nearby.
"Are you here to see the apartment?"
There was a man talking to me with the oddest hair. Light orange feathery strands barely clinging to their follicles were pulled across clear to the other side, attempting to cover a vast expanse of empty freckled head.
"I am Mr. Humphries,” he paused, took a breath, and then said with increased volume," and you can call me Mr. Humphries."
"Okay, oh, yes . . . yes. I’m here to see the apartment. Thank you for showing it to me Mr. Humphries,” butter-honey tones dripped into my voice.
Without acknowledging my effusive greeting, Mr. Humphries marched abruptly into the mustard palace.
"It's on the first floor, and it has a beeeuu-tee-ful balcony."
I only realized mid-sentence that he’d already embarked on a litany of apartment features spoken in a quiet Scottish-accented mumblespeak. I was nodding in complete agreement to everything he said.
"There are two LARGE closets in every room."
As he spoke, he led me down a dark cement hall lined with a greenish-yellow stucco variation on the external mustard tone, with matching gold mailboxes. He stopped at a wide green door which had a large gold A on it.
"Here it is!” he sprung open the door. " We just shampooed the carpet. See how nicely it matches the walls?"
I blinked my eyes twice, hardly able to make out any carpet color in the dim light emanating from the sliding glass door's northern exposure, and then I saw it: the carpet was a thin acrylic ply of avocado-green with mustard threads. I followed him into a small, dark bedroom.
“This is the master bedroom, the cars don't come by hardly at all. It’s really very quiet."
On the back wall of the "master bedroom" there was a sliver of window that faced a parking lot and an adjoining alley. And next we saw the box-size bathroom.
"And here's the most elegant kitchen you'll ever see," he jutted his right arm nervously in the direction of a tiny rectangle of a room containing a mini-sink and an oven-next to refrigerator combo.
"Look at these nice new cabinets. I spent so much time installing these cabinets. Aren't they beautiful? At $600 a month, this place is a deal. This apartment is very clean, and it has to stay that way. I run a nice building, no bums or wiseguys, there’s a nice lady upstairs, she can tell you. Well, I can't say anymore, the place speaks for itself," and he turned abruptly towards me and stared, his mouth sealed completely shut in a zip-lock vertical line.
I sucked in a nervous gulp of excess saliva, and with barely a breath of consideration at the horribleness of it all, I proclaimed in my best I-am-so-nice-and-responsible-and-I-won't-cause-you-a-second-of-trouble voice, "I love the place. Can I fill out an application?"
"How old are you?" Mr. Humphries' point-size, watery yellow eyes were looking straight at me, and I realized too late that he was actually focusing his gaze.
I mustn't show anything. I must not gulp, or blink, or even think about being 12 years old. . . .
"I'm twenty-six. I can't believe how beautiful those cabinets are! Where did you get them? I know exactly how you feel, it's so hard to get cabinets in exactly the right shade."
His eyes looked like baked pinenuts that had been implanted in his sharp bony face. He still refused to blink or look away, and was not deterred by my gratuitous complements, but I could tell he was actually weighing something about me.
After a full three-minute pause he finally broke his gaze and asked, "Do you work?"
"Of course. I work full-time, actually, I'm always working. I never have any time to do anything else."
"You know, there are no parties allowed here. I run a quiet building, with quiet people, and no one complains. That's how I want to keep it."
"I never have parties. I never go to parties. All I do is work."
Toward the end of my sentence, Mr. Humphries gave a little snort.
"The applications are in the kitchen. I thoroughly check all references on that application," he said as he turned away from me and marched out of the room.
Two days later we got the place – one terse scottish phone call announced my acceptance- the model tenant role was not just about presentation and implied normalcy- it was also the ability to please people and make them feel good about their hideous green rugs and fake carmel cabinets – admiring their discount builders – easy-install-toilets – it was about making them feel validated for what they did – for their greed –for their down payments, for their desperation – for their mortgages.
We moved in to that dry white place in that cold, white neighborhood which had no real sounds no identifyable colors or intensity of light – we moved one foggy- smoggy day into a deadly abyss of nothingness that almost completely destroyed us.
The torture began on the first day – the complete utter torture of nothingness setting in on day one, as I ventured out into the alley framed by other equally ugly mid-seventies constructions – all of them modeled in the california “neo-optimism” style of archetecture. Each building was titled with redundant italicized names proclaiming their “californian-ness” like The Californian, The Surf, The Ocean Breeze, like somehow their proclamation alone stated their wonderfulness and yet their was nothing inherently nice or lite or breeze like to any of these hideous buildings, on the contrary they resembled cheaply constructed stucco motels- with absolutely no concept of how to capture the beauty/ light of a california day or moonlit sky- this kind of archetecture defies all notions of Fung Shui and in fact seems to be made for their affordability and expediency.
On morning after dreary morning a week after we moved into that apartment I walked down the alley unsure of where I was going, what I was going towards or what I was going to do- I walked down the alley feeling an increasing pit of confusion and disorientation growing in my gut. As I started to panic – I passed the occasional human washing his car or getting home from work – they had soft expressions of melancholy and never said anything and I have always marveled at the way we can live side by side as humans and do nothing about each other – how could they not know that we were suffering so – how could they not help us – how could they know that it was only a matter of moments before we were down to our last hundred dollars. I usually ended up in the nearby supermarket, the only problem, I had no money to buy anything.
12:30 p.m.
I walked through the huge glass mouth leading to the glistening innards of the nearby SAFEWAY Market. It was the 20th of the month and my mother and I didn’t have any food stamps left. Through the corner of my eye I caught the squinted gaze of a store official. I escaped his view by turning to the dairy section. My hand was swift as I darted for the delicate pearls of cheese encased in a glimmering blue vessel of cottage cheese at $1.59. It tumbled gracefully into my backpack. Now for the bread. I had a list: bread, cheese, milk, chicken, jam. I arrived at the jam section to find nothing less than $4.29 a jar. I knew intuitively that my plan was about to fail.
Approximately three times a month my feet would caress the liquid floors of Safeway. My illicit food gathering always increased in size depending on our shortage of money or stamps. I would usually purchase one or two things so as not to cause suspicion and the rest would end up in my backpack. Today I had only $2.00. after an intoxicating mix of twelve year old omnipotence and severe hunger...I took a chance...I stole everything. As I walked out, those squints became furtive glances of action leading to the advancement of unknown troops and suddenly as my feet barely tasted the asphalt parking lot, I felt the arms and smelled the sweet sick aftershave of a nineteen year old box boy turned security guard. There was something slightly wrong about the pants of people that accept security roles - always too new or too tight or strangely rolled up and tucked into their white tube socks. One this day, I was detained by one such bad dresser.
They dragged my 11 going on 12 year old self into the “security” office, a very hot, closet-sized room with three twirling video cameras and a two way mirrored window facing the produce section. This was my first run-in for crimes of poverty and yes I was scared of being taken to jail as they kept threatening but I was more afraid of them calling a truancy officer. I had not been to any kind of school for almost a complete year and if they took me now – it would all come out.
As it turns out I relied on the defense mechanism that began to set-in for life in these years, getting me through all varieties of difficult situations I lied. And in retrospect, it really was too easy. I told them I was 30 and they believed me . I didn’t really look 30 but they were short of staff and really had no time to deal with my obviously lying almost 12-self. So off I went into more walks of confusion and hungry afternoons.
Days from that time on in Santa Monica only come to me in excerpts - excerpts alternately filled or completely devoid of sound.
“Ha ha ha- I told you I was going to get you Cindy -now you’re it- you like her oooohh- i’m telli...-” children my same age laughing playing capping on each other running, skipping , torturing each other down that dreary alley directly under my window everyday at 3:15 pm pouring out of the school down the street. Each shrill excited thread of their voices shattered the still- blankness of the air - a momentary drop of life, in a sea of empty air. Ohhhh how I longed to be them for even a second. To have friends, to worry about my clothes, homework, boys. Maybe mine was the ultimate in covetousness - the desire for the other.. the other ..me the other me I would never be able to be and yet I thought I was. The desperate bone-aching desire to be normal, to go back to school, to have friends, and to not worry about money ever again. Finally, I just desired something, anything, that was alive, that wasn’t part of the dreadful silence of Santa Monica, the disdainful hate of the omnipresent Mr. Humphries asking for his rent and worst of all The alley, filled with the sounds of happy children or filled more often with…. nothing at all.
For years I was consumed by those desires, by that longing for everything I once had and knew that I would never have again. Not fully understanding the depths of our poverty and desperation at that time and how it was closer to the experience of poor families in third and fourth world countries who need to lean on each other just to survive, whose young children work alongside elders to keep the family fed and clothed and who ultimately are about sacrifice even when that sacrifice is ones’ individual happiness, success or wealth. My only reference was the omipresent Brady bunch and Cosby show family realities living out the ultimate in Amerikkan Independence rather than interdependence. The template for ageist, classist and ableist Individuals who look out for number #1 and only care about “families” at capitalist holiday buying seasons.
Chapter 28
Earl Wilson
The ticket out of “the silence” was “discovered” leaning against a wall, smoking a cigarette, James Dean asEx-con style.
“his name is Earl and he is an amazing artist” Earl, the chicano,ex gang-member with the white trash name, had a handler, a pimp, an agent iif you will in the embodiment of a strange, gypsyesque, “dancer” named Lila who was well-known for her successful maneater techniques and who made the original hook-up between my mother and Earl on the Boardwalk in Venice Beach .
What happened next was a blur of Dinah Washington records, fresh fish dinners prepared by Earl and astrological predictions foretold by the amazing Lila, resulting in the successful coupling of Earl and my mother. Then in even less time I had a new step father. Earls culinary abilities were a special plus to the prospective men and women Lila, put her sights on connecting with .
In many ways, Lila and Earl were old school grifters, living off the kindness of strangers, duping anyone dumb or needy enough to let them But their whole thing was essentially foiled with us. We had nothing to give and needed even more. My mother wasn’t particularily nice to her men but rather had the punitive style of Rush Limbaugh
To this day I am still unsure what Earl got out of the whole deal but I am grateful to him nonetheless. Because of him we moved out of impending homelessness in Santa Monica into the wondrous buzz of barely clothed men and women, old hippies perpetually playing “Doors” music, gentrified gangstas, miles of off-white sand and street artists that was Venice Beach.
Chapter 29
Venice Beach
The morning fog reached up out of the gray-green pacific ocean and barely tasted the burning sun at 7;00 am on any Saturday or Sunday morning in the infamous semi-town of Venice Beach. A crackling noise pervaded the salty cool air that preempted the multi-layered sound of a day on the Venice Boardwalk.
It was into this crackling that I was introduced to the bane of my existence, what would sustain my mother and me for many years..just barely. And what would eventually become so loathsome to me that it would almost drive me insane
“Whaddya think you are doin here kid” I was introduced to the third world in the first world reality of vending or what should be called micro-business, by an extremely rude cockney-accented man in a tiny ruby red speedo. “Get the fuck out of here, …” His large yellow teeth were less than an inch away from my face with this last sentence.
“NO!” Out of the desperation of wanting to buy luxuries like fresh blueberries (and no longer able to safely shoplift) My 12 year old self stood up to this very intimidating, 6 foot tall old hippie with hardly any clothes on,
“ What makes you think you can sell here, this is my spot” adroplet of pot-stained spit fell out of his loose lips on that last “t”
“ Because I need to and I have to”, I really didn’t know what I was saying , just a whole lot of freefloating front poured out of my hungry mouth.
After I convinced my mother to move in with Earl to get us out of the poverty and isolation of Santa Monica by any means necessary, we all moved to a tiny house in the “dogtown” section of Venice, i.e.the pre-gentrification Venice ghetto filled with African Descendent, Latino, and Laotian families living in cheap houses filled with low-rider-in-progress souped up cars, pit bull dogs, and young brown and black gangstaz fighting the undeclared war of displacement.
Into this battle ground we moved, filled with the hope and dreams of new love and endless possibilities of anything-ness.
In the first year we ran a day care center for 0-12 month olds from very low-income families referred by the County. This was a cool job for my mom but eventually we had to close the place cause we didn’t make enough money to pay the exhorbitant rent increases of the ever-rising Venice Beach rents.
It was also at this time that things began to fall severely apart between my mother and Earl. As is often the case of poor folks from very poor pasts there tends to be difficult skeletons living quietly in closets, that given a little time will jump out and bite.
And bite they did. The fights became worse and worse between my mother and Earl as our collective poverty became worse and worse. Eventually they had no relationship at all, only breaks in between fights.
And then there were no breaks.
One particularly bad night earl came home from his job still wearing his cook hat. His requisite “salmon-cutting” machete dangling at his side. His face was an odd shade of charcoal under his deep brown skin. He sat on the front step of our little house and smoked his cigarette with a particular emphasis on the Ex-con-stylizations of the puff and drag.
“So Debra, what are we gonna do about the rent”, he asked my mom, his black-brown eyes turning into small black shiny pellets of fury buried into either side of his sharp face. His question was meant as little more than a fight starter as he was the only one with any money in our trio and he therefore knew that there was really nothing to be done about the rent. Earl’s favorite thing to do was fight; small fights, big dangerous fights, squabbles and all out domestic violence-inducing battles. When ever he and my mom were in the same room it was only a matter of time before a battle of some scale was waged.
Our new form of horrendous poverty was what launched the vending weekends in Venice. In between all those fights and police calls and screams and weird household manifestations of a broken relationship holding onto itself for dear life, my mother convinced Earl to put his art talent “to some use” and in a matter of weeks I was in Venice Beach selling t-shirts with horrendously cutesy little brown bears on them
After the last really bad Earl fight which included the police and the machete and a lot of expletives out of my moms hella ghetto mouth, my mother decided we needed to live separately from Earl. The only trouble is we really didn’t have the money to support one apartment, much-less two, so this is also about the time that our serial evictions began. It would always begin innocently. We would have a particularily good weekend, selling a lot of bear shirts – clearing at least 500 dollars. My mom would direct me to put on the “suit” and I would go and get an apartment. Venice was a tourist community so the landlords were traditionally laid back and never checked on my credit, my age or even my references, this was good as all of what I wrote on the application were lies.
One to six months would pass of our on time rent paying and then we would have a bad weekend – no bear shirts would sell and the thirty day notice to pay rent or quit would be taped to the door and then the Unlawful Detainer notice to evict and then the marshal’s notice and then we would ask Earl for money for 1st and last mo rent, I would put on the suit, acquire a new apartment and then it would start all over again.
Meanwhile, Earl and my mother barely saw each other but they would still fight, if only by proxy. In other words, I would be my mothers cowboy, roping in Earl wherever he would roam, I would check on Earl while he surfed at Malibu , check on Earl at his cook jobs to make sure he wasn’t cheating with waitresses, check on Earl at his trailer where he was living. And if necessary I would be the stand in for her fights. Except the bulk of my role was to beg Earl not to leave us.
But the final night that terrified me more than all the rest put together was the night it seemed like it was really over. My mother had me deliver a note to Earl, to let him know that once again we didn’t have any rent money and needed him to help us get another apartment. Somehow on this night, It was the straw that broke Earls back.
Chapter 30
Brooks Street
It was late, the PG&E at our Brooks Street apartment had long ago been turned off due to non-payment, so the long, almost empty room was awash in an eery darkness. "Earl are you here?", I walked gingerly into the room half-heartedly calling his name hoping NOT to find him. He didn't answer so I thought the coast was clear, I would leave the note containing the "news" that once again we had ran out of money and this place would be served with a notice to vacate the premises by the marshal on Monday morning at 5:00 am
I left it on the one piece of furniture that remained in the place, a small chipped wooden table that we got from the Good will that sat in the middle of the room.
After dropping the note, I ran out, but then I realized I forgot my keys, so before opening the door to leave I tiptoed back in. The note wasn't there
"I got the note" Earl snarled through gritted teeth in an almost inaudible voice diced with fury.
Those three words, which hung in the air for seconds that seemed like hours froze the moment in a capsule of dread, and embodied the most frightening moment I have ever had, "Well I'm just gonna go" I inched for the door.
"D you think this is OK?" suddenly Earl was a millimeter away from my face, the snarl had turned into a whisper. He was holding the note in a clenched fist trembling at his side.
"No, but there was no way ar…." Before I could finish my weak explanation, I felt Earls hands grip my shoulder and then I felt the wall in my back. Earl had thrown me against the wall of the apartment and was now pushing a plywood slat that doubled as a door to the kitchen into my face.
The consummate fear of impending death is like no other and as I stood there my head rushing with adrenaline and pain it was harder than one would imagine to actually conceptualize escape.
Suddenly without even thinking, because "thinking" was not an option in that moment, my body writhed and twisted in an odd maneuver and I was out from under the door and ran like I had never run before for the back door which just luckily was still ajar because as I had guessed correctly, that was Earls way in.
I never looked back once I reached the door and continued to run down the alleys and walkways of Venice Beach until I reached the boardwalk, the sand and then the shore where I still ran and didn't stop for what seemed like miles. It was times like these, of complete fear and confusion that I always thanked the sea for being there, crashing, breaking and re-inventing itself with every wave, every break, every wind.
Chapter 31
The Trailer
No-one ever mentioned that day with Earl. Not me. Not Earl. And consequently not my mother, cause it would be many years later before I would even detail the events to her of that terrifying day.
Earl found some sort of peace with the trailer, I think out of guilt for what he had done to me that day. Living quietly and without incident in the little 50's trailer we had parked in an abandoned parking lot in Dogtown. Whenever we drove by to give him one of my mothers notes he would be sitting on the little steps leading up to the trailer casually smoking a cigarette, with only a little bit of James Dean, Marlon Brando or "Wilmos" cholo thrown in.
Meanwhile the only times he and I would speak is when he would come down to the Boardwalk to take a shower at the Beach, or drop off his portion of his paycheck to us so we could pay the rent on the last place I managed to rent in Venice Beach. We no longer sold bear shirts. We moved onto other things. And for that last summer, my mother and I, had one of the best times of our troubled lives.
Chapter 32
Street Clothes
My mother was an artist, a conceptual artist to be exact. She was also crazy. But then again one questions how much in a person is artist and how much is crazy. Perhaps she was just really artistic seeing that her whole take on life was skewed and alternative and she like many other artistically inclined people never did anything normally, consistantly or regularly.
After several months of endless bear shirt production, my mother's tendencies toward fiber art were born. One morning without warning she began cutting patterns into a form of post-modern Zoot Suit.
Concurrently to the establishment of her postmodern Zoot Suit entitled the Bamba line, we began to be a part of the very disparate yet oddly tight knit community that was the Boardwalk. There was Birdie. An ageless "designer-artist" who had a proclivity for gay men, art openings and redecorating, Peter, the hippie "folk" street musician extraodinaire who sang multiple deep throated, renditions of Brown eyed girl as the boardwalk went from sun-glare yellow to the gray-browngold blanket of warm dusk.All the while galvinizing the community of housless hippies, colonized native people passified into drunken submission with the white man's brew, confused, yet beautiful young men and women bent on some vague form of stardom but with no plan and several party invitations, extremely rich, extremely successful hollywood art and industry folk, slowly but surely gentrifying Venice with each addition of their multi-million dollar mansions and everyone else, into one note of 70's nostalgia that never ceased .
The "La Bamba" line of shirts, pants and skirts was named first for the song, one of my mom's old school favorites and second for a dance choreagraphed by me in one of our first performance art presentations that doubled as the opening for said clothing. My word-smithing began with the advent of the business name that produced the clothes; Street Clothes. Named by me because in many moments of our design process we were actually "on the street" noone at the LA design center knew that aspect of the naming and only thought I was making a pun based on the old 40's esque name of clothes that you wear "on the street" .
Our encounter with large fame with Street Clothes was the first in an ongoing series of life meeting art meeting tragedy meeting innovation that becomes fame that always seemed to be our odd reality.
Once we actually got a “rep” to sell our line of clothing, it started to garner a media buzz. Starting with a spread in Playgirl- the men's (women's ) magazine ostensibly created for women who wanted to see naked men but probably "read" by gay men wanting to "read" about naked men. Suffice to say it wasn't read by the usual reader and I am not sure we ever made any money from that "spread" but it was full color nonetheless and we were thrilled.
From this big fame we launched Street Clothes the store. A tiny ( 2 feet by 1 foot) corner of a building on the boardwalk. My mother would create fascinating temporary art installations in front of our store "on the street" each week that got so much attention we were written up in the LA weekly and other local papers as the next "big" thing. Now mind you its not that hard to be the next big thing in LA - that's why LA is so cool - if you do, create, or instigate something , anything that is new , different or exciting - you will be famous and become the next big thing - its so odd cause in other places - you actually have to work for years and do whatever you do really well and gain skills , etc but in LA you only have to do "it " and you are it"
In that wonderful summer I captured a mini moment of teen-ness, the first and last brush with it that I would ever have. Without a formal entrance or acquantence but only working on the borrowed access card of young female I "hung" out with three crowds; mini wannabe gangstaz, white, black and brown who did graffiti ( read: art) on any and every wall that they could get away with. Surfer/Skater dudes who rode skateboards endlessly and dangerously late into the night and finally; "kids of stars". I never actually went to middle school or high school but with these three crowds I gained access to the highways and byways of nearby SAMO high school. Including the semi crush from a wayward slightly disturbed son of a prominent actor, who only loved me from afar.
Chapter 33
Surfboard
The board shorts hung low the hem just skimming the lower end of a very brown calf. Earl worked those hems and those calves. And on this crisp August Morning my little to the left of heterosexual, artist, surfer and donetimecholofromWilmos stepdad stood sideways, so as to catch the sun bearing down on the Venice Beach asphalt and deflect its' rays onto his custom-made Becker (Surf) Board dangling just so at his side. I saw from the pose, and the accompanying scowl that he was about to proclaim his long-feared departure.
Almost since the beginning of his stay with us, he threatened to leave. And that threat ruled everything we did. For without Earl, we were homeless.
"I'm gonna order that Becker Board - then I'm gone .. boom" Earl would say this on average of every three months. Always sideways, always with a flick of his wrist and always with that same scowl on his face.
Every time he would verbalize the "I'm leaving-Boom" sentence my mother and I would spend hours talking about what we were going to do if Earl "really left" and then what I would need to do to convince him otherwise. The plans varied from low level surveillance at his surfing spots (with intentions of intimidating him?- me a 13 year old girl dressed from head to toe in punk rock Black) to high terror alert including one time that I elicited the help of my houseless friends in Venice to go and "scare" him into changing his mind. Each time the plans were foiled as Earl was not an easy man to scare, threaten, cajole or beg. Begging and pleading that he should change his mind and stay, almost always was resorted to and even that tactic towards the end of their relationship, became harder and harder to facilitate, so the forms of begging became more and more desperate and the locations, times and situations that the process took place more and more odd
Chapter 34
Lincoln Blvd
Lincoln Bl at the edge of Venice Beach at 1:30 am was empty. Empty and oddly quiet like almost all of California, urban and suburban alike, becomes after 1:00 am. Even this, one of the largest, ugliest and most badly landscaped and developed streets in Los Angeles that traveled from one end of the City to the other filled on every corner with the requisite strip malls, gas stations and mini marts was completely empty - and so quiet the occasional car seemed like an intrusion.
Earl had said that morning on his way to surf (and then work) that as soon as his new (surf) board was "in" he was "outta here-Boom" he had said the same thing many times before but this time it resonated with a new kind of certainty that both my mom and me heard, sending chills up our collective spines. After way to many hours of discussion it was decided that the “meet Earl at work and convince him to change his mind “ plan would need to be implemente. And if all else failed ask him to at least postpone his plans until we had more time to get prepared.
At 1:00 am right when he got off work I was there as planned, waiting outside his job. Elaborate stories of why he should stay dropping off my lips like water. He saw me and began walking quickly in the other direction .
"Earl…Earl… Earrrrrrrlllll!" I screamed in vain into the silent Santa Monica air
He kept walking. His checkerboard cook pants billowing out from his thin legs with each stride. The puff of one cigarette after another wafting up from his head. We passed blocks and more blocks and then we were on Lincoln. At the corner of Lincoln and Santa Monica Bl's I caught up with him. It was 1:30 am. He continued to walk. The beginning of several hours of begging and pleading began.
At four o'clock in the morning he agreed to stay. I will never forget that night. Something very disturbing and different happened. At some point in the "walk" I no longer felt like I was fighting for my mother and me, but in fact only for me. I no longer could differentiate between who was in the relationship with Earl. Nothing physically ever happened between me and Earl but the vague feeling of love-desperation-attraction-incest set in, never to truly go away.
Covert and/or overt incest/molest experiences between father-less child and boyfriend of mother are the bane of all single mothers. Causing many a mother to never seek another partner again. Or worse, to "look the other way" when the incest/molest does occur if it helps the mother's chances of being fed and housed and a little less lonely. My mother worked so hard at not having that Ever occur to me. Dropping men if they so much as looked or spoke to me in an inappropriate way. But in the end it was a testimony to our level of desperation, our intimacy with the viscous jaws of poverty, that she only weakly considered that issue with Earl. And then went on to devise "our next move" to get Earl to stay.
Six months after the near death "incident" at Brooks ave Earl made this the final declaration to leave. The odd thing about this time is noone really fought it. It wasn't that we were any more stabilized or less likely to be homeless, and we were still bereft of options but for me Brooks av was really the break in the incestuous covenant. And for my mom, I think she was just tired.
Chapter 35
1984
1984. The year began in the sky between two tropical clouds filled with dense piles of rain. Mists of rare cleansing moisture slid across the sky all day and into the night. As if to meet the wondrous cool wet from above, the ocean climbed way up on the flat broad beach filled with gray and white break water.
The old 70's song doesn't lie (It never rains in Southern California) It really doesn't. So when it does people literally coil up into small confused balls and rarely leave their house. Its partially because of their hair ( rain doesn't do well with "blown" hair) but its mostly out of pure shock. Most of the time you can count on the fact that it will only rain for a minute and then be over so nothing and noone actually makes plans around the possibility of rain, and when it really does occur it renders the entire city in a strange form of mutually understood paralysis.
"I'm not going shopping today cause its supposed to rain"
"I'm not going out tonite cause its sposed to rain."
It literally took me several years of living in the Bay Area to get over the "paralysis"of rain. In the Bay Area I was shocked to watch people make plans, meet people, party and shop, even outside, sidewalk vendor shop, in the middle of a torential downpour
Suffice to say in 1984 everything that almost looked like hope for my mom and me, ended. We had started "Street Clothes, the business, with absolutely nothing. No money, no bank loan, no business plan. Just hope, extremely hard work and a lot of raw creativity. Every sale, every customer kept us alive from week to week. Paid the rent, paid our expenses, and started, after that first summer to really begin to grow into a viable profit making venture.
And then it rained.. and rained and rained. Day after day, week on top of week it just kept coming down, cleansing the dry earth, purging the air of its thick layers of dust and smog, and paralyzing the entire city of L.A. Sunday after Sunday the boardwalk remained empty, and frighteningly quiet. The lone skateboarder passing every so often, breaking the deafening silence with their "whoosh swish" and inevitable slap clap as they would crash on the cement and then start all over again. In those days I rarely even ventured on my "board" to scared to even have fun cause it meant nothing ,every wet day after wet day would end in the same dread.
Chapter 36
The Myth of the Bootstraps
The old adage it takes money to make money is so flagrantly true. Whether its actual cash or just strong connections and some folk who have your back financially, etc, without either of those, you really can't make it in "your own business" Notwithstanding the mythic "American Dream" or "Just pull up your bootstraps and work hard lie" we worked harder than two people could have ever worked, we pursued our "dreams", and if there were any bootstraps left to pull up we had worn them to a tether
Almost 30 days of rain rendered our outside sales dependent business over. It was at this moment of almost failure that my mom convinced me to call my wealthy dad and ask for some help to get us through this, cause if we didn't have some help, we truly would lose everything and end up "on the street" It would have taken less than a thousand dollars to save our little business til the rains were over, "I don't believe in the entrepreneurial spirit… hun" was his reply spoken with a glaze of implied understanding
As he spoke those 8 devastating words, My heart and mind crushed and imploded on top of my stomach and I lost all my breath in my body , eventually it became a rock of air lodged for several minutes in my dry tear stained throat. Of course he had never helped us out so why I agreed to cal him and feel even smaller and less important than I already felt , I don't know. It wouldn't be the last time either, just one of the worst times. He ended with his patronizing mini-cure for everything, “I’ can send you $100.00 hun, maybe that will help”
“that’s why I have to get a job, I could work anywhere, I could do anything, “
“what are you talking about, you are only thirteen”
So what, I drive, I rent apartments, I run the business, I can lie about my age to get a job, what’s the big deal”
“you know why, you can’t “ With those last words almost always spoken menacingly through gritted teeth by my exasperated mom all talking about jobs would cease.
After the call to my dad my mother and I had one of our endless fights about me getting a job. Originally ,the reason for me doing vending was it meant we could control our own time, in other words, she could come with me, or have me come back home if she got a panic attack. But when the business failed and there was clearly no way for us to survive, I began endlessly, mercilessly begging to go out and get a job, knowing every time I brought it up that it had no chance of going over but hoping against hope that this time she would be convinced. Getting, having or trying for a job became such an obscure object of desire for me, that only recently have I stopped gazing longingly at Mcdonalds and Burger King workers, bus drivers, receptionists and UPS delivery people , as these kinds of work were the only things available to my 6th grade educated self and seamed like the panacea to all of our impossible problems
We held on in the store for another three weeks until the landlord nicely nudged us for the 3rd month in a row that "they really couldn't wait any longer for the rent.” Notwithstanding this decidedly landlord-like nudge, they were one of the nicest landlords we had ever encountered, even giving us some time to pay the rent and trying to extend us some credit and when we finally left even though we owed them money, agreeing to "let it go"
Chapter 37
The Shangri-La (motel)
(insert cartoon)
The departure from Venice Beach was when our official homelessness began. OF course we had been homeless before that but so far had some hustle , plan or roof under which to crawl.
The last few days at the old Street Clothes office/apt were spent filling our old 70's model station wagon with everything we owned and to the last second wondering where we were gonna go and with what. We were down to our last little bit of money and had no way to get anymore.
The bulk of the car packing job was left up to me which was kind of a travesty cause I knew nothing about packing and was then as I am now "organizationally challenged". Worst of all, I knew nothing about "tying knots"" so everything was hilariously precarious. Mattress piled upon clothing, couches made quick friends with lamps and end tables, sheets, pillows, silverware, TV , stereo, records, boxes, cat toys, and on and on. An end table sort of rested on the corner rack on the top of the car. A box of valuable papers "leaned" against another box. By the end of our journey every part of the State of California was littered with one piece of furniture formerly belonging to Dee and Tiny
With the car completely filled and only a little bit of denial money left to our name, my mom decided she would go out in style and stay in the Shangri-La hotel in Santa Monica. Denial money I called it , cause my mom would act like it was a lot more than it was and deny our impending vehicular housing.
The Shangri-La was an odd place befitting its lofty name. Large, white and scary. The tiny box-like rooms looked they had previously been used as an old-school mental hospital. There was an eery background sound of a perpetual scream whistling through the long empty halls.
I experienced my first bitter taste of class discrimination at the Shangri-La, " Miss how long are you going to stay here", the undertaker-like front desk man would ask us every day how many more days we were going to stay. Now, theoretically, that was none of his business, we were paying him every day before the check-out time, but still he would ask and then suddenly one week after we were there , he shook his head from side to side, in a defiant "no" filled with all forms of disgust, when I tried to pay him for that nights stay.
"I'm sorry Miss but I can't extend your stay"
"but why?" My breath began to dribble out of my chest
"we are all sold out" He did not look at me.
"but you told us this room was available all winter, when we checked in"
"well, I'm sorry" That was by far the most, stiff, hateful bullshit sorry I had ever heard. Nails on a thousand black boards would have sounded sweeter than that "sorry"
Later that day as were dragging out our burgeoning hefty bags containing everything we could carry. ( we did not have enough money for luggage and would try to make the white and black trash bags look less like pure trash bags by tying them in elaborate knots at the tops) the bellman ( who happened to be a brother) told us quietly, sadly, and in solidarity, that the hotel management had gotten a lot of "comments" about us. "Comments" is code for "trash" "homeless" "bums" et al. And as I thought about it what would elicit those comments, we didn't smell , our clothes were clean and relatively new, our hair was clean.
But it didn't matter, we were homeless, we were two women alone. My mother was a single mom. Our car was old, filled with everything we owned, topped off by a weary blue king-size mattress perched on its side like a cloth wave in mid-break. We didn't belong to anyone or anything. We paid with cash, we had no credit cards, we owned nothing of value.
That night in LA we drove around, terrified and unsure of where to go and what to do, how to do it and……. The traffic lights seemed to change and blend into one long beam of blood red. It was still raining so the streets were constantly wet and glowing, the cars were absent so even the comforting whir of traffic was absent.
"Should we go to San Francisco?" As we drove from strip mall to strip mall, gas station to mini-mart and then back again. From Westwood to Crenshaw The Valley to Long Beach, San Pedro to Hollywood, never stopping cause if we stopped we would have to turn off the heater and freeze in the cold wet car with a bed frame sticking in our ears, my mom was talking obsessively about whether to go to The Bay Area or to stay here. "We have friends here, but no money and no hope of any money, I can't get a job here cause I can't breathe, its not going to work out, but on the other hand we have money making options up there but no friends and no place to live…. Well I guess we can always get a place …I just don't know what to do…"
And then we saw it. The First in a series of Signs leading the way for Dee and Tiny When all else fails, theres always signs. Or perhaps, there were always signs and that’s why everything else failed. My mother had just asked her question for the 60th time and for some unknown reason we both looked up at the same time , and good thing too cause as we did a giant truck almost sideswiped us into certain death. On its 20 foot side wall which filled our window was pasted a giant billboard stating the words in large black courier font KEEP TRYIN'
And then suddenly coming right at us from the front again almost sideswiping us again was a double decker greyhound bus and in the Marquis where they put their destination was: SAN FRANCISCO…
We both looked at each other and for a moment, nothing, not the undertaker front deskman, not the cold wet , not even the bed frame in our necks could stop, a thick laugh of ridiculousness, art-imitating-tragedy, pure unadulterated silliness that overtook both our souls and enveloped our entire weary beings and we just laughed and laughed for so many healing, joyous minutes that felt like hours. Yes, we both said, it could not be denied, we were given the signs, we must go, we must "KEEP TRYIN' to go to SAN FRANCISCO .. and so it went… into the slick moist streets our tragic heroines, the superfriends Dee & Tiny raised their arms out, clutched the sides of the wavering mattress and began the long journey by car that would spirit them into new lands, new tragedies and most of all, new possibilities…..
Chapter 38
Seven Days And Seven Nights
I heard once that it took seven days and seven nights to create the world. So maybe me and my mom were really re-creating the world instead of just driving to the Bay Area from Los Angeles, because it did in fact take us 7 days and seven nights.
It was in this trip that the Dee and Tiny myth began, ie life imitating art imitating life, tragedy becoming reality, becoming performance, becoming art, or maybe just a really long miserable drive. My mother hated driving, even if she wasn't the actual driver, she just hated being in the car for more than two hours at any time.
And then because we really weren't sure of our destination, my mother would consider each dumb strip mall infested California town on our route as a possible town to reside in.
"I wonder what life here would be like", she proclaimed one day, her spoon wading through a green pile of green mush.
"Where?" I asked, shocked that she could be considering a motel known for its pea soup and pea soup accoutrements as an actual home.
"here, " she answered with a sly smile, pointing up to the giant green spoon and large bust of the plump little baby-like Dutch man in lederhausen who ostensibly was the proprietor/founder of the Pea Soup Anderson Conglomerate located in a barren freeway off-ramp-town in the middle of California
"I wonder if I could get a job here, or how much the apartments would run…" she went on about our possible residence in Pea soup Anderson Town throughout the night until I rolled into a strange dream riddled sleep on the dusty shag carpeted floor of a Pea soup anderson motel room. We managed to rent the cheapest room in the motel, which only had one twin bed, a fake vinyl end table, dark brown curtains with double plastic lining and which happened to be under the belly of Mr. Anderson himself
The next day I awoke to the beautiful view of Mr. "P's" cute little midriff peeking out of his lederhausen. I guessed the statue maker created this Britney Spears touch on poor Mr. Pea to prove how his tummy was so filled with all the wondrous Pea soup.
As my mother sardonically considered all the benefits of life in Pea Soup, I noticed that in fact there was no actual town that surrounded the restaurant, the gift shop and the motel. This kind of extreme small town weirdness always frightened me. where did the people live? In trailers buried under the ground.. 30 miles away? In the vast land of nowhereness that made up the surrounding environment. I just couldn't get used to the miles and miles of undefined, blank country that made up the middle of Amerikka. It only seemed unsafe to me. Unprotected zones where large white men in huge white trucks with tonka -like Big wheels, wearing cowboy hats would come up at any moment and do away with you, and worst of all in towns this quiet, this barren and this small, no-one would know you had gone.
Later that day after breakfast, lunch and midday coffee all in preparation for the "long drive" we finally got back in the car and sped away from all those green legumes, never to return again.
Two hours later, we were in another town and a another cheap motel, and another mini mart and then another and on and on…
The odd thing about the entire trip was the fact that the corporate archetecture was so synchronized. Each town having the exact same amount of Chevron, Shell or 76 stations, minimarts, starbucks, Mcdonalds, Wendys, Burger Kings and so on with only one or two exceptions. At times that kind of capitilist comfort is addictive, no matter how sleepy you become on the road you know there will always be a nearby coke , some beef jerky or hot tamales around the corner to jarr you, if only for a few more minutes from your road exhastion. But then it becomes eary, like a bad horror movie , you expect some sisy spacek look-alike to emerge from the "Spotless" Chevron toilets blood soaked prom dress sparkling in the endlessly bright florescent gas station bulbs
Chapter 39
The Oakland Sign
And then one day we were in Oakland. It was about 5:00 pm and my mom had just been complaining that we had been driving for too long ( it was coming up on 1 and 1/2 hours and we were still driving!) And there it was; a green freeway sign a little to the left of the road, in a plain, non-descript Freeway font, the world was finally done being Re-created. We were there. We were in Oakland.
We curled offf of the freeway and crept into Berkeley. I caught my first glimpse of the beautific and horrific complex of building, cement, and lush green land that was University of California at Berkeley. I wasn’t completely conscious of it yet, but from that moment on high school was no longer the obscure object of desire, in fact I don’t think I even considered high School again for even a moment…no, from now on it was all about College, an institute of higher learning if you will, and to be more specific, UC Berkeley
Chapter 40
Berkeley
Our first year in Berkeley was sheer chaos. We came to Berkeley/Oakland based on a vague memory my mom had of her pre-my-dad life when she posed as a hippie and breathed in the beautiful foggy nights of the bay Area, escaping her orphan home reality of the past and believing in another incarnation of herself. She even went so far as to change her name from the overly somber “kings English wannabe of Mary Josephine to the ultimate in cutesy Americana; Debbie. My mothers personality re-inventions were always marked by the changing of her name. This re-do was particularily notworthey as it marked the formal trend towards the letter D.
A few decades of Ronald Reagan/Pete Wilson-inspired cuts to private and public funding of Social Services and Housing budgets did much to transform the entire Bay Area, and specifically the East Bay. Casually strewn designer hippies lounging in random places were replaced with houseless punk rocker posing youth, homeless adults, many of whom had untreated severe mental illnesses and/or serious substance abuse problems, perpetually circling the city, and cops, so many cops, UC Police, Berkeley :police, BART police, AC Transit police, Federal police, vista College police, Housing authority police, name the quasi-institution in the Bay Area and they could probably boast their own police force, giving parking tickets, giving Driving While Poor tickets ( no registration, broken taillight, suspicion of…., sleeping in vehicle, nuisance, etc) and whenever they could just giving people a hard time. The truly frightening aspect of all these armies’ invasion of the Bay Area is the fact that we were homeless within six months of our arrival. And it is illegal to be homeless in Amerikka.
Chapter 41
The Bears and other acts of Art and resistance.
“Whats that Bear doing on that station wagon?” Within the first few days of our arrival embued with all of our LA- conceptual art-wildness- we began some site specific car art; which involved a very large (almost 6 feet long) slightly soiled teddy Bear, ala Winnie the Pooh, which in our case should have been re-named Winnie the Poor. My mother went thrift shopping for found art goodies in one of our tiny town stops on the way up, and even though we had absolutely no room for the Bear, decided she had to have it. So of course it ended up on the roof of the car.
In its original roof placement, the Bear, was just one of several things on top of the car, wedged ever so slightly between the unsecured couch, end table, a couple of lamps and a mattress. By the time we arrived in Oakland, the Bear was the only thing that survived. With the addition of the miles of randomly placed, multi-colored rope, draped over the protruding belly, legs and perpetually smiling head, it was clear to us that we had birthed the piece; Goldilocks Revenge; A hand-painted sign in big block letters with those words as the title framed the bear and its ropes.
The hilarious part of this rather goofy piece of car art, was the fact that UC Berkeley’s school mascot ( i.e., football, baseball, basketball, et al) was a Bear- A Golden Bear to be exact. So unbeknownst to Dee and Tiny, as they drove homelessly through the streets of Berkeley and Oakland, garnering the attention of minions of law enforcement for a multitude of Driving while Poor violations, they were also garnering the attention of frat boys and girls eager to sprit away the soiled bear to a frat house mantle as soon as one of them were drunk or high enough to get the courage to do so.
“Haaaa, Haaaa, nobody gets an apartment in Berkeley” Soon after our arrival, we were flatly told this by a tall thin man overwhelmed by a long, unruly gray beard covered head to toe in faded tie dye. We were all huddled over a series of vending tables butted against the curb on Telegraph ave, scratching the right corner of his dusty beard, after a long disdainful chuckle, he added that in fact there was a serious housing shortage in Berkeley and it would take us 6 months, a year or longer to actually find a place and if we did find a place it would not be, as my mom had idealistically hoped, near Telgraph Av where she wanted to vend “her art” in other words, not the half dozen EarlBear shirts we had squirreled away in the trunk in case of dire emergency, but some real and truly amazing wearable art that she was producing with found fabrics and medals from the street. And that our only housing option was an overpriced Single Room occupancy hotel that although it was poor people housing and filled with old men with soiled beards and semen stained hands, it would still go for $45-60 per night
After resigning ourselves to that option we found out that we couldn’t stay in any of those hotels for more than three weeks at a time as the landlords would kick you out on the 29th day of your stay to insure that you did not acquire the dreaded “tenants rights” which in Berkeley actually translated into a powerful form of activist fought for Rent Control.
Within in one week of parttime car dwelling and ongoing cop harassment, we decided to stay in one of the Motel 6 offerings that led up to the “campus” which went for 35-55 per night but included a little kitchen and at least a further distance between you and your beer stained neighbors.
Chapter 42
Rose of Sharon and Dean Raspberry
We ended up in Rose of Sharon and Dean Raspberry’s motel 6 . Rose of Sharon and Dean were Loretta Lynn hair having and Granpa Jed t-shirt over bulging beer belly sportin, tru-blue white trash direct from the pages of Grapes of Wrath. And like all unpoliticized klan-leaning white trash from the deep south – they had a bad case of self-loathing, i.e., anything that looked poor acted poor or was in fact poor like me and my mom were hated on sight and treated like the “dogs we were” and then cause my mom was obviously non-white and also kinda strange in dress ( she was in her punk rock/pink yellow haired stage at the time) she was even more hated and I as her mo-hawk having daughter , even more so.
But notwithstanding all that hate and loathing, it had a frigerator and that was something.
Within a few weeks time at those room rates we had used all of our savings meant to go to a first and last months rent and security deposit on the elusive Berkeley apartment and within a few more weeks we were completely out of all cash, and still the $55.00 daily rent on the room had to be paid, in cash, by 12:00 noon everyday, no matter what.
“The Bank has put a hold on our funds, because of a problem with the Swedish account” I cried in the tiny office Rose of Sharon shared with the motels sole ice machine. It was at this point that I began making a series of excuses to Rose of Sharon each day before I left the motel about why I couln’t pay that days room rent until later that day, none of which she ever believed,
“Reaaalllllly, “ her tongue rolled out the ‘L’s’ to signify her utter disgust for me and my ilk
“Yeah, ever since we got the Swiss account, its been nothing but trouble” her disgust made me compound the original lie with more lies all to acquire the desired one hour check-out time extension to 1:00pm.
At this point Rose of Sharon promised in her best Birmingham drawl to make good on her threats, “I will change the locks and kick you people out on yer ear”. In that grab bag of complex lies and omissions, I also failed to mention that my mom was still in the room
So at 7:00 am each morning I began the terrifying race to actually make that days room rent by selling enough shirts, unlicensed, on Telegraph avenue. This was always hard cause without a license, the other vendors would automatically turn you in to the vendor police Again, the once “open-source” notion of unregulated U.S. micro-business (Telegraph ave vending of the 70’s) fell prey to an extreme level of bureaucratic hoops, replete with a one year ( or longer) wait list to even qualify for a license, not to mention a lengthy “screening” process to make sure you actually made your product by hand, rather than imported it, a hefty license fee ( over $300) and the requisite 6 page city government-based application.
I would begin “setting up” our far too sculptural series of galvanized steel and pipe fittings that comprised our clothing display racks at 9:00 am.I chose the “not so popular part of the “ave” where theoretically the licensed vendors would not want to set-up. I would start at 9:00 so as to “Catch “ the morning crowd and not be seen while the daily lottery for licensed spaces was conducted.
Sad hour after sad and hungry hour would pass, with nary an inquiry into all of our very avante garde products. Suffice it to say we didn’t get Rose of Sharon her money and in a few short weeks we were in our car again
“click…..click,..click” A flashlight smashing against your car window always sounds the same. Hollow, and dense all at the same time, and just shy of causing your window to shatter. “Miss.. you need to move or you will be towed”
There is absolutely nothing romantic about sleeping in your car. And the whole experience, in perhaps anywhere but Hawaii can be summed up in three single syllabic words, Cold, Cold and Cold. In fact the whole experience of outside-ness, whether it be on the sidewalk, in your car, on a bench or in an alcove, is always about struggling with an unending, powerfully insidious form of cold
Blanket on top of Goodwill purchased blankets, were piled on our already overdressed bodies, crunched behind protruding steering wheels, gear sticks and dashboards, and still, minute corners of inexplicably exposed skin would catch the ice-like drifts of air from the black California nights
And even if you did get a moment of mock warmth, on any given night the police were sure to show up and threaten you with a citation, towing or arrest.
In retrospect the cops that “tapped” on your window and asked you to move were nicer than the parking and traffic officers who roamed the streets at all hours of the day and night in the Bay Area slapping your windshield with those foreboding little pieces of paper that foretold your bureacratic future of court dates, fines and stress
And so the first wave of tickets began to hit. It wasn’t clear to us at the time that we must do something about these pile-up of citations, coming from LA where the police harassment is more focused on out of car experiences. So they kept coming and we kept driving.
Chapter 43
Market driven art
Month after month of homelessness and post-modern art making passed. Our refusal to change our product had nothing to do with pride just ignorance to, as my disdainful father would call it, The entrepreneurial spirit, or as a business person would call it; the market. Unfortunately the average allowance driven student, would not kick down $50.00 for a hand-dyed pair of jeans that my mother painstakenly created….no matter how cool they were
In the end, just to get some food money we began drastically reducing our prices and scaling down “the artifice” in our products. In other words, within less than a month we were making and selling what any true artist could only describe as schlock, I being a truly starving artist, described it as survival, by any art necessary. Out of our desperate hands came jackets and dress shirts strewn with paint ala Jackson Pollack, t-shirts and sweatshirts handpainted and silk screened with any number of popular cartoon icons from Warner Brothers to Disney, you name it we painted it on any wearable surface of fabric I was able to get my ink stained hands on.
In the first few days of this hunger inspired “art-making” all of which was being painted, dyed and silk screened surreptitiously in the early morning or late at night on the streets, in alleys, on abandon lots, and on the sidewalks in different neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland, we actually took in at least $50.00 per day or more, landing us back in another motel.
“Check-out time is 10:00 am and there are no exceptions” This time around, the motels were run by the infamous Patels, hindu for Landlord. Notwithstanding their disdain for me and all of their very poor tenants, I was fascinated by all of the multi-generational Patel families I ran into.
Some of the long-time tenants who were in a constant struggle with the Patels to get basic tenant rights described some of the Patels situation as a mild form of indentured servitude, i.e., very poor Indians would get offered $1.00 per month and free rent for 20 years to come to America and“run” a motel, until one day they would own it, sort of, supposedly the original Patel could take it back at any point. I don’t know how much of that mythology is real, but I do know that it could also be viewed as a fascinating form of micro-economics
But for whatever reasons most of the Patels were pretty ruthless landlords who refused to budge on tenants rights. Rumour had it that one of the most notorious Patels actually burned down one of his poor people hotels just to avoid having to bring it up to code
Once in the hotel, any hotel, the highest paid days of our vending ensued, and the “production workshop” moved indoors, at least most of the time. A minute motel closet became a mini art studio and our move from motel to motel had to be in the night as noone could know that we had turned their off-white, needle strewn closets into a Jackson Pollack masterpiece
Chapter 44
The Scene of the Hustle
“wow that looks so great on you.. I think its cause of the shade of white, its sooo… ice-like in contrast to your black-brown hair, “
“wow, that is such an amzing fit, just in terms of the “but-fit” alone – it’s a keeper”
“ Every shirt is hand-painted and hand-dyed… its truly a work of art”
And so it went, the uber-salesman/street hustler in me was borne out of desperation for food and shelter. I found I could convince anyone to buy anything, well at least a 15.00 t-shirt, and I would say so much bullshit just to make that happen that I would surprise even myself. As the money flowed in where there was absolutely none before, I began to feel that anything was possible and all my dreams of food, shelter and new underwear were just realities waiting to happen.
The process of making ones own money on owns product when you are very poor and very young, is a very heady one as that success, no matter how small it may be feeds directly into your ego not to mention, your pocket, and once you made that 20,50 or 100 dollars you feel large, if only for that night, you buy a box of blueberries at a whopping $499 a box, you eat out and blow $20.. without even thinking twice, you even fill your gas tank or buy a whole weeks worth of groceries.
But the next day I awoke, like the alcoholic after a binge left only with a hangover to the almost emptied pocket filled with barely enough to pay that days room rent, or worse not even enough to pay that mornings coffee and I scrambled back to the scene of the hustle to nervously re-create my pseudo-success of the previous day .
Many years later I was an observant participant in POOR Magazine’s extensive investigation of underground economies and unrecognized forms of labor and micro-business operators for its 1998 issue entitled WORK which included industries and laborers such as Sex workers, panhandlers, recyclers, street vendors and drug dealers. Our findings included the fact that these workers all shared similar work habits, rises and falls in profits and most importantly, extremely unstable economies, as they inherently have only their own hard labor, bodies and wits to keep their businesses alive, much less sustain them and their families.
Indeed my subsistence experience as a micro-business-person is one shared by very poor entrepreneurs worldwide. From Bangladesh to Haiti, Mexico to New York, we all start with a product, be it “legal or illegal”, from hot dogs, multi-colored twine, fake rolex watches to crack. We stand on corners, in the streets, under tarps, in mini-malls on stolen, borrowed or rented public or private land. We cry, scream, stroll, bullshit, fawn, flirt, beg, and sing, all …to thrive..to survive…to stay alive…
The only difference between the so-called third world and the dominant, colonizing ‘first world’’ micro-businessperson is the fact that the majority of the micro-business people here are criminalized, because of the extremely high value this capitalist system puts on the value of ground rent, and if you aren’t paying ground rent, if you are selling anything “outside” you are automatically suspect, if not illegal. This concept was best summed up by enemy to the poor former mayor rudy Guiliani, who promised when he took office in the 90’s to get rid of the “panhandlers, peddlers and prostitutes that plagued the streets of New york
Chapter 45
In and Out
And so on it went, day after day month after month, me and my hustle began the full-time residence on Telegraph ave trying in vain to become homeful, to get out of the motels, to buy lunch
Click, click, swoosh, heheheh, “yeah I know” oh migod did you see the size of that book,” swish, clomp, clomp….” The minions would pour from the mouth of the University in rushes of 50-100 at a time, filled with thoughts of critical theory, political analysis, science, language, art. My hungry eyes would scope out the possible targets, My mouth would begin the onslaught of words, sure to convince the overwhelmed student with a few surplus dollars to part with their 10’s and 20’s
At first the rush of some money, any money filled my mind, helping me to forget the desire to learn , to think, to analyze, to read, about something other than food and shelter. But after what seemed like an eternity and was actually only two years of standing on a corner selling a product I couldn’t stand to people that I wanted so much to be, began to tear me up.
After all that time there we still stood, unable to save the 2000-3000 dollars needed to get into an apartment which we searched for weekly with any random available moments between 19-22 hour workdays which included silk screening and hand painting 20-50 shirts for hours on end to the point that I would fall on the floor because the pain emanating from my overworked shoulder blades would get so severe. Even through this non-stop labor we couldn’t ever seem to earn enough beyond the days room rent and on “bad” (no sale) days not even that, which meant we were in and out of our car, the police harassment increasing.
The beginning of most days spent “outside” were marked with fluttering pieces of tissue-paper like citations tucked under our broken windshield wiper scribbled with the badge numbers of various police officers and parking and traffic agents. These tickets, filled with assignments of court dates, fines and section numbers that coincided with multiple violations, bench warrants and unconsidered consequences joined a dashboard already stuffed with bills and classified ads and at some unknown point landed on the soiled floor of our over-filled station wagon to be looked at when time permitted and crises ebbed
One morning I awoke to a note from my mother, she, still prone to giving daily notes even throughout our homeless car stints, TAKE CARE OF THE TICKETS!! With an extra bold line under the words TICKETS and TAKE CARE.
So off I went to Alameda County Courthouse. Six hours and one whole day missed of selling later, I still had several thousand dollars worth of tickets in my name (six months prior we had registered the car in my name cause my mom had tickets in her name, cause you can’t get a car registered unless you pay any outstanding tickets
After waiting for a same day court appearance in a line winding out the front door and then sitting in court for several more hours,I finally stood in front of a rather bored looking judge and explained that I had no money to pay the tickets. I requested community service or very small payments, but the judge had told me that he wasn’t giving out community service except in special cases because they had closed the Alameda County volunteer center due to funding cuts for this year. I pleaded for small payments of twenty dollars a month, but the judge had said it would take far too long to pay off the debt. Finally he reduced the fine from $2,800 to $2,700 and gave me six months to pay.
Chapter 46
The Obscure object of desire
As our situation worsened my covetousness of the seemingly uncomplicated, focused and housed lives of the students who passed me daily increased to the point that I began to imagine my involvement in large scale sniping incidents perpetrated against the entire student body. My role in the massacre was never completely fleshed out in my mind but the shadowy deaths of many students were involved without any blood, but just a lot of screams and mayhem.
Fortunately for the UC Berkeley student body those kind of large scale Columbine/Kazinksky-esque tableus take a lot of energy and the privelege of time, money and/or organization to plan, carry out and follow through with and as I could barely get enough t-shirts bought, painted, dried and sold, not to mention my own clothes and my mothers cleaned as well as every other chore and life hassle completed just to get through one day, they were safe.
In lieu of the sniping drama, I began to manifest a smaller form of terror, Love. Or better yet, a lacanian form of love; i.e. unrequited, with intentional pain to the other party. I guess I thought If I could control the mind and body of at least one privileged student with an otherwise uncomplicated life, maybe I could get some kind of revenge
He was tall, almost like a giant, with a paintbrush of chocolate black hair that perpetually fell in his eyes. He walked by fast, not intentionally, but because his legs were so long he couldn’t help but cover a lot of distance quickly. He smiled like someone or something I had been charmed by before, and it would transform his face which otherwise was stuck in a paralyzing smirk, “ how much are these stupid coats?” he would ask with a chuckle, “You don’t really like these, do you?” another chuckle and then the smirk would settle in.
To these comments several really cool responses would glide through my mind, but I could only smile and then laugh a way too large, un-Lacanian laugh.
He was the perfect target for my non-violent takeover. He was an extreme womanizer of the LA variety. Like me he was the child of a wealthy doctor and unlike me had been raised his entire life in the very expensive area of Palos Verdes, the exact place my father had started his private practice.
I
Within a few short weeks I began an illicit relationship with him. I snuck out of my house and visited him at 6:00 am before my mom would find out I was gone.
Months passed and we would only share furtive glances in public. My rules were simple, no sex, no kissing, no dates, no calls. And yet despite my cool exterior, I fell in love. A deep, strange film noir, painful love.
He had a light-ness, an LA-lightness that is often shared between fellow Angelinos as well as an easy laugh, and a brutal awareness of all that was pop culture. These attributes drew me in and made our stolen hours whisk by as though they were seconds, but really it was all a direly needed escape from all the hassle of our complex lives that I fell in love with.
On our last night together a yellow-orange sun paste rested quietly coloring the 6:00 pm sky. It was a rare moment of afternoon-ness, baked in a thick August heat. I snuck away for minutes from work to visit with him at that late almost-night hour. He was leaving, that next day on a “trip to Europe….and possibly India, I’ve always wanted to go to India, its so beautiful”, he would say with a clueless chuckle. His trip was the kind of soul-less explorations into third world and fourth world poverty beyond their comprehension that wealthy white boys like him were prone to do when they reached certain benchmark ages. In this case, he was 22 and done with school. I knew as I stood there, my head buried deep in his wool tweed prep-gone-bad sweater that he and I were over. I knew it although he protested otherwise.
At that hour his house was full of roommates, cigarette smoke and dirty clothes, so in search of a moment of private-ness I pulled him out of the house to the closest strip of almost –nature that was in sight; the median strip lodged awkwardly in the middle of the tiny North Berkeley street that parelled his rented house.
When we reached the slice of grass, my mind transformed us into a vast meadow in the high sierra, I couldn’t see the BART parking lot to our immediate left spewing out rush hour cars by the hundreds, I couldn’t hear the trains honking and spitting their arrival directly underground from us, I could only see his black hair as it fell into my hot face, and feel his long fingers as they caressed my tear-stained cheeks. And the sound of his pounding heart against mine, as he whispered a way too slow goodbye
Chapter 47
The Janifs
In the midst of some of the worst chaos and overwhelming poverty the art continued. My mother begged, cajoled, promised and eventually wrote bad checks to attend classes for a single semester in a small private art school in Berkeley that specialized in fiber art. In her short tenure there she developed a large body of amazing works of wearable and non-wearable clothing which were really pieces of kinectic sculpture. Every piece was a collaborative production between her and I, she would create the physical manifestation of the art and I would develop the story or myth that would accompany the art in the form of audio, video or live performance.
One day as we were scouring the neighborhoods of Berkeley and Oakland in our daily search for apartments, my mother noticed a for rent sign on a very narrow storefront that was lodged under a carport attached to a five story apartment building in Oakland. The window itself looked as if it had just been put in and the structure behind the window appeared as if someone had added on walls to part of the carport. The whole combination was so small and so makeshift that we guessed it would be very cheap. We were right. A hastily printed sign in a barely readable red felt pen stated the price$ 350 per month
“Hello, I am Billy Jannif “ his black mustache corners glistened in the morning sunlight. “ You are interested in the store, what is it that you do exactly?”
“Oh well we manufacture clothing, I mean we actually design and manufacture”, there went my mouth again, moving autonomously from my brain, “oh yes we have many clothing lines and we sell them to the individual but they also sell in stores all over the country”
“oh really, are you able to make a profit”
“oh yes, a large profit
“well you understand there is no living allowed in this unit, it is really a storage space”
“yes of course, we are only interested in the store”
“Well, I need you to fill out this application and if your credit passes then its yours”
“ok” I grabbed the paper and began writing. Inventing lives, identities, names and numbers as fast as I could write. If I didn’t think about it too long, I could think of more creative and believable combinations of real and fake, misspells with mis-statements. I had given up along time ago actually telling the truth on rental applications, my real identity lost in the 1984 eviction wars of Venice Beach
“Here..” I handed it back to him
“Ok, we’ll run it tonite and I’ll call you tomorrow” With that he clicked his Chanel brief case lock closed with an especially sharp snap I knew the drill, after all I was rent starter, but for some reason this felt different, I was so afraid, he couldn’t say no, this was literally the only affordable place we had found after so many months of searching, it would bring all our dreams to truth, we could create installations in the window, it wasn’t so far from Berkeley, in fact, it was on Telegraph ( just the Oakland version) but more than anything else, I couldn’t live through another night in our car.
I was dreaming of suicide every night as I tried to capture some sliver of warmth that existed under my car seat. I would imagine the kind of gun I would use and how it would feel in my hands, and the relief it would give me to our endless suffering. This horror of our impossibilities were like Santa Monica all over again. Each ticket, each secret shower, the endless night shivers and non-stop parking struggles, were silently killing my spirit
“Ms. Graham, you can have the place if you want it,”I heard these beuatiful combination of words as if they were the announcement of an Academy Award nomination, or the win of a lotto jackpot. The next morning at the dot of 9:00 am I was on a pay-phone calling in to my stand alone $10 a month voice mail. One of several numbers I acquired just to appear as though my mother and I had a home and I a full-time job at a reputable business.
“Yeeeeeeaaaasssssss!”, I screamed. My head filled with the vision of heaters,and mattresses and stationary refrigerators filled with unspoiled milk and meat.
I ran to my mom to tell her the news and we both raced to the bank to turn our crumpled 5, 20 and 10 dollar bills into a clean, organized cashiers check for a whopping $700.00 made out to the Janif family. This being the total cost of move-in fees to our new dream house.. or rather dream carport-turned-store-turned illegal live space
Chapter 48
The first storefront
Within weeks of moving in we had installed the first Northern California Street Clothes store in the tiny front room. The whole space was less than a 100 square feet and, the rest of the space acted as our post-homeless haphazard living space. My mother immediately claimed the largest floor space for her state-of art queen size mattress. No matter how poor we were, my mother always managed to acquire a brand new really firm mattress. Creditors acting on behalf of mattress stores across the state plague us to this day.
It was in the Janifs place, the first after such a long stretch in the depths of homelessness, that I began my permanent residence in “the closet” from then on no matter the largess of any of our acquired apartments , I was always assured the closet. It was an adaptation of necessity, most of the places we got were too small to afford me the luxury of a separate room. But in the end it became the closest thing to a life-size cardboard box.
A box being the Safest and most secure container for my severe disorganization or as I later put it, “I was organizationally challenged.” This is not to be confused with a Hoarding/Cluttering disorder, these people many of whom are very organized, are just unable to get rid of anything. I on the other hand developed no deep attachments with belongings, I was just unable to arrange or contain the things I was able to hold on to.
Between the serial evictions and constant moves, nary a stuffed animal or baby picture remained in my possession Throughout the life of a homeless child, you lose EVERYTHING, it is like going through a fire or a hurricane every day and the little things that really matter like baby pictures, school year books and letters from important people all drift away like water from a shore
Who is to know how much of my loca vida created my organization disorder but contrary to popular belief homelessness and poverty has no inherent connection with disorganization, One of the many myths associated with poor folk is the idea that they are “messy”, “dirty” or “lazy” but the truth is, some of the most organized people I know are living and working on the street. Imagine fitting the entire contents of your apartment, car, and/or office into a shopping cart, a cardboard box or a hefty bag.
Chapter 49
Living in
As it turned out the Janif’s warning to me about living in the unit was meaningless. In our first few weeks there we snuck in and out of the place late at night and early in the morning fearing that our “living in” status would be cause for eviction, but eventually we realized that the only thing that the whole janif family cared about was money, how to get it and how not too spend it.
“when are you going to fix this SINK?!!!”, my mother began screaming at the janifs almost from day one about a running list of serious problems. “This is our 13th call about the broken glass, why aren’t you answering us?”
“No-one else ever had a problem with the sink” Notwithstanding an onslaught of unanswered letters followed by my mothers very contentious calls to the Janifs they were from the landlord school that believed the “tenant was always wrong” answering every complaint call with a vague accusation of our wrong doing
They refused to answer any of our request calls or letters about plumbing, broken appliances or severe bug jnfestation and is it turned out the entire unit was so hastily thrown together that within weeks of our tenancy it fell apart, the tile in the bathroom curled into a perfect vinyl wave, the windows cracked and shattered when we opened them and the ants and roaches didn’t stop marching in once they caught a whiff of us.
Our Northern California eviction wars were unwittingly launched with the Janifs. They continued to refuse to make any of the increasingly serious repairs but they still expected their complete rent on time, which we paid by any means necessary, but the final blow was they decided that they wanted even more rent for that tiny messed up place, and as our un-luck would have it, their rent increase coincided with yet another impossible poverty crisis
It wasn’t the rain this time it was the car. Notwithstanding the inhabitability problems with the Jannifs we were still planning to pay the increased rent in full once they actually fixed the problems But crisis has a way of hitting you right when you most can’t handle it which with poor folks is all the time.
After our third month in the Janifs’ the transmission on our old car completely stopped shifting in to drive. On a gray wind filled day in January we coasted it gingerly into a mechanic down the street.
Later that day when we went to pick it up a man wearing a blackened uniform with a nametag on his chest that said “John” looked up from the underbelly of a shiny gray Toyota and said wearily, “It’s not worth it”
My heart and stomach filled with acid and dread at the same time, “what’s not worth it?” I asked
“Fixing your car wouldn’t be worth it, you should buy a new one”
“But we don’t have the money for a new car”
“Well I don’t know what to tell you cause then you probably don’t have the money to fix this one”
“Can you please just tell me how much its gonna be to fix our car?” For dramatic affect, John didn’t answer me, instead he gave me a disgusted smirk and loped over to an oil stained desk in the corner of the auto shop. For some reason every mechanic I have met, (and I have met a lot of mechanics) have oil stained desks filled with piles of oil stained papers and unopened oil stained letters obfuscating small oil stained boxes of random auto parts .
Dan shuffled around in one of the piles and pulled out my estimate. He handed it to me and continued to shuffle through the pile in search of something else.
.
Scribbled breakdowns of multiple numbers filled the page. On the bottam of the page in the right hand corner was the most terrifying combination of numbers: $900.00 This was everything we didn’t have and then some; food, rent and PG&E combined.
The poor people dilemma discourse ensued. “We could get another car?”, I would plead
“With what… a semi decent car would cost at least $1000.00 and then it would still be a used car meaning you are inheriting someone elses’ problems and who knows how much it would cost to fix those problems
“Maybe we could get rid of the car”
“then how would we transport the shirts”
“but if we pay for the car to be fixed then we won’t have any money to pay rent…or anything else…”
And so it went, the end of all of our money and barely tasted stability and the un-planned for launch of our long-term eviction for shelter campaign
We did fix the car with what little money we made that month but the viscious cycle was in full effect so after the car broke down, I got really sick and missed a whole week of vending and we had to spend almost $100 dollars on antibiotics. This $100.00 was supposed to go to the very overdue PG&E bill.
Chapter 50
PG&E
I was cold. The February wind whipped up and circled through the invisible holes in my pants. It was dark I could barely see the phone I was holding. The chill was starting to get to me. I was standing in my closet.
It had been 24 days since the PG&E worker had lumbered into the communal mailbox room of the building carrying a large Orwellian time clock device, asking everyone in a very loud voice “Where is Unit #1? I’m here to turn off the utilities for nonpayment.”
I considered pretending not to be there. Perhaps that would delay the inevitable. But instead I chose a direct plea. I ran out of the store and into the mail room, motioning to him furtively, trying not to look at the crowd of tenants that had gathered.
“So, Miss Garcia, are you prepared to pay your bill or should I proceed with the shut-off?” Before I could say anything he called across the room to me in an over-loud baritone
“But we asked for a five-day extension, I’ve been very sick. And we have to use all of our money for the rent. We can’t be without heat—aren’t you a public utility?”
His eyes stared down at me, then closed once before resting at half-mast. His face settled into a fixed gaze befitting his Master of Heat-Lord of Electricity role and stated loudly, “We are a business, Ms. Garcia, not a social service.”
24 days of no service passed and now the suffocating odor of rotting milk products from our shut down fridge permeated the air of our dark, cold mini kitchen as I stood there with the phone on hold. Thirteen calls to service agencies had elicited only a constant refrain, “We have no more funding for utilities .”
“But we have no heat,” I would scream.
“I’m sorry.”
“Name?” a voice sliced through my dark silence, resonant, disgusted.
“Oh, ah, Lisa Garcia,” I answered.”
“Age?” yelled at me. I had taken too long with the first answer.
“Amount of last bill?” any trace of humanness were long ago erased from her voice.
“Income?” I scrambled to answer in the less than five seconds this woman was giving for replies.
If you didn’t answer everything correctly, based on the county needs sheet, you were not helped—no PG&E, no nothing. But I was getting really tired. I didn’t have the energy to think of all the right answers.
“We’ll call you in two or three days.” Click. It was over.
Had I made an information misstep? The fear lingered. I fumbled in the dark to hang up the phone.
Five days later a call came in. “Be there, 1238 San Pablo, Golden Gate Rec Center, 10:00 am sharp. Be on time.”
“But I have to take my mother to the doctor is there another time?” I asked. A long pause—too long.
“That’s your only option.” Click.
I arrived at 9:55 am to a tiny abandoned school building located on a cul-de-sac in Oakland . There were dark, resolute shadows lurking in all the corners and an icy wind whipping through the concrete walls. In the front was a large gate where several people stood trying to stay warm. I listened as they talked.
“The water’s leaking all over the floor. I kept it on with several extension cords out to the hall but then the landlord didn’t pay the electric for the building, so now no more fridge,” the woman closest to me said. She punched out each sentence in a thick Hawaiian pidgin. Her face was a study in pleats, each brown fold waiting for the smile that would break them free.
“Oh we haven’t had it on for about thirty days,” another woman said. “But then my babies started to get sick, ya know, the cold and all.” She had slanted, honey-colored eyes and tight, fine curls. She spoke between asthmatic breaths as she looked down at two very small children. The boy’s face had an ashen film that clouded his light brown skin—his left eye was red and didn’t stop dripping—and he held his head with his small hand. The little girl by his side said nothing. She seemed unable to get a deep breath, and her soiled pink parka was zipped all the way up.
“It really gets cold at night,” the woman whispered. Then there was a silence. “But I didn’t have money for the rent and the utilities,” she continued. We all nodded violent yesses. “I’d figured I’d let them be off for a while—until I caught up. I worked ten days at the market as a relief worker last month, that’s how I get my food for my babies—but then the Salvation Army disqualified me for making an income, so I have to lie or not work at all ‘cause what I make is not enough to pay the utilities,” Everyone fell silent again.
Minutes inched by and then it was 11:30 a.m., and fewer and fewer jokes could be manufactured about the good ol’ days when you had your PG&E and could have parties, entertaining your guests with the wonder of dinners and refrigerated beer. At 11:50 I retreated my shivering body675 to a patch of sun way out in the yard. I was followed by a man I didn’t know screaming to himself, “You just missed me asshole Gemini—two days ago—your fault they put the cream on lemon pies—your fault—I’m alive—you Aries asshole—I know how many miles to the sun—right asshole they’re all Aries in Oakland.”
At 12:40 p.m., a small light green official Oakland city car pulled up. Why that particular green, I pondered—was it a closeout from an industrial boat yard? The only other thing I’ve seen in exactly that color is a Porta Potty. Anyway, they pulled up and rather like a bite-sized Mafia got out all at once—four women of basically the same weight, wearing a similar amount of make-up, and all with variations on the same hairstyle.
They brought with them a power to take us out of our collective misery by bringing us one small step closer to attaining normal human needs. Our hearts started to beat, our stomachs to churn—would we have heat? We were all collectively afraid, weakened by the struggle to be sure we would tell the overlords of aid exactly the right answers. In we stumbled, carefully selecting small, wooden chairs.
“That woman in the gray dress—she’s the bitch,” my Hawaiian friend was mumbling loudly. “With that dress—a real bitch.”
Then we had to shut up. The women were motioning for us to be silent. “You’re here today to apply for help from the energy program of Alameda County,” one of the women told us. “We want you to understand that you only get help from us once a year. It doesn’t matter if your lights get turned off—don’t call us! We get funding once a year, and we have received and order to give special help to those of you that haven’t been helped by us before.”
As she talked, I thought about what I’d learned in the course of my phone calls to various agencies: Over 5,000 people per year in Oakland seek aid to pay utilities. The program, however, helps only 1,500 clients. The majority are families with children and senior citizens.
Meanwhile the woman is still talking. “We can’t promise you’ll receive help, but the fact that you’ve been called to be here today is a good sign. You should know that PG&E is tracing social security numbers so if you’ve had any unpaid bills from as long as ten years back they can find you and without notice will shut off your current service until you’ve paid the unpaid balance. Also if you’ve been calling us for months and have only gotten a busy signal that’s because we haven’t been answering. Alameda County cut off fifty percent of our funding.”
With that last statement she stopped speaking. We all waited. Somehow the clock crawled toward 3:00 p.m. I took pride in the fact that the worker who called on me had the best hair—an upper crest of gray flowing into lower billowing waves of varying shades. She checked all my information and granted me preliminary aid which would cover our past due bill at the Janniffs and at least cover the next thirty days of utilities.
I went back to my seat to await final evaluation. A new woman had joined our group. Her face was pulled tightly across oversized dark yellow teeth that she showed often. “I used to weigh 240 lbs.,” she said with a laugh. Her jeans were draped over a skinny column masquerading as a thigh. “But it’s sorta funny ‘cause when I met my boyfriend he weighed 100 pounds and now he weights 240, and I weigh ninety.” She pulled at her nails as she spoke, revealing with a series of innuendoes the extent of her crack addition.
At this point the Hawaiian woman cut in, “Ya, I know that crack pipe is smooth. I tried once but no more. But my man, he’s on it, girl. If I didn’t hide all the money he’d have us on the street. But I make sure the rent is paid. Any extra I spend on food. He can get off himself—no help from me.”
Right then as I was sitting in that rec room with all these women thinking of all the depressing things we had to do to as poor people just to get a meal, secure housing or get a shelter bed, pay for utilities, I understood the lure of substance abuse, no matter how destructive, as the ultimate numbing distraction to a horrific reality.
Eventually I was granted compensation with a warning to not come back. My Hawaiian friend was not given aid—she had gotten it one other time in twelve months. She walked out mumbling, “I had to get that bitch.” The woman with two children got only partial aid because she admitted to the crime of working ten days that month, which put here income above the allowable level. The lady with the crack addiction gave up in the application process because she had to have proof of income, which she was afraid to retrieve because it was in the apartment of her abusive ex-husband. Those of us who “won” smiled conspiratorially at each other and caressed our yellow aid receipts.
As I walked out the oversized doors into the windy shadows that filled the long hallways, I was a little lighter in my step. A problem was actually solved.
Outside the steel gates of the building, the little boy and girl stood with their mother—the boy was wheezing, his eyes a hollow stare. The mother looked up at me, almost embarrassed, as she attempted to find a hidden button on his coat. “I haven’t been able to afford his asthma inhaler,” she whispered to me. Now it’s the PG&E or his medicine. I have to pay the past due before they’ll help me out here.”
Chapter 51
Three day Notice to Pay rent or quit
After the last several days of unpaid survival work, our utilities were covered. But we had no money left at all, even for soap or toilet paper, much-less food, so, we began writing bad checks to large corporate entities like Walgreens, Safeway, and Longs just to get basics. We promised to ourselves that as soon as we started selling stuff again we would make all the checks good.
One week after the PG&E struggle I woke up to a gentle flapping noise coming from the front glass window of the store. THREE DAYS TO PAY RENT OR QUIT. The letters were large and black and ran in a straight line across the top of the fluttering paper attached with extra wide masking tape .
I leaned my upper body out of the door only long enough to snatch the paper As I read the words small painful tremors ran through my body. I should have been used to it, but you never stop being terrified of homelessness. Never.
No matter how many times you live through the receipt of those words, the feeling of overwhelming fear that follows and the endless instability that ensues hits you as new, fresh and more insurmountable.
In the Jannifs place we mistakenly thought we had a chance for stability, but the final blow to our homefulness was leveled with their unjustified rent increase. On the first day of last month the Jannifs sent us back our rent payment that we had barely scraped together and gave us the $100 rent increase notice effective immediately that they had threatened the month prior and cause we were in the heart of weak rent control having Oakland, a landlord could raise your rent and/or evict you just cause he or she felt like it. As well, the Janifs, were completely unaware that tenants had any protection at all and unfortunately they were mostly right, tenants had little or no protection not to mention representation or advocacy in the mean days of pre-Just Cause ordinance Oakland.
We had responded to their 80% rent increase by certified letter and made several phone calls asking for a reconsideration or at the very least that they only assess the increase after they dealt with the flagrant habitability issues.
But we got no reply. The Janifs believed that by the very fact that they owned the property and you did not that you had no rights to be there if they didn’t want you there. Issues of legality, habitibility, accountability, ethics and/or professionalism ceased when it came to tenants. So after the three day notice was prominantly posted by them on our front door, on our car and all over the communal mail box room used by all 210 tenants in the building, they counted down the three days and on the third day waited for us outside our front door with their hands crossed.
“where is your moving boxes?” when I tried to leave that morning to go to work they were waiting for me. Their adult son, property manager and all –purpose henchman, Billy Janif, Mr. Soluomon Jannif , father and owner and Juli Janif, the mother and real money behind the whole operation I tried to push past them and they stopped me with more questions, “You are supposed to out of here today so I hope you are packing”, they all screamed in unison as if rehearsed.
That day passed and then another and then another and they were completely baffled about what we were doing. They tried to call the police several times but the police kept telling them that it is not a criminal matter, it’s a civil matter and they needed to get a lawyer. I guess they finally heeded that advice and did the unthinkable, they hired an attorney. I am sure that the cost alone for the attorney’s retainer caused them to wait as long as they possibly could.
Chapter 52
One Court Date Away From Homelessness
The oddly bright fluorescent bulbs clashed with the deep cherry wood paneling. It was a Perry Mason room with Safeway lighting.
10:00 am Municipal Court, Department C, Eviction Day. I was one court date away from homelessness. Bits of my stomach started to get caught in my throat.
Varied shades of muted gray and brown wool and polyester paced in and out of my courtroom, walking quickly in and out of the mini swinging doors with the Keep Out sign that separated tenants and other civil criminals, from the officers of the court.
These were the attorneys, almost exclusively the landlord’s attorneys, and periodically they would yell out a name. That day, a man in a gray, slightly wrinkled suit barked out my name. A light shake emanated from his hand that clutched a bulbous briefcase. I got up slowly, turning, to follow him outside.
“Ms. Garcia-Gray, we have a settlement for you.” He started in right away. He didn’t look at me—he looked around me. I paused for a second, thinking naively that maybe he was offering me an actual settlement, but immediately I remembered what the other 22 files held precariously in his swollen briefcase had been “offered” from this well known “eviction specialist” as his card read. This “settlement offer” was just a part of the eviction process masquerading in court-speak that really meant: save my client some money; move out.
I tried to explain my situation to this man—how we had deposits on file that weren’t mentioned in their court papers, and how none of our habitability claims which were documented were included and the fact that there was still no working heater or frig…
What!?” he shouted. His eyes began to dart wildly,“Do you have the rent?” he glared down from the top of his eyes. I proffered another shortened explanation settlement offer, such as a retroactive rent reduction for the months without heat. .
He cut in loudly, “I’ll ask you once more, do have the rent?” He spit slightly at his last demand/command.
“I do, but I don’t want to pay an increase until the apartment is habitable”, I pleaded.
“Well, I just don’t have time for this anymore.” He got up from our little bench and marched back into the courtroom, probably not even bending slightly down to move aside those mini-courtroom swinging doors. I should not be scared, I chanted, this man could not hurt me. But I knew indeed he could, as he whisked back to the judge’s chambers with his conspiratorial conferences branding me to the judge a defrauder, a liar, a cheat, and, worst of all, a tenant—the most unempowered, unimportant member of this court system, usually unrepresented or under-represented for lack of funds.. This man’s power held my homefulness in the balance, and he had just checked the box on his form, “Can’t Settle”.
“All rise.” The judge entered. We did the oath and then he began, “Marcus vs. Malone. Please approach the bench.”
Marcus was the older African-American woman who had been sitting next to me. She had looked straight ahead while the same attorney presented a signed “Settlement Offer” to the judge. Apparently it was a habitability case and this woman had been shuttled outside the courtroom before me by that same man. After a couple of officious shuffles of his papers and the utmost of legal brevity, he “convinced” her of the great advantages of getting out of her home she had lived in for the last 20 years, rather than proceed with the court trial and face the “danger” of losing the case. If she had protested it would have cost his client, the landlord, another $375 in court appearances, but he did not mention that to her. She acquiesced, as she had no counsel and no money for an attorney and therefore not much choice. She quietly approached the bench, her head slightly downturned.
“Do you understand what you signed, Ms. Marcus?” the judge proffered. Her eyes darted up.
“Well, not really. I’m not sure if the leaking water in my apartment, which ruined all of my furniture is a solid case to take to trial.”
“Ms. Marcus, that sounds like a legal question and I cannot answer a legal question. You need to consult with an attorney for that information.”
“But I don’t have any attorney.”
“Well, then what do you want to do?”
“Maybe I could get a continuance.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t grant those on eviction cases. Counsel, is this for possession?”
“Yes, yes, your honor, and there really are no more possible disclosures in this case. A continuance would be a waste of the court’s time,” The lawyer had said with a carefully modulated tone.
With each of the overly definite words her head dropped a little lower. Shortly the gavel was down. The settlement had been reached. She was out.
“Graham vs. Housing Authority.” The judge called the next case. A family of three, headed by one very young woman, approached the bench. It was a housing authority issue. This young mother had been late on rent three months in a row and for the last two had only made partial payments. After some lengthy paper shuffling by a very disinterested housing authority official, the judge requested a recess for deliberation. Some of us walked outside.
“Do you have any matches?” a short, pre-owned cigarette wavered in her small hands.
“Uh, no…sorry.” It was her, the young mother. What could I say? The fuchsia sheen from her nylon running pants blinded my gaze.
“Rent’s a bitch,” she murmured. “They gonna put me and my babies on the street. Why? Cuz of rent. I won’t be able to get another place. This whole thing really messed us up.” Her eyes began to shine with an anxious glaze, “Sometimes it’s jus’ too hard to be dealin’ with all these problems…”
“I know…how it is…”
“I already called all my family. No one’s got any room,” she continued unerred by my empathy. “I even called about the shelters—they’re all filled.
“It all comes down to energy, honey,” a bright pink pencil-like finger clutched at a new cigarette addition to our group. She wheezed out the rest of her paragraph. “After you deal with all of life’s regular problems there’s no energy left to deal with these kinds of problems—so you end up on the street.”
I thought about energy, about how if I had just a little bit more maybe I could have researched that one more option. Court noises drifted past my ears as I recalled my process to get advocacy in the thirty days that led up to this court date.
Third appointment, 14th call: Legal Aid
A deep gray stone building tucked into abandoned walkways. The walkway edged you around a corner with a small oft-replaced paper arrow – “Legal Aid” it said. I walked through doors made of beveled glass, the kind a detective would have had in “The Maltese Falcon.” The elevator was aging pine, the buttons for each floor were worn black plastic. Darkened stairways and adjoining floors connected with overly painted wrought iron and stained marble. The fourth floor was awash in dusted sunlight.
After a short wait I was directed to room 304. As I inched down the hall, large droplets of sweat crept up my spine, invading the soft, dry cotton of my new underwear. No emanating signs of the law – one might have mistaken it for an accountant’s office. Then – a large brown door, copper-coated oversized numbers shouted “304”. I twisted the knob too carefully. A man who appeared not much older than me sat at a very big desk in the middle of the room. As I entered he didn’t look all the way up, just a partial upswing of the eyes and head. After gulp-coughing I started right in, having rehearsed my brief intro nine to ten times in the waiting room so as not to waste any of my allotted six minute time.
“Well, my problem is complex, but I’ll try to give you a brief intro…”
“Do you have any papers?” he sliced through my tense wheeze of words.
“Huh?”
“Can I see your papers?”
“Yes, but they make no sense without the…”
“I need to see your papers,” a weary edge entered his voice on this last command, again without looking up, only forward at an odd mid-air angle.
After a minute or two of humiliating paper shuffling, I handed him the skewed, one-sided paperwork, primarily documents prepared and constructed by the attorneys for the plaintiff, the landlord.
He hummed and sighed as he read, accompanied by a side-to-side shaking of his head, and then I saw it—a click of the eyes—a particularly long open and shut of the lids and I had lost him forever. He discovered a definitive legal reason that he couldn’t help me. He let me go on with my superfluous words, but we both knew the “I can’t help you” was just a matter of a few more seconds.
“Why didn’t you come here sooner? Not that I could have helped you, but you would have had a few more options.”
“Because I didn’t know about your program. I was told by all the referral agencies that I could only go to the clinics, not receive actual representation.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” his eyes had flicked briefly in my direction, but were now comfortably locked into an intense study of his doorknob. “But there’s really nothing we can do. For whatever reason, you waited too long before you came to us and essentially they are asking for possession to be granted, which in an eviction process the landlord always gets.
“But I have the rent money and this would be an extreme hardship for us
“Unfortunately that’s not enough. In many states if you have the money they automatically give the tenant possession, or in New York they assign a public defender to low income tenants in eviction cases. But I really can’t represent you because there’s no chance you could win, therefore it’s not a justifiable expenditure of our time.”
I climbed out of my chair, unable to say a pseudo-pleasant good-bye, and tumbled outside. I watched the masses pass me, certain each of their twinkling laughs was unfettered by the imminent danger of homelessness. I had never felt so desperately sad. My bones ached with the overwhelming possibility of it all. Dry tears welled in the corners of my eyes, large gulps of unused air throttled my breathing. I could not explain this sadness to the minions of apartment dwellers that surrounded me—to be able to know your kitchen sink, to look at it comfortably and know it will always be yours. To sit on your back step and fondle your light weed growth, look calmly upon your front door with no danger of not seeing it again, to lavish in insideness—your walls, your light fixtures, your toilet paper holder.
Fourth appointment, 25th call. A pro bono attorney visit:
Glass, so much glass. Tinted, solarized, sparkling, gilded expanses of architecturally correct glass begging a light caress from the clouds. My referral slip said 450 Jackson #1300. My first real attorney. “450” – the numbers were etched in stone and marble. I entered through walnut doors. Thick, blood-red carpet cleaned hourly by special services glistened beneath me. A smooth elevator ride with a honey-voiced operator.
“Thirteenth floor”, he murmured.
Suite 1300. There were ten hand-engraved gold surnames on the redwood door.
Can I help you?” I was greeted by a well-dressed secretary shifting delicately in her Macy’s ensemble, hip, ever so slightly.
“Uh, yes…I’m here to see John Sandal.”
“One second please. Take a seat.” She directed me to a series of small chairs lining the office
And then He came out. Round of face, tall of stature, small bright eyes hidden behind round rimless glasses.
“Please come in,” he beckoned me with a softened nasal tone—a worked-on voice, probably originating from a middle-California town such as Modesto or Fresno. “So, what’s the problem?”
As he shoved out these words and settled his gaze on me I noticed his hand glide across the desk and flip a switch on a tiny box to his right like a snakes tongue. A red light began flashing at intervals. He noticed my eyes wandering to his subversive action.
“Oh, this? Well, since we only have 30 minutes at this cut-rate price, I find I must keep track of every minute and demi-minute or before you know it, I’m giving away a whole $100 phone call for nothing. Hey, it’s hard times. Just the other day a client called up screaming after he got his statement because his whole $1,500 retainer had been used up in five long distance question calls. He screamed that he hardly ever reached me and most of the time, indeed, we had not actually spoken to one another, but what he did not understand is I have to charge for the time I am on hold as well as messages left on his machine, any extensive dialing time, as well as our actual phone conversations. Anyway, enough of that, please go on.”
“Uh…okay.” And then I embarked uncertainly into my “facts”. Somehow I couldn’t get it straight where my fall had originated. We have the rent money without the increase like we always have had. As messed up as the Jannifs are we never wanted to move, we just didn’t want to pay more for a broke-down place that had no working frig or heater.
The timer whirred softly in the corner. He blinked twice, then licked his line-thin lips.
“Oh-h-h yes…you have options. There’s a thing called Relief from Forfeiture…there are also negotiations…and subsequent out-of-court settlements. I could even get you some cash…there are many options for you.” He proceeded to tell me a vast array of procedural manipulations that he could wield with his legal knowledge. I stopped listening at a certain point, unable to follow anymore legalese, my eyes resting on the whir. The timer let off a muffled bell.
“Ms. Garcia-Gray, I guess that’s it. I’ll make a proposal retainer statement for you and you can decide what you want to do.” With that he got up with a college basketball thrust. “Ill be right back.”
I watched the city move in quick time animation below his 26th floor vista. Silver-lined clouds shifted. A gold-framed milky-colored wife stared at me from his desk holding a very pale baby. A store-bought grandparent group in another frame smiled at the pencil sharpener.
A few minutes passed and then a swoosh of Ivory soap and a touch of just-ingested cheese Danish rushed back in the room.
“Here’s your estimate. Take a few seconds to read through it.” He dropped his paper language into my trembling hands. There were many careful equations, numerical rivers and deltas streaming down the page. I touched it ever so gently, forcing my futile hope to lodge in my neck muscles as I ran my fingers tentatively over the bottom figure of $1,496. I gulped softly and lowered my gaze.
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford this. I really only have my rent money. If I use any of it I won’t have enough for the rent that’s owed. Is there any way you could direct me to do this myself?”
“Oh, no…there’s so many documents to file…this is a complex court procedure.” He looked flatly at me through his translucent blue pupils, again blinking exactly twice, complete extension and closure of each lid simultaneously. “I understand…times are hard…you’ll do whatever you have to do.” And then the vocal pace quickened – almost hyper. “Just remember, you do have options!” and then he was calm, his face a flaccid plane. We stood up together. “Thanks for coming.”
I nodded stiffly to the secretary, pushing away the heavy wood enclosures to the Outside. Again, I noticed the sky’s delicate transitions. A cold breeze bit at my legs.
* * * * *
“Order. All rise. Judge Derk presiding. Housing Authority vs. Graham.”
“Yes, your honor. John Magaw, attorney for the plaintiffs,” he stated in loud, very fast tones. “She has no case, your honor, it’s been three months. We have served her timely notice. She already requested one stay. These requests for stays are just delay tactics. We gave her plenty of time to pay or vacate.”
“Do you have anything to add, Ms. Graham?”
“I offered payments for the rent owed after I lost my job. They refused unless I had the whole rent. I was just asking for payments until I was employed again. I was laid off.”
“Your honor, she’s three months behind. That’s almost $1,800.”
“How much money can you give toward the rent today?”
“I only get $980 a month for myself and my two babies.”
“Please answer the question directly, Ms. Graham. How much can you deposit with the court today toward the rent?”
“I brought $580,” she replied almost in a whisper.
“That’s not enough for my client, your honor.”
“I’m afraid I can’t extend anymore stays on this case, Ms. Graham.”
“Thank you, your honor,” The attorney’s mouth was small, almost invisible as he formed the appropriate closing remarks. His hair shot up from his head in large black waves creating dagger-like crests positioned at whomever he was speaking to. He turned his head to the waiting audience, his black eyes finally resting on me. I was next.
The brown floor—maybe a carpet—began to churn as a hushed fear fell over the room.
“He usually doesn’t show up in person.”
“He’s the eviction king – it’s all he does.”
“He only works for landlords,” muffled voices of reverence surrounded me.
As the voices beside me increased in volume a thick starch smell suddenly filled the air. I looked up to see a cardboard-like shirt standing above us.
In a fury-filled whisper the courtroom sheriff screamed, “Do I need to eject you from the courtroom? There is NO TALKING!”
We all nodded in unison… “I’m sorry” and “excuse me” gathered at our collective lips.
“Call the next case,” a voice rang out from the bench.
“Garcia-Gray vs. Jannif.”
“John Magaw, attorney for the plaintiff here.”
“Who is here for the defendant?”
I stood up. This was it. I stepped carefully through the brown waves beneath my feet. I would not fall. My legs would not buckle under me as they were wont to do. My eyes would focus on a place just to the left of the judge. No one could completely see the red terror that would pass before them. My hands would not crumple when they reached down to move aside the short dividing doors to get to my designated seat.
“Lisa Garcia-Gray, in pro per.”
“We’re asking for possession and that you deny the request for relief from forfeiture he is asking for, your honor.”
“Proceed, Mr. Magaw.”
“Well, first I’ll present to the court a copy of the original notice served in a timely manner.” A paper was passed to the judge. “We’ve already been granted possession, your honor. It’s a simple case. Her request is just a delay tactic.”
“Ms. Garcia-Gray, what would you like to say?”
“Your honor, I am here to request a relief from forfeiture. We have the rent money that’s owed. It would be an extreme hardship for her to be forced to move.”
“But possession was granted to the plaintiff, Ms. Garcia.”
“I had no money for legal representation so I did not know how to present the issues of the unfair rent increase and flagrant inhabitability that brought this into court.” At this point I looked up from my paperwork, finally prepared to see my failure reflected in his glassy eyes. Moments dripped by, a paper shuffling and rattling sound rose into the voiceless air in an orchestrated cacophony. Then he looked at me, his face filled with resigned disinterest. A slight smile seemed to play with the sides of his lips.
“Ms. Garcia, I’m sorry you went to all this trouble, because I have to say why did you bother? I rarely, if ever, grant a relief from forfeiture on an eviction case. As you know, the possession is granted, and I am going to deny this request for relief. I hope you have found another place. You’ll have about five days before the marshal comes with the writ.”
“Is there any chance of getting an appeal?”
“Not unless you can deposit five or six months rent in advance with the court at the time of filing. Counsel, please approach the bench.”
There was a momentary hush. The dagger-like head shot over one soulful dart of lighter brown inside his blank gaze.
“Call the next case.”
Chapter 53
Trash
“You are trash”, Our relationship with the Janifs ended 6 days after that court date with one sentence spit through Billy Jannifs gritted teeth and manicured moustache. I could have yelled back about the broken plumbing, the ants and roaches and the forever cracked window, I could have added the always broken heater and the peeling paint. But I just cringed agreeing with his assessment of me as most beaten down people do. Loathing myself and my mother for our poverty more than even he could have dreamed of.
We drove away from the Jannifs that morning with a little more things in and on the car, causing our rear view to be completely covered. We drove fast and even made a u-turn on Telegraph ave attempting to incorporate a mini-screech as much, as our old station wagon tires could muster.
But we had nowhere to go, no family waiting , no planes to catch, no apartments to furnish, no people to talk to. So with a suffocating layer of sadness, we drove around Oakland fighting about what to do, picking desperately over our meager choices like birds over one crumb of stale bread and within seconds we were screaming at each other, throwing blame at one another as fast as we could manufacture the words.
“You should have called that other place that gave rent assistance”
“I tried but I was working on the PG&E thing”
“that was a waste of time”
“I did it cause YOU said to”
“I didn’t SAY to .. we had no heat , no lights and no hot water, whaddya mean I said to ?
“None of this matters anyway , the point is what are we gonna do now?”
And that was usually the end of the fight at least momentarily, as it crushed the air that both of us had in our lungs and we both felt unbelievably terrified and hopeless again.
We went from that horrible day into an endless series of horrible nights of outsideness. The deafening cold was my bead partner again. In the last six months since we got the Jannifs place the car had gotten another dent and a new hole in the floor board so new channels of night wind reached up and bit into my flesh like small daggers.
The tickets started again and the pile of belongings and paper on the cars floor and dashboard got higher, swaying to and fro with every breeze
One very dark and cold night after a successful day of “selling” we stayed up on Telegraph ave to eat, take a walk and hang out. At approximately 10:25 pm we returned to the car which was in a University California (UC) parking lot, As I jiggled the key into the stiff ignition an ominous white light hit the hood, illuminating the dust that lay in a deep crevice
“UC Police.. don’t move” a mechanical voice filled the air around us And then we saw them, two shining white oversized vehicles circled first and then stopped. Within seconds there was a heavy click-click of door handles; the crunch of heels hitting asphalt, the deep wumph of doors slamming, faint police band radio yelps which grew louder until a pair of thighs appeared at my window, swathed in too-tight khaki polyester. Bits of arrests came through a shoulder radio as he slowly squatted to reveal a white-mustached face, his pores glistening in the night lights.
“Why are you parked in a University of California parking lot at 10:30 p.m, what is all this stuff in the back.?” His high powered flashlight traveled to the wagon portion of our car and then he added. “And the registration on this vehicle has expired.”
I quickly tried to explain that my mother and I were art vendors and that we were transporting stock—unusual, perhaps, but not a crime. I didn’t add that currently we were homeless, but that detail didn’t seem to matter to him. He wanted to see my driver’s license. I fumbled—where had I put it? Oh shit! It was in my other jacket.
“Sorry, officer, I didn’t bring it but I remember the number.” I recited it slowly, tremulously.
“Just a minute,” he said, retreating from my car, caressing his shoulder radio as he murmured softly into it.
Meanwhile the officer from the other squad car had been staring into the back of the car at the clothing, boxes and small appliances lumped into an ever-growing pile A brush of warm wet air flowed around the tape I’d pasted over the broken vent window. I was hoping that he didn’t research further into the lapsed insurance that I no longer had, but considering this was clearly a DWP stop ( Driving While Poor) he was probably compiling a complete dossier of my crimes of poverty while we waited.
Suddenly the second officer’s pace began to quicken, and the first one’s thighs again appeared at my window. This time he didn’t bother squatting but stated in an oddly mechanized squeak, “You’re going to have to come with me, Ms. Garcia.”
Inwardly I screamed in despair, but I said quietly, slowly, “What are you talking about?”
“There’s a warrant out for your arrest, so we’re going to have to take you to jail.”
“For what?”
“A warrant for $2,800 in tickets.”
“What about my car?”
“We’re going to be towing your car.”
“But my mother can’t get home without me. Can’t she at least stay in the car and wait for a friend?”
“I’m sorry, but we’re required to tow unregistered vehicles parked in university lots.”
“But it’s only been expired for two days.”
“Please step out of the car, Ms. Garcia.” His hands seemed oversized as he clanked the steel shackles on my wrists.
He didn’t look me in the eye anymore; he spoke to the place in the air that I happened to inhabit. And I too had stopped feeling, so I stood numbly as a female officer they had called in frisked me. As we were driving away, I looked back; men had descended on the car. It was being fed on a giant fishhook to an immense yellow truck, while my mother stood off to one side in the dark garage, clutching her backpack with both hands.
As we drove off, I sat back on the hard plastic shell which masqueraded as a seat. Every minute bump in the road cut into my vertebrae. Now that I was powerless they could kill me, I thought. Moments became minutes and then we were there.
“Don’t sit on your cuffs, they’ll tighten,” I was warned. Big grates of steel with prison movie peepholes were opened by immense steel keys. Code words were barked through more peepholes, and then we were allowed final entry. Since it was Saturday night, I was told I would be booked by the UC Police and then transferred to the city of Berkeley’s jail, and from there, depending on the severity of my crime, transferred to the county jail at Santa Rita.
I was let into a very small cubicle and ordered to take off all my personal effects. What did that mean? I wondered. I started to pull off all my large jewelry, extracting each expression of myself, putting it in the brown paper vomit bag they gave me. I was all done, I thought, until a female cop called out, “Your belt and shoes as well.”
“But my pants are only kept up with this belt, it’s a style;” I explained.
“I’m sorry,” and then she left me alone again.
I realized I no longer had the right to rock a “look.” Style wasn’t for criminals like me. I took off my belt and held my pants up, crumpled into a ball in my right fist. With that belt went my last trace of power.
Eventually another cop pulled me out of the cubicle to ask me some questions, to take my fingerprints and my mug shot. The men talked about me while I was waiting, making jokes about whether I was single, how they had missed their coffee break all for me. Finally I was brought back to my cubicle to await transfer.
Through the tiny air holes in the windowless room I heard the man from the next cell scream, “Bloody showers—people take bloody showers.” Then he started whispering directly into the screen connecting our cells, “They’ll make you take showers. Insist that you see their kidneys before you give up your dirt. They’ll take the oxygen right out of your pores.” Then silence.
After almost six hours of “procedure” and paperwork, the arresting officer determined that I needed to be incarcerated at least for the weekend, with a possible transfer to Santa Rita. He was quick to inform me that I could have taken care of the tickets before now and not have landed in this mess. I didn’t have the energy left to explain to him that I had gone into court and what had happened
As the policeman implied that I was just “lazy,” and that’s why I was here, a new feeling began to take hold—I started to feel relaxed about my fate. Life, problems, landlords, phones, cars, were just too difficult; I would stop trying to fight. I would just be eaten up by this jail—almost analogous to suicide but without the mess. There would be a kind of withdrawal, a relaxed death of self. Two of my teeth ached very badly, I hadn’t taken care of them cause I had no money for a dentist visit, but hey, I won’t need my teeth in jail, I thought. I’ll learn to like cigarettes and sip black coffee and never worry about anything again.
The arresting officer came in again, this time saying nothing, bypassing me with his disgusted eyes as he unshackled me from the bench and led me down narrow corridors and back to his vehicle for our short ride to Berkeley’s city jail—more peepholes, a dirty, cage-like elevator, more codes, locks, and whispers. I was left in a yellowish room as he finally departed from my life. Two new police officers took my bag of possessions. After a few disdainful chuckles about the in competency of the UC police, I was led into an oddly bright cell filled with women and shown to an upper steel bunk bed frame partially concealed by a grayish/yellowish quilted mattress, sort of like a futon from hell.
I moved it gingerly aside and attempted to lie on the ribs of the bright steel bed, but I couldn’t seem to close my eyes tight enough to shut out the white intensity of the light. A headache began that would not depart for the duration of my stay.
Voices—quiet, resolved, yet lightly shaking—started to fill the air; bits of disconnected fear, fragmented concerns, and realizations of collective desperation and shared terror. One voice finally cut through. “I was only getting a cigarette, one fucking cigarette. The Berkeley PD have a quota. My son always says the police are too eager. I never believed him, thought he was just making excuses for getting arrested all the time. It didn’t matter what I said in my defense, it seemed to get me further into it, at the end of my explaining this cop would ask the same questions all over again: What were you doing on this corner at 4:00 a.m.? Who were you supposed to meet? Why were you talking to those boys? I tried to tell him I only knew them because of my son but he wouldn’t listen. My son always said it didn’t matter what you said—they’d only believe what they wanted to. Why did I need a cigarette?” Suddenly from below a very small voice broke in, “Oh, shit, did you get your sandwich yet? Excuse me, did you get your sandwich yet? I’m so cold.” The breathy plea was coming from the bunk under mine.
Oh, I thought, that Wonder Bread nightmare I was allowed to see before I was led into the cell. “No,” I called down, “but when I get it, I’ll give it to you.”
“Oh, thank you,” the thin voice replied, and then she coughed and sneezed and got up to pee in the little toilet at the foot of our bunk bed. My headache seemed a knife lodged in the back of my neck. The ambient voices reduced to an occasional murmur. I began to wonder what time it was and then if time was passing. There were no clocks, watches, radios, variations from dark to light. At first this filled me with terror, but then I started to feel a comfort in this timelessness because it was a further separation from all that was reality. An extremely loud bell signaled us what to do; now it was time for sleep.
Several hours later—or maybe fifteen minutes—it was mealtime; we were informed by the bell. The warden’s compassion was gauged by her food-serving technique. How she brought us our food became extremely important to us—whether she would actually say our names or take the food all the way into our common area and put it on the table rather than just shoving it through the hole in the door. This first warden was nice, so we were happy. We all sat together as we ate, and I began to attach names to voices.
Mary Jo, a 56-year-old retired teacher in the Oakland schools, had had an unfortunate lapse in her attempt to quit smoking. At 4:00 a.m., she had ventured out of her apartment and walked to her friend’s house a block away. A cop patrolling the neighborhood saw an African-Descendent woman walking by Alcatraz and Shattuck and figured she must be a suspect. After extensive questioning and a subsequent search he couldn’t find any evidence, but he called in her driver’s license number anyway and found she had a $3,000 warrant for failures to appear on a moving violation. He took her to jail.
Penny, a white homeless woman, had been picked up from her parked car in Berkeley. She’d become homeless after leaving her abusive husband. Her car’s registration had just expired, and while she was parked on Haste near Telegraph on Saturday night, she was arrested for the registration expiration and one moving violation that had mounted up to $3,200 in fines. None of us had drug or alcohol violations or had been driving under the influence.
The strange psychology of cool comes into play in jail—the look, the gaze, how long it lingers, what is said about little things, how much complaining is okay and about what. “She’s so nice,” Penny proclaimed about one warden. “Be careful of that other one; she won’t even look at you, but this one, I asked her for a toothbrush. She looked right at me and said she’d try.”
I thought about how I hated that same warden—how she had taken my Vaseline away even though I had begged her, explaining I only used it for my lips to keep them from cracking and bleeding. She had looked right at me and without blinking said, “Too bad,” I didn’t say any of this because she was Penny’s favorite warden and she needed to believe that there was some humanity left around us. Privately I resolved to continue the quixotic struggle over the Vaseline—to fight all wardens nice or mean until I imposed my minuscule, senseless will to keep my lip salve.
Suddenly—clank, clank—the outer door sounded and then the inner locks opened. The newcomer was beautiful: charcoal brown, thick woven plaits, olive-shaped eyes, still in the shock state, brimming equally with fear and hope. First time, I thought. Our gaze was careful.
“Sit down.” Mary Jo offered her a seat at the table. Penny had been carefully positioning her bed mat on the floor under the suspended television, readying herself for when and if it came on. She got up immediately to offer her mat space. We observed such delicate etiquette, strangely happy to be able to give, to hold on to our gallantry. We had been completely forgotten; our respect was reserved only for each other. Even our friends outside had become distant voices, suddenly uninterested in us, out of our league.
Gently we questioned the new woman. “Why are you in?”
Her eyes were excited, dilated. “Warrants. I couldn’t keep up with my community service assignment and pay for childcare so I got a job, but there wasn’t enough money from it to pay the tickets and survive. So I went back to court to ask for an extension or lower payments, or even a smaller community service assignment, but the judge said there was no more community service and fifty dollars a month is the least you can pay. So I just gave up. Three months later they caught me—wrong place, wrong time.”
We all looked at one another; all of us locked in the same vicious cycle. Mary Ann began to repeat her cigarette story, punctuating each sentence with an “uh-huh.” My head was starting to pulsate with pain, but somehow it didn’t matter. For the first time in my life I felt at ease, no longer a wannabe fraternizing with people outside my reality. These women wouldn’t think I was scum because I couldn’t pay my rent and got evicted, because my car was rickety and filled with junk, because my jeans weren’t the perfect oldest newest and my shoes were wrong. They might even appreciate my struggle to care for my family in a society that encourages you to abandon anything that interferes with your independence. I didn’t have to hide my pain; in fact I was soothed that a society that will drop you in a heartbeat had finally just let me go. I no longer cared that I could never overcome these problems.
“Gotta get some candy, just somethin.’ What about your man, would he bring you some?” Penny was pleading with the new woman in hushed tones.
Loud clanks, keys jangling. We all turned toward the door as it swung open dramatically. It was my favorite Vaseline warden. She was motioning to me. “Garcia, you’re going to court …. get going—NOW!”
I looked quickly at everyone. We cheered together, promising foreverness. Guilt and terror filled me. The system wanted another look at me.
I was taken to court in an orange suit and shackles. I was led into a tiny cell with a blurry glass wall and a phone with no dial tone. I was told to expect a visit from my newly appointed public defender with whom I would negotiate the conditions of my freedom. A tall man in a non-descript suit flew in and out in a matter of seconds.
Part of the craziness of the system is that it’s almost impossible to get free legal help over traffic matters, i.e., sleeping in vehicle tickets, moving violations and other supposed “civil” matters and the only way you can get a court appointed attorney which most poor folks call a “public pretender” because of their consistent disinterest, sleepiness and or lack of job experience, is if you’ve been incarcerated. It wouldn’t be til the next time that I was incarcerated that I would meet up with an extremely innovative attorney who helped me in ways that changed my life forever, but today I was led to court in ankle shackles like the criminal of the state that I was, armed with a flagrantly inexperienced law appointee aka public pretender.
When we got into court they unshackled me into the tense looking audience. There was desperation in everyone’s face that Wednesday morning. It was our one chance to redeem ourselves, to clean our record, whatever that meant. So when the rather ashen, yawning man wearing a sheriff’s uniform gruffly said, “Paperwork,” we shook in our collective boots and showed him what we had. If it was sufficient, he would check our name off on his list that he submitted to the judge and direct us to a seat with a detached snarl.
Without warning, a whir came from the upper right corner of the room where a TV screen was mounted. A face appeared, to inform us in an extremely nasal voice, “I am Judge Rasmussen. I am here through video to tell you the laws of the court.”
As he read us our rights, I found myself fading in and out. After his droning video introduction, Judge Rasmussen appeared in person. There was much flurry about whether the two worlds that flanked me required translators. Sheer terror shone from the eyes of the Middle Eastern man sitting on my left. Finally a translator was acquired, but somehow I thought the man would’ve fared better without, as his fix-it ticket progressed to a license suspension and a $300 fine.
The man sitting in the front row had been charged with not making a complete stop. He had a large diagram which he’d mapped out on newsprint. After some muffled questions the judge looked up once and dismissed the case.
When my name was called, I explained that I’d served time in jail and had no money except what I made selling art on the street, and as well that I was the sole caregiver for my mom who was disabled. The judge reviewed my papers and decided he would convert my huge fine to a huge community service assignment. I nodded in agreement even though I knew that 2700 hours of community service would be virtually impossible for me to complete, but still shaking with jail residue, I backed away from the bench without a word. Our car, riddled with unpaid tickets, a distant memory, never to be retrieved again.
The woman who was heard after me requested a community service assignment. She had just been laid off and couldn’t afford the bail, but the judge told her that to get her car out of impound she needed to pay the bail first.
After the bailiff unshackled a newly "free" me, I was directed to turn in my papers at the building across the street. Across the street, I waited in line behind a small woman who barely reached the window. An adamant employee was telling her, “No, we can’t make a court date for you unless you pay the bail on these parking tickets.”
“But I can’t afford the bail, that’s why I need to go to court,” she said.
“I’m sorry. These tickets are over three months old; you’ll have to pay the bail before you go to court.”
The woman gave up and withdrew from the window. She seemed to get smaller as she left the jail building, free for now. I turned in my papers and ran after her, hoping to give her some advice, nervously clutching my tube of Vaseline in my pocket.
Chapter 54
Keys
The headache I left jail with clung to my head like stale gum for over six months, but it really wasn’t the headache it was the memory of the headache, the fear, the powerlessness and in some ways the beginning of consciousness. The realization that we as poor women, poor people in Amerikka were so vulnerable, so powerless, so connected, was the beginning of my enlightenment
Meanwhile, the art-making and the poverty crimes got more serious, more complex and much more dangerous After I got “out” my mother was determined by any means necessary that we absolutely could not be without a roof, and yet we had even less resources than we had before. I was directed to put on the rent-starter suit and cause our real time fictional/real art/life needed a “frame” Store-fronts were the order of the day.
One night when we were driving through the Berkeley streets searching for that nights parking place, pondering our pennies to see if we could afford a motel room we stumbled upon a sign, STORE WITH LIVING SPACE FOR RENT
“Hello, I was calling about the store for rent” I started calling about it the next morning at 8:30 am.
“Oh yes dear, its beautiful place, it needs a little work….well come and pick up the keys and you can see for yourself, ” A sing song voice shouted into the phone. Within minutes we had the keys, within hours we had moved in.
“Did you like the place dear” I met Mrs. Lyon only once, a tiny woman who wore her shiny white hair in a swirling bun like silver cotton candy and epitomized the notion of “old money”, when I went to get the keys at her palacial Berkeley hills office/home. The rest of the time we only spoke by phone, and due to her diminished hearing she would always scream into the phone as though I was very far away
“Oh yes but there is no working bathroom, can we get a toilet put in and a maybe a sink....” I tried to sound nonchalant as I listed the multitude of problems wrong with the place, “and there is no tile in the kitchen or carpet, or any drapes or anything, I mean we can do a lot of the repairs but we don’t really have a lot of money…”
“Well dear, if you can do the repairs then we can give you something off the rent”
“How much is the rent?”
“Well deeeeah, I can give it to you for $1.00 per square foot”
“How many square feet is it?”
“Well, its 1800 dear”
“Oh, “ I audibly gulped, knowing that we could maybe raise one months rent at that rate ($1800) after six months of non-stop t-shirt sales. Maybe.
I agreed to everything she said, having no idea how to do any of the needed repairs. Notwithstanding the uninhabitability of the place, within a month we had “installed” the storefront with one of our most compelling tableaus to date. Including; “the phobia support group” a group of cut-out cartoon characters who all suffered from severe phobias and other assorted pathologies and “met” as a group on a 24/7 basis under a table. “Count the heads” an interactive contest where you, the passerby, would guess which mannequin head had the number under it and throw your “guess” through the mail slot. The myth of Dee and tiny…. A story that was painstakingly “written” in its entirety on the wall of the 1000 square foot store, from one end to the other.
Dee and tiny and their eleven brothers and sisters were sailing on a yaught in the Bermuda triangle when their boat capsized killing everyone but Dee and Tiny, who were rescued by a Hindu Tamal coast guard cutter and brought to Berkeley where they worked on the street selling painted clothing for 17 years and saved $780.00 dollars.
And there were clothes, so many clothes on racks, on the walls, on the floor. My mother continued to create amazing pieces of wearable art; including “night of a thousand faces coat” which integrated sound and light. You, the audient, listened to the thousand stories through sound chips attached to every “face” hand-printed on the coat.
After the last check bounced at the boutique Berkeley art school we began to sit –in on performance art classes at San Francisco State University. We had the honor to meet conceptual and sound artists like Ellen Zweig, Doug Kahn, and Pamela Z, not to mention teachers like Leonard Hunter and Lise Swenson who encouraged us to do what we were doing and then some.
As our “appropriated” education at SF State increased our art got more and more complex, including elements of sound, theory, video and dance. Our own versions of Linda Montano meets Hugo Ball with a smidgeon of Chris Burden thrown in began gaining attention. Suddenly we were riding on this incredible high of performance and installation art infamy, we had articles written about us and appeared on local radio shows, we were doing extremely innovative “life-art”. Our mythos was building, our poverty compounding.
Chapter 55
A cold wetness
One morning I awoke to a cold wetness lapping at my feet. Due to the size of the pre-1900’s mini-closet in this storefront my whole body never really fit in the closet, leaving my calves and feet to droop into the main room. On this day, I opened my eyes and found my feet completely submerged in over three feet of water .
One of the main pipes that led from a makeshift toilet we had installed in a closet had broke and gushed over the entire bottom floor
“Mrs. Lyon, please send a plumber , the main pipe has broke and this place is flooded.”
“ You aren’t even supposed to be living in there, who are you?”
“You told us to move in if we could fix the place”
“I said no such thing, you need to get out of my house, you are trespassing on my land” After living there 6 months and investing over 1500 dollars of time, money and sweat into a place that wasn’t fit to live in previously we were suddenly tresspassers. Within minutes she had called the police.
“BOOM BOOM BOOM…Hello .. Police.. OPEN THE DOOR!!!” The police always had a special terrifying depth to their knock which made it that much more menacing. Their black gloved hands pounded on the long bay windows that made up the 20’s style store front causing them to shake and tremble.
After we opened the door and they marched in “with authority” as though they expected to find a crack lab in the corner of the room, they began to question us as to what we were doing there. Five minutes passed of us producing every document we had to the cops which proved we had been there for the last six months doing repairs, and then without explaining anything to us they walked out. We found out later that the cops had determined that it was in fact a “tenant landlord”issue and Mrs Lyon would have to get an attorney and file papers to get us evicted.
Within 24 hours of the pipe break we received a NOTICE TO VACATE and within 72 more hours we received an illegal unlawful detainer notice. Illegal because they didn’t properly “notice” us, but in the end it didn’t matter, we couldn’t stay there anymore, the entire contents of our life floating through the room in 3 feet of rusty water like lost ships at sea.
Chapter 56
Destruction in Art
The eviction was swift and illegal. Mrs Lyon retaining one of the slimiest real estate attorneys around, his motto, “if you rent, watch out” He lied to the judge about the illegal notice, he didn’t inform us about the court date and he falsified the dates so we were forced to move almost immediately. In the entire 15 days that the whole process took they never even tried to fix the plumbing and refused all of our calls.
Their attorneys smarmy lack of ethics were only matched by mothers determination to not be roof-less again. Roof-less because although we were, by any means necessary, “acquiring” shelter, we were only there by our ongoing crimes of poverty.
After Mrs Lyons place we spent the next three months in one of the most terrifying Patel-owned motels on the edge of downtown Oakland replete with dirty sheets and cockroaches aplenty we spent most nights dragging large broken furniture in front of the door as there no was no working locks on the door and admittedly convicted sex offenders roamed the halls day and night.
It was at this time that I began yet another sex-less love affair with a very white, very conventional man. In retrospect I realize that all of three men I loved were recreations of the hazy memory I managed to retain of my dad
He was an artist who was in search of a muse. I was a daughter in search of a father-alike. A cold, somewhat bland simulation of a male, he personified all that was white and middle class. I fell in love with a slightly skewed Greg Brady.
Our love was a series of ablinear happenings. We only met in secret places and at secret times. I never revealed my complete situation with my mom and with the desperation of our life, but in fact played out the mythos that we were creating every day. Every meeting with him was a tableau of text and image. All of our time was spent in the middle of my stories.
Chapter 57
San Pablo
The last storefront in our “berkeley series” was the most uninhabitable of them all. The building was originally created as an old theatre built in the turn of the century that had been long ago abandoned and turned into a series of unsuccessful businesses, in the end it stood there, empty, dark and perpetually lost in the shadows of the dark side of San Pablo Avenue in West Berkeley. It had 2000 feet of stone flooring and absolutely no heat.
Our acquisition of this place was perhaps the most dangerous of all, as we truly did “get the Keys” from the realtor, and then without even an agreement, credit check or nod, we just moved in. The police were called several times, but every time they came we weren’t there. Eventually the magical thirty days of habitation passed and now it would take a court process to evict us
With no heat, no money and no help, we installed the storefront with the highly conceptual piece: Fear of the Marketplace, a literal and metaphorical translation of my mothers disability played out in a 20x30 square foot glass case. In the middle was a sign that read; If you want an item in the window, throw your money through the mail slot in the door and we will throw the product out to you.
There were also my “books” a series of painted furniture with all of my love poems painted in large black letters all over the “pages”, i.e., the end table, chairs and broken lamps piled in a corner of the window.
The art and life merged in this place to launch “The Art of Homelessness” replete with docent tours through our life as we were living it and the beginning of the video documentary on the Myth of Dee and Tiny and Mom and Dad’s Birthplace.
Due to the severe chill pervasive in that space, I began an intimate relationship with a tiny space heater purchased with our last illicit Walgreens run. One night that had dropped to a low of 36 degrees, I cuddled up to the soothing orange lines of electrical warmth contained in the tiny metal box. At 5 or 6 am I awoke to a thick smell of something cooking that I didn’t recognize. As I looked down to identify the odor, I found my own leg melting into the black grid of the heater cover.
Within seconds a deep searing pain began which increased with each passing minute. I had burned off the top three layers of my skin, penetrating muscle and almost reaching bone. The process of extracting ones own skin off of burning metal is one of the most disgusting things a human being can do
That was only one of a series of strange and horrible tragic comic experiences we had in that place. There was no toilet, sink, bathtub or shower, essentially there was no plumbing at all, and with the exception of the storefront itself there were no windows in the entire 2500 square foot room which meant we had no light or air. The problem is, at this point we barely had money for food, i.e., much-less major capital improvements.
“My boyfriend can do anything, he can plumb the place, he can put in a window, he can fix a car, whatever you need done he can do it.” A woman we were friendly with from Telegraph avenue told us about her boyfriend when we told her about our dilemma.
“When can I talk to him”
“Never, he doesn’t speak to people, he has a lot of phobias, but his assistant does and I can set it all up if you tell me what needs to be done”
“Oh, well…uh… when can he start?
By the next day a 1960’s dark green van painted over so many times that the green paint itself seemed like a bumpy hide on a prehistoric reptile rolled up San Pablo Av and stopped in front of our store. The windows were dark, almost black and the license plates were barely visible, blanketed by the fluttering remnants of three generations of political bumper stickers.
As it whirred to a grumbling stop, a man whose entire face was submerged in hair, sideburns melding into beard melding into a continuous mustache melding into wayward eyebrows with two tiny bright eyes peeking out. Next to him was a wisp of a man with a starter beard and a hint of mustache capped off by thick rimless glasses which seemed like an acrylic shield for his large round eye sockets which were in perpetual nervous movement
“Hi, I’m Steve and this is Plumber, the little man spoke first, his tiny thighs dangling inside of his supposed-to-be-tight bell bottoms “we’re here to do an estimate for the job”
“oh yes, please come on in” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, but I was scared to ask again in case it might seem like an insult, but yes, the hair-filled man’s name was, in fact, “plumber”
After a mumbled “estimate” of $250.00 dollars for the toilet, sink, stall shower and an extra “$25.00 thrown in for a window install” all barely audibly spoken through the gritted yellow teeth and dirty mouth surrounding hair of “Plumber” Wow, I thought, he must trust us, he sort of, spoke!
And then the job began. Day after day the green van would lumber up the street, puttering and whirring for several minutes until it finally would stop. Both men would dismount from their old green pony/van, swagger meaningfully to the front door and pound on the glass, work belts a jangling, work boots a stompin, in they would march.
“We’re eatin it, Plumber”
“Yea I know man, we’re eatin it”Plumber would mumble back, his reputation for not speaking was, I found out, just a front to make him seem less insane, more dramatic, less Kazinsky, more Putin. In reality you couldn’t shut him up about anything and everything, he spent the entire day listing what he couldn’t stand about life and why he wanted to kill everyone, himself included. He would only break from this diatribe to start or respond to, the “we’re eatin it” comment which always ended with “This is two thousand dollar job, man!”
Notwithstanding that, he was the one that launched “the sliding glass door project” a quixotic and uninformed attempt to “bring light” into the space, which was later discovered was, in fact, the retaining wall for the entire building. A fact which would have been known if either Steve or Plumber were licensed trained contractors, an idea which of course my mom was all for, an idea which in the end put our already precarious lives even more at-risk as we slept nightly for the duration of our tenure there under the sliding glass door area which ultimately could have collapsed the whole building with us inside.
Six months after Steve and Plumber first coined the now infamous anthem “we’re eatin it” they were finished and in fact, at the end of the sliding glass door project, they had determined that the “$25.00” window job was in fact worth several hundred dollars more and it was only after we showed them the eviction papers which asked for $25,000 in damages for destroying the buildings retaining wall did they stop bugging us for , “their damn money” as Plumber would always phrase it when he drove by in the green van slowing down just long enough to yell that out the window whenever he would see me vending
At the end of our contentious, stress-filled and irony laden stay there my mother became simultaneously more creative and more insane. She began a habit that she kept up to this day, which is needing to talk to me at least once if not twice or ten times each hour every day. With the advent of cel phones that habit became easier to facilitate but back in the day, people thought I was dealing drugs cause they were the only other people hanging on pay phones for hours at a time on random street corners throughout the Bay Area.
We would spend hours at a time figuring and re-figuring how we could survive on so little money, where we were gonna go next, how we were gonna fight the eviction , who we were gonna turn to for help and what if any resources did we still have, what we could sell, how we could afford any “stock”, i.e., blank shirts and/or clothes, supplies; ink, paint, blank screens, brushes, dye, and how if possible could we afford food, utilities, gas and/or the always at-risk phone bills At the same time we spent hours plotting the next performance piece we were about to perform, “writing” the scenes and/or conceptualizing the ideas.
At this point in Dee &tiny’s mythstory we launched a complicated catalogue that listed our art-I-facts that one would discover if you got a docent tour through our life, or more specifically, The art of homelessness installation. We also conceptualized, choreographed and performed the multi-media; Car piece which put people who interacted with the piece in the position of empath, i.e., they sat in the car in the back seat facing two video monitors attached to the back of each seat which played moving and talking images of the back of our heads deep in conversation about where we could park that night to sleep. Each participant was forced before they could sit down to do something with a bag of trash that was on the back seat where they were supposed to sit, i.e., they became perpetrators of the crimes of poverty (litter, get rid of, sit on, et al)
We temporarily inhabited an empty apartment in Park Merced apartments, an oddly Fred MacMurray-ala My Three Sons-apartment complex which reeked of white, middle-class dreams and unseen pathology. We installed the whole place with all the demarcated artifacts which made it all appear like an archeolgical dig, shooting the now infamous video, Dee and Tiny’s Mom and Dad’s Birthplace, which was a filmic version of our docent tours through our mythical history of family, homefulness and dark pathology.
Our final act of conceptual performance art-making in that time was the installation of a storefront in San Francisco with a complicated kinetic dance and sound piece which integrated the idea of sales and its complex web of lies and deceptions with metonymy in a choregraphed movement entitled The art of Sales. I had an installation entitled; Becoming rod Stewarts leopard skin outfit
As well as an entire wall filled with letter sized paper filled with sentences like “You are trash” You should be locked up” You never pay your bills on time” You people are bums” etc entitled; Things People said about us
Chapter 58
Bleak
When we were finally evicted from that place things started to become increasingly bleak. Losing our public “frame” we tried for many weeks and months to produce our “work” in a gallery setting or even an outdoor location . But this soon became a futile effort, lacking the basic resources of time or money to put on shows and/or the knowledge, connections and built in network one can derive from an art school education, we got nowhere, and eventually lost hope, falling further and further into the depths of poverty and homelessness. The reality overcoming the mythology
For the following two years we bounced from apartment, to car to motel to apartment. We worked for hours on end trying to raise money, trying to do some modicam of art, trying to survive. Our “artmaking” becoming almost solely limited to silk screen and hand-painted t-shirts of popular cartoon characters that also happened to be illegal to reproduce seeing as they were very well-known copy-writed images. There were many disappointed pauses in the decision to “steal” images, we admired the artists work, we tried to create our own original cartoons ( I made a series of cartoons that were mildly popular, but sales of these never even came close to the corporate referential art), we were bored out of our minds making these same horrendously cutesy images, and although they were all hand-painted and hand-screened by us they were basically formulaic. But in the end, to survive on the street, to eat, art was elitist, theft was necessary. And hey we weren’t really thieving, we were appropriating, changing re-creating, sampling if you will, like any good turntablist, DJ, or pop artist of the 21st century.
Chapter 59
Amping up the poverty crimes
After so many evictions, we had to amp up the housing crimes, newer and better manipulations of the court system were employed, things I won’t even reveal in this book as they might place current and future poverty criminals in danger, but suffice to say, the evictions became increasingly dangerous. The immediate result was we were in constant motion, either moving in, moving out or trying to find a place to move to. Just to have enough money to make the original move-in fees required for the ever increasing initial lease contract, we had to work more and more cause after two years our product was already getting old and therefore even the pop-art stolen images less likely to sell. We didn’t understand it yet but the Berkeley market was basically saturated
Sometimes I didn’t even make enough money to eat lunch, much-less pay into the rent fund or motel stay
It was also in these horrible times that my relationship with my mom got more and more violent and difficult. We were fighting every day. No day would start without some kind of screaming about one of our impossible situations followed up by hour long pay phone calls to “work-out” the problem.
Even if we didn’t start out with a fight, we would still talk for hours. My mothers need to talk, to get counsel, to get some kind of hope was equal if not worse than mine, I still had a little hope of youth left in me and dished it out in daily ad-hoc therapy sessions. The funny thing was, there really was never an answer to our problems, both of our lives caught in the same vicious cycle of poverty so often referred to, just more problems added and skewed manipulations created that would compound the existing problems. Suicide became one of my few escapes, I dreamed daily of the kind of gun I would use.
Simultaneously to the decline of Dee and Tiny’s life I began transferring all my hope, all my escape needs, all my dreams of a sane-er life onto my current boy. We made plans and promises of forever-ness, we planned trips and created art, all in a dream sequence of secret 6:00 am meetings so my mom would never find out.
And we could never be found out about or it would be over, even the mere mention of a boyfriend would be met with a terrified shriek by my increasingly phobic mother.
My boyfriend told me at the time that I should just leave, that I could go to school, get a career and be something, that I needed my independence. The unpoliticized me only felt the cold chill of those words. Of course, I was strong, I wanted to say, strong BeCAUSE of my mom. So yes, I could leave her and only concern myself with my own survival and thrival, but in the process of my self-centered pursuit of so-called success, my mother would have gone into a mental hospital, or roamed the streets sleeping in the Sidewalk motel.
Chapter 60
The trip
We were fastly approaching the middle of the boom boom 90’s and the taste of redevelopment was already on the lips of Oaklands apartment owners, our most recent one room apartment acquisition in the heart of Downtown Oakland was smaller, darker and more depressing than all the others, and save for the Jannifs inexplicable rent increase, this was our first experience with eviction for profit. Six months after we moved in we received a completely unexpected and unjustified rather large rent increase and then a subsequent notice of termination.
At this, the 19th eviction, 375th motel room and 2,345th overnite parking space, to date my dreams of suicide increased to hourly. Death felt like a relief from our impossible situation. It was at this point that my secret boyfriend offered to take me to New York for a trip. It was absolutely the worst thing I could do as far as my relationship with my mom went and yet I was unable to stand the prospect of one more day of our life. And afterall, I reasoned, it was only 5 days. I would be right back .
Throughout the entire 5 days of large urban blur, my blood cursed with guilt. I was back within minutes, it seemed. Only a few dreamy pictures shot by my photographer boyfriend lingered in my pocket, and within seconds of my return I was on the pay phone at the Oakland BART station apologizing profusely to my mom and dealing with her impenetrable feelings of fear, anger, pain and betrayal .
After the trip my mothers lingering fear, my guilt, and our collective hopelessness over what would never be forged a permanent crack in our mythos/reality art making. We were no longer able to look at our life with the humour and irony necessary to make art. In fact, we were barely able to laugh.
It was in this general state of depression that found us driving down Bancroft Ave in the heart of Berkeley one cold morning in December. Bancroft was one of the worst DWP (driving while poor) traps in Berkeley.
There was a pale glare in the sky that day, with an occasional breeze dragging through the blue-brown haze. I turned left off of Telegraph after meager day of sales. On this day I hadn't even made enough for lunch. As I turned the wheel a non-specific shudder shook my sad heart. I have since learned that that particular shudder is as close to my psychic grandmothers magic as I get because I always get it before anything really devastating is about to happen.
Seconds later I caught the blink-flash of impending police arrest in my mirror. My hands clutched the steering wheel. This was it, I thought. I had never come close to completing the community service assignment. I did go in and get assigned to a county work program, but the worker had signed me up to 2700 hours of weekly street cleaning and other volunteer jobs, spanning over several months. I barely got through 100 hours. I could not help my mom, buy and paint enough shirts to eat and/or pay for hotels, rent, utitilities, gas, toilet paper, sell them on the street, move in and out of hotel rooms, cars and apartments and do all of those hours. I gave up. Deciding instead to "not deal with it" right now. In fact not really deciding anything. Decisions borne from overwhelming situations just happen to folks. They aren't chosen.
"STOP THE CAR AND PULL TO THE RIGHT" the mechanical shout rang through the air. My car chugged to the right. The Catalytic converter had not passed the smog test, so we didn’t' even have current registration, this along with our old poor people car with too much stuff in it (read: homeless) was in and of itself enough for a Driving While Poor stop every day. Because of this we only used the car to transport our stock for vending as early in the morning as we could so as to miss the cop beats.
"License and registration please"
"Officer, why are you stopping me"?
"License and registration" He repeated without a blink
"I don’t' have my license with me
"Do you remember the number?"
"Oh yes, its C0771169"
"Hold on I'll be right back"
As I lied to the police officer about my license number, I told myself it would be ok, that I would actually get away with it, that he wouldn't find my name and my delinquent hours in the system, that he would trot back to my broke down car and my broke down life and tell me to move on.
"STEP OUTSIDE OF THE VEHICLE"… , this came through the megaphone. I grabbed my backpack and opened the car door
"You need to come with us" he was towering above me, hands resting ever so slightly on the one snap in his holster covering his gun
I was led into the hard plastic seats with the grooves in precisely the wrong place, ensuring that no matter which way you sat, you were very uncomfortable.
At the station I was searched and de-robed of all my accroutremonts. I was held in a tiny cell with ancient urine stains competing with new urine puddles.
This was in fact, the holding cell, where I was kept for the first several hours at Berkeley. It seemed like lying to an officer was, in the police culture, analogous to punching an officer; so my crime being seen as so serious, I was not even able to join regular jail population.
"Mmm..urrrr…mmmm," Every few minutes shadows of sound and movement would seep under the tiny cell's door and darken the steel threaded windows from the adjoining men's holding cell. The shadows belonged to feet pacing out unsaid fury, pounding out unscreamed expletives and un-punched blows. Begging forgiveness, justice, homefulness and revenge. Thundering paces resembling caged wolves, tigers and horses. Murmurs resonating burning forests, suffocated sea mammals, lost birds, oil-soaked seals writhing in pain.
The headache started again. This time it reached into the depths of nerve endings, connecting thick surges of pain from my fingers up to my vertebrae down to my toes and back up through the entire circumference of my skull. This headache, I was sure, would never leave.
"Why did you leave?"
"Who do you think you are bitch, I haven't been on a horse since last year!"
"Shao-La.. Shao-La " As the hours, minutes and seconds dripped by in the holding cell I was joined by three severely mentally ill elders. One white, one African Descendent and one Asian. All three were self medicated with alcohol and a lethal admixture of street acquired psycho-tropic drugs. As each of them tumbled into the tiny room they alternately wept, screamed, rocked back and forth and repeated the same phrases into our stale air directed for the heads and ears of relatives and lovers long ago lost or rejected
On top of them were momentary piles of other poor women on their way to the television-having luxury of the actual jail cell, in for homeless citations, Walking, Driving or Hanging Out While Black or Brown violators, and minor drug violations of poor people drugs, ; i.e., crack and alcohol used outside of a residence in the "wrong" neighborhoods.
72 hours or seven hundred and twenty hours, I wasn't sure which, eventually crawled by . The florescent morning appearing identical to the florecent afternoon, evening and midnite.
"Garcia-Gray, you need to get ready, you're going to county (jail) on the 6:00am bus" As the 72nd hour approached suddenly everything was accelerated for me. The warden yelled in warnings of my impending fate every few minutes.
"Girl, you don't want to go to Santa Rita( county jail), I almost got killed there…. Twice. The African Descendent elder stopped rocking, screaming and repeating to whisper this dire warning into my ear. With her warning, the Asian elder and two weary sex workers who had just been thrown into the cell also shook their heads up and down in agreement. She continued," What did do you?"
" I got too many citations for being homeless and then I lied to a cop" With that last assertion the whole room let out a collective nod.
"God Bless you" and then the elder resumed rocking and looked away from me certain that if she didn't she would be looking at the last alive version of a dead girl, another unlucky vision she didn't need to add to her already over-filled psyche
"Garcia-Gray, You're outta here" On the Friday that I was arrested, my mother had made a lot of desperate phone calls, one of which was to the now "ex" boyfriend who agreed to put up bail.
After the trip we broke up cause he was “tired” of my difficult situation, which I really don’t blame him for, after all, how do you empathize with problems you have never had. He also had said in one of many tear stained phone calls, that he couldn't go on, "like this", referring to our once a week surreptitious morning visits and little else and it seemed like I just couldn’t get my life together. Apparently my mother had contacted him right after I’d been arrested, but he’d wanted to torture me with two nights in jail before he bailed me out with his VISA power
After I was released I was escorted to the exit out of jail which was an oddly small door like the entrance to Oz, with no overhang, metal title proclaiming that this as “exit” and no pathway to the street. After several minutes of post-institutionalized befuddlement I finally located an ivy strewn pathway leading out and I walked to the front of the jail building where my boyfriend was waiting. He looked at me square-jawed and said, “Did you learn your lesson?”
“What?!” I screamed internally, watching him disengage the car alarm on his late model Jeep Cherokee.
Chapter 61
The 1st Intervention
The arraignment of my almost-felony was later that morning. I walked through the ice-cold Berkeley morning touching ivy and running my fingers along the sides of buildings, cars and the trunks of trees. It wasn't that I had forgotten how they felt. It was just to know that they, things, trees, buildings and cars, were still there, even when I wasn't helped to ease the shudder, the ache and the tension that was now felt permanently lodged in my head
"I will call all the cases in custody first", when I arrived the juge was already seated thumbing through that days cases. He was thin faced, with small dark eyes that showed little emotion, " Ist case; Garcia-Gray vs City of Berkeley"
My first intervention. My savior and in some ways my real uncle , father , brother and truest inspiration of the power of real advocacy and applied ethics slumped through the swinging doors of Berkeley jail when my name was called, in a Goodwill polyester suit, with matching yellow nylon tie. He had a white-ish beard, and a scruffy mop of grey-white hair which rose in tufts toward its mothership of color; the over-bright Florescent lighting. The only way you knew he was an attorney was because of his leather UC Berkeley professor-esque briefcase slung mightily over one shoulder and the omniscient legal look that he donned when speaking to the judge, " Osha Neuman, Counsel for the defendant, Lisa Garcia-Gray; present."
" Your honor we are requesting 30 more days of jail time, in County - or at the very least a fine and supervised probation" The City Attorney, a sharp featured man who spit out the citys' desired revenge for my crimes of poverty.
"Your honor, my client will submit to supervised probation and she is willing to accept a reassignment of the original 2700 hours of community service to a non-profit organization, which I will personally supervise."
As they tossed about my fate through a series of words I stayed numb. I could not fight anything anymore , I would accept whatever was to be my fate, Death at Santa Rita, more fines, I could never pay, and/or more community service assignments I could never complete. They were only words after all , only words and agreements and promises…
My ears stopped listening, my heart stopped hoping and then.. a few minutes later the white haired man was talking to me in hushed tones, " Come to my office tomorrow morning and we'll work this all out.."
Chapter 62
The Beginning
I climbed up to the beginning of my life on rickety wooden stairs which led up to a wooden clapboard house with peeling yellow paint and white shutters. A tiny paper label taped precariously over the doorbell confirmed my location, "COMMUNITY DEFENSE INC" - Law offices of OSHA NEUMAN." I rang the bell and within a few seconds the door flung open.
"Just a minute," a distracted voice called from a room down the hall, " Wait in the room to the left, I'll be right there.." I being dyslexic, wasn't sure what was 'to the left' so I almost went into a small dark office to the right, filled from floor to ceiling with piles of papers, yellow legal pads, law books, telephones, faxes and assorted post-its floating through the air like a mini ticker tape parade. Not being sure I chose the other direction, which looked almost austere in a comfortable way, rows and rows of law books lined the walls, stopping only to make room for a large white puffy couch positioned under the huge bay windows flooding the room with morning sun.
The sun's glare alighted on a lone water color portrait on the wall above the couch of an older woman being thrown a coin. The lines of her body were round and soft, she appeared beautiful and yet unseen. This was the first painting I had ever seen of a houseless woman. And yet it was also one of the most beautiful paintings I had ever seen of an older woman.
"Sorry you had to wait, our copy machine is acting up again… so first of all; do you understand what they ruling was?"
He proceeded to explain that the court had ruled that I must complete 2700 hours of supervised community service in a non-profit agency. As my mind started to sink into the quick sand of those impossible words, I heard, “ So what can you do?”
“Huh?”
“I said, our agency is supervising those hours and I need to know what it is that you can do..”
“Well, my mom is disabled, and vending is the job that I do, 12-20 hours per day, 7 days a week, I paint in the morning and at night and sell in the day, just for basic expenses and now we have no car and so I don’t know how I am going to sell at all, and then I have to move cause we are being evicted, again, and we probably won’t have enough money to get another place so we’ll end up homeless…”
“I understand that you have a really complicated life, that’s why I said, what can you do “
This was odd, I thought, he was actually asking me a real question, so in response I felt it was safe to answer a real answer“I can write,” I said this quietly, almost embarrassed, noone had told me I was a writer, I was homeless, I was a vendor, a salesperson person perhaps, but a writer? I didn’t look at him as I murmured those three little words.
Osha looked at me blankly, he didn’t laugh or shake his head in disbelief, he just continued calmly without pause, “Well, then, that’s what you will do for the hours, write.
Well, then, that’s what you will do for the hours, write.
Well, then, that’s what you will do for the hours, write.
Write…write…write….
A zipper suddenly appeared through a small slice of the morning sky above Oshas head. As each tine of the zipper unfurled; words, letters, sentences sailed out into a tongue of light. They danced to salsa, merengue, and hip hop. They dangled their feet over the fluffy wall of a dangling cloud
Well then that’s what you will dooooooooo…….
I looked back at him and said, “ok” .
Osha went on to arrange a weekly check-in/critique appointment and created an approximate time-line for me to follow. I listened and agreed and left his office. The heavy office door closed with a thud behind me.
“I feeeeeel Good eeeaowwwwwwwwwwww” They were there, waiting for me, suspended just above Oshas rickety steps, the words, the sentences, moving in sync with their punctuation to the Sounds of James Brown The “W” from Write reached his hand down to pull me up. “Dadadadum, I feel good…now….”
The words and I sailed through the entire Bay Area for the remainder of the morning. We played James Brown, Billy Idol, Run DMC and Celia Cruz on our Cloud boom box at the highest volume. They delivered me back to the vendor space lottery at 10:00am sharp , …
With his innovative advocacy Osha had given me hope. For the first time in so long I actually wanted to be alive!.
After that days vending I ran back to our tiny Oakland apartment and dragged an ancient typewriter into the water heater room that acted as my micro painting studio and the bedroom for our nine cats. I piled two cat-fur filled boxes on top of each other for a desk and unearthed a wobbly step stool to sit on. I dug furiously in all of our perpetually unpacked hefty bags until I found one somewhat clean notebook used by my mom for last months call lists. I carefully cut the serrated edges off of ten pieces of only written on one side paper and gingerly inserted one piece into the typewriter and began to write.
Writing, reading, thinking imagining speculating. These are luxury activities, so I am reminded, permitted to a priveledged few whose idle hours of the day can be viewed otherwise than as a bowl of rice or a loaf bread less to share with the family, excerpt from Women, Native, Other by Trinh T Minh-ha
A few years later I was exposed to the revolutionary writings of Trinh Minh Ha where she breaks down the privelege of writing itself. This was my truth, my struggle; I did not have the time away from earning a loaf of bread, I did not have the paper, I did not have a computer and to expand on her concept, and that which is a truth for very low-income and homeless folks I did not even have the priveledge of an organized life; i.e., schedules, knowing what I would be doing from one moment to the next, being able to ocunt on the fact that my wobbly desk of boxes would even be here after this week.
So in the end, but for the innovative and brilliant advocacy of Osha Neuman, I would NEVER have had the privilege to write, to think, vocation as a writer would never have occurred, this is why I always refer to his help as the 1st intervention or in some circles; the first miracle
After much haphazard plucking away at the broken keys on that old machine I tentatively began a mini-schedule. Tucked in between painting, silkscreening and selling, running errands for my mom and talking through her increasingly long list of fears and anxieties , looking for a new apartment and dealing with endlessly litigious creditors, fixing, acquiring and following towed vehicles I actually managed to write for a whopping 30 minutes every morning, if I woke up at my desired 6:30am
Although I had written endless reams of what I considered to be rather good poetry since I was 15, several hundred pages of a sprawling romance novel when I was 10, 11 and 12, all the texts to all of our collaborative performance pieces piles upon piles of journals, some interesting narrative essays in a creative writing class at UCLA that I sat in with my mom, and other assorted bits and pieces of fiction/non-fiction I had never written anything that would resemble journalism.
Imbued with the writers edict, “write what you know” , the blood, sweat and tears of our daily survival coursing through my overwhelmed mind, I embarked on a first person narrative about one of our poverty struggles, unwittingly launching a new genre that later, as co-editor of POOR Magazine, I termed poverty journalism.
But most importantly I created a little corner of order in my loca vida. 23 1/2 hours a day were all in preparation for those 30 minutes. Nothing, including hours upon hours of depressing sales, a Schwarzenegger-alike landlord who decided that threats of physical violence were the way to get us out of his apartment so he could raise the rent to “market value” and endless dental problems that began to plague me could not deter me from writing at my designated appointment with the furry desk and the broke-down typewriter.
Several months, a dangerous eviction and two broken teeth later I finished the story. I had my last appointment with Osha. “This is great,” he said after reading the 1500 word essay on my struggle to get PG&E turned on with no money, he continued.,” You should try to get it published”
“Published??! Who would want to read about this”
“A lot of people, this is an important story, you’re an excellent writer, and this is good work”
I walked out of his office that day. Oshas’ sentences were too busy in the courts to sail with me that day but it was ok, I was on a new mission. I was going to get published. No matter what.
Chapter 63
The 2nd Intervention
Two weeks after I sent out my first draft to my favorite literary magazine which happened to be based in Berkeley; The East Bay Express, which specialized in very hard-hitting but well-written narrative essays about all kinds of issues. I received an onion skin-esque envelope at our P.O. Box.
Ms. Garcia-Gray, we have decided to publish your essay, please contact us about necessary editing….
There was more on that page but I could barely see the words through the tears streaming down my face..
Two weeks later through a blurry acrylic window on a dented Express News rack in downtown Oakland I saw the issue I was published in. My hands trembled as I reached inside to grab a copy. The newsprint felt like velvet to my paint-stained hands. I turned each page slowly stopping to read every ad, every entertainment listing. I must not get to page 34 quickly. And then all of a sudden…..
Criminal of Poverty
By Lisa and Dee Garcia-Gray
In print my name, my struggle to survive, my solutions, and my words. I was alive, someone “heard” my voice. I had hope.
For most writers and artists’ recognition is very important but it is my experience that for folks dealing with extreme positions of poverty, recognition is a life-line with life changing implications. So much about the experience of homelessness and abject poverty is humiliation. In the eyes of society, you are worthless, trash, a burden, or pitiful at best. Your awareness and knowledge is not considered scholarship, your words are not valued as art or theory, you are talked about, not talked with, written about not written with. Many of the concepts that we launched in POOR Magazine came from this, the 2nd intervention. For me personally, I had the strength to go on living because now I had hope that there would be change, that people would hear my voice and that someday I could affect change.
As well, I began another POOR Magazine tradition with the inclusion of my mothers name on the by-line as I believe that if you have lived through an experience, i.e., are the subject of a story, you should get authorial credit.
After my first article was published I was on a roll, I wanted to write all the time, but of course, nothing had really changed. We were still very poor. Sales were very bad at that time, annd we had just gotten evicted.
To up our sales quotient I began talking bart to San Francisco with a dolly, our racks and all of our clothes. This was a new experience, new cash and new risks. I was committing poverty crimes, art crimes, civic crimes and parking crimes right and left, we had no permit to sell in San Francisco and no money or time to wait for one…
In addition to our labor intensive forays to “the City” my teeth began to hurt so bad that I had to do something about it…
Chapter 64
A Healthy Mouth is a Wealthy mouth
Knife-like corners of starched cotton cut into my reclining thigh.
. “You don’t have the money to keep your teeth” his voice, like his face was flat like the top of a table – round and flat and shiny and his eyes darted urgently from scalpel to drill arranging and re-arranging his tools as though he was preparing to solve my dental emergency.
. “Ms. Garcia-Gray I can’t help you,” this time the words were louder, a slight edge around can’t. “I’m afraid saving your teeth would require a root canal and you stated on your intake form that you don’t have the financial resources to afford that kind of procedure.”
. “What can I do?”
. “You have no choice but to have these teeth pulled, and I would suggest that if you are in pain, you have the extractions done immediately.”
. “But you said these teeth are restorable – and if they are missing it would be rather obvious...”
. “That’s all you can do.” Suddenly he stopped arranging tools, snapped off his gloves and threw them in the trash with a pointed thump. Before that time I’d never hear rubber gloves make a thumping noise.
. “Well, our time’s up.” He made a complete military pivot and left. The whack of the door-slam vibrated the steel clamp that had seized my skull since these two teeth had become inflamed. He left me in that room in the overly reclined dental chair.
Working poor or unemployed dental work was a luxury. Ongoing dental insurance an impossibility. Now I was being encouraged to pull two teeth that were very near the front of my mouth. Ok..ok...sure...take ‘em all out – I’ll spend the rest of my years gumming my food like my poor grandmother, drinking cheap coffee, and smoking Lucky Strikes (I don’t smoke or even like cigarettes but I’ll learn, just to complete the aesthetic vision).
.As I staggered out, the secretary suggested I try the UC Dental Clinic
.
.Several calls and voice mail matrixes later I arrived at the UC Dental Clinic. The windows were massive – mirrored glass revealing the lush body of trees that spoke to the wind – California redwoods – Pine and Fir, whistling, flirting, lightly daring a touch at the shiny transparent reflections of themselves.
.I knew the trees would understand what I was about to do.
“Can I help you?”
“I have an appointment.”
“Lily Smith.”, I added
“Ok, just fill this form out and the doctor will call you,” her voice, light, upper registers.
.I walked very slowly to the chair, my eyes focused on an angry arm of the redwood tree flogging its glass counterpart.
.I sat down with the metal clipboard. I loved its solid edges – the way it resonated with my touch. The intake form paper crackled under my pen. A steady pounding began in my ears. The sweat on my fingers began to lubricate the pen. I glanced over at the secretary – did she see me – she was turning on a walkman.
.I began to fill in the application......Lily Smith. I glanced over again – I knew she knew – I could see her lips move as she answered a phone call, “Can I help you?” This was a code phrase – she was saying “There’s someone in the waiting room committing fraud.”
.The pounding in my ears became a synthesized drum – I started to move across the page faster with the false information. Under my sweaty pen a new person was born. A healthy, problem-free, well paid, responsible individual with an amazing health history and no bad credit record that smoked any computer it made contact with.
.... Past surgery? No...Any health problems? No...just a little too busy with all her many high paying businesses to retain a permanent dentist.
.As Lily Smith, the perfectly pure patient was being birthed, the deep throb that started somewhere in my upper left jaw had become more solid, more comfortable, in its systematic attack on my teeth – the throb stood alone, ate alone, and when its host was under any kind of pressure it launched a special assault of reds and purples a dripping bloody knife – fight into the depths of my gums.
.I stood up – guided by the throb – passing the ominous security guard – up to the secretary, thrusting the completed form onto her desk, without even a blink, I returned to my seat. If I were arrested, I would plead, “Not guilty,” coerced, to commit fraud, I would tell the judge, by “The THROB.”
.The throb and I sat together, watching the trees, listening to the distant musak, “When you’re down and troubled, and need a helping had.......You’ve got a friend.
. “Ms. Smith........Lily Smith?” A tentative voice called out my name.
. “Lily Smith?....................”
. “Oh yes, here I am.”
. “Lily, I’m Dr. Rogers. How are you today?”
. “Just fine.....” the throb answered bluntly.
. “Well, hopefully we can take care of your problems.”
. “Uh..yeah,” my tongue glided across the gutted contents of my mouth. How could I explain all these rotted, broken teeth with partial fillings, demi-teeth and exposed roots? Lily Smith would have been able to afford the necessary crowns, root canals, bridges and replacements – financial problems would not have impeded her dental health.
.Dr. Rodgers led me to an exposed cubicle with two beige dividing walls, in the middle of one of the walls there was one small square of floral wallpaper.
. “Have a seat, Lily.”
.I climbed into the pre-reclined dental chair.
. “Open up,” an odd smile contorted his face as he peered into my mouth. “Whoa, you have a lot of problems, just a minute,” he ran out of our room leaving my jaw agape. Should I close it? Or will he really be right back....?
.Suddenly three very large men in buttery soft linen shirts, wool garbardine slacks, woven cotton and silk sweaters and vests with hastily applied white coats entered the room. They began a brief procession around my chair, when each one of them would look up from my mouth they would shake their head, at one point I think I saw them all shake their heads together – almost in unison.
.Tri-syllabic dental words were exchanged between the three men and then they turned inward, looking at one another while one spoke out, “Ms. Smith, you have a serious set of problems that require a series of complicated surgical procedures, there will be at least 8 visits over the next three weeks.
. “Ok.” I tried to nod without losing the dental dam.
. “And you will have to brush every single time you ingest any substance.”
. “Ok.”
. “You won’t be able to chew solid food during this time, and if you eat at all you will need to floss immediately.”
. “Ok.”
. “I notice on your application, that you carry no insurance – these procedures are going to run into several thousand dollars – are you able to handle that?”
. “Uh.....ok.....but will you be able to take me out of pain today?”
. “Sure, we will be performing a pulpotomy which is just the beginning of one of your problems – that will take you out of pain temporarily, I notice you have a lot of unfinished procedures in your mouth – why didn’t you complete the work?”
. “I was too busy.”
.They shook their head understandingly and filed out of the cubicle. As they left, the fear began to settle in my abdomen, a chilling, nail scraping terror slamming against the walls and ceiling of my stomach – the throb had transformed into a dangerous animal kept against its will in my body – determined to torture its captor – tools were readied – engines were activated, protective gear was applied by the various white coated technicians who would attempt to control the beast – I tried to keep up with the fight – stay awake through the lengthy procedure......
. “Ms. Smith....Ms. Smith...wake up..you’re all done for today.”
.Lily Smith held up my shattered body that day as I crept out of the cubicle – into the waiting room – past the secretary – my eyes downcast – my breath in small shallow parcels.
. “Ms. Smith?” ... I almost didn’t turn around.
. “Yes?”
. “I’ve made your next eight appointments, the doctors say it is urgent that you keep all of these appointments.”
. “Ok,” she handed me a small piece of paper with a list of days and times on it.
. “Oh and Miss Smith, please bring at least $500 next time. This will be your first payment.”
. “Ok.”
.In the subsequent months, depending on the severity of my pain – new identities were created – new treatment plans started for new people who never seemed to come back for their follow-up appointments.
To avoid committing these new crimes of poverty I would spend frustrating hours on the phone researching other possible affordable options, even a possible small payment plan at UC dental school always ending where I began – with nothing.
.To avoid this whole devastating process I began to deny the pain when I had it – I drank smaller and smaller sips through increasingly smaller canals in my mouth; french bread, fresh carrots, gum, candy, soft or hard, steak, steamed vegetables, anything cold or hot, etc, all became dangerous luxuries I dare not risk salivating over. This life of culinary asceticism with a heavy dose of denial sort of worked....until one particularly sunny day in the middle of April.
.My weary face warmed by a sharp clear April sun, I bit into a lukewarm, pre-cut bite of processed turkey....At first I only felt a crumbling sensation, something you normally associate with gravel beneath your feet, and then before I could figure out the origin of the crumble; deep, fresh cleaves of pain shot into my jaw and out through my skull. I looked out of my parked car’s window certain an earthquake had ripped open the middle of the street – fast on its heels was a tsunami that must be barreling down the sidewalk by now – but instead of people running, screaming and ducking for cover – passersby walked, laughed and casually consumed all variations of the dangerous substance known as lunch, while I sat beneath them trying to contain blood curdling screams.
.I tried to compose myself and start the car – I must get home, at least I’ll be in a safe place for the next attack. I reached for the ignition and then it came down like a hammer – a new double strength force struck the side of my head – I slumped over the steering wheel – the sun beating down on my broken body.
.UC DENTAL SCHOOL, NEXT DAY:
.This time the fraud was easy, too easy................
.The wind was strong today – screaming through the trees – “Be careful – Be careful,” it warned through fatal slaps against the glass – I walked up to the front desk – in deference to my deception I wore glasses and a new sweater.
. “Do you have an appointment?”
. “No.”
. “Have you been here before?”
. “No.”
. “Are you sure?”
. “Yes.”
.She tilted her head to the side of my reply – I guess she was trying to picture me in my other sweater. “What’s your name?”
. “Lisa Graham.”
. “Ok, fill this out and have a seat.”
.The false information flowed freely from my pen – my wits were dulled by the severity of my pain – I looked with longing at concrete walls – believing I could ease the pounding in my jaw if only I could smash my head against a hard surface. “Here,” I handed over the clipboard.
.I watched her over my torn remain of a hospital waiting room magazine. I prefer I was enthralled with a story on “How to buy a home with only $200,000,000. After making a few phone calls, with pointed stares in my direction and an excessive amount of loud paper straightening accentuated with a punch to the stapler, she abruptly left the front desk area.
.Five hours later, a new secretary led me back to the dentist’s area. As I left the outer room I noticed that the trees had fallen silent – the smallest hints of afternoon were streaking across the beige linoleum – it was too quiet – even the musak became more faint – “AH, AH, AH, AH, Stayin’ ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE” – I was not only the last patient – I was the only patient............in the universe.
. “Miss Graham...” a round faced woman wearing a too-small uniform was directing me to the chair.
.I watched the burgundy polyester slice into her back and arms as she readied the tool tray and then I heard a voice behind me.
. “Thanks Gena” those two words raced up my spine – the tone overly clear – on the edge of a laugh.
. “So I guess you are Miss Gray – oh excuse me, Miss Graham.” He was tall, very tall. His head was lush with soft chestnut curls, the florescent rays in our cubicle shone upon the delicate gold highlights that frosted each ringlet. “So I guess these all belong to you.” He slapped his hand on a large stack of files, each one of them rife with notes, bills and charts...the stack teetered under his fingers, threatening to tip over and reveal the multiple personalities associated with my mouth.
.He watched me for a second. “I know how it is” – he paused to laugh, a large comfortable laugh, “I used to sneak my friends in to get free dental care when I was in my first year of dental school....” Again he chuckled, a wayward curl falling forward onto his wide brow, and then suddenly, he stopped all parts of his laugh, focusing his eyes into mine. “So what brings you in here today?”
. “I’m in severe pain.”
. “Let me take a look,” he peered into my mouth....”Wow you’ve got a lot of problems, let me see your arms – I mean, so we can take your blood pressure.”
. “Why?”
. “Just routine.”
.Not its not, I screamed inside, this man thinks I am a junkie.
.He got up from his chair to make room for Gena and her blood pressure apparatus. Gena started rolling up the sleeve of my shirt – he stood by long enough to see my veins – then left the cube momentarily.
. “Well Ms. Gray,” he was talking very loudly in a new, sharp tone, eyes wandering over the walls of the cubicle, “you know there is really nothing I can do for you, apparently you owe $200 in back fees, so I can’t even do an emergency procedure until you pay off the balance.” He smiled, “Hey, I know how it is.”
3 MONTHS LATER, POTRERO HILL DENTAL CLINIC
.His eyes were round pools of warm volcanic water, they watched me as I spoke, only interjecting when he was sure I was finished.
“Where is the pain from, which tooth?”
“My whole mouth is in pain, I’m not sure which tooth is the problem.”
. “Well, let’s just say the worst pain you’ve been having recently?” He asked very gently with no conciliatory or punitive tones – each word tied up carefully in its own special enunciated package.
.As we spoke he prepared for the exam, barely tilting the fragile body of air in the small office;
.a delicate snap...
the gloves were on
a cushioned click....
the face mask was down
a subtle whir...
my visual perspective was dipped
I was his, yet I was not afraid..........
I watched the motion of his over-washed white coat as it hugged his size thirty-six shoulders, the soft crevasses that ran through his carmel face and as he guided the exaggerated needle into the depths of my jaw. I listened rather than cringed, “It will be very fast and only a moment of discomfort...it should pinch just a little...and only for a second...that’s it...that’s it...it’s going to be ok...,” and as he continued his soothing murmur/speak I caught the corner of the Disney-sized needle withdrawing back into it’s space-craft where it and it’s fellow needles are kept until they are summoned. This satellite is only known to dentists – and most dentists have no control over the pain these needles wreak on their victims – but this dentist had a special relationship with all dental instruments of torture, a calming effect if you will, that confused the needles, rendering them helpless in his hands. In the same soft murmur, he said, “the anesthesia takes a few minutes to effect, I’ll be back.”
I tried to not focus on the corners of my mouth which became strangely large – each lip line becoming a cavernous canal, the tongue becoming mad until it decided to take its new found largess and stand in revolt of years of food abuse, standing erect and inflamed between my blood soaked teeth, like Moses parting the Red Sea. I tried to not think about the ramifications of this revolt, and the fact that in addition my jaw felt as though it was filled with 100 pounds of foam. I tried, instead to be overjoyed that I was attaining partial dental health by actually being able to complete this reduced cost dental procedure, partially funded by the county YIPPIE!!!! I cheered with out moving my dental dam.
As I started to get terrorized that this procedure was actually going to happen, my dentist came back in the room followed closely by the nurse in a light cloud of mousse and cotton starch who was calling after him, “Dr. Taylor what should we do? The medical examiner from Delancy Street said no matter what they won’t approve anything but extraction.”
.Nervous whispers were exchanged above my head. My dentist stopped, changed his gloves, and looked at the piece of paper she had been waiving in the air, he began to shake his head from side to side emphatically...”That’s ridiculous – that would be bad medicine – that tooth can be restored.”
.I remembered those men in the waiting room – tall, drained, dark eyes darting from one to the other, regulation chinos – white t-shirts – one of the men clutched an over-folded piece of paper – massaging it with wide flat fingers – clicking it with nails bit to the cuticles.
. “You don’t have the money to keep your teeth”...the refrain of my dentists sailed above their heads.
....white t-shirts covering pounding hearts,
mouths
filled with the residue of blood and cigarettes
days when there was just laughter and sugar and....
Today they would pull his good restorable teeth at
county general hospital..........if he was lucky.
. “So how do you feel?” The whir died down, my eyes opened, sort of. I saw the bottom of my pants. They seemed calm. My calves were relaxed and organized inside my pants. My hands were beside my body, quietly, as if they had nothing to say.
. “We’re all done.” My dentist watched me, his countenance stern, calm and sad.
.I’ll miss him, I thought. I finally identified myself as the participant victim/observer I aspired to be, requesting just a few minutes of his time for questions.
. “So what’s the situation with the UC dental system – why was I denied care when I was unable to afford their fees ?”
. “They are mandated by the state to not operate at a loss.”
. “Oh!” I winced – my humiliation was valid and for a larger purpose, visions of shrunken, screaming dental students strapped onto aluminum tool trays floated past my eyes...
. “What would you like to improve on here, if you could?”
. “More patient hours – right now we’re only allowed 52 per week.”
.I remembered the subtle encouragement by the receptionist not to make more than two appointments within one month. I knew it wasn’t a perfect system and I was already becoming luckier than my poor ex-con brothers by receiving this much care; the luxurious root canal
A crooked, anesthetized smile consumed my cottony mouth as i left the dentist’s office.
(insert poem here) – three generations- (or in the beginning after the statement)
Chapter 65
Consciousness;The 3rd Intervention
“Poor single mothers in this society are some of the hardest working, most under appreciated folks I know. And to be a homeless mother, a homeless child and survive, that is pure heroism.”, her wide brown eyes catching mine, embedded jewels in smooth velvet mountains, pouring spirit with each word, “….Pure heroism” She was tall and lean, her hair in tiny dreads crowning a delicate skull. Cheekbones wide and long like chiseled mountains, her skin smooth like walnut butter.
I was privileged to meet the beautiful and graceful Erica Huggins, former Black Panther, artist and teacher in a class on Incarcerated women at San Francisco State. My mother always the seeker of knowledge and cutting edge truths began inching her way into a series of life-changing Women studies, Black Studies and La Raza Studies Classes at SF State.
I was a sponge meeting water for the first time. Every class fed me with political awareness about women in poverty, 1st , third and fourth world contrasts and similarities, Black psychology and deep structure, revolutionary literature; Zora Neal Hurston, Dorothy Allison, Trin Min Ha, and Toni Morrison, and so many more, new solutions, and Resistance.
The scholarship of Chinosole, Angela Davis, Jose Cuellar, Velia Garcia, Mina Caulfield and Dr. Wade Nobles flowed together like rivers of liquid inspiration coursing through my thirsty mind. But the turning point, the moment I became truly engaged was with delicate recognition of me and my mom’s struggle by Erica Huggins. She went on to relate her experience of serving 2 and half years in a maximum security prison for her involvement and eventual ‘framing’ by cointelpro causing her to do to hard time. She also went on to relate the extreme struggle of poor women, poor mothers, poor families locally and globally.
Theories, words, ideas, concepts, and histories awoke a new politically conscious tiny and dee. Our extreme poverty and unending crisis began to have a framework.
Chapter 66
Welfare
“You are a great writer, but this is too much misery”
“This is compelling writing, but poverty is not on our agenda this year….can you write about something else, perhaps a current affairs story, we could publish that….”
While my consciousness was growing by leaps and bounds, I began writing more. All of the stories were meant to be literary advocacy written in a personal narrative format. With the wide submissions came an ever growing pile of rejections. Of course all writers get rejections, its part of the trade. But my rejections came with a new disturbing twist which I have consistently experienced to this day as journalist focusing almost exclusively on poverty and racism; the intentional disinterest, no matter how great the writing, in poverty as a subject for most corporate newspapers and national literary magazines.
But I had little time to focus on this issue. Sales were worse than usual, we were facing eviction from our apartment due to another higher rent wanting, no tenants rights abiding Oakland landlord, our car had just been towed and we had nowhere to live and no way to make any money. It was with this last bout of hunger and homelessness that my mother and I decided I should apply for welfare.
25 page applications, 6 different documents proving homelessness, 3 documents proving income or rather lack thereof, at least two documents proving residence in California and 6 intake appointments later.I received a whopping 279.00 dollar check and $60.00 in food stamps. To get this ‘free money’ (a completely misleading concept about cash assistance in the US) I had to wake up at 5:00 am two mornings a week to sweep the streets. This very labor intensive, hard work is not called work. Instead to continue the mythology of the lazy welfare recipient who doesn’t want to work, this work is called, Workfare and instead of receiving a living wage for your work, you receive your cash assistance. If you viewed the cash assistance as a wage for your workfare which varies from bus cleaner, street sweeper or county hospital maintenance, it would be equivalent to less than $2.00 per hour or less depending on the city you are in.In addition to the unsafe working conditions, lack of respect and the fact that these jobs previously were considered to be living wage scale positions, workfare is viewed by many economic justice advocates as modern day slavery.
Chapter 67
The last intervention
Once I applied and received welfare, which took several days away from any money making or apartment searching we found ourselves on the brink of immediate outsideness.
Because most of my vending was now located in different illegal (unlicensed) locations in the city and on many days I could barely afford gas or public transportation to even get there, my mother suggested we seek out new housing frontiers, i.e., San Francisco.
A newer, updated slightly hipper version of the rent-starter suit was applied and out I went. The stakes were higher than ever, we absolutely had to find a place or we would end up on the street, without even a car to hide in this time. I had 15 days from application to deposit to move-in. But this time something was different.
“You don’t have any credit cards?!” After the 10th San Francisco apartment rejection I realized I was encountering a not so subtle, yet very powerful form of classism. It wasn’t that these landlords didn’t buy the innocent-suit-wearing-working-person-who-will-pay-their-rent-on-time-and-is-a-stellar-tenant act , it just wasn’t enough.
In my whole history of rent starting I had never lied about having credit. Noone tried to give me a credit card, sent me letters of solicitation for loans or cars or houses. I had nothing except a delinquent phone bill which stood out alone and proud threatening death or destruction to anyone who would dare cross its path from the otherwise blank pages of my credit report.
So with the exception of my dental and rental crimes, when I said I had no credit, good or bad, to all of the landlords in LA and Oakland I was being completely honest. But in San Francisco it was not ok to just be credit free and hard working with a good story, it was necessary that one be “established” with wealthy relatives, equity, credit cards and a car loan to actually attain “The Lease”And so on the 10th day of my search I still had no apartment or even a hope of one.
One day I was walking through the Tenderloin district of San Francisco scribbling down every possible For Rent sign in my path. And then I saw it. It wasn’t obvious, almost obscured by a dust-blurred window, For Rent with a tiny printed reference to an obscure realty company. The same information was also printed in Cantonese
“Hello.. I am calling about the apartment for rent”
“Who is it for?”
“Myself and my mother, she is disabled, I am her sole caregiver…I am a hard-work…..”
“Oh you are a Good Daughter, that’s wonderful ..why don’t you come by tomorrow so we can talk, your mother is very lucky to have a Good Daughter like you..”
“ok” I said quickly, baffled from my new title. A Good Daughter, is that what I was? No-one had ever recognized my sacrifice to help my mom at all, much less recognized it as something “Good”
I met the diminutive lily, property manager and friend to the even more diminutive Mrs. Chin, an 83 year old monolingual Chinese elder who owned and resided in a tiny 2 unit building in the tenderloin district of San Francisco. Within seconds of our meeting, we were laughing a genuine laugh, rather than my fake sycophantic landlord laugh employed at most of these interactions. Within a few more seconds I was telling her everything. Well, almost everything. She was still a realtor after all. But I told her about most of our struggles, I told her hard I worked to keep us both alive. I told her how we didn’t have any family to turn to cause my mom was basically an orphan. And I told her that I would work as hard as I could to pay the rent, like I always did.
At the end of my story Lily hugged me and told me about her struggle to work with her daughters. How only one of them were “good daughters’” How she had done the same thing with her mother. She told me about the tradition in all chinese families for the children to take care of their elders. She told me how scared she was about the “new generation” of American born Chinese children who won’t even bother working with their parents, and their parents who don’t even insist. How the breaking down of traditions will lead to the breaking down of the Chinese community.
I later found out what Lily was referring to was called “eldership” by Ethnic Studies scholars. And how that eldership was key to the survival and thrival of not only the communities’ elders, but the children and everyone else, for that matter. As well, that capitalism itself does not support eldership as it means that people aren’t as free to be good capitalists when they are worried about being good daughters and good sons. They aren’t as likely to go out and rent their own apartments to live separately from their families. In so doing they aren’t buying their own furniture, their own cars, their own food, et al. In effect, the in tact, multi-generational group sharing resources, goods and land isn’t as good for business.
Eight months passed. With non-stop work and no crises thrown in our path, we had paid the rent on time, every month like the good tenants we strived to be. I wrote whenever I could, the beginning of a novel about an abandoned child of poor immigrants taking shape in one of my many notebooks. Knowledge about collective banking, micro-economics for very poor third world women and the scholarship of Trin Min Ha rolling through my mind courtesy of my acquired education at SF State Black Studies department. And perhaps most importantly I was making very tentative inroads into organizing little piles of my belongings I was slowly unfurling from a mountain of hefty bags, in what was now the longest stint I had inhabited any space. And then the shoe dropped.
I got really sick. So sick that I couldn’t go out and sell on the ice-like winter streets. I was bedridden for 10 days. That was more than enough to ruin us. Within days of my illness, our current broke down car finally completely broke down and within a few more days we got the shut off notice for an over due water bill.
“Realty Company, can I help you?”
“Hi is Lily available?”
“This is Lily”
“Hi lily, this is Lisa”
“Oh hi Lisa how are you?”
“Not so good, a lot of bad things have hit at once, mostly that I got sick and then we got behind on everything else and now we don’t have this months rent”
“Do you need some time to pay the rent, dear”
“Well , yes, if that’s possible cause we don’t have it right now, but I think I am getting better and I am selling more than ever and I am quite sure I will be able to get caught up by the first of next month and I will pay you in full”
“ No problem, dear just call me on the first and we’ll see how you are”
“Ok, thank-you so much Lily, and please thank Mrs Chin for me”
“Its ok Lisa, just get well”
Things didn’t get better by the next month. In fact, things didn’t get better for several months cause when things go bad they aren’t easily made better when you have very little resources to begin with and even less left for the aftermath . But for the first time in my life, thanks to a true anomoly in a capitalist society; a kind and empathic landlord steeped in old school chinese culture, we weren’t facing homelessness. And this, perhaps was the most important intervention of all because had it not been for the kind-hearted Lily and Mrs chin I would never had had the chance to rest, to think, to dream, to conceptualize, to breathe….or to unpack my clothes.
Chapter 68
The tres Jennifers
“ The Kuna of Panama are one of the few indegenous tribes who control their own wealth; their own production of goods, and their own land. This is why they have successfully fought and won multiple attempts of colonization” One of the last most brilliant instructors I had the priveledge to learn from was a teacher by the name of Mina Caulfield. Over one short semester she broke down the ways that several folks had resisted the oppression of colonization by being in control of their own monetary systems.
The power of the conscious Kuna, the words of Toni Morrison, Mumia abu Jamal, courtesy of Professor Chinosole and the haunting voice of Puerta Rican poet, Piri Thomas, all of which encompassed that semesters’ selection of inspiration, education and consciousness filled my slightly less tense mind. It was in this period that the birth occurred.
I visited one of my best friends who belong to the exclusive club I referred to as the “Tres Jennifers” or “Three Jennifers”; so named because all three of my closest female friends are named Jennifer and in 1995 one of them had just given birth to a baby by the name of Leo.
Before I went to the hospital, I had to kill some time and opted to go into a nearby yuppie enclave of books, magazines and overpriced and over strong coffee. I immediately walked to the magazine section, soaking up all the specialty magazines with their beautiful glossy covers and perfect bound seams. As I stood there, blinded by a collective multi-colored sheen, I realized there was something glaringly absent. In a textual river of 30 font sized titles including; MONEY, ARTFORUM, THE NEW YORKER, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, CARS, CIGARS, PEOPLE, ARTWEEK, NEWSWEEK and GOLFWEEK,….. where, was the word…POOR…?
As I descended the 12 floors from the maternity ward to the lobby in the unadorned tin box that acted as the freight elevator for The University of California Hospital, suddenly a lightness, an air, a strong breeze filled with 6000 floating ideas struck the side of my head all at once. “That’s it!!! ”, I screamed into my trembling tin confines. “That’s what’s missing,” I was addressing a stain in the industrial carpet strip that lined the elevator wall, “why shouldn’t poor folks have a beautiful magazine all their own, something so fine, so glossy, that it would reach across the great divide of class and privelege, filled with literary and visual art, from people unseen, unheard… ” !!Bits of conversation, poetry, solutions and ideas issues ranging from shelter food to life in an SRO from my homeless friends, many of whom were unrecognized artists in their own right, all of whom were true poverty scholars, some of whom were just like me 1 year ago, barely holdin on and desperately in need of hope. All of whom were in need of some recognition, some love and beauty. I knew what I must do… By any means necessary….NOW!
The automatic doors flew open, small children and animals looked on in awe. My flowing white beard and orange caftan waved to and fro in the morning breeze.
Chapter 69
Media Resistance
From that day on I was filled with the kind of unstoppable motivation one must have to attempt the impossible. What I was setting out to do would potentially cost no less than $10,000, and take several designers, copywriters, writers and artists to bring together, not to mention the biggest commodity of all; time The only problem is I had no backing, no secret friends in the publishing industry, no computer, no cash, credit and most of all no spare time.
“Law offices..?”
“Hello, Osha, its tiny, do you have a minute?”
“yea, whats up,”
“Well, I have a big idea, but its gonna happen no matter how hard it is.. I am trying to create a literary magazine dealing with issues of poverty and racism, stories, not a zine although I am all about zine-ness, but this would be glossy, intentionally glossy , like ART FORUM or THE NEW YORKER, it would be nationally distributed and it would contain the words, art and knowledge of poor and homeless youth and adults, trying to survive, stay alive and be heard,
as well, it would be solution driven addressing the root causes of poverty and racism, and as well, with information on how people could help themselves out of homelessness and how others with priveledge could help folks who need it, anyway, the only missing link is someone who would print it , you know I have no credit or money or, well you know, so do you know any printers who might do it for free or do it on credit?
“Whoa, well that’s a cool idea but the only printers I can think of are INKWORKS, they are in Berkeley on 10 th street.
“Ok thanks, I’ll check it out right away, talk to you soon, bye”
“Ok, but hey, I don’t know if they will give you credit, but you can tell them about your project and see what they say”
“Yea that’s what I’m gonna do, thanks for the tip”
Click
“INKWORKS, can I help you?”
“Hi can I talk to someone about a proposal for a project”
“Sure, please hold on”
A few seconds later I was talking to a sweet voiced man who was in their production department. I explained my whole idea to him and in a few more minutes he said, “Well, we can’t do it for free, but we could give you our best reduced price”
“Ok, what would that be”
“A rough estimate based on the page count and quality of paper, approximately $6,000.00”
“Ok, thanks I’ll call you when it s ready to go”
I had just heard the most preposterous amount of money that I had never had my hands on and didn’t expect to have them on any time soon, but it didn’t matter, I was on a roll. No obstacle seemed to great, no problem insurmountable
And in the process odd synchronistic events began to collect in my life
One of the rare moments that my mother and I could afford the gas and time away from selling to drive out of town we happened upon a little boutique coastal town common to Northern California. After we parked my mother decided she needed to use the restroom and the only usable bathroom for non-customers of the over-priced local restaurants was in a little bookstore. In we trotted, instantly marked for shoplifting by our unsightly, oversized backpacks and adjoining plastic bags
The store was lined with coffee table-like picture books in large format color, none selling for less than $50.00 dollars so I only looked on in admiration, noting their fine printing and binding quality, something I was now very familiar with, tasting the illustrious color, and fine paper quality. After I finished soaking up the array of literary delicacies my eyes traveled non-chalantly behind the desk of the check-out desk and there they locked. Soon I was hearing the salseros on Osha’s rug. Light rays from unknown suns shone through the storefront glass, Congo drums, water lapping against shores and a thousand carnations floated through the sky into the little bookstore at the feet of a tiny gallery opening card, there it was, one of the most frightening, beautiful and haunting images I had ever seen and in my mind the only image befitting the cover of Volume 1; of the as yet un-published POOR Magazine. The paintings title, printed in tiny 9 point font was under the image; The Hammer by Evri Kwong.
The images’ background was film noir black-brown, a spotlight at the center shone on a very sad young girl , seemingly made of clay, laying on the ground outside of a toy house and toy car. Above the whole tableau was the oversized head of a giant, foreboding hammer. I asked the lady behind the desk if she knew of the artist or how I could get in touch with him, she knew nothing about it, a previous customer had accidently left the card on her desk and the opening it advertised had long since passed.
When we got home I made several futile attempts to reach the gallery but it was closed for an extended period of time and in a few weeks I gave up, vowing to find the artist because of course the magazine could not be printed without a cover
One day, a few weeks later I was driving with the ex-boyfriend (aka“the middle class white boy”) on our way to get coffee, we were casual friends now, no more drama, no more pain, only mutual art and mild caffeine appreciation. As my eyes perused his new, slightly old car I noticed on his dashboard a small folded art gallery opening card. Oh mi GOD ! it was the same artist.
“Do you know him”, I screamed.
“Oh you mean Evri, of course, he is a great friend, do you want to meet him?” he said this in a blasé, style he had been perfecting to seem painfully sophisticated for as long as I knew him
“AAAAAAAAhhhh, do I want to meet him, that’s the cover of my magazine, that and nothing else,” I was pointing at the card as I screamed
By the next weekend I had the pleasure of meeting the prolific Tibetan-American painter Evri Kwong. We instantly became soul mates, he loving and believing deeply in my vision of POOR and I loving and being startled by all of his work and of course, he was more than happy to allow the use of his image. He also pledged support in any other way we could see fit.
After the magical meeting with Evri, I began conducting a series of what I called short term extreme outreach writing workshops in all of the poverty enclaves that I and many of my houseless artists struggled, survived and lived through, including the GA (welfare offices) SSI, and food stamp delivery centers, in shelters, group homes, and on the streets where we lived and died. From these workshops the voices, poetry and art was gathered to make up the content that was Volume 1 of POOR
As well, I began some of POOR’s early collaborations with several grassroots non-profit organizations that served very low and no-income youth and adults such as Sixth Street Photography workshop, The Luggage Store Gallery, Youth Guidance Center (Juvenile Hall) The Suitcase Clinic, and Writerscorp
While I and an adhoc group of other organic intellectuals, houseless poverty scholars and writers were facilitating the grassroots production of a large body of amazing literary work, Evri was helping me reach across the divide of class priveledge and into a pond of artists with expensive art school educations who were willing to have their art published in the first literary magazine on poverty.
Chapter 70
One year later
Bein Homeless
By Timothy Holden, age 16
from Centennial High School in Compton
Being homeless ain't the thang for me.
Walking around with beat up clothes it's a catastrophe.
Can't take a shower I'm all funky and hot,
Staying in a old building sleeping in a cardboard box.
Living in this world it's a big struggle.
Trying to do jobs awarding myself with scratches on my knuckles.
Being poor is like a maze, Being in one place lock up in a cage.
No water, No food, No place to move,
Being poor is not nothing to prove.
It's like getting stab in the heart with a knife,
I need to get up and change my life.
Serving people saying Ma'am or Sir,
Getting out of this hell hole I'm my own answer.
One year of street vending, shirt painting, intermittant poverty survival work, workshop leading, art curating, copyediting, writing, outreach, administration, and a desperate, underground form of fundraising passed without a hitch, well almost. Everything went right and everything went wrong, but nothing deterred me, no matter how impossible…
As the submissions of handwritten poetry and stories began to trickle in culled from our multitude of workshops and workshop partners across the nation, a new, unforeseen and seemingly impossible problem began to materialize; I had no computer, no access to one and no knowledge of how to use one even if I got one. Until I discovered the computer lab at Kinko’s.
It started as a makeshift office to enforce my own form of writing discipline. Since our move to the smaller Mrs Chiin’s place, there was no extra painting closet that could double as an office for writing, so after roaming the streets in search of some kind of place to write that had a typewriter nearby. I found the magic that was Kinkos. I could sit twice a day, for my regulation two hours that I had set aside for writing, unbothered, at the now unpopular typewriter and write, first in long-hand, and then edit it on the typewriter.
One day I tremously climbed up the winding stairs that led into the inner sanctum of the computer lab. A large sign demanded the toll to access: $.60 a minute. That meant it could potentially cost thousands of dollars I could never attain just to word process all of the work needed for the magazine. I sat down momentarily discouraged. And then it came to me. There had to be a system, everything from welfare to jail to banking was based on some kind of system.
Within minutes of covert observation I had cracked it. It was all about access codes and who you knew. I launched a week-long assault of focused sexual politicing with computer lab attendants until I finally attained the access hook-up.
Now the work began. Hours upon hours of time, stolen, like Trin Miin Ha said, away from the time it took to earn a loaf of bread, were spent in Kinko’s early in the morning and late at night I tapped away, sorting through submissions of notebook paper, the backs of old envelopes, paper bags and even slices of cardboard boxes . My too slow word processing only skimmed the surface of the volume of work that had to be done, the remainder of which was only possible because of the help I received from another one of the tres Jennifers; Jennifer Harris, copyeditor and transcriber by day, visual artist extroridinaire by night.
From that conundrum I moved to the next one; Layout; for which I have middle class white boy #3 aka, partner and friend, Barry Schwartz who hooked me up with his talented artist and graphic designer friend; Edourdo Paulo who took the entire 75 page pile of poetry, prose, visual art and resources and turned it into a coherent document ready for publication.
And then we were there. All 75 beautiful pages were safely nesting on a thing my digital divided self did not understand called a zip disc. There was only one problem we still didn’t have any money. It was at that moment that I dreamt of my first fundraising project; Fun-Ding. An art performance, auction and all around night of pure fun to raise money for the printers. It was a huge success only because of the support of conscious artists like Barry McGee, RIGO, Michael Brian Foley, Chico MacMurtrie and Scott MacLeod and most of all the amazing Evri who donated the proceeds of one of his large paintings. Despite the raging success of the event we only raised 2,100.
One thick-aired day in July I was standing on the street trying to sell at least one t- shirt so I could buy lunch in my favorite unlicensed vending spot in the City, when an Asian woman wearing a beautifully tailored ensemble came rushing down the street. Oh mi god it was her. We knew each other because she was on the board of an organization that helped women get small business loans.
Years before I had embarked on POOR, we tried to get a business loan through this organization. We were turned down because of unempathic, old school banking requirements, i.e., the ability to organize your project into a banking style business plan, which required regular attendance in one of many how to write a business plan classes, the ability to “show a profit” in your business and the omnipresent requirement for some kind of collateral to secure the loan.
The odd thing was, this was the organization that a few years later got the large city contracts to provide a program known as micro-economics or savings circles to poor women in the Bay Area. The concept, originally launched in severely impoverished third and fourth world countries like Bangladesh, starts out with a group of poor women who want to start a business but have no credit, equity or money to do so. It is founded on the principal of collectivism as each women puts a little bit of money into a collective fund and at the end of a period of time the womens’ money is matched with funds from the World bank ( one of the only decent things that the World Bank has had anything to do with) These loans enable the women to buy the livestock or equipment they need to launch their very small businesses (aka micro-business) and through their micro-business development are eventually able to achieve long-term economic self-sufficiency for themselves and their families.
When I first learned about this program I was entranced by its organic empowerment and non-individualistic premise which has been done with much success for many years by several immigrant communities surviving and thriving locally and globally. I knew it could be the answer for poor women and men in the US as we, like poor folk in the third and fourth worlds, share the lack of access to credit and business to expand or launch our businesses, I knew this personally due to my experience as a micro-business person turned down from many standard small business loans even so-called “alternative programs” like the one started by this organization .
So when I excitedly researched this whole concept with the idea of starting a local savings circle only to find out it was subsumed by the very old school liberal, wealthy ladies trying to do good group that I had already knew of I was pretty discouraged. In my opinion it was important that this program be run by other poor folks who understood what you needed to know about the subtlties of poverty and racism and therefore could help you come up and out of poverty from their shared poverty scholarship and experience.
Anyway, she knew we were turned down for the loan, cause of course you know my hella ghetto, never take no for an answer, mom caused a big stink about the whole thing and she felt bad about it and vowed to help us out in some other way in the future if she could.
“I and a whole group of very dedicated folks have worked all year to get this done – we started with nothing, as you know, but now at the end of the year we have raised 2,100, which is great but its not enough cause we need at least 4000 for the printer to even start the job. Do you have any ideas, do you know of anyone who might lend us some money, we only need $2000, we could pay it back, I have taught myself to write grants and one from the SF Arts Commission looks really promising, or it could be an emergency grant or….” My pleas floated down that busy street in the Financial district, weaving in and out of cars and sailing above our heads into the windy afternoon. I couldn’t hear myself, I only felt the sheer desperation of being that close and yet that far away from everything I had ever lived for and knowing that after all my struggle there was no other solution to turn to.
“Call me tomorrow in my office and maybe we can work something out”
Two days later with 4,100 in my backpack, I stood at the front counter of INKWORKS. My trembling hands held the zip disc as I awaited the production representative with the odd, yet appropriate name of Lincoln.
Six weeks later
The day had a sweet smell – a just after rain smell – even though it hadn’t rained The clouds floated through the bay area sky as though they were boats in a calm ocean, large, silent, almost unmoving. It was today. I had gotten the call, “Ms. Garcia-Gray, Your books are ready for pick-up” My breath felt hard to keep in my lungs. It was everything and everything, and it was ready. For pick-up.
I drove across the bridge in our current broke-down vehicle, alternately blasting Tupac, Little Richard and Celia Cruz. Its Saturday Night and I justgot paidDear Mama,Ayyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
I pulled into the driveway of INKWORKS. Moments and normal things like walking and opening doors and turning knobs and sitting and licking my lips and swallowing rolled into one movement
“Because you don’t have the balance of the cost we can give you half of the books now and we’ll keep the rest til you can pay for them.”
As the accounts person was describing their books for dough payment plan Lincoln emerged from the back room with one magazine. He was rubbing his had the cover as though it was a kitten or a soft rug.
“Here it is” My hands reached and everything became yellow. A sane, more logical me kept standing there discussing when I would get them the rest of the money and our current contact info. The yellow me was screaming and dancing and running outside. When the logical me was done we opened the doors and made it as far as the front stairs, where both mes’ collapsed into a huddle with the magic that was POOR Magazine Volume 1 HOMEFULNESS.
I sat there for many minutes, my hands catching the tears pouring from my eyes before they buckled the fine glossy cover adorned with Evri’s beautiful painting. My fingers caressing the page numbers, the solutions, the poetry, the resources.
Before I got up to leave I looked up in the sky. They were there, the flying words from Osha’s office floating on one of the ocean liner clouds. I feel Good I feeeeeel good , they were playing James Brown again. But this time something was different, In the middle between all the R’s, S’s and E’s for rent, eviction and sorrow were four letters standing together in neat succinct order spelling one word, meaning so much, simultaneously empowering, degrading and resisting with its directness, its possibilities and its pain ; POOR
And then…
“So now,
they rename us..
to
members of the lodging tribe
and
remove us from the land
for having to sleep
there…
Excerpt from Arrested Artistry, a poem by ken Moshesh
After the unbelievable wonderfulness of POOR Vol #1 happened, a new kind of schizophrenia was birthed.
“How much is this t-shirt?….Excuse me… HOW MUCH IS THIS T-SHIRT!?” The day after receiving our non-hostaged boxes of magazines and stuffing them in every spare orifice of our current broke-down vehicle, I was hustling our t-shirts on the street for that days lunch.
In the year of extreme outreach and writing workshops that led up to Vol 1, I had squirreled away $10.00 a month to pay for a voice mail that acted as POOR Magazine’s message phone. Next to that and the 6 boxes of as of yet undistributed books, that was the sum total of POOR Magazine’s assets and if I didn’t sell a t-shirt, I still didn’t eat lunch.
Nothing really changed and yet everything changed. Between selling, painting, silk-screening, helping my mom and a new addition to the group, my adopted little sister, I was planning and leading workshops and outreach efforts in juvenile halls, elementary, middle and high schools, on the streets, in churches and community organizations all over the Bay Area.
We also started to form the core leadership of POOR’s staff: Dee, and me, Ken Moshesh, Jennifer Navarro (“ tres Jennifer #3”), Deshawn Hollins, Joseph Bolden, Eddie Camacho, Roxanne Trade
I also began to teach myself to write grants, Beginning with an individual artists grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. After a painful and rigorous process of learning how to construct a more business oriented sentence with my 6th grade formal education in grammar and basic composition, not to mention time stolen away from vending ( i.e., earning a loaf of bread) I actually wrote a rather decent proposal and got the grant.
The whopping $10,000 allowed us to pay off the balance to Inkworks and pay poor folks a small stipend for their submissions. This was very important to me as I believe that it is very important to create access for poor artists by solving, if at least temporarily, one of their problems, their poverty.
Any remaining money went to the endlessly challenging dee & tiny rent fund and I was vending everyday just to eat.
The word “hard” does not do justice to the layers level of work/struggle that filled my plate to juggle the parallel realities of working on this extremely important and valuable project while also trying to survive and support my family and stay pseudo housed and keep the utilities on.. , i.e., strife and strength, hunger and hope, resistance and reality, but I was way too hopeful to be completely discouraged or daunted. Nothing was impossible. I had proved that, at least temporarily.
Many years later after struggles to achieve amazing acts of media resistance such as youth poet/spoken word projects, media organizing which saved shopping carts from being seized from poor recyclers and African descendent elders from being evicted, disabled men of color from being incarcerated and and on and on .. that were then met with discouraging losses of all funding for the organization I eventually lost the ability to be blindly hopeful. I also recognized the inherent pimp ho relationship of philanthropy which barring the support we received from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development in later years was all fraught with that element. As well, I realized sadly, that most “successful” i.e., still alive, non-profit organizations are run by Executive Directors or board members who have an independent source of funding like family money, trust funds, , etc…
But this was the beginning so none of those daunting realities could hold me back
Chapter 75
Indigenous Organizing Model
“Whaaaaaaaat?!” you can’t have that class at 9:00 in the morning," Dee screamed over the phone on one of our POOR Magazine 3 minute executive meetings via the pay phone in the basement of Macy’s between t-shirt sales
“But we need to do a morning class,” I plead.
“Well, not one I have to be involved in!”
From the beginning POOR practiced an indigenous organizing model, meaning that the key leadership consisted of family, elder members and friends, in that order.
Logistically what that means is endless discussions between all concerned until we reached a unified organizational voice. After things were cleared and argued between Dee and myself, they were then cleared, conceived built and organized with POOR Magazine poverty scholars and elders.
None of this is easy to actually do, but that is a common practice followed by indegenous communities and families of color who have businesses, and/or enterprises together. If one family member gets rich, gets “connected” or even has an opportunity to build something it is incumbent on them to create access and/or a job for the other members of the family. As well, if a business is started with little or no financial capital it is necessary for families and communities to work in that business and help each other with human capital as this is a way to come together up and out of poverty. And for very low-income, at-risk families like ours barely making in this capitalist society we felt that intentionally adopting these non-capitalistic principals of interdependence, collectivity and co-habitation were key to our survival and thrival.
So the t-shirts and the team work flowed, the poverty continued and hope and a lot of energy fueled the whole process.
In the first year of our organization, we developed the notion of poverty scholarship which was inducted into POOR’s core practices with the clear realization that us poor folk had to flip the power of media, voice and authorship. Poor people were inherently denied a voice in the media, they were also denied a voice in the creation of legislation and academic scholarship, consequently it was POOR’s goal to intentionally listen to, conceive of policy and reassign authorship to the folks on the front-line of the experience of poverty and racism.
Ken Moshesh, a currently homeless, former Black Panther, artist, percussionist and videographer was one such poverty scholar and elder statesmen of POOR, in his tenure at POOR he co-authored several journalistic pieces, took a leadership role in the launch of the Oakland “Jerrification” Project which was instrumental in the launch of Oakland’s Just Cause Ordinance ( i.e. the first form of rent control that Oakland instituted) as well as an organization of the same name. At the tail end of his leadership at POOR he launched a battle and won a landmark legal challenge against California’s penal code, 647 (j) aka The Lodging Laws which is well-known as the code that is used to cite houseless folks for sleeping outside and is also one of the aforementioned Quality of Life citations.
From the first of our formal workshops/leadership meetings we also established our radical notions of poverty journalism/community journalism which included institutionalizing my ideas about the hierarchy of authorship, i.e., if a poverty scholar at POOR who was living outside dealing with mental illness or assorted issues related to a life lived in poverty, including different forms systems abuse or survival work and therefore could not steal time, energy or clear thoughts away long enough to write “their story” Or due to his or her lack of literacy was unable to construct a clear sentence or paragraph, they were assigned a “writer/facilitator” who would listen, transcribe and/or translate their concepts/stories/struggles into a complete piece of prose or journalism.
As well, we expanded the narrow definitions of what journalism could be.. For a youth of color speaking from his or her perspective about his or her experience, spoken word, hip hop and rap is journalism. Grafitti is journalism. Murals are journalism. Music is journalism. For an African Descendent elder such as POOR's Po Poet Laureate A. Faye Hicks, poetry is journalism or what we called in later years; PoetryJournalism.
Finally, we tackled the notion of Journalism, as it had been defined by mainstream media, which, we believed was essentially a form of voyearism:
An 86 year old, African descendent elder is evicted from her residence of 22 years. Activists protest.
The radio, TV and print reporters come out. They take some pictures, they point film cameras at her, they film the protest. They leave. At best, you might get a "feature story" following mainstream media standards of "advocacy journalism" that talks to all the "sides" i.e., the supposed side of the landlord evicting her and maybe one quote from the activists.
Rarely are the root causes of the eviction dealt with in the piece such as the gentrification brewing in that neighborhood and the landlords profit margins if he sells without an elder aka "problem " tenant in residence.
At worst, you won't here from the activists at all and you'll only get one sad picture of the woman, saying nothing
POOR's rule from the beginning was to break down the myth of objectivity and the implicit "other" stance of journalism. We accomplished this through the integration of self, the use of the "I" in every story. No Dickensian positivism here. We were the subjects; the incarcerated, the welfare moms, the working poor, the disabled, the homeless, the low-income youth of color, the evicted tenants. We were the "insiders" seizing media and creating media resistance with every article, statement, story, picture. We intentionally broke the mainstream media rule of using the "I". Every story was written from the first person narrative of the writer, as well as creative writing techniques and opinion about the injustice of their situations.
In later years as we developed the curriculum for our Poverty Studies Program which was created for college students and/or professionals who had the privelege and access of a formal education. We taught them the same thing; they were not sent out to cover stories only to re-port, but to sup-port the activism, the resistance, the family, or the person being harmed by the situation that caused the story to materialize in the first place. As well, in the writing of the story they were required to reveal of themselves, their own stories, their own relationship to the pain felt by the subjects of the story. They were taught to have empathy, not sympathy.
Chapter 76
HELLTHCARE
"But it is an emer.....gen.............." the last part of my sentence was cut off by my own saliva which was draining into my throat at a rate of three gallons per second.
"No Miss Garcia, I don't think so"..... the admitting clerk mistook my choking pause for uncertainty, and proceeded to start shaking her head from side to side while she filled the silence with her persistent rant, " We can only see you if it is a life threatening emergency, and of course that is only if there is no other county facilities available."
"I'm.....tell...ing.....you....I can't..... breathe.....It is an emer....." She was still shaking her head. I managed to spit out one last sentence. "Can you ask your sup...ervis..or..?!"
At this point she made a small snort of frustration/confusion and walked away.
It had been several months since I had had an asthma attack quite this bad and when I had the last one I vowed to never go to an emergency room due to an example of what I call "Hellth-care" which included sitting in a County funded emergency room for no less than 16 hours before I recieved any treatment. Unfortunately illness is an untameable beast which strikes unexpectantly when you are least prepared....
As an uninsured, very low-income person I had struggled on and off for all of my adult life with the impossible choices of 1)standing in line or sitting in waiting room of a county health facility for up to 16 hours, 2) fighting with a clerk about my right to emergency room care in a "private" non-profit hospital or 3) remain deathly ill and who knows, maybe even die. Because my mother never allowed accepted any systems abuse to go unchecked, she would insist that I seek immediate care, by any means necessary, forcing me into choice number 2 and in my struggle to "prove" the emergent nature of my illness, I discovered a little known act named Hill Burton
The Hill-Burton Act forces acute care clinics, hospitals and other medical health facilities to provide free services to people whether or not they have the ability to pay. Due to the fact that your illness has to be deemed of an "emergent nature" there is a screening process that admitting clerks must follow to find out if you are in fact in an emergency state.
The problem is, even when they do decide that your problem is in fact, "an emergency" , and even if you tell the clerk very seriously and clearly that you are indegent, and/or otherwise unable to pay, the hospitals' billing departments harass you mercilessly until you agree to pay or sell your debt to a credit collection agency that proceeds to ruin your credit, forcing many people to file bankruptcies, (which due to recent changes in the Bankruptcy laws is also no longer an option.)
If you are an undocumented worker, many county facilities acting under the guise of "reporting" use the billing and collection process as a way to get information to Homeland Security, thereby terrifying the potential undocumented patient from ever seeking care.
Due to the highly punitive nature of poor people health care policies, myself and many POOR magazine staff were in constant fear of becoming sick and as we planned our next issue of POOR it seemed only logical that we should focus on this extremely dangerous problem plagueing poor folk.
As was POOR's standard, we set about looking at not only the problem, through investigation, as well as literary and visual art creation, but at possible solutions with the goal of creating each issue of POOR as a resource for poor folks as well as a resource for empathic and creative minded providers seeking to be part of the "solutions".
We began by questioning the western notions of mental and physical health and the ways in which poor people and poor families are patholigized as well as the severe lack of mental health services for uninsured folks and the impact that that lack can have on community survival.
We also investigated the ways in which providers can actually provide services for poor folks on a real sliding scale, i.e., providing dental and medical care starting at Free.
Chapter 79
The Sliding Scale
As yet another form of direct access and problem solving , we at POOR will be offering display ad space at a sliding scale rate, starting at free for small and very small capital poor businesses. We will afford this luxury by selling limited display ads to capital rich businesses or corporations. For many years myself and my mother barely survived on a very small business that we could never expand or turn into a profit making venture as never had any credit to attain a bank loan or credit cards, family support or any kind of backing, if this chance had been offered to us….
It was also with the HELLTHCARE issue that we congealed our holistic notions of "sliding scale" My belief is that everything should be based on a sliding scale. In other words everything can be affordable if everyone kicks down what they can afford. So if someone wealthy purchased a subscription to POOR and paid 100.00 dollars they were also "sponsoring" or creating access for the low or no cost subscription of someone who had very little money. We did the same thing with ads.
Display ads in a glossy magazine were so costly as to be impossible for micro-businesses, this was just one more reason among many that people without capital had such a hard time developing a business. We tried to provide that radical form of access.
Chapter 77
Youth at POOR
Pain
Pain is in my head
Its in my art
Its in my body
Its in my life
Like the time I got hit by a car
It was like a hit
From a shot gun
By Kevin (15)
In the year leading up to the release of HELLTHCARE we began a series of long -term workshops with very low-income youth scholars 12-17 interned at group homes, and closed mental health placements. Unlike our previous workshops for youth, these ran over a whole semester and included a series of literacy exercises that tied in with the kids curriculum and were part of their school day.
"Who do you think makes your shoes?" I called out to the class. Each workshop included a media literacy/ social justice component that questioned the unjust society of haves' and have-nots that they were definitely caught in and the capitalism they were spoon-fed through corporate media on a daily basis .
"Do you think the workers at Nike are getting paid fairly?" These questions would open the discussions which would inevitably lead to a critique of media messages and corporate product pushing as well as opening their minds to other forms of survival and thrival.
"Who would call themselves poor?" Perhaps the most important thing we dealt with was the shame inherent in the life of a poor kid. A shame so powerful that a kid would shoplift or take part themselves in some form of unsafe underground economy just to attain the right clothes, right shoes, or right computer accessories. A shame that would make a kid lie about being homeless so they wouldn't be "the homeless kid" in their school.
Boxes so large
Spaces so small
These are the things
that make up my walls
Cement so cold
Covers so dirty
More boxes around me
Keep my house sturdy
Begging for money
Finding old clothes
Looking for something
to cover our toes
Giving Donations
of a quarter or more
Some hesitate
Because they think they know what it's for
Living like animals,
Hardly ever clean
People look and laugh
Because they don't understand what they have seen.
Walking down the streets
with nowhere to walk or run
Material things your people have
me and my people have none
Crying for all of your help
in the midst of our own tears
Searching for someone, anyone
to calm of our fears
These cries for help we ask from you
you act like you can't hear
because we are the homeless
and we will continue to be for years
by Jennifer (14)
Chapter 78
WORK
POOR Magazine would like to propose in this issue that work must be defined by the worker who does the work. We believe that the concept of work itself should be broadened to include Un-recognized labor or what some mainstream researchers refer to as Outlaw Subculture, which is a marginalized title for what we at POOR consider work and workers.
Additionally, in this issue we are dealing with the concept of the "new slavery" . This concept defines prison labor, sweatshop labor workfare work and any other labor in which the a worker does that receives less pay or benefits for their work than those performing the same work in another setting… Excerpt from the POOR Magazine editors statement in Volume 3.
"It's because of people like you that Governor Wilson was in office," I sat on a hard plastic chair perched on the edge of the sort-of cubicle that was my welfare worker's office. He officiously stacked a pile of papers together and pushed them across his faux wood desk in my direction.
I let him tell me that and I only gulped. I was conscious, aware and understood the wrong-ness of what he said. And yet I felt small and idiotic. I was nothing. I was almost homeless ( we hadn't been able to pay our rent again for the last 6 months and Lila was gently threatening eviction.)
I was applying for grants every minute I could spare a second. The rain had been falling for weeks and even without the rain, sales were worse than ever.
Our meeting was about a new Welfare program borne from the loins of Welfare (de) Reform, a legislation signed by Clinton in 1996 that many of the POOR Magazine staff were about to be impacted by. There were a lot of punitive parts of the act, but the main thing it did is put a cap on the amount of time a person could receive the little bit of nothing that constituted cash assistance from the government, i.e., welfare.
The papers I was signing basically told me that I had a limited time to "transition" off of cash aid and that I had to enroll in a training program in secretarial administration within a few weeks or I would stop receiving food stamps and cash aid immediately.
"Would it be possible for me to go to school, I am a writer, and I'd like to pursue a career in media," I asked.
"That's great but you need a job, any job as soon as possible, so that’s not practical,"
"But I can eventually get a job in that field that would pay me more,"
To which he scrunched up his face even smaller than it already was, like someone who was peering at a bug they were about to step on, and declared my inspiration for former State of California fascist-in-residence-Governor Wilson.
I left his office with a punched in the stomach feeling. My eyes watched the soiled tile of the welfare office glide effortlessly past my feet until I reached the outside.
The next morning I donned my orange jacket and fulfilled my twice weekly workfare requirement of cleaning the streets, the little spoken about lower than minimum wage job required of all welfare recipients nationwide just to receive their meager cash grant, which of course shouldn’t even be called a cash grant as it is in reality a below minimum wage salary given for hard work that used to be done by union workers.
"Excuse me, you should come to our next planning meeting about workfare wages" A small woman also wearing an orange jacket was handing me a flyer as I toiled over my last load of trash.
"You know these jobs used to be done for decent wages by union employees," she added.
"Yes , I do"
"So I hope you come, " she said and then disappeared down the street into the early morning fog.
I looked down at the flyer;
POWER, People Organized to Win Employee Rights.
1:00 pm steering committee meeting.
126 Hyde
"What do we want..?.."
"JUSTICE!!"
"When do we want it?!!"
"NOW!!"
I sat tentatively at the edge of a small, stuffy room for my first POWER meeting. On the morning of the meeting I sold shirts til 12:30 and then fraught with guilt and fear over possible lost shirt sales, I raced over to the 1:00pm meeting where I was met with a group of folks chanting for justice, a stack of steaming pizzas and an array of butcher papers lining the walls listing in red the mythologies of workfare and the action steps needed to attain a living wage.
Everyone there had experienced the oppressions of the racist and classist welfare system and were organizing together to fight back. After a few more meetings stolen away from rainy days, I became a proud member of the very power-ful POWER.
Meanwhile, as we tried to raise money for the creation of Volume 4 POOR was experiencing an onslaught of "no's" from private foundations who require that you come up with new and different "sexy" project every year in order to fulfill their designated need that year. Even though Volume 3, which is what we were showing to the funders was about as "sexy" as any one literary project could be, it didn't seem to matter.
With another grant I attained from the San Francisco Arts Commission and The Vanguard Foundation as well as a small loan from our partners in struggle the amazing grassroots organization, The Coalition on Homelessness, and its then director Paul Boden, and individual and in-kind donations from friends, artists and subscribers like designers David Baal and copy-editor Jennifer Harris, we barely scraped by enough cash to publish one of the most revolutionary and powerful issues of POOR; Volume 3: The Work issue.
The WORK issue examined un-recognized forms of work and workers including Dee's re-visioning of panhandlers and recyclers as micro-businesspeople, workfare and prison workers as low-wage workers and sex workers as, well, sex-workers. As well as looking at mothering ( parenting) as a legitimate form of Labor. It also featured over 15 street artists from Berkeley to Venice Beach with their products and their contact information and featured a fascinating array of POOR Magazine Food Reviews which focused on everything from the best shelter food and free coffee places to a restaurant in the Bay Area dedicated to making soups. It included pages and pages of literary and visual art by folks like Margot Pepper, Chris Papa, Julia Vinograd,A.K.Black, Dorothea Lange, Ed Gould, Barry McGee, Herbie, Larry Clark, Dipti Desai, and Osha Neuman as well as video reviews of Ken Moshesh's work and a book review on Dr. Chinosole's book about Mumia Abu Jamal.
The cover art and full-color centerfold was of a new superhero created by me and the extremely talented youth artist and poverty scholar Eddie Camacho; El Mosquito; The new multi-lingual, poly-racial, Panhandler by day , Superhero by Night. It also had an amazing resources page and a feature story on a micro-business enterprise in Haiti as well as so much more.
But notwithstanding all of that wonderfulness, we went to grant meeting after grant meeting and encountered the dreaded, "NO". In one grant proposal meeting five members of the poor staff laid out all the wonderful projects we launched surrounding the creation of Volume 3 and what we were planning for the next issue and the board of the grantors said; "That’s all really wonderful, but how are you really changing the world?"
Chapter 80
Welfare (de) Form
YOU MUST APPEAR ON THE BELOW LISTED DATE OR YOUR BENEFITS WILL BE SANCTIONED.
As I read and re-read the most recent dispatch from my friendly welfare worker, I was struck by the irony of its punitive tone. Although I had never actually missed an appointment and I had only been late once in the two years since I started receiving benefits, all of my workers were either rude, indifferent or downright hostile to me. I can't blame them as I know that they were just cogs in the overall program wheel that was set up to criminalize poor folks for just needing help. A system that would accuse a poor mother of welfare fraud if she lied about her current residence or who she was living with on her welfare application. And God help her if she managed to make any money, even $5.00 on the side and not claim it, cause that would be punishable with ankle bracelets and 2 year probation sentences.
"How Much is this t-shirt?"
"$15.00"
"Oh, well thanks, maybe later"
My stomach was growling with hunger and yet there was no t-shirt "hustle" left in me, I fingered my welfare appointment letter under my display table. I knew that this appointment would be the intake for the "job, any job", training program that my worker had "set-up" for me. I knew I had to do something. And then I heard a faint noise.
"Get Up stand Up… Stand up For your Rights…"
I looked up in the sky, and there they were, the WORDS in the sky, dancing and singing, only faintly this time, as though they were on there way to somewhere else and could only stay for a minute.
This time they were rocking to Bob Marley. Their carpet had sort of morphed into a tiny black stage rolling through the sky.
"Some people say…"
And then it came to me,, "Of course," I screamed into the sky, "That's it!"
I threw all of my shirts and the elaborate galvanized steel racks onto the dolly and raced home to our tenderloin apt aka the basement office of POOR Magazine. I searched desperately through all of my welfare documents until I found a pink piece of paper stuffed among all of the other millions of superfluous forms they handed out to me each time I visited the welfare office. I had picked this one up at a satelite office for my food stamps. It was meant as an internal document to service providers.
A Request For Proposals for Welfare to Work Job Training Programs
Due Date; November 1st, 1998
For the next three nights and early mornings I taught myself how to operate Excel as I had to create an elaborate budget with terms and acronyms that were completely foreign to me and then I constructed a four page narrative about a job training program replete with corporate service provision concepts like intake, orientation, hard skills, soft skills, placement and retention.
On the morning of November 1st, I walked into the Private Industry Council (PIC) which was the corporate entity who would be facilitating the "Welfare to Work" dollars for the City and County of San Francisco's Department of Human Services , aka Welfare.
I had managed to organize all of the literacy and education programs POOR was already doing in the community into a full-fledged revolutionary Welfare to Work job training program in Journalism and multi-media digital technology aka The New Journalism/Media Studies Program at POOR Magazine.
It was structured as a 6 month program which in and of itself was revolutionary as most of the WTW programs were set up to "graduate" folks into jobs in 30-45 days.
It had two tracks and four components; 1) Writing, Journalism, media content development 2) Digital technology, graphic design and web development.
Within 30 days we received a phone call. It was Joyce Crum and Amanda Feinstein, who although they were working for the "man" i.e., inside the system of Welfare, thought outside the "box" on that rainy Thursday in December .
"We think your program is interesting…" Joyce gingerly started the discussion that day after we all introduced ourselves with a tentative yes to our proposal. We spent the next two hours working out some of the details and within 10 days POOR Magazine got a check for "start-up" funds of $18.500.
Christmas came and went that year without so much as one glance at the streets near Macy's. My mother whined sadly at the loss of "all those Holiday dollars". I agreed with her, it wasn't like we were rich or even had money for the rent we owed and we could definitely use some of that fast cash that flows in over Capitalistmas. But I didn't relent. I wasn't going back. Ever.
The weekend before that thanksgiving, I had silk-screened 320 shirts over a 12 hour period. By the end of the night my shoulders were doing something they had started doing in the last two years; searing with a pain so great I ended up on the floor of the work studio screaming in pain. No. I vowed, it was over. Dee and Tiny had made it out of the rabbit hole, finally.
Chapter 81
One drop-let of Water
With that little droplet of water, we soared. The day I received the check I ran over to Joseph Bolden's Single Room Occupancy Hotel room in the Tenderloin ( cause he didn't own a phone) and told him to get off welfare and come to POOR to be our first employee.
Together, Dee, Joe, Ken Moshesh and I began to set up POOR Magazine, the grassroots, non-profit, arts organization. With the help of in-kind donor and webmaster Dan Gottron we launched our on-line newsservice, PoorNewsNetwork(PNN) an on-line version of POOR and a news service focused on issues of poverty and racism, which included columns such as illin and Chillin with the radical voice of revolutionary journalist and Poet; Leroy Moore on issues of race and disability, tenants/housing resistance, Welfare De Form and REsistance
We launched Community Newsroom, a radical, community-based news-making project which met weekly and integrated the voices and scholarship of low and no-income youth , adults and elders in the making of news.
We launched the radio broadcast of PoorNewsNetwork on KPFA radio, which would also include a media training program that would teach POOR's students how to write and produce their own radio segments.
We launched the Po Poets Project, a multi-cultural, multi-generational poetry and spoken word project that used the "word" ie poetry and spoken word to heal , educate and relate how to survive , thrive and stay alive through race and class oppression, which included poverty scholars and amazing poets; Jewnbug, A. Faye Hicks, Dharma, Aldo Arturro Dela Maggiora, David Smith, Leroy Moore, Charles, MariLuna, me, and so many more…
We launched The Poverty Studies Program which was an internship training program for college students and media professionals who needed to learn how to translate the stories of low and no-income communities without perpetrating the "other" positions.
We launched the YouthinMedia/digital Resistance Project and the on-line column of the same name which was a media and journalism training program for very low and no-income youth and adults which has birthed the amazing words and images of Oji Elliot and MariLuna
We launched POOR Press - POOR's publishing arm which published the powerful scholarship of poet/journalists like Leroy Moore's CD and book Black Disabled Man with a High IQ,, A. Faye Hicks' book The POOR Nation Muteado's book; Untold Stories of Amerikka, Marvin Crutchfield's book Paradise Ventures , Byron Gafford's book; Thru the Eyes of A child, and The SNAG Magazine ( SEVENTH GENERATION OF NATIVE AMERICANS) And Dee's hilarious political allegories' The Po' Cats - a couple of low-income cats talk back for a voice that's never heard. As well as the compilations by POOR scholars including The Houzin Project - words , art and theory about gentrification, homelessness and displacement and The Poverty Hero and anthology about a new literary hero.
Dee launched the very powerful Courtwatch, which was a media advocacy project that provided support for parents being abused by the highly punitive system of Child Protective Services and the Juvenile Dependency Court.
And finally we congealed collaborations and launched projects with Media Alliance, Street Spirit, Families with a Future, Homeless Prenatal Program, Applied Research Center, The Coalition on Homelessness and Hospitality House and with the wonderful family of the san Francisco Bayview Newspaper who provided job training and placement support for the graduates of our journalism program.
With that little droplet of water we drank, we organized, we gave voice to unheard elders, youth and adults, gentrified communities, evicted elders, we helped stop evictions, we formed partnerships, we made change.
We were the subjects; the incarcerated, the mothers on welfare, the working poor, the disabled, the homeless, the low-income youth of color, the evicted tenants. We were the "insiders" seizing media and creating media resistance with every article, statement, story, picture.
This poem is honor of mothers…homeless mothers and poor mothers
low-wage mothers and no-wage mothers
welfare mothers
and three job working mothers
immigrant mothers
and incarcerated mothers
in other words
this poem is honor of
INS-ed with, CPS withed and
Most of all system messed with mothers
This poem is honor of all those poor women and men
And yes I said men cause don’t sing me that old song
About gender again
Who fight and struggle
And steal and beg in every crevass
And corner to keep their kids in a bed
Who dress and feed with tired hands
Who answer cries over and over again
This poem is in honor of those
Mothers who desserve to be coddled
And loved ,
Fed and protected
Instead of criminalized,
Marginalized and rarely respected
Who can barely make it but always do
And still raise all the worlds people
Like me you and you
Can I get a witness?
This poem is honor of mothers
Who can barely make it but sometimes do
And still raise all the worlds people
Like me you and you
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