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by T.W.C.
The year I began cleaning Dick Clark's windows and
Mary Crosby's home, I lived alone in a
three-bedroom bungalow on Broad Beach, the nicest
beach in Malibu. I had pocketed a couple of thousand
dollars, and I felt I might be able to make it through
some heavy rains.
When it began to rain, people began cancelling jobs
and talking about waiting till after the rains (3 or 4
months). Then the front end of my '81 Subaru fell
apart, piece by piece. After it had eaten up my entire
savings replacing axles, brakes, calipers, rotors and
things I knew nothing about, my only financial
cushion was gone.
Then my landlord gave me notice, and I had to get
out. Without even the money to pay first month rent
anywhere, I began to live in my car at the
campground at Leo Carillo Beach on the western end
of Malibu. It happened so fast, it took me awhile to
accept the fact that I was homeless. It honestly
doesn't sink in very rapidly. Even when you are
driving around seeking a safe-looking place to park
and lock yourself in for the night, you tell yourself it
is only temporary.
I discovered the trick to the campground after a few
nights. There was an $8 charge normally, but if you
came in after the rangers had gone and left before they
arrived, you didn't have to pay. I still had the Crosby
job, so I was earning enough each week for food and
gas, but nothing more.
I spent about four months living in that car, which
seemed to shrink daily. I can't begin to tell you how
depressing it was. It was raining a lot, and all I could
do was sit or lie in the car, reading when there was
light. I sincerely believed that one could find valuable
understanding in every experience that life throws in
our direction. As time passed, however, my search
for some valuable lesson disintegrated into anger. I
began to drink a lot of beer during that period to ease
the pain. It occurred to me that some homeless people
who become alcoholics don't necessarily follow the
drink into homelessness: it becomes the quickest way
to ignore what has happened, and dull the torturing
thoughts which can make a bad situation one hell of a
lot worse.
At the campground, I realized that a lot of the people
were there for an extended period, even though there
were 14-day limits. Many were families with
children, and one or both parents would go off to
work during the day.
They were making enough to feed themselves, as long as
they didn't have to pay five hundred to a thousand dollars
rent. Many of them paid the daily fee, for which they
received a campground with fireplace and public showers,
and packed up and left for one night every 14, before
coming back for another two weeks.
I had been living in Malibu, California for over three years,
and I had no idea that there was a whole community of
people who lived at the campgrounds.
Unfortunately, my deepest personal journey into the world
of indigence was occurring under the eaves of the homes
of some of Hollywood's wealthiest people. I had no desire
for wealth. But cleaning Dick Clark's windows or Mary
Crosby's home, and then getting in my car to wait for the
sun to go down so I could park it for free and sleep in it,
gave rise to emotions that I neither understood nor could
control.
I thought about how many of the places where I worked
were just weekend homes or one-month-a-year homes.
The rest of the time they stood empty - huge homes with
massive bedrooms, restaurant-style kitchens, cathedral
dining rooms, and totally empty. The owners were in
Europe, or shooting a picture somewhere, or only came for
two months in the summer.
Hundreds upon hundreds of empty palaces, but not one
with a spare bed for the hundreds of homeless people
parked at the beach or squirreled away under the brush in
one of Malibu's many canyons (where homeless people
without cars lived).
The ending of the rains that winter was like waking up
from a nightmare. Jobs began reappearing, and finally I
could afford the 80 dollars a week for which someone had
offered me a room in their home.
My God, what a luxury it felt to sleep in a bed again, and
have a shower and toilet right next to the bedroom, and a
kitchen to make some food in. Who cared if it was shared?
I had my fill of locking myself in bathrooms of restaurants
or office buildings to make a clean, private place to shit and
then brush my teeth, sometimes getting rousted out by an
impatient security guard. I was long ago weary of the loaf
of bread, mayonnaise, mustard and cheese that traveled
with me as lunch and dinner. The number of daily
humiliations that accompany homelessness are
incalculable.
"Poverty Sucks!" was the caption of a poster that hung
framed on the walls of a few homes I worked in. It
showed a man dressed in English riding attire, leaning
against a Rolls Royce with the arrogant sneer of the
priggishly rich on his face. Some people who chuckle over
it have no concept of how deeply poverty sucks to those
who stew in it, and the hatred of the affluent that
impoverishment nourishes. | 
