How To Stay Homeless

I try not to one-up people of my generation when they talk about being homeless, the way  some former millennial hipsters do (as if poverty was some study abroad program). A badge you can sew onto your jacket once you’ve decided it was time to settle down.

I was homeless with my mother when I was between two and six. My earliest memory is our bedroom: the backseat of her car. I’m on my back, maybe getting changed or just waking up from a nap, and through the rear passenger window I can see a cloudy sky with seagulls cutting through it. That’s the first place I remember living.

I don’t remember much else from that time, only a sense of motion. Parking lots at night. My mother’s friend’s garages or sun-rooms offered by church people for a night. My mother bathing me in beach bathrooms with sink water and a wet rag, what she called “monkey baths.” This would crack me up, because I’m brown as a monkey. For years after, it felt like those memories were following me around even if I couldn’t fully picture them anymore.

That kind of childhood teaches you things. How to stay calm when everything around you is unstable. How to adapt to boredom or crisis like an adult after years of therapy. How to live with a low-grade anxiety that never fully goes away. There are moments in my life when that anxiety disappears, and those moments feel unfamiliar, wrong. Like staying in one place too long still does at thirty-three.

I like to joke that the second time I was homeless was “by choice.” I say it with a smirk. People eat it up. The truth is I never learned how not to be homeless. My mother did. She married my father when I was seven and settled us into a home with walls. I absorbed stability secondhand. Osmosis, not practice.

I was a quiet kid most of the time with good grades. No trouble. But my imagination was always elsewhere. Always driving away somewhere. I don’t think I ever daydreamed about arrivals. These dreams evolved into a teenage recklessness that my parents couldn’t handle.

When I was eighteen, my mother cosigned my first apartment. She left me a mattress, a desk, and my clothes. Furniture, she said, I’d figure it out later. The second she and the apartment manager walked out, I lit a cigarette off the electric stove coils. It was the freest I’d felt since we slept in her car. A rope snapped. The umbilical cord cut.

Six months later, I was evicted. I’d spent the rent on alcohol, amphetamines, cigarettes, and magazines. The friends I let move in with me and I turned those magazines into a game, picking celebrity women, voting on who was most beautiful, and then pinning the winners to the wall. The Wall of Beautiful Women was our name for it. On my last day, I took my clothes and my books. Everything else stayed. I found out later my mother was forced to pay for the cleanup.

I was homeless again. Free again. My friend Eric chose that life with me instead of going back to Texas with his father. He had a T-top Camaro and enough belongings to prove he thought this was just a phase. And it was, for him. We parked behind the local movie theater and called it a home. The car filled up fast. Clothing, boxes of books and DVDs, random items we found in the woods behind the theater, and a full bedroom cabinet shoved into the backseat somehow. I slept in a little nest between the cabinet and the trunk, training my body to disappear with the night.

Every morning I woke up staring through the back window. Gray sky. Blue sky. Sometimes the black sky of pre-dawn. The same view I’d had before I knew what rent was, before I had language for loss or distance.

Some people survive things and call it resilience. I survived because this life was familiar to me. Because I had already learned how to live inside of a moving box and how to squeeze comfort out of life. I didn’t end up like my mother. I didn’t learn how to stay, or at least not yet. I learned how to leave before anything could decide to throw me out first. But that’s not strength. That’s conditioning. And it works right up until it doesn’t.