Bellissa and Faith

I walked out of the shelter and hefted my suitcase into the back seat of Bellissa’s truck. Together we rode towards Rudy’s.

“I have to ask you this,” Bellissa was saying. “Are you on any drugs?”

“Nicotine,” I replied.

“OK. So, nothing? Because if you need any kind of counseling, any kind of treatment, I’ve got hookups in that department too. I just want to make sure you’re taken care of in that regard too, if that’s the case.”

“No drugs, no nothing. Just me and my karma.”

“OK.”

We ordered our burgers and fish sandwiches (me the former, vegetarian-esque she the latter) and one Schaffer beer each. Bellissa paid. I was grateful. The Wednesday night Rudy’s crowd was a decent size. We talked about moving me into her spare room for awhile, and about what I can do for her in exchange and for how long it should go on. I would move a gigantic pile of sticks and branches from one part of her backyard to another. I would crush and destroy the bamboo-like weeds that had taken over one corner of the yard. I would put together her new entertainment center, install “grippy tape” on the front steps to reduce the chance of someone slipping, and help to unpack a room full of boxes and distribute their contents around the house where they belong. The latter is the only one I never got around to, because it turned out I was out of there and into my own place in a week.

Meanwhile, Bellissa drove me around, bought me lunches and dinners, introduced me to her friends and brothers and her basement roommate, talked with and counseled me about my options for the immediate and near future, and took my thousand thanks gracefully, eventually asking me to stop thanking her. I couldn’t help it. Although I was helping her out around the house, I still felt that yanking me out of the shelter and putting me up for a week was a true gift. She was, and continues to be, a true friend. We laughed, we hung out, we even drank and made merry one night around a bonfire in her backyard. The fire burned an invisible igloo of warmth in the still, cool air of the opening days of April as we sipped on Bud and nipped at a small bottle of Southern Comfort. I felt completely at ease in her presence, yet also oddly responsible and productive.

I continued the blog from her place and considered my plans. Ultimately the blog drew forth a number of Good Samaritans (much like paramedics to a crash site) who offered all measure of things helpful: money, jobs, housing, food and coffee outings for discussing life and its vicissitudes, kind sentiments and powerful words of encouragement. The blog also drew forth a some chastisement from old friends who I had wronged at one point and with whom I had not yet made amends. Even that was OK, as it just felt good to be reaching out and talking to everybody.

Two people expressed doubt that I had ever been homeless. I felt immensely complimented and encouraged to hear that I was just “a professional writer riding a trend” of homelessness and poverty in the literary and pop culture arenas.

Perhaps I never made myself sound desperate enough. Maybe my positive attitude in the face of hardship wasn’t typical. Certainly I was not living in the shelter for very long, but now wait just one minute, fellas. I have known poverty all my life. I grew up on Section 8 housing and welfare checks and grossly early Social Security benefits. When I was little, my mother and I usually had enough money left over for a Friday night donut date at the kitchen table. Silently, gratefully, and full of mischievous giggling, we slurped our half a donut each by candlelight. Dunked into milk sopping wet dripping. This was our treat for the week. I’m grateful for the donut memories.

Welcome to the story of my life: not having much, being resourceful, trying not to think like a poor person, being a chronic spendthrift when you get a few extra bucks in your pocket, only to find yourself broke in a few days and having to pawn something or ration the milk. Fine. Not so bad. Have you ever heard me complain?

Bellissa related the story of how she once asked a poor old man, Rawls, a jazz saxophone player, why he would spend $200 out of his $300 monthly government cheese on a handheld DVD player.

“When you’ve been poor your entire life,” explained Rawls, “you really are not interested in counting your pennies. If you get a little extra cash, you want to get something nice for yourself. You just want to feel normal, like other people.” And then you’re broke for days or weeks and you have to beg people for food. That’s thinking like a poor person. Again: welcome to my world.

One of the Good Samaritans who responded to my blog, Faith is her name, offered to put me up in an efficiency apartment in her house in exchange for 20-30 hours a week of work around the house. I could choose the jobs as I find things that need doing – raking, picking up trash, doing dishes, general cleaning, painting the unfinished woodwork around the window sills – what-have-you. It would also include feeding the stray cat, Squeak is his name, “because I want you to learn how to take care of something other than yourself,” Faith intoned in all seriousness. That sounded great, so I took the efficiency.

And that’s where I am now. I have a cozy little room – not too little, but little – enough room for walking loose figure eights, a writerly pace of pondering – with my own bathroom and kitchen. This is more than I could have ever hoped for, especially on a work exchange basis. The house is situated right off the New Haven Harbor, which is an inlet off the Long Island Sound, which is an inlet off the Atlantic Ocean. I can open my side door and see saltwater. It comes in violently in big tumultuous waves when it rains all day, like it did three days ago, but when the weather is stiller sits patiently in the cold early April breeze, lapping the shore like a stray tabby cat to its stairway water dish.

Is this the place where I can write my Great American novel about how I am not Great at all, hardly even consider myself an American in the popular sense of the word? There is seclusion and solitude here; Faith, ever faithful, assures me the place is well protected by His divine love. I can write my life and my memories and my nows and forevers, and I can take a bus or walk an hour into town for a little social healing, a healing I need so badly.

But it’s the solitude I love. No sirens can be heard. No nighttime ambulances in a steady procession towards the Yale New Haven Medical Center, almost on top of which I lived when I was over at George and Howe, before I was evicted on sincere threat of violence.

No. This place is peace, here in my “kingdom by the sea”. So I’m grateful, I’m not homeless, and I’m ready to move forward in life. Tell me, please: Is that so boring?

Note: Some names were changed to avoid drama.

Every Day: Character Sketch: Joe

Character sketch: Joe. About 50. Pissed off and in pain all the time. Washes windows for ten, fifteen bucks per business (Au Bon Pain, Koffee Too, etc.), if he can get the manager to sympathize and pay out-of-pocket on a personal basis. Someone stole his tools a month back, he laments, pissed off. Sometimes sleeps in doorways. I saw him on Palm Sunday in the rain in the dark in the town, covered with a black trash bag with holes cut out for the arms and neck.

“Hey man,” I called after him. He turned around.

“Hey man, how you doin’?” He normally doesn’t ask. Curious. We walked together.

“Hanging in there, hanging in there. You?”

His first word in response to that question is always the same:

“Terrible. My whole body hurts. I am in such pain.” It was the rain, doing a number on his various injuries, magnifying them to a brittle, shill crescendo of seeming breaking and accursed, acute specificity. He demonstrated his bastardized bones, first by gripping his jaw in two hands and wrenching it to the side so that a cracking, crunching sound was made, like a sabotaged factory machine. Spectacular.

“Oh my God,” I grimaced. “What happened?”

“Fell off the Coliseum.”

(He was referring to the New Haven Coliseum, before it was demolished early this year. The Brutalist structure was a sports arena and concert venue for the more world-famous touring acts that came through New Haven. The thing was ugly as hell, but many memories were made there. People mourned its demise. When the engineers set charges to it and brought it to the ground in an instant, the crowds cheered from rooftops, parking lots, roadsides, apartment windows. Channel 8 televised the Coliseum’s last performance. The explosions clapped in succession – clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! clap! followed by a couple of thunderous booms! as the load-bearing concrete and steel pounded to the ground. A dust cloud bloomed brown like a dirty cauliflower and evaporated toward the Harbor in moments. Cameras flashed like a parade of paparazzi. I was there for it, because building demolitions are a minor interest of mine, due to studying a certain political event that must remain nameless here for reasons of irrelevance.)

The Coliseum had demolished Joe. Here in the rain he showed me his missing ribs on his right side and the deformed ridge of a bone on the bridge of his nose, glaring fiercely at me for emphasis.

I commented on his trash bag, “I see you’ve gotten creative with keeping the rain off.”

“Gotta be smart out here to stay alive. Remember my old shoes? All full of holes. Feet got soaked. These ones,” he lifted a foot to show me, “cost two hundred dollars new. I got ‘em for free. I’m on my way to tell ‘em I stole ‘em.”

“What? Nah, man, don’t do that. Don’t do that. You need the shoes.”

“I gotta tell ‘em.”

“What. Why. You trying to get right with God?”

“I’m right with God, been right with him for years.”

“So, what. Stealing is wrong, so you’re gonna go shoot yourself in the foot by turning yourself in? Don’t you have enough problems as it is?”

“I gotta tell ‘em.” The combination of desperation and honesty and momentum are what keep this man down, it occurred to me then.

We walked on and paused under the light and shelter of the awning outside Gourmet Heaven, an overpriced health food store, as the nearby church bells clanged the commencement of the 10:00 p.m. Compline service at Christ Church. We discussed the evils of the Grand Avenue Hotel.

“Get out of there! That place is infested with over-the-counter illegal drugs. You better pray nobody ditches their stash in your suitcase when the cops finally come to bust that whole place and burn it to the ground.”

“I’ll get out ASAP,” I assured him. I didn’t mention I had already gotten out a couple of days earlier and was staying with my dear friend Patty in Milford for a week. Joe and I bid our fare-thee-wells. He headed off into the rain. I headed off to Compline, out of sheer curiosity and to meet Patty and a few others to sit together in silence. Not being a Christian, I took the experience in its raw form, devoid of context, for my virgin eyes and ears only, and that’s the best way to do things, in my big opinion.

In the church – the same one that has fed me a dozen times – it was cold and dark but lovingly candlelit. Incense permeated the air like campfire. I inhaled the dirty sweetness. All you could see were black silhouettes, mostly just shoulders and heads in the chairs. I sat in the darkness and clasped my hands together in thoughtless meditation as the choir, unseen, hidden in the rafters or the walls or, ostensibly, meant to be emanating directly from heaven, opened up their steady repertoire of liturgical Gregorian chant or whatever it is. I listened to each song and sat and silently thanked the architects of this large building with the vastly arched interior, and wondered at the guys in the black robes – priests? monks? students? What were they? I just sat and breathed and tried to listen for that perfect silence I did not know I had been craving up until that very moment, that moment preceded by the occasional, lonely, echoing cough or a leather jacket squeaking as its wearer shuffled into a slightly more comfortable position in the hard wooden chairs, and then I found it. That perfect silence, as the choir’s sung rendition of the Our Father drew to a close, and, yes, you could have heard a pin drop, or your own heartbeat, or John Cage’s 4’ 33’’ (in which the tuxedo-bedecked pianist lifts the cover of the keys, sets a timer on the lip of the piano to four minutes and thirty-three seconds, hits the start button, positions his hands over the keys, those keys so full of potential sound, not touching those keys, hovering inches above, oh-so-close, and just sits there perfectly still until the timer runs out, and then silences the alarm, closes the cover to the piano, gets up, and walks out of the concert hall to the rapt applause of the audience, some of whom may “get it”, others of whom may not or may just not give a damn), or, again, your own heartbeat, and you thank God for that heartbeat, that percussion in your chest that signals the continuity of life, the non-stop march of the inner human drumbeat, the one that Joe has, I have, you have, Patty has, our companions have – Peter has, Kevin has, Jason has, J has, Faux Paul has – and those not in attendance, our earthly devils and angels, like my ex-landlord Chad (that devil-angel he), everyone has, while we still walk the earth, and it signifies you are still alive, assures you this is not a dream, and fills you with life and blood coursing through your veins, oxygenating your lungs, the air.

Homeless people have it, beating, beating, breathing, breathing, as they settle down into their shantytown between I-91 and I-95 here in New Haven, where the cop brings blankets in the murderous January wind to save a few lives this winter, Winter, with a capital “W”, and you can’t ignore it when it’s windy and snowy and death surrounds you and you’ve got no place to go and your landlord is but a long lost memory of eviction and responsibility shirked and guilt and regret and the raucous battle to forget the memories, memories as deadly as the cold, and you can’t ignore the cold like you can when you live an Overground life with electricity and walls and emergency candles, candles: a quaint item in a drawer full of loose batteries and extra pens without the caps and you’ve got your hot water – hot water! Praise the Lord! – and the extra blankets for the guests who may never arrive but oh boy could somebody use them tonight, my friends, oh my good Lord could somebody use those blankets tonight, for their hearts beat too, my dear, their hearts beat too for yet precious moments, moments until the candle is extinguished and.

Note: Some names were changed in honor of our universal human right to privacy and sanctity of all things personal.

Nights 1, 2, and 3, PART II: Chad

Character sketch: Chad. My former landlord. Lives in the tastefully-decorated basement of the apartment I rented near the corner of George and Howe Streets in New Haven. 41 years old. Flaming gay black dude with a paunch and a cheap bronze grill (a few front tooth caps). Brooklyn, born and raised, ten siblings. Accent is a hybrid of ghetto tough and queer-eye-for-the-straight-guy. Has lived in New Haven for 15 years and owned his house for ten. Used to work at Ikea in the kitchen display section until he was fired a few months ago. Now does very little but hang out with very young ‘hoods (18, 19, early-twenty-some years old), who pleasure him in exchange for money and sanctuary from whatever life they lead. Knows how to navigate both the ‘hood and the bureaucratic Overground.

Up until I fell behind on rent, Chad and I were on good terms. We were chummy, and would crack jokes, and I would leave him to his little life of debauchery. He respected my space and I never had a problem with him. Before I fell behind on rent, Chad and all his tenants (all black, making me the token white resident), really appreciated my rap stylings, and would on occasion request a live performance on the front porch. I always obliged happily. The woman on first floor, Sue (50-something, Section 8 renter, has a boyfriend of Puerto Rican Chicago jailbird origin) especially liked my poetry. Last July 4th we had a barbecue party in the back yard; my white friends and their black family members and friends mingled politely and had a nice time. All was good.

My former girlfriend moved out of the apartment in January of this year. We used to split rent. So now I was stuck with an $800/month burden, and I did everything I could to pay it, along with all of my other regular bills, most of which were in arrears. Chad brought in someone to be my roommate so I could catch up; I thought this was very generous and proactive of Chad, and I have nothing but gratitude for his patience and willingness to work with me. The roommate paid his fair share and respected me and smoked his “L” every morning and every evening. (An L is a long, skinny marijuana cigarette crafted of a hollowed-out cigar, in case you don’t know. For any teetotalers who might be reading this: it’s completely harmless. But let’s not debate, OK? It’s irrelevant, and for what it’s worth, no, I’m not into pot or any other drugs, whether they be synthetic or organic.) Things were peaceful still, and the roof over my head looked salvageable.

Then the karaoke lyrics editing job ran out. At almost the exact same time, all my financial and work-related karma returned to me. As I said in a previous post, I lost my cell and land line phones, my hardwire Internet connection, and finally my electricity. I received a notice from Chad on my door – the initial “Summons” or Step One in the eviction, formally known as “Summary Process”. It gave me six days to leave the apartment. Talk about short notice. He had previously expressed no desire whatsoever that he would like me to vacate. I protested, arguing that six days was not enough, and that the stated date of departure was the exact same day as when my girlfriend was going to be coming to visit me for a week in New Haven. It was the worst possible timing for my admittedly deserved comeuppance. “Give me one more week, I pleaded.” Chad wouldn’t budge. He told me the police would come and arrest me and throw my things onto the street in six days if I wasn’t out by then, but I had a feeling he couldn’t legally kick me out on six days’ notice. I thought it had to be at least 30 or even 90 – regardless of his moral rights. I was behind on rent. But I had nowhere to go on six days’ notice, and the prospect that I would not have a place for my girlfriend to sleep when she got into town just killed me inside. I repeated my protests to no avail.

It was at this point Chad started losing his marbles. As his house was up for review by the City, Section 8 was sending him no money for floors One and Two of his apartment. As previously stated, he was fired from his management job at Ikea. That left him with no income but my roommate’s $100 a week. Chad got desperate.

On March 13th, 2007, I knocked on Chad’ door.

“Who is it!” he bellowed.

“Will!” I shouted, so he could hear me downstairs in the basement where he lived.

“What do you want!”

“I’m staying in the apartment for an extra week,” I replied, and started to walk away. He emerged from the house, looked me in the eye, and said, “This is the kind of sh** that will get you seriously f***ed up.”

“What do you mean, f***ed up?” I demanded.

“I mean violently f***ed up,” he replied. “Like in the hospital f***ed up. I can do it myself or someone else will do it.” Fist to palm he pounded, drilling holes in me with his eyes from six inches away. I stood my ground.

“I’m going to the police and telling them you threatened me.”

“Fine. You do what you do. I’ll do what I do. Don’t touch my f***ing door.” In he went.

“Don’t lay a finger on me,” I shouted after, and took off for the Housing Clerk’s office, located in the courthouse on the Green.

The housing clerk gave me a copy of the Tenant’s Guide to Summary Process (Eviction) (PDF format), satisfactorily answered all my questions, and suggested I go to the police regarding Chad’ threat. She assured me I had the legal right to stay in the apartment until the case was heard before a judge, and that the landlord would go to jail if he touched me. “Thanks,” I said, and took off for the police department.

Unfortunately, the police department was too busy to file my complaint. The FBI had just the day before performed a sting operation and caught some crooked cops red-handed in taking bribes from crack dealers. The cops were in no mood to hear about my physical safety; everybody’s job was on the line at headquarters. I turned around and left.

I was supposed to meet my girlfriend at the Bradley airport outside of Hartford in two days – the exact same day I was supposed to be out of the apartment, according to Chad’ first notice. March 15th. The Ides of March. That’s when Julius Ceasar’s good buddy stabbed him in the back. Perfect timing. Ultimately, I decided that Chad meant business and that the law had nothing to do with ghetto codes of honor. If I didn’t leave, I’d probably end up in a wheelchair, a coma, or a coffin. Worse yet, I could have pulled a Raskolnikov (see Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoyevsky) and landed in prison. I opted for homelessness.

I packed my backpack and huge suitcase hastily. Laptop computer, battery charger, headphones, microphone. Cell phone (off but with important phone numbers stored inside) with the charger. Assorted toiletries, paperwork, old bills, keepsake birthday cards and other little mementos, the little gifts my girlfriend sent me for my birthday. Clothes, a box of bank checks. Soup kitchen schedule, other helpful information. Phone numbers and other contact info like email address and websites. An umbrella. My head, my heart, my body.

Everything else was left behind. I didn’t care about the bed, the dresser, the desk. The love seat and the chairs and the stool – no big loss. My books and CDs, my small collection of small household tools in a bucket, assorted knickknacks, the clothes and blankets I couldn’t carry, all my pots and pans and silverware and ceramics and everything. I didn’t feel bad about them. I even sold my mint condition 4-in-1 printer/scanner/copier/fax to a guy on Craig’s List for a paltry $17. Fine. No big whoop. I’ll let them go.

What I really felt bad about was leaving my former girlfriend Robin’s art behind, as well as the guitar that my brother gave to me in late 2004, making me promise to “keep it in the family.” I turned to a great friend, Moyer, with whom I share a downright spiritual love of hip hop, and asked him to take the art and guitar, and love and care for those items in stewardship. He accepted the charge with a solemn vow to keep them safe. Moyer and I, along with my roommate and the roommate’s brother JD had one last ceremonial cigarette. We said our said our goodbyes. I turned around and walked down the stairs.

On the way out, I approached Chad, who was standing on the curb next to ever-diplomatic Moyer, and I cracked this joke: “Can you give me a ride to the bus station?”

Moyer laughed. Chad didn’t. “No!” was all he said, averting his eyes. Off I went down the street, shaking a fist of solidarity at Moyer, who returned the gesture. I didn’t think I would ever return to New Haven.

Note: Some names have been changed or withheld to protect both them and me.

Nights 1, 2, and 3: Prologue: Sweeping up the details for you

As you know, I am a homeless man living in New Haven, Connecticut, the richest state in America. You might have read the blog from bottom to top, wondering why it begins with Night 4. That’s because during the first three nights I was scrambling to survive and gain a foothold in the underground homeless community and navigate the terrain. The following is a chronology to catch you up and hopefully solve any questions you might have about my homelessness and how I got to this point.

It began last year when I first watched an online video documentary about a world event that will remain nameless here, for reasons of irrelevance. I devoted 12 hours a day or more, seven days a week, to studying the aforementioned phenomenon. It hurt me inside like thunder. I cried a lot, my hand over my open mouth, as I read this testimony or that record or viewed this movie or that clip. I learned is that the world was the exact opposite from what I thought it was. Everything I believed was obliterated. It was a lonely and depressing time.

The conclusions and thoughts I formed in that time are not important to me now. The details do not matter. I had to rebuild my world view from the ground up. I decided that family and friends are all that matter.

Yet there I was, failing to reach out to people, ignoring emails and phone calls, isolating. I stopped showing up for work, not even calling in, just letting people hang, skipping band practice, ditching coffee talk appointments, foregoing poetry night at Cafe 9 here in New Haven. My then-girlfriend was so patient, God bless her. I stopped reaching out to her as well. My silence and lack of eye contact tore through her like a hurricane. She moved out of the apartment in January. She’s in Portland, Oregon now, carving out a new niche for herself in the adult care and deli counter sectors of the economy. She’s making a living. Amen.

How could I pick up the pieces? I’m still picking up the pieces. I stopped talking to my sister. My dad and step-mom and mom – they didn’t hear from me for months at a time.

Isolation has always been par for the course for me. It’s what I do. I go away. I hide. I am swallowed by this Muse or that creative endeavor. It tends to destroy me every few years. Do not, however, think for one second that I am some kind of idealist, clicheed artiste. I have a strong marketing background, and can think like a nasty capitalist on occasion. I have offered more than a little advice to businesses that needed saving over the years. Once, I closed a deal that saved an independent newspaper from financial annihilation. If only I could have saved myself too.

Life was very pretty, come 2007. I had a little freelance job with a karaoke company, editing lyrics. I used that money to try and catch up on my cell phone, land line, Internet, and electricity bills. I was trying to play catch-up on my rent. By the time I had lost all but my apartment, I was two months behind on rent. My landlord served me my first eviction notice early this month.

Eviction is a widely misunderstood phenomenon. For those who have never been evicted, here is A Tenant’s Guide to Summary Process (Eviction) in PDF format, published by the State of Connecticut, Judicial Branch, Superior Court. To put it briefly, eviction is a long and drawn out process. You must first be served with an initial notice known as a “Summons” stating when the landlord would like you and your belongings to be gone. He can choose any date he wants. It can be tomorrow. It has to be stamped and signed on the back by a State Marshall. This costs the landlord $35 to process.

But you don’t have to leave. You can stay right where you are, and the law is on your side still. Nobody is legally allowed to touch you or your things. If you are not out by the date the landlord gives in the initial summons, he then has to go to city hall and lay down $150 to file a “Complaint”. This is received on your door as well, or handed to yo in person. In can be either way. Once this second step has occurred, there is a long, drawn-out process in which you have to go to court a couple of times and wait for judgments and so on and so forth. In other words, if you really wanted to be a jerk, you could stay in your apartment for months, and the landlord couldn’t legally do anything to you. Legally.

But legality is not King of the Ghetto. My landlord is, as I have put it before, “Brooklyn to the core”.

Note: Names have been withheld to protect everybody, including me.