Fourth Time's a Charm?

This is the fourth time I've been homeless since I moved here (this time around — I'm an intermittent native) from Seattle via Las Vegas back in May 2000, and looking back I see a progression from living on the streets being a fun adventure to living on the streets being a shameful and arduous lifestyle of boredom, fatigue, inconvenience, and peril.

My first stint as a City of Roses tramp was inaugurated by the Starlight Parade that greeted me when I stepped off the Greyhound bus. I had a few hundred dollars in my pocket and a check for over a thousand dollars waiting in the wings at a nearby temp agency branch office. Enough money to rent a cheap studio long enough to land a job, I was thinking; unfortunately, I was body-surfing a cresting wave of irresponsibility, aided and abetted by youthful good looks, charm, and luck. My dream of establishing myself as a blue-collar dish dog living with a cat in a quiet neighborhood in Northwest Portland evaporated when I encountered an old acquaintance from Seattle and moved into a squat with him and his coterie of punk-rock junkies. From then on I fancied myself a Third Millennium Jack Kerouac, documenting the class war while soaking myself in beer and occasionally braving the highway to hitch-hike as far south as Eugene and as far north as Bellingham — hardly adventurous! Which rapidly spiraled downhill into spanging money for booze and passing out in doorways or beside freeways when I failed to seduce cute girls. It took medical detox from alcohol and subsequent clean-and-sober housing to rescue me from a soggy winter on the streets with nowhere to go because most of my charm and good luck had flown south.

Five-and-a-half years later I was at it again, after having managed to succeed gloriously as a 4.0 GPA student at Portland Community College. Alas, I'd also failed magnificently at being a boyfriend in my only long-term relationship, and at keeping the easiest job I'd ever had (pumping gas). My addiction to alcohol wasn't fooling me or anyone else anymore, and as such the carefree days of homelessness came to an end. Again, it started in May, this time in 2006; but summer was short-lived and before I knew it fall and winter had careened past me — in a fugue of malt liquor and Old Crow — and I'd even somehow managed to fleetingly enjoy four jobs and two residences, which I sabotaged almost as soon as I acquired. I even ended up in a psych ward at Providence for a week! Then I made a critical mistake, one that changed my life forever: I made the mistake of moving into a party house as an alcoholic, while relying on financial aid disbursed by Portland State University to pay rent. Three terms of dropped classes later I lost my eligibility to receive financial aid and owed the university over $2,000 and defaulted on my student loans, and of course I ended up back out on the streets, this time beneath an overpass for close to a couple years before moving into subsidized housing.

Which you'd think would have presented me with a golden opportunity to get it together. Indeed, that was the plan … for the first two months, after which I succumbed to boredom and peer pressure and slid into the old familiar — and dismally comfortable — rut. Resulting predictably in me getting kicked out because of repeated drunken disorderliness. Which begs the question: Have I finally learned my lesson? As much as I like to think I have, it's a matter of time and convincing before anyone with any wisdom will believe so. I'm not going to beleaguer a jaded public with positive affirmations; we'll see in time.

Jǫtunheimr

It's been one hell of a week; hell as in ninth-circle, because a winter storm struck the fair City of Roses with a ferocity uncharacteristically blustery and frigid of our mild Pacific marine climate. Hence the title, which is the name of the realm of the terrible frost giants in Norse mythology. Roughly five inches of snow accumulated between the first dusting on Thursday and the onset of freezing rain late Friday, which covered the snow with perhaps up to an additional half-inch of ice, making for treacherous footing. Not much by Midwest, Great Lakes, and North Atlantic standards, but it was enough to shut down a city that owns only fifty-five snow plows — a city typically more concerned about how storm water runoff affects the water quality in the nearby Willamette river than with snow accumulation — and certainly more than enough to freeze a man to death on a bench outside the Greyhound station a few night ago (hearsay).

Tuesday night is when it all began. In spite of the cold wind predicted to surge past the Columbia Gorge I elected to see if I could tough it out near the Northwest industrial area I'd been spending the past three nights. Underscoring the deficiencies of my "homeless swag", by around ten in the evening my folly was made apparent when my tarp was uprooted along with its stakes and the wind transformed my Backpack Bed™ into an ice coffin while still somehow insinuating its way inside and whipping through my sleeping bag and clothing. The only thing I could do was pack everything back up and walk the two-and-a-half miles to the Imagio Dei church across the Willamette river on East Burnside, where I hoped an emergency overnight warming center would be open. It was, thankfully, and so I ended up sleeping there the five nights, on a mat alongside 149 other desperate homeless people blindsided by what we probably all thought would just be a spot of bad weather to shrug off after an uncomfortable night or two.

I was just asked by a friend what it's like to stay overnight in an emergency warming center. Think of it as like being inside a pressure cooker full of volatile temperaments and incompatible and often hostile subcultures, cliques, and individuals. Lone wolves, hard-core druggies, street drunks, punk rock kids, runaway kids, Vietnam vets, working-class stiffs recently shit out of luck, people tormented by severe mental illnesses … we all file in at nine o'clock every evening when the Red Cross volunteers open the doors and give each of us a foam mat and an emergency blanket, then escort us to a taped-off spot on the floor about three feet wide by six feet long. Whereupon we try not to kill each other before the lights are turned on at six the next morning and everyone's turned out an hour later; not really any different from other scenarios in which people of different persuasions and from different walks of life are forced into a situation of constrained co-operation, whether it be in a stadium full of flooded-out refugees from a hurricane or aboard a grounded cruise ship — only we street people tend to be more incendiary, by both nature and nurture. In spite of all that everyone was mostly well-behaved, aside from Saturday when in the morning it was discovered that a man had sexually harassed a girl and stolen five cell phones and later that night two guys almost got into a serious fight right next to me. Fortunately for me fatigue, sleeping pills, and ear plugs ensured that I was able to get adequate sleep. Not only that, I even managed to score a couple nice military surplus wool blankets on my first night, which I hope eventually to replace my sleeping bag with. It could have been much worse, in other words.

Even though it only snowed on Thursday and Friday it was bitter cold outside during the past few days because of the twenty-mile-per-hour winds and temperatures below freezing. While there were a few emergency warming centers open during the day I eschewed them because of my lone-wolf temperament. Besides, I didn't really feel like I was stranded between the ugly options of braving blizzard conditions or navigating my way through a squabbling morass in a malodorous room until Friday morning, when the library downtown was closed and the city of Portland decided to shut down — that's why this post is late; the library just re-opened today. Friday and Saturday found me meandering around Southeast and Northwest Portland drinking and smoking weed, essentially squandering deposit refund money I could have used to purchase stuff like an extra pair of long johns … but, hell, I was homeless and had to amuse myself somehow with nowhere else to go but a cardboard-mattress Jerry Springer Show! I did manage to locate what may be a promising location to relocate to in Northeast Portland, about five miles out of downtown, which I will check out as soon as I have the bus fare for the commute. Besides, I didn't get frostbitten, or even mildly sick.

These past couple weeks haven't been very pleasant for me and have brought to my awareness most painfully just how inadequately prepared I was to live out on the streets again after so many years indoors. Even with my nice backpack I still have a lousy sleeping bag that takes up half of the backpack's space, a Gore-Tex™ coffin hotel that seems to be ill-suited for winter weather despite its durable construction and the obviously high quality of its materials, only one pair of long johns, and a Columbia jacket that is little more than a water resistant windbreaker. And, I'm sleeping on the sidewalk beneath a busy interstate freeway. In short, I need to gear up and get out of downtown, and start taking my situation more seriously in the meantime.

FYI Freeways Suck

I bailed out of my place at around a quarter after six, Tuesday, having woken out of a nap sprawled out on the floor with my head propped on my rolled-up sleeping bag; I was waiting for a couple neighbors to swing by earlier with a bit of chronic to send me off into the rainy night with some cheer. Of course, no one showed up, so I stumbled out of my "home" for the past four-and-a-half years with my monster trekking backpack loaded with my clothes and sleeping bag, while wheeling a heavy-ass K-Mart-special Mongoose in one hand and lugging my “homeless swag” in the other.

Go figure it would rain as soon as I was scheduled to beat my feet, after weeks of abnormally dry and even sometimes balmy days. It was dark out, of course, and I couldn't carry all that crap, so I ended up schlepping a few blocks down to the side of a freeway on-ramp I used to occasionally drink and crash at years ago when I was a street drunk. There I inaugurated my return to homelessness, spending the first four nights until I moved my spot close to the Northwest industrial district. It was no place to be, and three events in particular underscored how vulnerable I was while there: 1) on my first night there an obvious street druggie girl came by shortly after I crawled into my Gore-Tex™ coffin motel, asking if I was Jesse (or some similar-sounding name); 2) early Friday morning I woke up to what sounded like a shopping cart being thrown on its side nearby and when I took a look I saw that some guy had nailed a cyclist in his car, making me grit my teeth for the next forty-five minutes in anticipation of police harassment after the incident had been reported — fortunately I was left alone (and fortunately for the cyclist it wasn't a hit-and-run!); but 3) the most portentous event occurred at around 8:00 AM on Saturday while I was breaking down my shelter and getting ready to break fast at St. Stephen's, when I saw three shady-looking guys creeping down a street nearby with beer-shaped plastic bags in their hands — the kind of people who look like they'd date rape and rob a hooker, and as such wouldn't be above rolling a homeless guy for some cash and gear to sell.

I'm definitely pleased with the move! It's noisy beneath the freeways perched on pylons far above me, but I actually felt pretty safe last night, and with the ear plugs the noise didn't deprive me of sleep any more than the previous spot did. Unless the thick foam mat I found Friday night gets stolen along with the brown tarp it's wrapped in, tonight should be a similarly pleasant rest. You see, it's not just the noise that causes homeless people to sleep poorly — or even the discomfort — it's the fear that jerks us out of slumber at the slightest suspicious sound. Once I manage to get a small one-man tent and a compact air mattress I'll probably make that area my new home, at least until the encroaching gentrification summons police harassment or the sketchy ghouls migrate in en masse. It struck me yesterday at a feed that I've regularly gone to over the years just how low the creep index always has seemed to be in that area, is why I chose that location. Alas, being below two freeways means there's a lot of vehicle emissions, which my smoker's and asthmatic lungs don't need, but I plan on getting a filtration mask before summer.