Going Nowhere

I've been outside for a little over four months, and I'm not getting ANYWHERE at all!

I was supposed to wake up at the luxurious hour of eight o'clock this morning in a nice two-man tent concealed in some underbrush or a thicket somewhere in North Portland, sprawled atop my air mattress next to a book and the headlamp I used to read it last night, firing up my propane camp stove for a simple breakfast of chorizo hash and Irish breakfast tea, getting ready to break everything down and jump on my BMX to head down to Breakfast in Bedlam's fifth year anniversary to play meet-and-greet with the visiting therapy llama. Instead I woke up at a quarter to seven in the makeshift lean-to I make out of my Backpack Bed™, beneath the freeway I've spent most of the past three months beneath when I haven't been trying in vain to move to a location that's less tweaker- and cop-beleaguered (the last spot I tried turned out to be a mosquito-infested pissing ground for a couple street drunks!); cursing myself for my addiction to alcohol and my spendthrift ways, the city of Portland for its corruption and this summer's war on the homeless, and life in general for having made me so screwed up and the world so enthralled to ignorance and greed.

That's right, instead of canning and saving money and using it to improve my lot, I've been going on wild four- to five-day binges of Four Loko and other awful malt beverages. I started out just fine, with the intention of abstaining completely from alcohol because of its prohibitive cost and its role as a potential liability to a precarious lifestyle. Then that snow storm came and I got bored and wandered around in the snow quaffing hobo antifreeze until it was time to lay down in an emergency warming shelter. You know you're an alcoholic when you can't pick up a drink without falling down a ravine and into a gully of backwash and B.O. I used to think that I could learn to become a social drinker or be one of those guys who sips at red wine every dinner to keep his heart nice and healthy, but for some time now I've realized that's simply not the case: I can't drink even a thimbleful of watered down Boone's without being cajoled by a black goat to join the witches' sabbath whirling intoxicated on the dark Bavarian hills looming on the eastern horizon of my heart. So, now I'm back to Square One, but wondering if perhaps it may not behoove me to seek some sort of treatment for the addiction. Alas, my materialistic disdain toward anything religious or "spiritual", my discomfort around people, and the obsessional nature of my thinking, seem to conspire to force me to tough it out alone.

I'm going to have do something if I'm going to recoup my losses, get the hell away from the encroaching police dragnet and the inevitable refugees of my more shady and troubled peers, and figure out how to eke out a meaningful and productive living. Every year it gets more difficult being poor and homeless, with no end in sight; wallowing in a mire of malt liquor isn't going to make it any easier.

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But, who wants to be sober while sleeping in a tent by a freeway or wrapped up in a tarp like a derelict tacquito beneath an overpass? When having to disgrace yourself in public by spanging or canning whenever the need for money arises? Having to deal with mosquitoes eating your face during the warm months of summer; what would normally be a blessed season of respite from the rain and snow, the dampness and cold that no cover or clothing can stave off permanently? Lining up for a plate of tuna casserole and a cup of coffee less potent than what Confederate soldiers woke up to? The fights, threats, and thefts by your peers, and harassment by security personnel and cops? With little hope for upward mobility above and beyond landing a lead-poisoned ten-by-twelve cell in a roach hotel, pushing a broom for chump change part-time (unless you're young enough to go to college and have the gumption to get a degree in a field that won't end up in Asia within the next ten years)?

I don't, but it's a choice between alleviating the boredom, hopelessness, shame, and anxiety of the streets in alcohol and subsiding in a state of abject stagnation or gritting my teeth and holding back my tears every day so I may have a chance at landing a job through day labor. I'm probably going to buy a twenty-four of some of that delicious elixir of Kill The Poor, but if I'm going to be doing that it would certainly be wise of me to limit my consumption of one daily and in the evening when bed time approaches.

Proletarian Aspirations

I've decided it's time for me to try to go back to work. I'm hooked up with an "employment specialist" at Central City Concern's Supported Employment program and have already gone to one interview and am balking at a temporary assignment as an evening desk clerk at the Helen Swindells, a low-income housing building downtown that's one of those places where people with severe mental health problems are washed up in a sort of last-chance tidal pool by social workers desperate to keep them off the streets; people who can't even be housed in my old building! I wouldn't get off until midnight, which means instead of getting only six hours of sleep a night at best I'll be hoping for four. And then there's the matter of the pre-employment urinalysis, which I can't possibly pass at this time; frankly, the idea of having to just to earn minimum wage galls me considerably — give me a liveable wage, benefits, and a union card, and I'll think about it!

It boils down to the cruel reality that homelessness makes working inordinately difficult; why do you think so many of the guys who work the carnivals look like they just rolled out of a box car the night before? In fact, if I hadn't blown this month's food stamps on pâté and brie and a pile of microwave burritos and spicy kimchi ramen bowls I'd be down at the Waterfront Park right now, hoping to get a couple weeks' work scanning tickets for rides. Put simply, you need sleep, you need to eat, you need to keep yourself clean, and you need to be able to get around; problems for neighborhood baristas and commuters that are magnified logarithmically from inconvenience to often utterly impossible. If I were still selling my food stamps and didn't have a locker and shower access at the Friendly House I'd be totally screwed, but even as things currently stand I'm pretty limited in my options. I'm going to Labor Ready to see if I don't end up wasting two hours of my time sitting in a lobby drinking crappy coffee, getting nowhere. Small wonder even those determined not to sink into stagnation eventually end up giving up on the idea of working regular jobs: after enough years of street-life problems of dealing with the elements, thievery, police harassment, poor diet and sleep, etc. being compounded by additional woes like not being able to find somewhere to store belongings securely in time for job interviews that frown on prospective employees lugging giant backpacks around like urban sherpas, and having to quit good jobs because of fallout from the homeless lifestyle, only to have to resort to taking on demeaning and ball-busting work for chump change as a carnie or day labor wage slave ... who would want to keep that up? That's what I ended up doing; I haven't worked for six years.

Canning just doesn't cut it, not unless I push a shopping cart for a lion's share of the day. Those Burnside Cadillacs aren't just negative-attention magnets, they're fucking LOUD! Especially when you have a bunch of glass bottles in them. Still, I'm going to need to start pushing those pretty regularly because I need to bring home more than five dollars a day if I'm going to accomplish more than pay for my locker every month, recoup my inevitable street-gear losses, and suck down a twenty-four of some crappy malt liquor to ease my bedeviled mind down into Erebus' quiet halls each night. But, I will give the local Labor Ready office a try as soon as I can bring myself to get up at five; and I will continue to work with my "employment specialist" and guardedly hope she can find something part-time that will work for me. My ultimate goal is to land a reasonably secure steady part-time job before I get into housing, so that way I won't have to worry so much about the unavoidable shrinking of social services budgets in the future causing me to get thrown out of subsidized housing; not to mention I'll be doing something constructive with my time and be free from the tyranny of Home Forward's Byzantine income-reporting rent policies that frustrate welfare hotel rats' efforts at returning to the work force through day labor and temp work; another part of why I haven't worked in six years.

Yet Another Move

I moved out from beneath the freeway and away from the Maginot Line the night before last, my decision ushered along by the sight of the Midnight Creeper who woke me up with his flashlight Easter morning sauntering past the row of shopping carts and across the Wells Fargo parking lot while I was chatting with a couple of the neighbors there I'd gotten acquainted with. It was the last straw; I'd already had my backpack and sleeping bag stolen by a batshit crazy street girl who compounds her madness and misery with drug use, and the cops had begun to cruise through the area multiple times a day because the local tweaker scene had expanded its thievery to local residents and businesses. I wasn't about to deal with this guy again, especially since I suspect him of having stealthily unscrewed a couple of my shelter's carabiners the night before I spotted him.

I'm not sure how permanent this spot will end up being, but it seems promising so far because it's behind a chain-link fence alongside the Highway 30 that follows the Columbia River to beautiful and quirky Astoria (where I'd love to live if I came into sufficient money to do so). There's plenty of cover from bushes and small trees, the freeway is about twenty feet below me past a gently sloping embankment, and I'm at the very edge of the residential part of Northwest Portland; all factors taken together favor me remaining undisturbed through the rest of summer if no one else comes upon it and decides I need neighbors — which, this being Portland and therefore a traveling vagrant mecca, I'm half expecting. As soon as I determine the exact location to make into a semi-permanent camp I'll be doing a bit of cleaning up of the area with a shovel or rake, since there's half-decayed garbage from previous camps here and there; it would also behoove me to get a couple new tarps, nylon rope, stakes, carabiners, and maybe even add some camouflage netting and rig an intruder detection system out of fishing line and cans or something similar.

Of course, what I really need is some kind of work, if I'm going to successfully gear up so that I'm relatively safe and secure and comfortable living outside; canning just doesn't cut it in terms of income, especially since I'm gouging a significant portion of the earnings buying a couple beers a day. Since I'm looking for work through Central City Concern I can't smoke weed anymore, but I think I'm just going to try to save for some synthetic urine because frankly living on the streets is too much of a drag for me to be stone-cold sober every day. I actually have a job prospect at the end of the month, a seven-day desk clerk assignment at subsidized housing building similar to the one I used to live in. Which means not only passing the whiz quiz but also one of those annoying personality tests that are designed to trip you up for acting like a flesh-and-blood human being. You'd almost think that prospective employers really don't want to hire anyone, and I imagine many corporate elites would prefer their work places filled machines and bio-engineered drones.

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves

Sometimes I just get tired of this blog, mostly because I weary of beating depressing and infuriating ugly truths and experiences into the keyboard. There's times when I want to take a vacation, but because I can't laze around the house or drive my Airstream down to Mazatlan all I can do is prop myself against a freeway pylon on a sheet of cardboard and quaff enough booze that I can get lost for a few hours in whatever scrivenings are pouring out of my pen at the time until I pass out early to bed.

My brand new Swiss Army backpack and my nice lightweight mummy sleeping bag were stolen from me Wednesday night. I was stupid and let my guard down, leaving my stuff strewn all over my camping spot while I wandered kitty corner across the street to chat with some of my neighbors camping in the shopping cart complex. I was glancing over at my spot pretty frequently, but apparently a girl had managed to slip inside a window of opportunity to make off with my stuff (the sleeping bag was in the backpack). I wandered all over the area looking for the girl, even into Old Town, my thoughts a muddled vermillion morass of murder shot through with consternation at having been careless enough to let my bed get stolen out from beneath me, figuratively speaking. Of course I never found her. Luckily for me I was given a replacement military surplus mummy bag by a neighbor who tends to collect stuff from the streets only for it all to pile up on two large push carts, which I made sure to wash and dry at the laundromat by the Friendly House.

It's just galling, knowing anything I haven't locked up at the Friendly House will get stolen from me if I don't carry it on my back or sleep on top of it. I'm not the only one, too: a couple over at the Maginot Line has had a toolbox stolen from them and one of their neighbors has had all of his bedding taken from him multiple times. It's the damn druggies, is who's responsible; meth heads. Like a buddy of mine complained last night, we've got kids running around on the streets who are turning themselves into kleptomaniacal zombies by ingesting a poison that's ladled out of trailer park and welfare apartment crucibles or trucked in from Mexico, and God is probably the only One who knows just what chemicals these fools are using to melt down their bodies and burn holes in their brains.

Yeah, it gets old, constantly complaining about thieves, the weather, cops, canning, thugs, nutters, wastos and dope fiends, and life in general. It'd be nice to have something pleasant, or even triumphant, to relate.