Houseless Part 1

CRV recycling is, by far, the most realistic, legal way for extremely impoverished people to earn a few dollars a day. In high school, I would clean up after small parties I had when my parents were out of town and take the empty beer cans, and bottles to the Miramar Landfill recycling center, so as to permanently remove them from the premises. I didn’t get the idea of doing this out in public, in city parks, and other areas until after I did a beach and bay cleanup after July 4th of 2008.
The beach cleanup occurred on July 5th, of course. While I was walking around picking up and disposing of random litter on the ground the July 4th party goers had so conveniently left about for me, I decided, in a sudden epiphany, that if I was willing to scavenge around finding scraps of discarded food wrappers, or whatever other kind of garbage I was eagerly searching for without getting paid for it, in a sincerely honest attempt to help my home city appear clean and tidy, why not, since I could not afford in any way to celebrate the 4th in the same manner with which the partygoers I was cleaning up after had, begin making recycling a source of income, instead of an arbitrary hobby?
Basically, if you could get paid to scoop shit when you had been scooping it year after year with no monetary return, why the fuck not?
After that epiphany, throughout the rest of 2008, and the beginning of this year, I did begin my recycling expeditions while in between paychecks of the meager-paying part time jobs I had been working.
This daily and nightly activity became especially important for me when my unemployment insurance expired, and my attempt at getting an emergency extension was denied. Suddenly, without any source of income at all, I found myself fully dependant on CRV collecting for everyday monetary needs.
There were both good and bad experiences I had during this time period. Sometimes, late at night, or very early in the morning, I would feel extremely peaceful, almost in a Zen-like trance with my surroundings, as I walked about, or tried to sleep in a place where police or people in a neighborhood wouldn’t complain about my presence. (Because gas was so expensive, especially late in the summer, as the Presidential elect ion was heating up, I would often leave my car in one neighborhood, and walk, often times for hours, or, literally, all night, collecting CRV, and only returning to my car when I wanted a change of clothes.)
People might suggest living like this is extremely dangerous. I think though, with my intimate knowledge of the city, having lived here my entire life, I already had a pretty good feel about which neighborhoods were dangerous, or which were less dangerous to be in late at night.
It helps also, as far as avoiding the criminal element, to not be involved with any illegal activity, and to also, maybe more importantly, to establish somehow that you are not a police informant.
In a more obvious way, I most likely appeared so dirty, desperate, and impoverished that the criminal element, whomever they were, considered me as useful to them as the trash I was picking through.
I had learned early on in this experience that when people collecting recyclables became territorial, it was best to just move on to another area. This did not happen very often because, for the most part, there was always enough recyclable material in any given area to sustain three or four, or possibly even more collectors at any given time. However, during certain times of the month, as people’s money ran out from unemployment, or disability, and they waited for the next check to come in, having exclusive rights to recycle in a certain area where it was guaranteed a person could make a certain amount of money became very important for a lot of people living on the street. If people who depended on three to ten dollars of livelihood in a certain time period suddenly had that source of income stolen from them, things could get ugly.
I was never myself confronted by anyone for this reason. I did not have to be told twice to leave another can collector’s territory. Especially, considering many of the people living like this could be hard-core alcoholics, or junkies, and not normally prone to violent tendencies unless coming down, unwillingly drying out, or really, really hungry.
One of the more notable experiences I had while doing this, that was ultimately bizarre in its’ coincidental nature, was when I found money in one of the trash cans I was pulling CRV out of.
It wasn’t a lot of money; maybe three or four dollars of pennies and nickels, all at the bottom of a trash bag in one of the cans somewhere downtown around the Gaslamp. I carefully separated all the coins from the trash on the ground, and then put all the trash back into the bag.
(One of my ideals while living on the street was not to ever litter anywhere, especially in an area where my car was parked, or I was trying to sleep. That seemed an easy way to draw negative attention to myself. I would even pick up random litter if it was laying near my car, so people wouldn’t suspect I was the person dirtying up their neighborhood. I attempted to follow the old camping rule of leaving the campsite cleaner than I had found it. Basically, I kept my own junk in my own trunk.)
I took the pennies and nickels I had found inside the trash can straight to a Coin Master machine inside of the Ralph’s grocery store downtown, then walked all the way up to the nearest recycling yard, slept for an hour or two until they opened, and then cashed the collection of CRV I had collected the night before.
With the change I had converted to whole dollars at Ralph’s and the money from the CRV, I came out a little over seven dollars, total. I immediately hopped a bus (before MTS ridiculously hiked the bus fares, I normally had a monthly bus pass every month) into Golden Hill to eat at one of my favorite restaurants. The good fortune of finding real money in a trash can, inspired me to eat at a real restaurant, instead of at Joe’s Kitchen.
My bill after eating somehow came out to about the exact amount of money I had in my pocket, including a fair tip. So, after walking all night collecting CRV, and even magically finding free money at the bottom of a trash receptacle, I spent all of it in less than an hour on one meal.
But, that was the kind of ironic, and twisted turns of fortune I had become used to in my day to day existence when I had no stable source of income, and no real way to go about planning anything more than twenty-four to forty-eight hours ahead of time.