Houseless Part 2

When I first began living in my car on a full time basis, I would curl up underneath a blanket in the driver’s seat, with a tire iron in one hand, and a flashlight in the other. I was prepared at any moment to defend myself from certain danger; mugging, murder, or worse.
after only a few nights, I realized it was ridiculous to pretend I was any safer with these two objects clenched in my hands. For one thing, I was losing sleep. Protective awareness was only allowing me to sleep an hour at a time.
The second thing I realized about sleeping with a weapon in my hand, was that it would be far too easy for a police officer to mistake the tire iron for a gun, possibly shoot me in the head, and ask questions later.
One night in Balboa Park, about two-thirty in the morning, a very nice security guard came up to my car, and tapped on the window to remind me that 2 A.M. was the cut-off time for cars to be parked in the lot my car was in, and wanted to warn me that if the S.D.P.D. rolled in, I would certainly be ticketed for parking illegally, if not cited for illegal camping, which was, and still is, I believe illegal almost everywhere in San Diego city and county.
The man was honestly being nice and doing me a favor by warning me about my parking situation. Everyone knows though, what it is like to be woken up unannounced by a stranger. I came very close to raising the tire iron up in a defensive position when I awoke to a man I had never seen before standing at my car window staring in at me.
Because things like this happened to me numerous times involving police, not just armed security guards, I stopped holding anything in my hands while sleeping my car, and also, attempted at all times to have my hands somehow exposed while asleep, so passerby’s could see I was not molesting myself while in my vehicle, or hiding anything in my hands underneath the blanket, or sleeping bag that covered the rest of my body.
Another thing I found ridiculous about the act of arming myself while I slept, was that in a very realistic way, anyone could approach my car, and do numerous misdeeds, if they chose to, way before I had any kind of chance to hit them with the tire iron, or even step outside of the car.
I learned, eventually, that it was almost safer to sleep outside, with two or three walls at my back, or surrounded by bushes, or trees than it was to lay in the driver seat of my car where I could not see, even if I was wide awake, anyone approaching me from about the entire peripheral of my vision.
It does not take a fucking trained Army Commando to figure these things out. A person realizes, over time, that it is incredibly difficult to live outdoors and appear harmless to the breadth of humanity that is always wandering by, but also to have enough awareness of personal safety to sleep extremely well.
After months and months of sleeping either in my car, or out on the ground somewhere, I was only bothered by one person beside the police. I believe it was a solicitation for sex; a man pulled up next to my car twice, in a five minute period, to ask me how I was doing. I considered it very threatening, since I had purposely parked far from a residential neighborhood, in hopes of being able to sleep and not come in contact with people.
The second time he stopped next to me, I said something like, “What the fuck do you want?”
I don’t remember the exact wording of the phrase I used, but it did cause the man to drive off and not come back. I slept okay that night, but only after staying up for a couple of hours to make sure the man did not drive by again.
That was a common misconception I found amongst most people who observed me, or anyone else, sleeping in a car, or on the street. People believed all homeless individuals to be drug addicts, rapists, child molesters, prostitutes, or some other kind of degenerate criminal. Certainly, that element is always present in all communities, homeless or not, but the idea that a person like myself had no stable source of income, and had no magic safety chord to pull in order to immediately remove himself from this desperate situation eluded many people.
Once again, feeling threatened like I had when that man stopped his car next to mine, only happened once. I felt most safe while parked in a residential neighborhood. I always tried to park my car next to someone’s side, or back fence, as opposed to in front of the walkway to their front door, or right next to their driveway.
Many times, because I would arrive at my car to sleep late at night, and usually be up very early, I think most people in these neighborhoods I was in didn’t even see me. I found several locations in San Diego that were close enough to houses and apartments that the place was considered residential, yet, where my car was actually parked was far enough away from people’s homes that there should have been no logical reason for anyone to overtly observe me, much less call the police on me.
The criminalization of homelessness, whether it was in the form of city ordinances banning people from sleeping in public, or other legalities; like the aforementioned time limits on how long a vehicle can be parked in a certain area, waned a little near the end of 2008. I think police, certainly city officials, and many of the public at large, came to a realization that the growing homeless population around them was in direct relation to their own financial circumstances, as well. Unemployment was at an all time high, and home foreclosures, also, skyrocketed around the same time.
This kind of economic climate wasn’t good for anyone, especially the poorest of the poor, but at least, hopefully, more people became aware that unfortunate economic events were often times out of the individual’s control, and that balancing act of stability could be lost to people who previously believed themselves capable of weathering any monetary downturn.
My biggest problem and concern still, to this day, is finding stable employment. One thing a tremendous recession like this does, is give companies great leeway in which employees to keep around, and which to get rid of. In today’s economic instability, even companies that are not losing money, or on the verge of bankruptcy, can still get away with laying people off, or firing them indiscriminately. And, people in charge of terminating members of a company’s workforce, whom may have friends or family members in dire circumstances, feel little or no sympathy for other people they hardly know outside of the work environment.
These kinds of cutthroat situations; whether at a large corporation size company, down to the smallest independently owned business, should constantly remind everyone of the cruel and selfish nature of humanity; especially, when people feel most vulnerable, and fear for the basic necessities of what they believe they need in order to survive.
When I have a conversation with someone, anyone, on topics such as war, genocide, mass rape, torture….and the person I am speaking with is exclaiming that the perpetrators of these crimes are animals, lacking in a basic human compassion, or worse, just purely evil, I cannot help but agree, but it makes me wonder also, whom in this world is purely good, or generous, or kind?
There are very few real charitable souls in this world. I don’t think I can even call myself one, either. If you fall down, I will try to pick you up, but if you throw a rock at my head, I most likely will throw one back. I’m not necessarily vengeful, but I don’t want to be stoned to death, either.

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.