Homeless

I was having difficulty writing about my homeless experiences previously, but no one reads this, so fuck it.

I used to have a friend that was from a wealthy family. He needed me as a friend at the time, and he took pity on me, so would help me out when I was in a tight spot. He saw me go from a college student to a tech guy to a medical engineer to a tow truck operator to nearly homeless. 

The problem is, during my time wrecking, and presumably all my life, I managed to ruin my joints. I always had bad joint pain, and had a bad back since I was a teen. I was poor and couldn't afford treatment, so resigned to suffering most of the time as I grew up and went through college and kept it up as a habit as I was older. I have to take a lot of pain killers and anti inflammatories to get through the day. The point of this is, when you have bad arthritis, you are rather limited to what sort of work you can do, and for how long you can do it. This is the sort of thing employers don't really care so much about, or want to see. So you have to hide it with alcohol or drugs. But that doesn't last long. Eventually you will miss too many days or you will simply be unable for the work. I tried to do some forestry and some arborist work because the certs were easy to get, I had a knack for it, and I loved it. But that work also tore my body apart. Today I can not kneel, or raise my arm much over my head, or lift much etc etc. I am basically crippled. But I really did this to myself. I should have stayed at a desk job at all costs. Anyways, that part of the story is boring. I'll go on to the homeless part. I just wanted to explain how people become homeless, even if they appear to be 'normal'.

So back to the wealthy friend. He was fine with giving me a few bucks here and there since I had no family and no means of income. At first, it was just enough to get by to help me as I returned to the US after losing my job back in Ireland. But this was during a global down turn. There were no jobs, and definitely none for a cripple. I was given barely enough to fuel a truck and go to another state in search for work. One day I literally begged him as I was sat in a pickup at a truck stop in the freezing cold if I could borrow enough to get a cheap room to rent and feed myself and maybe rent a room for a month to try and set myself straight. It was too much to ask. I was given the money, but then was told not to ask for anything else. I don't blame him. If I were in his position, I might have done the same thing, feeling like I was being taken advantage of.

I spent the cash doing a repair on the pickup because it had just began to act up, bought some canned and cured foods, some water, a tiny gas camping stove, some warmer clothing and equipment.  I had very little left over.

A man named Ron had promised me a job in Washington. I was fortunate the work began shortly after I arrived in the state.  It was planting trees and picking seeds and conifers. It was back breaking work even for a young person. I did 3 weeks before I started to flag badly. I was on about 3200mgs of ibuprofen a day near the end. I got through the planting at about the time my knees gave out pushing those shovels in to the earth. The good man who hired me said he had some other work for me, but I had to purchase some materials to get the job done since it was quite a bit more involved. I just didn't have the cash, and he paid monthly, so I wouldn't see anything from the work I did for him for weeks. I had already taken enough advantage of him by him putting me up in a hotel to do the job I was currently doing. I thanked him and honestly thought it would happen when I told him once I was paid that I would come back and do some more planting for him. We shook hands and went our separate ways. I never saw him again.

By this point, I had maybe $30 to my name. I would have to wait until the money from the planting came in before I could do anything at all, including move my truck. Fuel was well over $3/gallon at the time. So, I took out a map, an actual paper map, and I looked at my options for where I could camp. I started by staying a night here and a night there in various logging roads not far from a local river so I would have water. But at such a high altitude near where my last work was the nights were a bit rough. I should have stayed put, but I also want some internet access to search for other jobs maybe, and catch up with the news etc. I hadn't seen or heard anything of the outside world in nearly three weeks. That meant something like a truck stop with a Starbucks or a McDonalds etc. They would have a cheap shower I could use. I hadn't showered properly in weeks.

I found a Pilot truck stop on the map close enough I could reach it on what fuel I had in the truck. Still, it was a couple of hours way. It would put me near Olympia after midnight if I left right away. Ron said he had a job near there in a few weeks time, so it seemed like the right destination. I opened a can of pork&beans and had it with a piece of bread. It taste about the same whether hot or cold. So I didn't bother to heat it this time. I packed up all my trash in to a shirt I had ruined with all the sap from picking cones, and dunked it into a dumpster outside a restaurant in White Salmon, the town just below where we were working.

It was nearly midnight when traffic came to a stop on I5 well outside of Olympia. Judging by all the lights up ahead, it looked to be a bad traffic accident. The minutes eventually became hours. Eventually, traffic started moving, but they ended up diverting us off the freeway. I had no idea where I was and was soon lost. I was so tired and my leg muscles were beginning to cramp, I had to pull over and stop. I found a road to turn on that seemed a bit out of the way maybe. I only saw a scant few houses around, and one end of the road looked a bit industrial with trucks on it, so I decided to try and blend in and stay the night.

Reflections

When I was six, I asked my mother when my father was coming back. She was wailing uncontrollably at the time. My grandmother had to find a way to comfort both of us. My brother was not quite five yet. He stood there, staring. My father had suffered a heart attack earlier that day, the last one of several he had hidden from my mother. He was on the way to work in an adjacent county when it happened. They found him on the side of the road. He had pulled over and shut the motor off, and then he left us.

Not long afterwards, late one evening my mother bundled us in to my father's 1969 Chevrolet Nova four door sedan. I thought she might have been trying to drive to my grandmothers. She was the only relative we had in town. Along the way my mother had side swiped a barrier at fairly high speed, sending a shower of sparks by my window. We slowly ground to a stop. The front of the car had become engulfed in flames shortly thereafter. Other commuters had seen us and come to help. The car doors were locked. My mother was unresponsive to their pleas. A man came to my window and pointed at the door lock. I pulled it up and he pulled us all from the car.

My mother was in shock. She didn't speak to anyone for weeks. Not one word. And after those weeks, she rarely spoke a word to us for months. No eye contact either. She was a shell. She would cry herself to sleep every night. And often late at night, I could hear her call his name. It made me cry. I was afraid if she heard me, it would make her even more upset. I thought maybe we did something wrong. I always muffled it. To this day, when I cry, I place my hand over my mouth.

I have to assume something inside her died then. Her hopes and her dreams must have been crushed. She was alone in a strange land. I don't ever recall my mother being happy ever again as long as she lived.

When I was 10, I worked at my mother's tiny shop and at her stall at the swap meet. I didn't make very much at all. It was definitely child labor. But, I did earn enough to buy a motorcycle. This would be about 1979. Man, I miss the 70's. And I was barely even there for it.

So, as a kid in the 70's, your prospects for owning a motorcycle were rather limited unless you were born right. But buying a stolen one wasn't difficult. Easier than stealing one yourself, anyways. The local bully and I were slowly becoming acquainted by the end of 1979. He was a good source for stolen goods, I would find. One day I managed to get in a fight with someone right in front of him. It was only a matter of time, really. There were a lot of fights back then. Not just because it was the 70's, but because I lived on the merge between three different types of neighborhoods. On one side you had a rather working class trailer park that today we would call 'multi cultural'. On the other side were farms and orchards with large estates which stretched on until the mountains from my point of view. They were rather mono-cultural. Our home was at the edge of a relatively newly built middle class area. We were only just barely middle class, though. My father had passed away from a sudden heart attack before I was 6. Had he still been around, I guess we could have been middle class.

You know what? My father deserves more than just a sentence in a nowhere blog. Let me at least make him an aside. My father was born in Claremore, Oklahoma in 1928. I dunno much about his father, but I do know his mother was a Cherokee. He worked the oil fields with his father until nearly 1943, when he joined the Army to try to get away from the poverty, learn a new vocation maybe, and help his country. He lied about his age, my aunt would tell me. She said he was a very broad guy, and tall for his age, not unlike myself. He became a wrench in the Army Air Corps by the time he turned 16, and was attached to a bombardment group after some training. My father then went on to help create such hits as Iwojima, Truk Island, Okinawa, and the bombing of Osaka. This is maybe as good a place as any to mention that my mother was orphaned during the bombing of Osaka.

So this bully watched me as I dusted myself off. He tilted his head like he was thinking of something he wanted to say. I rubbed my head where it hurt and looked at him with one eye as much as I dared.

'Someone needs to teach you how to fight.' He said with mild disappointment.
'Uh...did I not just win this one?' I looked around. The other kid had gone.
'Only because you were bigger. You won't always be bigger.' I wasn't a whole lot smaller than he was.
'I dunno. I'm rather fond of my pizza.'
The bully smiled. He lit a cigarette and offered me one. He was maybe 15? 16?
'No, thanks. I'm trying to quit'. I struggled to get the words out as I straightened my back a bit.
'Ya like motorcycles?'
'What?' I wasn't prepared for this segue. But it wasn't any worse than my plopping my mother at the end of the last segue.
'C'mon. Lemme show you something.'

Not far from my house were a few other homes in the middle of construction as well as a good deal of brush and trees cleared for that construction. The bully went behind one of the brush piles and shortly reappeared, dragging a dirt bike with him.

'Ain't she a beaut?' He waved his hand over it.
It wasn't. It had been ridden hard and put up wet, and then dragged backwards through the brush he hid it in, and then, presumably, someone had beaten it with an ugly stick. Sometime during the night, something made a nest in it.
'Yamaha?' I thought I saw some yellow on the tank.
'You DO like motorcycles!'
 I loved them. What boy didn't?
He straddled it and looked at me over his shoulder.
'Get on. We're gonna go to the reservoir... And don't hold on to me like a fag. Grab the seat.'
The exhaust was under the seat. I had to swap my hands from one to the other to avoid them burning too much. There were no foot pegs for me. At any moment, I expected to be thrown free. I had never been on a motorcycle before and I now suspected the bully had very little experience on them as well.

The reservoir is where we all gathered to ride our bikes or motorcycles. It was hundreds of yards of dirt.  It was dry until summer when the mountains ran off into them. It was the middle of the week, and there were very few kids about. I watched as the bully clumsily went about putting the bike through it's paces. Eventually he rode up to me and nodded his approval. I looked impressed because I was amazed he was still on the bike.
'Now you try'. I froze.
'Do you know how to ride?' He asked.
I wasn't watching him that closely. I knew the grip was throttle. I knew the right lever was the brake, and that was the extent.
'Don't worry about the front brake. It doesn't work.' That cut my knowledge in half.

An hour later, and not nearly as many tumbles as I expected to have, and I was at least as good on the thing as the bully was. I was so fucking happy, grinning ear to ear. It was a great feeling of freedom. I felt like I was flying. I didn't want to ever give it back.

That's when she died on me. A short sputter and that was it.
'She's out of gas'. The Bully said as he walked towards me.
'You got any money for gas?' He put a hand on me to steady me. The bike was so tall I could only reach the ground with one leg.
'Yeah. I got some money...'
'Good. Take her back to your place. Keep it in the bushes there, but not too close to the homes they are working on right now or they'll find it.' He looked around like he was about to tell me a secret.
'She yours, man. Don't never tell no one about this OK?'
I didn't know what to say. I just kept staring at him. I was waiting for him to take it back.
He smiled. Like, a genuine smile. It was the first time I ever saw kindness on his face.
'You owe me two hunnert bucks, though. Remember, I know where you live.' He walked away.
I watched him until he disappeared in the distance. He never did come back for it. He had actually left it with me. It took me two hours to push the bike to it's hiding place. My left hand was killing me because I was using the clutch the whole time. I didn't learn until later you could put it in neutral.

The advantage of living in the Pacific North West is there are a million miles of forest to stay in when you are homeless. If you happen to work part time in forestry or logging, you are familiar with the more remote locations. The good news is a remote location means no one is likely to bother you, and you they. The bad news is they tend to be short on resources, even to someone skilled at living remotely.

It's late summer or early fall of 2010 or so. Take yer pick. As far as I remember. And after an argument with my old business partner, I was effectively living out of a truck. Homeless, and soon to be stateless. Well, by American standards. I would never live in Texas again after I left. And I still miss it to this day.

It was nearly 90*F when I finally managed to fix the tire of my truck and head northwest, towards my eventual target of Oregon. I decided I'd take the Moab-Provo-Boise route. Not the fastest, but the straightest and potentially the least amount of fuel. I had much more time than money anyways. At the very least it takes me through some Native American reservations. If I got in to trouble, I was hoping they would help a fellow Native. Or, at the very least, not disturb me too much. I planned to stop for the night in the top of the Navajo Rez at the bottom of Colorado.

For me to get to Moab, Utah, I've got to go through New Mexico and Colorado.

The windows were all down, but it wasn't much relief. The only thing they let in was dust and hot air once I got going. As the miles came, so did the thirst and the hunger. But after a good while I still hadn't found a shop. I wiped the sweat from my brow and looked in to my rear view mirror to check on the dog. That's when I saw a large SUV with flashing lights. I briefly wondered how long they had been there before I noticed them. I glanced at my speedometer. I was well under the limit. It must be something else. That's when I began to worry. The only thing for miles was me and this police car. I pulled over and shut off the engine. I was too tired to be anxious. Whatever came to be would come to be.

"Howdy. Can I ask where you're going and where you been?" The officer stated plainly as his eyes started to wander over the vehicle. I was taken a bit by surprise at the abrupt line of questioning. Standing next to my truck in the blinding New Mexico sunlight was a Border Patrol Agent. His dark green agency issued jump suit was unmistakable. The good news is he was unlikely to kill me and steal my shit. The bad news is I now would have to prove I'm an American citizen. I had no idea where my passport was in all this mess in my truck. So, I guess I would have to at least act like an American.

"Do you speak English?" I had hesitated too long to answer.

"Yes. Yeah I speak English. I just been in this truck since Austin. I'm a bit shell shocked having to actually speak to someone after so long. I'm headed to Oregon."

"Oregon?! What's there for you?" I noticed the agent had a hint of a Mexican accent and mused to myself for a fraction of a second at the irony in it and my circumstance.

"What's there for me is none of your fucken business. I didn't drive all the way here to waste my time chatting up some border agent in the middle of God damn nowhere. Why not move along and go harass some other law abiding citizen so I can go about my own damn business, Tio Tomaso." Is what I wanted to say.

"Forestry work" Is what I did say.

The agent looked me over again, then looked in the back seat at Carlow.

"Nice dog. That a Greyhound?".

"Thanks, yeah. She's the only thing I own in the world besides this truck right now." I immediately regretted saying that.

"You homeless?" He was suddenly interested in what I had to say.

"I guess I am now."

He looked long at me and the dog. I knew what he was thinking. He's curious about my story. He now wanted to search my truck. But he didn't want to have to mess with the dog. Cops hate vagrants and drifters.
I normally wouldn't be nervous, but I had a revolver in the console and really didn't want to mess with explaining to a Fed that my Texas gun permit was recognized by New Mexico. I doubt he would care about it's legality in Oregon. Or, rather, it's lack of legality there.

"But I am not stateless. Y'all wanna see my ID?". Border Patrol agents almost never ask for ID if it's obvious to them you're an American.

"You got insurance on this thing?" I hadn't expected that. They usually don't care. And it would seem cruel for even a border officer to want to remove someone homeless from the only thing they own - the only shelter they had, and in the middle of nowhere. I had my wallet in my hand when he pulled me over. I opened it up, pulled out my Texas ID and a small insurance document, careful not to flash my gun permit. The ID was still good. The insurance document was a fake. My business partner was notorious for not having insurance. It was his last gift to me, a faked insurance document. I handed them to the officer.

He looked at the ID and then to me, and then looked back at the ID for a bit...

"It's a long ride to Oregon, Tex. I wish ya luck", he said as he handed my docs back to me.

"Obliged, Sir".  Now fuck off.

Silicon Valley Redux

Picture the mid 1990's... the internet was starting on it's way to creating and destroying lives and relationships, Alanis Morisette was about to come on the scene to tell us we oughta know, the Red Socks didn't win the world series again(Laf ), Arnold was back, and some blurry dinuh-sawrs were on the big screen. I used to work for Avanti. Everyone was hiring hacks. These guys designed microchips... and hired hacks. I was a unix admin in charge of all the puterz in one of the buildings on campus. This building also had a large server room packed full of racks and stuff and stuff with a monster AC system. Anyways, every server room has a big red button on the wall. In case of fire, smoke, flood, locusts, Alanis Morisette, whatever - you hit that button. One day it got hit. My pager goes off with the code 911, and 'Ballistic missile threat inbound to Hawaii'. And now I have to go into what is currently a 100*F+ room because the AC also shut off, and restart every workstation and rack system and nurse it back to health by hand. These aren't laptops, they are full rack systems taller than yourself, and they don't simply turn on - you have to check file systems and mount points and networking etc. as they boot, assuming you've got the network servers and routers on line first. So you run down the line tripping them all, hundreds of buttons, phone in hand describing the situation and begging admins from other buildings to converge on your location, riot in progress, and spread the word to join in on the fun, and there's also gonna be a raffle for prizes afterwards. Pager goes off(and on and on and on) and you have to eventually tell some engineer working in Sunnyvale that his server in Santa Clara may, or may not, be operational within the day. OK, mostly not. Also, that's like a 15 minute commute, you slacker. The poor guy loses the last 5 hours of his life, and then you'll use the awkward silence that follows that revelation to inform him that he can maybe understand yer just a little busy at the moment for a heart to heart since you don't have three arms. It took 12 hours to get that room functioning enough where I could let some of the other admins that assisted me go home. The dude who hit the button was someone's kid. Apparently it was 'bring your least favorite kid to work' day. He and his kid were about as welcomed as Steve Bartman after that.

Then there's the day the AC itself decided to go on strike. I am minding my own business, arguing with an engineer that wanted to print his integrated circuits on a bigger printer. 'This IS our bigger printer. Note the bigness of all that stands before you in printer form. Maybe make yer IC's smaller? Isn't that the whole damn idea?! Mas poquito, amigo! Julio Iglacias'
Then the 911 page comes again. I am staring at it in disbelief and gasping, and the engineer is still arguing with me - 'I'm Korean, no Mexican!', as I walk away in silence towards the stairs. I had front row tickets to an Alanis Morisette concert I won in my last raffle from the previous 911 call, and now that dream was about to be crushed. I shoulda known.
When I get to the server room, it looks fine; which is a huge relief since a 911 usually means the end of days. I sigh and try to think of something clever and racist about Koreans as I head back to the stairwell. Then another page comes, 'BLD G'. That's far away. I really didn't want to run all the way across campus, but I knew if I simply walked briskly someone in the 'end of week meeting' would bring that crap up. 'You were reportedly walking briskly, and not at all spiritedly'. I can't argue effectively at 8AM. So I ran. I ran so far away. I was the first admin to arrive other than the one that was chained to building G. I sorta felt stupid then. But I also noticed right away the exterior doors to the server room were open and smoke was coming out the top of the building. (That's why they pay me the big bucks, coz I knew right away that smoke was a bad thing.) The massive security doors only ever open to move equipment in or out that can not fit through the halls or the main interior door, and are a huge pain to unlock. When I peered through the opening, the blast of heat hit me. I squinted and saw a tiny asian dude with thick glasses, also squinting, with a rolled up dress shirt, somewhere in the mess of cabling furiously hammering on a keyboard. I secretly hoped he was Korean, cause I didn't wanna waste the insult I worked so hard for on my own Korean - it's all about timing ya know. He caught sight of me out of the corner of his eye and shouted 'Help!'. For the second time in my life I could actually hear someone talking in a server room because the massive AC fans were off. I already knew what had to happen - every single server in that room had to be taken off line and shutdown immediately, and I had to determine if the dude was Korean. All server rooms not only had a big red button, but they also had a big thermometer. This one read 125*F! And it was near the door! I was shirtless and surrounded by ALL our admins, several engineers and programmers, and a few maintenance engineers by the time the last server was off. Some of them shirtless, too. It was supah gay. It was also 145*F before maintenance got the AC to finally start up with the sound and shudder of a freakin' jet plane, and a shimmer of heat rising above the building.

So the management asks all of us as we were sitting on the curb in 45*F weather what the hell just happened(and we'll all have to stay and restart and QC check everything in that server room soon as the AC got the room temp below 80*). All we knew is the AC failed, and we then took turns shrugging our massively muscled and chiseled shoulders, covered in sweat, steaming in the cold crisp winter air, until one of the maintenance engineers approached us meekly. He informs us when the temperature outside drops below 40*, the AC compressor units switch off, reverses the fans, and start to funnel air from the outside. Saves us some scrilla, yeah? Except, in the case of building G, the fans didn't reverse. They were installed incorrectly. They simply stopped altogether, jammed up, and fried the hell out of the motors. Told you smoke was bad. He had to disconnect the motors, install new ones, defeat the control panel, and restart it all. This maintenance dude had his shirt off as well. But wasn't he outside that whole time in 45* weather... what?

For weeks and even months afterwards we were replacing system after system as they inevitably failed from being heat damaged. Engineers were working feverishly to relocate their data or back it up. We admins ran a dead pool, until upper management made us take the white board down. It was spooking the engineers. We prolly shouldn't have named their servers after them. Good news is I had the opportunity to rename a couple of servers because some engineers thought the same name again would be bad luck. One asked me for a suggestion. I said, 'Rick James?'.
I can still smell that server room ozone and smoke and manly, manly programmer aroma, 20 years later.