What They Carry: The Homeless of Laguna Beach
Five portrayals:
Charlie
Frankie
Katherine
Orlando
nameless
Fall 2009
Charlie
He carries a backpack with the day’s essentials: toothpaste, toothbrush, deodorant, legal papers, tapes and CDs, harmonicas, vodka, a knife. His sleeping bag, too bulky to lug, is stashed in a locker. Charlie spends nights on Laguna’s beach when the weather is clear, under shelters when it rains. There is worse, he says. He’s been homeless in Michigan. It snows there.
The important things—photos—Charlie stores at a friend’s house. There’s a photo of him at age four, sporting a pompadour, taken about the time his uncle and aunt got married. His grandfather and great-uncle got Charlie plastered at the reception. Charlie was the star of the evening, his drunken toddler antics the hit of the wedding video. He stores photos of his own three children, ages seven, seven, and eleven. And a photo of his grandfather, a Michigan dairy farmer, who amassed a fortune. He died when Charlie was seven, the year after Charlie’s mother abandoned Charlie in a motel room in Toronto. She was a bi-polar alcoholic. A single woman with two kids. She beat the hell out of him. He hasn’t seen her since he took off at sixteen. He hasn’t seen his older brother either. His brother beat him, too.
His body pumps chemical toxins. There’s the vodka (three fifths a day), heroin when he’s indoors, and the drugs prescribed to him through therapy. Is it depression or post traumatic stress syndrome? They can’t figure. There’s medication for each, and another against seizures. The seizures come when he is sober, which isn’t very often and never for very long. It’s a formidable mix of drugs, enough to kill an average guy. But Charlie is a big man. Hulking, Irish, a once hockey player. He wears scars at his eyes, a long gash across his neck. A girlfriend tried to kill him once, he was just too drunk. A middle finger in his left hand is bowed, crippled from months, maybe years, sitting daily in Bilbo’s bar squeezing a massive 32 oz. mason jar of loaded Irish Ice Tea.
He bears a musical soul, an intelligent mind. He taught himself the harmonica. He reads Charles Bukowsky, Tom Robbins, Jimmy Buffett, and William Burroughs: tough men living their addictions. He earned A’s in high school, finished college, and completed two years of medical school in a drugged haze before he was expelled when his girlfriend overdosed and died. Charlie had already had six felony heroin convictions.
He’s read the Bible through twice, though Charlie doesn’t know if there is a God. When he was in his twenties, he believed women were the Divine. Now they are his torment. They find him, he says, and fall in love with him. The women in AA especially, want to fix him. And with each involvement, his sobriety, whatever its duration, comes to an end. Once in a binge of drunken sex he impregnated two women in one night. The babies were born 1 week apart, two blond dolls. He already had a son by another woman. He collects some federal aid, but it doesn’t go far with three kids to support. Debauchery isn’t cheap, please help he wrote on a scrap of cardboard and placed it at his feet. He sat in an alley and blew melodies from his harmonica. Passersby tossed coins onto his plate.
Tattoos scream from sun-raw skin: a wolf with cross bones on a wrist, a two-inch wide China White syringe inked over a bicep, its needle entering a vein. In and out of rehabs in several states, he sparks still with the memory of those ECT’s: Electro Convulsive Therapies. Five of them in total. You want to explode after one of those, he says. They may be the only thing he fears. He wants to be sober, but then again he doesn’t. He says he’s angry when he’s sober, and he doesn’t like being angry. The disease consumes him wretchedly: missing teeth, a rotten liver, collapsed veins. Who knows about his heart. His uncle got a new heart some years ago. Charlie figures the heart is about 39, six years younger than his own. This is the uncle who took control of Charlie’s inheritance when Charlie went wild with drugs and cash at age 16 and landed in a Trinidad jail. The uncle is sober now, so chances are, Charlie figures, he won’t be dying anytime soon.
Charlie is a multimillionaire. An initial investment, willed to him by his grandfather, has grown sizably over the years—twenty-five million at last count. It waits for him, that money, enough to buy a home for himself and one for each of his roaming pals. Enough to put his kids through college. His mother and brother were left nothing in the will. It all belongs to Charlie. He can have at it, all of it, at any time. There is only one stipulation: he must be, and remain, sober.
His knees moan when he walks. His shoulders pull inward. Possibility is a weary load. One of his ex-girlfriends called him up recently, the one who slit his throat. She had a new boyfriend. At least you never peed the bed, Charlie, she said. At least you never vomited on the floor. His fingers fiddle a cigarette. The Vitamin Water bottle he holds is filled with vodka, and it is nearing empty. He talks about giving head butts, about the thrill of slamming a hockey puck into an opponent’s face. It’s time for a refill. His eyes sink. Hope can’t do anything for you that you won’t do for yourself, he says. His daughters’ mothers are still in AA. They like Charlie, when he’s sober. He stays away now. He wants them to make it.
Frankie
All we have is ourselves when it comes down to it, Frankie says. He is certain of this. He sits, arms barring his chest. His face is tanned, smoothly shaven. His hands, strong and clean. His clothes tidy, his socks bleached white. Frankie is smart and street savvy. He speaks with an authoritative lilt that gets people moving. He could be a big boss somewhere. He was once, years ago.
Frankie sleeps in a garage. A couple of blankets make a bed on the floor. The house is owned by two girls he knows, though he has no rights to the bath or the kitchen. It is there that he keeps a computer and a camera, some clothes. The garage is a good thing, though he might not have it this summer. The girls are thinking about renovating. He hangs at the boardwalk, carries his backpack with him. In it: tweezers for wood splinters, antiseptic cream, a towel, toiletries, an inhaler for his lung condition. He snapped his neck bodysurfing about a year ago; titanium rods now hold his head onto his body. Frankie flows through life like the air through the open sandals he wears. He takes little with him. The oldest thing he owns is a jacket, given to him about four years ago. He has no photos, no letters, no souvenirs. He doesn’t want to remember.
He spent the first seven years of his life in a children’s shelter. He doesn’t know who his father was, and his mother was incarcerated shortly after his birth. Then he and his half sister were adopted by a couple with three children of their own. The man was a deacon in a Christian congregation and treasurer of its board; the woman was superintendent of the Sunday school program. They sang in the choir, did bible study, spread the Good Word, and abused their adopted son. Knife cuts and burns. His forty-one year old body carries the scars. And then the incessant, hateful curse: You’ll never amount to anything, Frankie. You are a piece of crap. Crap.
The main cause of homelessness is lack of self-esteem, Frankie says. Twice, he’s tried suicide. The cure is to get people to feel better about themselves so that that they fix their lives, he says. No one wants to be homeless. And then there’s the trouble with boredom, he adds. You see, alcohol takes care of that.
Frankie’s been working on himself. He’s begun taking beach photos. He’s sold a couple. He’s been highlighted in the Laguna Beach press. All good for self esteem, but he needs cash.
No one will hire him. His prison record daunts: two felony convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, one of these when a friend ratted him out to the cops and Frankie took revenge. At the time he was a prosperous pot grower. Later he cooked meth for years surrounded by an entourage of private body guards. He pocketed five grand a week, but life was hell. A rival drug group tried to kill him, slipping him speed laced with poison. They nearly succeeded: he lay dead on the operating table for more than six minutes when his heart began pumping again.
He free-based coke and overdosed. Twice. Within twenty-four hours. The same emergency crew picked him up both times. Then there’s the alcohol. He drinks everyday. This, too, to the verge of death, some time ago.
He is a principled man, he says, acknowledging the fact that he is somehow both criminal and preacher. The Book According to Frankie is with him at all times. It is the nonnegotiable code he holds between himself and the outside world. Everything passes through this filter.
When he speaks, the beliefs spit forth. All organizations (especially AA) are useless and harmful; they offer people a place to hide. Marriage is an ugly piece of paper; it gives people unjust rights to ownership. Kids are never given a choice to be what they want to be; parents decide that for them. There is nothing good in politics; this country is becoming what it was taught to hate: Communist. Friendship takes years; you can’t know someone for a couple months and call them your best friend. Spanish speaking kitchens in this country are unacceptable; this is America, we should be speaking English.
Frankie’s principles don’t make life easier. He resigned from an enviable position as a chef at a homeless assistance center because of his kitchen language code. He’d had first dibs on all incoming donations of clothing as well as much food as he could eat, but he couldn’t tolerate the effusive Spanish spoken (even though he understands it well). He raised the issue to the boss, mentioning also that the Latino staff was taking more than their share, but the management didn’t want to press the issue.
Frankie believes what he believes. He does not debate. He will not compromise. Music helps to bring calm, he says. How many times has someone been sitting in the car thinking of suicide and a song will come on and make him rethink it?
Four of his matted photos are displayed on a ledge at Laguna’s Resource Center. He takes down the photos, for sale at $75 a piece. They are beach scenes. This one, he says, bringing it to the front. It’s one of his best: an evening tide, lots of orange. Waves, sky, sand. His finger taps at a gray and white gull, standing alone at the sea’s edge.
Katherine
Katherine carries knives: several small ones, a collapsible model, and a seven-inch combat blade. In the evenings when she sleeps, she straps them to her legs. They are her protection, her comfort at night. She will use them if she has to.
It is illegal to walk around with the deadly combat knife she knows, and she carries this concern with her, too. Though so much else is more important and besides, unless it is uncovered (It hasn’t been yet), who will know?
Katherine is searched often. She says it is because the cops think she is a druggy, though she knows it is because she is slender and pretty. Katherine strolls with grace, carries herself tall and lithe, the punkish blue streaks in her hair somehow elegant on her, enhancing the hue of her eyes. Her young face is blemish free, yet there’s a purplish tint on a cheekbone—a leftover bruise or perhaps a permanent one from a prior relationship—marking a swelling, subtle but obvious, around one eye.
She’s been in life threatening situations. They’ve taught her a lot about defending herself. When she hears people say I wish that never happened to me, she counters with Everything is good for something.
In her backpack she carries clothes, extra shoes, a bathing suit, a sewing kit. She wears a vest with embroidered patches and stitched-on beads. She made it herself.
She showers sporadically, preferring to sponge clean the delicate areas. She doesn’t shave; natural is best, she believes, and the most sexy. And yet she’s inked, punctured, and scarred her body. She’s self-pierced her ears and her lip. She’ll do her tongue next.
Katherine carries a lust for pain, pain she can control, pain she can determine when, where, how long. Getting a tattoo feels like someone cutting into you with an Xacto knife: the endorphins are amazing. She’d like to try suspensions. That’s where clamps are pulled through the tissue on your shoulders and used to hang you. Katherine has a friend who works in a suspension shop and he says he’ll do it for free. She releases a girlish, escalating squeal, then returns to the psychobabble: We’re all just animals in clothing running around in our boxes on wheels, she says. Pain is spiritual. It brings you back into your body.
She’s not afraid of anything, she says. But there are the nightmare memories of Havasu, the town in Arizona on the lake with the transplanted London Bridge. In Havasu, if you’re not on drugs by age twelve, you’re crazy. When she was fifteen, she was snorting coke off picnic benches. And then there’s the Shakespeare Inn: terrible, dangerous, $26 dollars a night. Katherine once spent a week in the Havasu motel, overhearing horrors ensuing in adjacent rooms. It was safer to sleep outside.
Katherine is hungry, yet she scrutinizes each label of the grocery goods on display and free for the taking at the homeless resource center. She tosses unacceptable packages back onto the mound of carbohydrates. Bread, always bread. It all has sugar, you know, and eggs and milk. Not good for you. Here! someone says, a scout who has taken to Katherine and her cause. Found it: bran and no sugar. She smiles, radiant. She stuffs the muffins into her backpack, along with the apples, kumquats, and bananas she already carries. Someone opens a refrigerator packed with meats. She turns her head. Dead animals, she says.
Katherine is a child without a childhood, parenting her parents. Her mom is an unemployed alcoholic still living in Havasu. Katherine supported her and her drinking habit throughout high school. Katherine’s father remarried soon after the divorce and lives large: an expansive home, two new kids, a dog, a tennis court in the backyard. He wants her to move in with him, but Katherine doesn’t trust the situation. Or him. She’s had a restraining order on her father for a couple years. She asked him recently if he would do her one favor, for her birthday. She’d gotten a job, steady. She just needed some help covering the first month’s rent. Her step mother stepped in. No, was the answer.
If they didn’t want to help her, she could just deal. Whatever. Most of us have adverse things to deal with, Katherine shrugs. A good friend of hers is beaten by her father, still, every night.
You’ve got to be firm with parents. Her high school graduation a year and a half ago was the first time she’d seen her father in three years. The morning of the event, he called her: Your mother’s being a bitch, he said. Then her mother called her: Your father’s being an asshole. You, she said to her dad, I never see. And YOU, she said to her mom, I see all the time. NOT today, okay? She shut them in a room, together, for an extended Time Out.
Katherine carries youth, fertility, and a conviction that as soon as she gets the money she will have her tubes tied. She doesn’t want to be a mother. When her body clock goes off at thirty she doesn’t want to freak and think that maybe she does. There are enough kids in the world that are a mess. She doesn’t want to add to it. And yet, one of the two professions she’s interested in pursuing is midwife. (The other? Tattooist.) There is such a camaraderie about child bearing among women that men will never understand, she says.
Katherine bites delicately from a vegan bran muffin, crosses her lean legs, and taps a napkin to her mouth. She could be a guest at a ladies’ brunch at the Ritz. Or Alice’s replacement at the Mad Hatter’s tea table. She trusts in fantasy worlds, especially those created by Gregory Maguire—disturbing places of psychological unrest. She holds a fascination for his Wicked and has a particular affinity for the story’s protagonist, Elphaba, an outcast free sprit who ultimately claims her power as the headstrong Wicked Witch of the West—a capable girl with ominous potential whom fate has, at least initially, shit on.
Orlando
It is talent night at the Laguna Women’s Club; the homeless are performing on stage. Someone finishes singing and the audience cheers.
Orlando hunkers in an open doorway, his shoulder pressed against the frame, a hooded darkness backlit by the kitchen’s florescent glare.
Prayer changes things proclaims his chest, white letters pressed into black cloth. And when he turns, Thank you Jesus, the words on his back.
His handshake is strong and warm like his presence, a tenderness out of place with his circumstance.
He slips from a pocket a photo. She’s mine, he says, beholding her, his joy, Victoria, now three, living with her grandma. She’s safe, he says.
Behind him, the club’s kitchen is laden with cookies and cupcakes and chocolates and sweets, empty calories, a temporary fix, and like the new $250,000 sleep shelter the city built, not really what the homeless need.
Earlier Orlando shuffled across the stage in a standup routine, trying to act goofy and rapper-cool, when what he was was smart and trying to hide it.
A sweat-shirted prophet sandwiched between words of belief and gratitude, he exposed his life and challenged the crowd.
I mean it’s not so bad being homeless. Though it can cramp your love life. (My blanket, or yours?) Yeah, like, Why don’t you come back to my place? It ain’t fancy, but it’s got an awesome ocean view.
nameless
She sits on a bench, a torn sleep sack under her feet, her graying hair lifting in the wind. A chapped hand weaves through the tangle around her face, then drops to her lap. She wears several shirts, one buttoned atop the other, and two pairs of socks on her sandaled feet. Her sweatpants lump with the layers underneath.
Coast Highway dips and crests, then dips again under a calm sky; waves froth blue and silver along miles of sand and palm. It is a promise of bliss, an affirmation that anything can be. Yet what is this vastness to one who dreams only of enclosure, who craves a small structure to call home, someone to voice her name? Possibility is a prison when there is no hope.
The woman stares at the sea. She whispers something to the wind. Don’t hug the drifters, I was told. And don’t sit where they’ve just sat. They carry fleas and lice. Those creatures can be dangerous.
Can I help you? I say. Her eyes shout yes, then no, her body sinks inward: maybe, I don’t know, never mind. A flock of gulls flap overhead. She follows their journey as they become smaller and smaller, then dots, then gone. Reaching down, she grabs a big toe and squeezes hard, and stretching her mouth wide, shouts silently for no one to hear.