Chain of
Misfortune
HOMELESS IN A LAND OF
PLENTY
PART 3: ALICE
By Jack Random
[In September
2018 the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that it is unconstitutional to
prohibit homeless individuals from sleeping in public parks or on the streets
if there are inadequate shelters.
While subject to Supreme Court review, the ruling is a reminder that you
cannot legislate the homeless out of existence. Since that ruling, tent cities have sprung up in parks and
open spaces, reminiscent of the Hoovervilles in the era of the Great
Depression.]
ALICE
She’d been
through it all before. Eviction
notices, drug deals gone bad, jail and bail, abandonment and betrayal. She had a way of looking at things that
was at once almost enlightened and supremely callous. She believed that people were fundamentally good but they
were governed by their immediate needs.
She didn’t hold grudges and she didn’t blame people for the things they
did. It wasn’t that she didn’t
care. She did but it didn’t
matter. She did what she had to
do. It was all a calculation. What would give her the best chance of
surviving until tomorrow?
She missed
Gary. Now that they turned off the
power she missed his warm body next to hers more than ever. Now she needed someone else to help her
make it through the days and nights.
She went looking where she always went: the local bars. She knew better than to go to the same
bar all the time. Word got
around. The bartenders knew
Alice. They knew she was always on
the make. Always. They knew she was always about the
drugs. They knew she was trouble.
She walked
halfway across town to a bar she’d never been before. She walked in, sat at the bar, batted her eyes and
waited. She was still young enough
and healthy enough to attract the attention of the average bar going man.
It was late
afternoon and the bar was in the process of filling up. It was a workingman’s bar – a few women
but mostly men. They were sweaty,
grimy and looking for a way to leave the day’s labor behind them. A few of them had their eyes on Alice
and she had her eyes on them. She
looked them over and measured their worth. They had jobs.
That was a major plus. It
meant they probably had cars or trucks or vans – some means of getting around. They all fell short of good looking but
all kinds of problems came with good looking. None of them were flat-out ugly. One of them had no wedding band. That was a plus.
She made her
choice and gave him a look that he understood. He exchanged a few words with the guys he came in with and
strolled over to her place at the bar.
“How you
doing?”
He was a
little shy with women. She liked
that – as long as he wasn’t stupid about it.
“I’ve had
better days,” she opened.
“Can I buy you
a drink?”
She motioned
to the stool next to her and nodded.
His name was
Billy and she could tell it had been a while since he had a woman to warm his
bed. He was hungry and she liked
that. It enhanced the odds of
getting what she needed. She did
not find him attractive but she liked the prospects of using him. She could lead him. She could persuade him to do her
bidding.
It took three
drinks in a little over an hour.
She realized it was up to her.
He was shy or so it seemed.
“Would you
like to get out of here?”
“Sure.”
She climbed
into his car and talked about nothing.
Because he didn’t say and he didn’t ask, she assumed they were going to
his house or apartment or whatever his place of residence was. He stopped for a six-pack of beer
before he pulled up to a cheap motel by the freeway. It was then she knew she had made a mistake.
“What are we
doing here?”
“I’ve got
money. Don’t worry about it.”
She was a long
way from home – Gary’s home but it didn’t matter – and on the wrong side of
town.
“I thought you
were a nice guy. Can you just give
me a ride home?”
“Look,
everyone knows what you are. If
you don’t want to put out, fine.
Get the fuck out of my car!”
She took a
breath and surveyed her options.
They were all bad. She
could get out and walk back to Gary’s house. She could hitch a ride. She could demand that Billy give her a ride. She could play along and get the
money. She could be the whore he
expected her to be.
She had to
wonder how she arrived in this place.
She had to wonder how she lost her family, her friends – everyone she
cared about and everyone who ever really cared about her. When did it happen and why? She was a good girl for the longest
time. She had friends who shared
her ambitions. She wanted to be a
cheerleader. She thought she might
be a secretary. She could do
that. She could do whatever she
wanted to do. But that was before
her Uncle Johnny abused her.
Abused her? What kind of
euphemism was that? He took her
into a closet, held his hand over her mouth and ripped her panties off. He took her childhood. He took her innocence. He took her naiveté and with it all her
hopes and dreams. It robbed her of
whatever confidence she might have developed.
He did what he
did over and over until she finally found the courage to tell her mother – a
lot of good that did. She said she
didn’t believe her but Alice knew better.
She believed her but she didn’t want to believe her. She was holding on to her life by the
thinnest thread. She couldn’t let
go. Not for a second. She let her own daughter be consumed by
the monsters in her life.
Billy reached
across her and opened the door.
“Get the fuck
out!”
Her mind in a
fog of rage, she grabbed his arm and shoved it away from her. She stepped out of the car just as he
gunned it. Her head slammed into
the pavement and she lost touch with the world around her until she found
herself strapped to a gurney being loaded into an ambulance.
She went in
and out of consciousness, catching glimpses of the waking world as she
went. In the ambulance a man asked
her questions that she could not understand – scattered words without real
meaning. Someone poked a hole in
her arm and ran a tube to a plastic bag filled with some mysterious
liquid. She blacked out long enough
that she didn’t remember being taken from the ambulance.
She came to in
the emergency room. She recognized
the sterile, Clorox smell. If she
weren’t sick already it would have got her there. She remembered the time her and a friend wrecked a car to
gain admittance in a gamble that they would offer the drugs that kept them
alive and ticking. It worked once
or twice but they caught on. She
was put on a list. No hospital
within twenty miles would give her any form of opiates. The nurses and the doctors knew her
here. They knew she had no
insurance and no means of paying the hospital even a fraction of what she owed
yet they still asked the same questions.
Who’s your
next of kin? Is there anyone we
can call? Do you have
insurance? Do you have a job? Where’s your place of employment? Where do you live? Is there anyone who would come? Is there anywhere you could go?
It was like
one of those movies where people keep asking the same questions no matter how
many times you give the same answers.
No, she didn’t have a job.
No, she didn’t have insurance.
No, she didn’t have anywhere to go and no one gave a shit what happened
to her.
They gave her
extra strength Tylenol and released her the moment she could walk. They didn’t care what had happened. The cops didn’t care. The doctors and nurses didn’t
care. She was worthless. She was less than worthless. She was a burden to her community. She was a drug addict and she was out
on the streets.
A cop gave her a ride to the
nearest shelter but they were booked. She knew they would be. It seemed to her the shelters were always full and even if
they weren’t, they were closed to druggies like her. They had a list and she was on it. She went to the only place she knew that wouldn’t turn her
away: the homeless community under
the bridge.
