Deciding to be homeless

I've written the details of my life from different perspectives elsewhere on this website, so I won't take a long time to give them here. In summary, I don't talk to my parents anymore.

When I decided to buy a tent and live outside, I had lived with my mom and my brother, Jared, for the final time for about a month. I spent most of that month walking the country roads, listening to old school hip hop music, and working on my poetry. I had enough time to consider that my mom seeking a new man to "take care of her," while crying over just about anything, while my brother wanted to obnoxiously try to pick fights over anything and everything, I needed something to change, and drastically.

I hopped on my motorcycle, bought a tent, and moved into the woods behind the Wal Mart in Denham Springs. There wasn't a trail or anything, I just started memorizing the path that I took. I lived back there for nearly two years, slowly accumulating weather proof containers to store my blankets so they wouldn't get wet in the rain, and to store changes of clothes. I was working, brushing my teeth in the bathroom and taking what I know to be called "whore baths," basically wiping down the essential areas with a clean, soapy cloth. Riding my motorcycle to work, gave me an excuse to hit up the bathroom upon arrival to change clothes and take care of the essentials, while also giving me a good excuse to carry a backpack in with the items I needed.

It wasn't a bad life. I had my freedom and solitude that I've always enjoyed. I could smoke as much weed as I wanted, and often bought 40s to get a nice mixed buzz going. I've always liked the feeling of being tipsy and high. Plus, it helps when sleeping on the hard, cold ground. My tent was too small for me to fully stretch out in, and I never bothered getting a sleeping bag, instead I had a big pile of blankets that I would put under and over me for warmth and a cushion against the uneven and hard ground. It gets so cold at night, sleeping on the ground, even in Louisiana. It might be 75 degrees outside, but it feels like the earth just sucks the warmth from your body.

I learned some lessons. If you're gonna set up a tent, bring along some kind of platform to put underneath it, maybe just a big enough piece of plywood or something you can piece together as a shelf of sorts, just to give you a flatter surface than the ground and to avoid the warmth draining earth. Sleeping on concrete felt about ten degrees warmer than the ground itself. Don't leave anything valuable outside the tent unless it is properly stored away. I learned that lesson when I awoke in the middle of the night to a raccoon stealing one of my shoes. What a fun morning that was, trudging through the woods with only one shoe, and having to go buy another pair. And, it's really easy to be homeless. Most people I told didn't even believe me.

"You don't live in a tent," they'd say dismissively.

"Yes, I do," I'd reply earnestly.

"Whatever dude, you're just fucking with me," they'd say with a laugh.

"No, it's true. I live in a tent right down the road behind that Wal Mart over there," I'd say.

"Ha ha," they would say disbelieving.

To be fair, my deadpan and absurd sense of humor does me no favors when I'm trying to be earnest, but I can't control what people choose to believe. Most people, when they think homeless man, don't think of a guy who shaves semi-regularly, and brushes his teeth, with clean clothes, and a full time job. They think, old, scruffy, smelly man, sleeping on cardboard in an alley, with mental health problems.

I won't deny that I've had a long history of depression and self-destructive behavior, the scars across my body speak for themselves, but even though they seem glaringly obvious to me, most people don't even notice they're there unless I point them out. I stayed out there for a long time, but my habits weren't very different from what they are now. I'd work for most of the day, and in my tent, I'd play games or watch Netflix on my phone or read a book, smoke some weed, drink a 40, and sleep. The main differences now are that I have a desktop, a T.V., a dog, and a bookshelf. Oh yeah, and air conditioning and a bed that is as soft as a cloud. I spared no expense on my bed, let me tell you. It was still really cheap, though, to be honest. Also, I can cook and store food. It's easy to forget how important that is.

I was near to my 27th birthday. This was the age my brother, Jesse, was when he died. Quite different from Jared, he was kind and loveable, amicable, and generous with his joy. He had problems with drugs and overdosed in 2013 on opioids. It was 2017, and I wanted to really do something wild and free to celebrate his life. I wouldn't go as far as he did at one point, smuggling himself into and then back out of Mexico, but I needed an adventure. I had always fantasized about running away from home, and even though I was homeless, I was situated about 20 minutes away from many different family member's homes, so I could visit, eat something hot, take a shower, and just have some time with air conditioning. I was still kind of rooted at home. So, as an adult, I made the decision to run away. It took me long enough.

I wanted something drastically different from Louisiana. I figured New York maybe, but I don't tolerate the cold very well. A lifetime of wearing hoodies in 65 degree weather wasn't really a great way to prepare myself for a place so far north. So, I settled on California. I didn't really map a route, I just figured I could use Google Maps and slowly find a way there, stopping and working temporarily, if I needed to make some more money. Working for just over minimum wage with no benefits doesn't give you a lot of extra income to save, especially when you spend the bulk of it on weed and booze, so I only had a few hundred dollars in my bank. Gas is cheap on a bike, but turns out, it isn't that cheap. Especially when you're impulsive and spend a lot of your money on the road eating fast food, instead of conserving your resources and eating peanut butter sandwiches or something.

On my little Honda Rebel 250, I couldn't match the speed limits on the Interstate, so I tried to avoid them whenever possible. I went down highways and side roads, which added miles to my trip. I kind of wanted to avoid Texas. Back in those days it sounded like a state full of pet tigers, guns, and people who'd kill you for just about any reason. I imagined it like the old west, everyone being a cowboy gunslinging in the streets. But, it didn't seem like there was an easy way to get around the state, so my first stop was at a rest area on the border of Texas and Louisiana.

There was a big wooded area behind a tall fence next to the rest stop, so I walked along the fence, until I found an opening that had been cut into it, and made my way down a four wheeler trail, then off it for a bit, to set up my tent, and sleep for the night. It was uneventful, but the adventurousness of it made it fun. I woke up the next morning, packed my stuff onto my bike, and rode off, headed north into Oklahoma.

So, I got lost in Oklahoma, trying to avoid toll roads. I'm pretty sure I either zig zagged across the state, or went in circles. Well, my tent fell off in Texas and I spent three nights in Oklahoma. The first night, I was lucky enough to find an abandoned gas station. I found my way inside, and slept at a booth made for eating, but not before exploring a bit. There was a dismantled pool table, with no change left in it. There was one large can of corn in the kitchen, unopened, that I left alone. There was a calendar with the date of their closure, two years earlier, circled. And there was a fire extinguisher that I decided I needed some practice with, just to see how they really work. I learned that as soon as you pull that pin, the pressure starts leaving and you don't really have a lot of time to use it. I thought that was pretty useful to know.

The next two nights, I wasn't quite as lucky. But, I had decided, if I'm gonna trespass and sleep on someone's property, I'll go to a church. They'd be the most likely to help me out if they caught me rather than calling the police, especially since I'm a polite guy, and not aggressive or mean spirited. The first church happened to have a church van out front, that was unlocked. That was kind of lucky. I slept in it and awoke to some people at the church, it wasn't Sunday or Tuesday or Wednesday, so it was quite the surprise to me, but in classic Splinter Cell style, I snuck out, and around back to where my bike was parked and rode away without getting caught.

The next night, there was no van, but they had a play area out back, so I climbed up inside, and spent the night there. It wasn't as comfortable, but it was off the ground and sheltered, and the suite I wore to ride my bike was actually a duck hunting outfit, made to be waterproof, windproof, and insulated. Decked out in thick camo, it was almost as good as a sleeping bag. When I awoke the next morning, there was someone at the church. I had no idea how often people go to church when there is not service. He caught me going to my bike, and invited me inside for coffee. I obliged, it would be a nice start to the day, and we sat in mostly awkward silence. I had only a few years prior lost my faith, and he probably didn't want to ask why I was sleeping on their property for fear of being rude, but it was still a nice gesture that I was hoping for from a church member. I may not believe in the Bible anymore, but I still mostly believe that people who go to church are willing to help someone in need if they can.

I made it out of the state, and finally made it to Colorado, but I was running out of money. I was talking to my brother, Mike, throughout the trip, and he informed me that weed was legal in that state. It was half the reason I wanted to go to California in the first place. So, I set out to find a weed store. I think I ended up in Greenwood first. It wasn't Denver, but the way those areas are, it feels like one giant city and the borders seem arbitrary to me. I found a weed store, and didn't realize it was an expensive one, since the prices were still pretty low compared to what I was used to, but the wait time was huge compared to what I experience later. I proceeded to spend almost all of my money on some edibles and a prerolled cone joint that had a gram of weed in it.

The edibles just put me to sleep. My first experience with edibles were homemade, and they were apparently much different than store bought. I'd never smoked a prerolled joint before, but after the first time, I learned that the fat end is wasted when you try to smoke it. I got into the habit of cutting them in half, saving the fat end for a pipe, and smoking the rest, because it was only about halfway down when it really started hitting like a proper joint.

I stayed in this area for about two weeks, sleeping where I could, and to be honest, shoplifting food. After the two weeks were up, I was tired of the situation. I was losing my conviction to stay, and almost headed back to Louisiana and to familiar territory, preparing myself to beg for change to get gas to go home. But, I changed my mind. The idea of begging was repulsive to me (but not stealing, I think it's about appearances maybe. Nobody saw me steal, but begging requires a large amount of rejection and disgust from the people around you). I looked up a free shelter I could stay at and found one nearby. They're called Jesus Saves. It was the first of two shelters I stayed at, and also the worst, but also the only free one.

They accommodated hundreds every night, and the overflow were bussed to another shelter about an hour away. I was part of the overflow that night, and soon learned that you had to come every night early to get a bed there, and there was a lottery system in place for when someone didn't show up for their bed, you could take their place.

They served breakfast in the morning. There was always a long line and people trying to skip to get seconds. I met a man I like to call my guardian angel on that first morning eating plain oatmeal, no sugar or anything, and a stale half of a bagel, and a bitter salad that they served with every single meal. It was so good after eating mostly blocks of stolen cheese and a jar of peanut butter for two weeks. He sat across from me, an old man, and talked to me very openly and kindly. It's not something I'm used to, but he reminded me in that way of my brother, Jesse, and I'm a polite guy who's willing to talk to most people, I just have trouble starting the conversations.

I call him my guardian angel because he came to me on my first morning after my first night in the shelters, he talked to me in a friendly way, he offered me a tour of the city, which I readily accepted (it tends to take me a while to get used to new situations and learn things, and even then, I'm not too great at it), and he seemed to disappear immediately after. I never saw him again.

So, he showed me around. He showed me the day shelter nearby, where you could get coffee. Let me paint this picture for you. It was a literal circle of people, just rotating around the coffee pots, getting their small styrofoam cup of black coffee, and staying in the circle, drinking it, as they went to get the next cup. That's really what it was. There were long lunch tables. There was a bookshelf full of free books, mostly religious, but I found some good reads on there, and there were outlets if you were lucky enough to find one. I had my laptop, mostly for gaming, and making music, and writing poetry/lyrics. I was homeless, but I wasn't gonna give up the things I loved doing.

He showed me where to find a job. It was outside of Jesus Saves, there were the people who would hire you for day labor putting flyers on doorknobs and the van that would take you to Ready Man to find a job for the day, mostly construction cleanup, or something related to that.

And he showed me around some other areas. He called the whole area he had showed me "The Devil's Triangle," and when I described it to someone else I remember them saying, "Oh, that's the devil's triangle." I think it's the area in Denver with most of the homeless concentration, with three outer points as the barrier. He showed me some other places to get a job, which I never bothered with, showed me a building that was abandoned and spray painted, asked me what I saw, I said "an abandoned building" he said what he saw was a crackhouse, then he showed me a house with an unkempt lawn, asked me what I saw, "I don't know," he said he saw a house he could get paid doing their lawn, or he could steal the two lion statues at the stairs, take a picture of them as they were, put them up for sale online, and when he got an offer, come and take them and sell them.

He also told me about his friend who worked for a weed company, cleaning out the machines that made the concentrates. He's wipe the machines down with paper towels, and keep the paper towels. My guardian angel pulled one out, I smelled it, it smelled like weed, and we smoked it out of my pipe and got high as fuck. He gave me one, and then told me about his business idea of wanted to sell them. I thought it was a dumb idea, but I'm a nice guy, he got me high, and so I told him it was definitely a great idea. He could totally have a truck that drove around the city selling weed soaked paper towels.

I was on my own after that, and had some interesting times. I met an alcoholic man who believed the government was shooting radio waves into his brain to make him unhappy. I also learned that most of the bars in the area are microbreweries which meant they only had their own alcohol, none of the names I knew. I met a man who told me the story of him and his girl smoking meth with a guy, the guy went nuts and started attacking the woman with a hammer, he put the guy in a choke hold and held it until the cops showed up, and the guy was pronounced dead on the scene. He was one of three murders I met.

The first one I met was tall, like my brother Jesse. He walked with a cane after a car had hit him, but I still had to practically jog to keep up with him. He showed me a newspaper place, The Denver Voice, where he worked passing out flyers. I tried it for a couple days, but it felt too much like begging to me, mostly just a bunch of people who didn't want to be bothered by you. Plus, you had to give it away for free, but ask for donations to make your money. The other aspect of the company was much more intriguing to me. I ended up having three of my poems published by them. And made a little money that way. He set a man on fire that was trying to kidnap his young niece. He told me he got sentenced to "arson of a structure" because the man was a pedophile. I can't verify the facts, but that's what he told me. He poured gasoline on him and set him on fire.

The third murderer I met was at the second and only other shelter I stayed at. I remember him clearly because when he didn't have a shirt on, I noticed the swastika tattoo on his chest very clearly. I decided immediately not to look at him or give him any reason to want to approach me. He had already murdered someone, but I didn't know that until his second murder.

The shelter, I don't remember the name, was in the basement of a church. It cost $9 a night to stay there, and I paid weekly. When you first arrived, you had to sleep on a mat on the floor. At this point, I had a sleeping bag and didn't bother with the mat. When a bed became free, they picked someone to get that bed. I remember clearly being drunk the night the man in charge, who was very friendly and fatherly, came to me for my bed. They had caught a man coming in drunk, which was against the rules, and had to kick him out, so I was being given the bed. That's irony, right? The bed was next to the cot the nazi slept in, but I was on the top bunk.

I had been at work at the day labor place, Ready Man, and spent my time afterward in the nearby Burger King. I had made a habit of buying a small drink and chilling on their free wifi for a few hours, one of the many different places I'd go to hang out. Most were restaurants I had to pay to be in, some were libraries. When I went back to the shelter, the people were standing outside in a big crowd and eventually led into the church for a few hours while the cops cleaned up. The nazi had a friend. They had apparently had some kind of quiet disagreement which led the nazi to grab a knife from the kitchen, calmly walk over to his friend, and stab him multiple times around the neck and chest, killing him. He dropped the knife, in a daze, and walked calmly toward the exit, where the attendants stopped him and made him sit and wait for the cops to arrive. I still have my backpack from those times. The man's blood had gotten soaked into one of the straps and the cops cut it in their efforts to clean up.

In between the two shelters, I stayed in a lot of places, mostly construction sites, when I bought my sleeping bag. I had gotten a regular job at Ready Man, by showing up at 4-4:30 AM every day, before they opened to be at the top of the list for jobs, so I could go into work as early as 6AM. It was usually an hour van ride to the place and an hour back, plus the eight hour shift, so it was important to be there early. Plus, if you showed up regularly (five days a week) you could get jobs more easily, or even go back to the same job the next day.

We had a van ride to a job one day, and a truck ride to the job site. We stopped at a gas station and the guy driving and his coworker went inside for breakfast. We three temps stayed in the truck, and chatted. A guy told me about going to this site before, and he went with another temp who showed him a bag full of meth, and asked if he was down, which he was. He said he smoked so much meth that he ended up staying in a porta-potty for six hours. The guy driving us recognized him later on and said, "weren't you that guy who disappeared for six hours?"

Construction cleanup sucks, but it pays better than passing out flyers, especially relative to the time spent. My last day with flyers was a twelve hour day earning $50. That's when I started to realize some things. Some programs that are meant to "help the homeless get back on their feet" are doing quite the opposite. You spend twelve hours of your day working, you've skipped breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the shelters, and you've earned just enough to buy a meal and get your fix. Let's be honest, I was buying weed, many were buying alcohol and meth. In my raggedy camo, I was offered "shards" so many times that I eventually had to get rid of it.

I was in an alley smoking weed when a guy pulled up on me on a bicycle. He asked if I wanted to trade weed for crack. I said no. He pulled out a crack rock from him bottom lip like it was some dip, and offered it. I said no thank you, I only smoke week. He inserted the crack rock back into his lip and rode away.

I remember walking down the street and finding a dime bag of some kind of white powder. I almost left it, but though that I don't want a child to get ahold of it, so I threw it in a nearby trashcan. A block down the road, in the park, I saw a man frantically searching his backpack, throwing things all over the place. I assume that he was looking for that baggy.

So back to the construction sites I stayed at. I remember waking up to power tools. It was so early, I thought nobody would be there, but one man was. He was in the apartments across from the one I was in, and I packed my sleeping bag faster than I ever had in my life. I didn't know they could just slip right in the bag like it did that morning. I gathered my things and climbed out the window opposite the working man, and climbed the fence, wrapped in my blanked, and waited to cross the street. He heard me, but I was off the property when he saw me.

At that same site, later during the building, they had the doors locked on the bottom floors, but not on the balconies. I had been using one of their ladders to climb up, with an extension cord for my laptop, and entering through the second floor. I remember a cop car catching me halfway up. I slumped my shoulders and approached slowly, ready to go to jail, when they told me they were looking for a missing child. I'd say I got off lucky, but what kind of luck is that? They didn't take me in, they said, if I find him in there, just to let them know. I didn't, and I hope they found him.

One day, my brother, Chris, decided to get married. He invited me to the wedding, and I wanted to attend. So, I had a choice to go to Louisiana with a two way ticket back to Denver, or go to Louisiana with a bunch of weed.

I live in Louisiana now. I've moved around and finally found a place where I feel I can live for a long time, and I've been trying to find a way to survive by doing what I love.

I have too many stories to share in detail. I didn't even mention the eclectic church I stared going to on Sundays just to have a warm place to be for a few hours, where I met a man who wrote a book that when I read I just had the burning urge to take a red pen to and give it back, highlighting the grammar errors. It was so bad. I don't think he had an editor. And the woman I met who sang so beautifully, that I bought both her CD's.

Most of what I learned is that I have a much better time with freedom in a life of hardship than I do in a constricted, fear filled life of hardship. I don't have to be afraid to lose my job or home, because I can find more. But, I also don't have kids or a wife, and that's on purpose. A life with no real responsibility is the life I've built for myself on purpose. My heroes are a mix of married and unmarried men, from Poe, Van Gough, and Tesla, to Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass.

I have this feeling of wanting to be great. I have this inspiration that I can achieve my dreams if I keep trying. At the very least, I have stories to tell that other people don't have. I've done things that scare most people. I've lived in the woods, slept in the streets. I've gone days with no money at all. I've been around junkies, not just when I was homeless, but as a child. I've defied the authority figures in my life and gone my own way. My parents dreams for me certainly do not control my life.

I hope you've enjoyed this story. I may come back to it with details I haven't laid out here. There's no moral of this story, it's just my life. I didn't have to be homeless, but I chose to be. I always had a way out, and eventually I took it, and it led to where I am now, typing this story. It wasn't that long ago that I slept in a tent on the streets of Denver in the snow (which I didn't even tell that part), and now I'm writing about it in a home with my dog. Thanks for reading, I hope you've enjoyed a taste of my story.