My Life As a Homeless Man in America
A.D. 2024—The United States
Twenty-seven degrees in a Port-A-Jon, the seat freezing my ass. I’m in the dark with a little flashlight. Chemically treated feces and urine splash up onto my anus. The wind howls, shaking the plastic structure. My hands go numb.
3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach in Westerly, Rhode Island. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless.
“How you doing?” he says.
“Good.”
“Just hanging out?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No.”
“Okay. Just checking. Have a good night.”
In the morning, I awake with back pain. Sleeping in the driver’s seat will be an acquired skill.
Sun-bleached fences wrap the perimeter of the dunes, blown over by the unrelenting winds off the cold Atlantic. I park at the beach most days and have spent all but one night here. Lovely Lady Lily, the sweet and wild angel with fur, is with me. The entire backseat is hers and she is adjusting to the car well, because I’m here and we are close. Her daily routine has improved in some ways. When we lived in the house, she snoozed on the couch, walked in the yard, and got to the beach, her favorite place, a couple times a week. Now she runs on the beach several times a day, hunting the tide line for shellfish. She crunches down crabs and tears the meat out of quahogs. And if there’s a fish? She found a single minnow on a beach two miles long.
My morning routine is taking gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication that also alleviates psychic and neuropathic pain and brightens my perception), lamotrigine (another anti-seizure medicine, but for me it helps my mental energy and cuts through fog, because gabapentin creates fog), fluoxetine (Prozac, an antidepressant), and Adderall (for focus and energy, because after the manic depression struck in 1997, my brain was a flat tire), walking the beach with Lily, getting coffee at the Mobil station up the road, and writing on an HP laptop I got two months ago that has already had one power-input jack fail. It sits on an upside-down acoustic guitar resting on my lap, a 12V/120V converter plugged into the lighter with the car running. I play the guitar first thing every morning, songs I’ve written. The rest of the day, I flip it over and it’s my desk.
When we’re on the beach early, we usually see John. Lily used to jump on his legs, and he didn’t like it. He’s about seventy and has the bearing and haircut of a military person. He walks the beach looking for sea glass.
I’m parked in the public lot across from the beach, sitting in the front passenger seat, working on a novel. An SUV police cruiser pulls in front of me, parks close, at an angle, as if to block me from a would-be escape. This officer is a young blond woman in a bulletproof vest with a pistol strapped to her abdomen. She says, “We received some calls. People are concerned.”
“Yes?”
“They see you out here and are concerned.”
She doesn’t say who these “concerned” people are, but the only ones who can see me are the owners of large beachfront houses. Maybe they’re looking out their $3 million windows and seeing the consequences of their avarice.
“What are your plans for the day?” she says.
She’s trying to get me to move along, but the lot is open to the public from dawn to dusk. I have every right to be here.
“Write,” I say.
“What do you write?”
“Literary fiction. I was a reporter.”
“Anywhere I know?”
“The Boston Globe.”
Her eyes open wide and she tosses her head back in recognition. She realizes I’m not dissolute and not a threat. She asks for my license and calls it in. Dispatch lets her know I have no criminal record or outstanding warrants.
“Do you need anything?” she says.
“Do you know if the homeless shelter will let me take a shower?”
She asks dispatch to call the shelter. Dispatch comes back. She says, “Yes.”
“Good,” I say. “Thanks.”
“You can’t stay here at night,” she says. “You can stay at Walmart, in the back parking lot.”
“Okay.”
She gives me her card. She leaves. I stay. I have every right to be here.
I go to Walmart that night and will sleep there every night. But the police will continue to come as if I’m some kind of one-man crime wave. Before I’m chased out of Westerly, I will meet, stand my ground, and lose ground to a dozen different officers, often at night, banging on my window and waking me just to ask, “Are you all right?” The question begins to sound like a pretense.
The officers are civil, but every encounter causes me apprehension and stress. I’m innocent of any wrongdoing, but the interaction between a citizen and law enforcement is unbalanced by nature. They are part of an apparatus that can take away a person’s freedom. I know it, and they certainly know it. When you’re homeless, you are even more vulnerable. You have no place to go, no kitchen table to sit at while you drink your beer, invisible to them. You’re always on their turf. It’s unnerving.
I rented a beach house in Westerly for a year and a half. It had a chalet roof, high ceilings. Nice. I was most often alone, my then-girlfriend working in New York. Lily and my girlfriend’s dachshund were entertaining company, chasing each other around the house at top speed or snoozing on the couch while I wrote all day—freelance art criticism, newspaper articles, and novels. I ate takeout, mostly.
Early on, I write an email to Westerly police chief Paul Gingerella to introduce myself. I inform him I am a writer and recently became homeless. I tell him I feel his officers are trying to unlawfully disperse me. I ask him to treat me as “who I am and not as what people fear I am.”
He writes back, invites me to come to his office or call to discuss the ordinances his officers are enforcing. I had also mentioned drug deals going down in the Walmart parking lot. When he took office, he stated that a priority was fighting fentanyl.
I don’t call or visit.
A sunny afternoon. I’m in the passenger seat, writing. The 2013 Corolla has been reliable since I bought it in 2019. It holds all that I need for daily life and makes for a decent workplace.
A police officer approaches the car on the driver’s side. Very short, he looks overwhelmed by his bulletproof vest and all that’s attached to it. Cops these days don’t look like they’re here for domestic law-enforcement duties. They’re equipped for martial law.
The cop asks me what I’m doing.
“Writing.”
“We got a complaint.”
“The chief knows I’m here.”
“Who’s that?” he says, a quiz.
“Gingerella.”
His face eases somewhat, but his smirk is fixed.
He’s looking at my hand. I’m rubbing my thumb and forefinger together. The involuntary motion is tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of the bipolar medication.
He says, “Do you have Parkinson’s?”
“No.”
“Do you have any health problems?”
By now I’m guessing they have investigated me enough to know I receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). That’s probably where this question is coming from. As far as I know, the Social Security Administration doesn’t make public one’s ailments. I say no, to avoid the potential discrimination that people with mental-health challenges face, but add that “I do have chronic renal insufficiency,” to satisfy his suspicion that something’s not right.
He doesn’t understand.
“Kidney disease.”
“How do you get your money?”
“Assistance.”
“Call us if you need anything.”
Statistics vary by source, but last year there were a record-high 650,100 homeless people in the United States, many of them suffering mental illness and substance-abuse issues. Of course, most citizens suffering mental illness and substance-abuse issues are not homeless.
One of the primary causes of homelessness, obviously, is a lack of affordable housing. Wages have not kept up with escalating real estate values and rents, especially in major cities.
The number of homeless people has grown significantly over the past couple decades. An advocacy group in New York says that the rate there is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. Across the country, most homeless people are male and almost half of us are white. Rates are much higher among non-white populations, with Pacific Islanders, Indigenous people, and Blacks all experiencing homelessness in disproportionate numbers. Twenty-two out of every ten thousand veterans are homeless.
In 1997, I was a twenty-nine-year-old award-winning art critic and journalist when I was stricken by a violent and disabling onset of manic depression. Bipolar I, rapid-cycling/mixed state, the most severe form of the genetic disorder and often fatal (by suicide). My psychiatrist actually said to me, “You are the worst manic depressive I have ever seen.” Together, we developed a unique cocktail of eight medications that enables me to function and has kept me alive for twenty-seven years.
The condition is a torturous gift, one imparting vision, and manic depressives historically succeed in all fields of human activity, from medicine to art. Theodore Roethke described these blessed sufferers as possessing “nobility of soul.”
The medications that save my life can be blanching. I am often tired. My kidneys are functioning at 30 percent, resulting in malaise and fatigue. It’s difficult to make it through the day without rest. Working in the high-stress, fast-paced world of newspapers was no longer possible. Before the crash, I had a lot of energy, was working on a novel and short stories while reporting for two newspapers and Reuters. (I attended the University of Rhode Island undergrad and Humboldt State University for journalism school.) I acquired the ability to remember every word spoken during an interview. Light hurt my eyes and my hearing became acute. I was jamming with a jazz band and saw the notes as animated apparitions flying before my eyes. Total breakdown struck me overnight. I went to bed feeling good and in the morning was paralyzed in darkness, staring at the white walls. Wallpaper was painful to look at. When I lit a match, it flashed as big as a blowtorch, and I could hear it burning and hissing.
I called my editors at Reuters and The Boston Globe and The Narragansett Times, where I had been the art critic, and told them, at the very least, I needed a break. I haven’t returned.
I tried to work in other settings, but I couldn’t master the computer at a retail job and was fired by a house-painting company for painting too slowly. I worked as a laborer on a vineyard, but I could work only two days a week and the longest I lasted was six hours. On one of those days in the sun, I collapsed to the ground unconscious.
I receive $960 a month from SSDI. I should have $32 a day, but my needs, and a few wants, are debiting my account. Gas is costing $10 to $15 a day, food is $5 to $8 a day, coffee $7, beer $9, ice $45 a month, nicotine patches $86 a month, and jugs of spring water $80 a month. Other incidentals like toilet paper add up. Living as minimally as I know how, I’m not making it. I’m losing weight I don’t have to lose. I quit smoking and went on the patch to save money. Alcohol is the buffer a sensitive soul needs to withstand the crimes of a race—the human race—that has proved itself ungrateful and homicidal.
The toughest parts of homelessness have been surviving the poverty and the marginalization, discrimination, and hostility from the non-homeless population. It’s usually subtle, this hostility. People pull in to visit the lighthouse or the beach or wherever I am, see me, and immediately park somewhere else. All day long.
They are so afraid. I know I look disheveled, but I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with me intellectually or spiritually. I know I could look better, but I just don’t see what the big deal is.
I live on Jif-and-Smucker’s-strawberry-jam sandwiches. At first, I ate bologna-and-cheese sandwiches, but the ice in the cooler melts within a day, and the bologna floated around in the water, turning pale and slippery.
I keep the food in the trunk, with my clothes. I make the sandwiches there, on top of a suitcase. I spread the peanut butter on sliced Italian bread thickly, thicker than frosting on a cake. I use so much jam, some falls out. I make it a meal.
In the Westerly town-beach lot, late afternoon, the air is getting cold. I’m standing at the trunk, bread on the suitcase, a jar of peanut butter in my hand, when a red SUV pulls in beside me. A woman climbs out, in her forties, long black hair. She sees me with the peanut butter. Most people look worried and afraid when they see me eating out of my trunk.
“Do you want the other half of my meatball sub?” she says. “Nothing beats PB&J, but you might want something different. I just went out with a friend. It’s still hot.”
I’m surprised by her kindness. “Yes,” I say.
She retrieves a carton from the car.
“Thank you,” I say.
She walks for the beach. Does she know I’m homeless? Maybe she’s seen me here before. She will be the only person in six months to offer help.
I sit in the driver’s seat and eat. I chew carefully. Four teeth hurt too much to chew solid food. The sub comes with potato chips. I try to eat them but can’t take the pain. I’ve lost nearly half my teeth since I became disabled twenty-seven years ago. I can’t afford dental care. When a problem has arisen, such as when I needed a root canal, I’ve had the tooth pulled at a clinic that charges patients on a sliding scale. One of my essential medications, gabapentin, has been linked to tooth loss.
Shortly before I became homeless—a period of mounting worry in which my appearance suffered—a tooth on the upper right began to hurt. It was excruciating to touch with a toothbrush. Then an agonizing pain developed in my lower-left jaw. The jaw swelled. Two teeth toward the front began to ache. I couldn’t eat anything. I couldn’t touch the teeth. I developed a fever. I shook, lost control of my body. I made an emergency appointment at the clinic. I resigned myself to the idea I would lose the two teeth. An assistant took X-rays of the two lower-left teeth, the most painful place, where my jaw was swollen. At my request, she X-rayed the tooth on the upper right.
The dentist came in and sat behind me. He said nothing. I couldn’t see him. Was he going to examine me?
He finally wheeled over on his chair. He was holding the familiar sharp, metal hook. He didn’t ask what the problem was. I told him about the two teeth on the lower left. He said nothing. He didn’t make eye contact. He approached with the tool. I opened my mouth. He looked, touched one lower-left tooth very quickly and lightly. He didn’t test for a cavity. He didn’t check any other teeth.
“You have tartar buildup, but I don’t see anything,” he said.
“The pain is severe,” I said.
“I don’t know why.”
He wheeled away and turned, his back to me again, and looked at a computer. He said, “The X-ray doesn’t show anything.”
“No cavities?” I said.
“No cavities. No abscess. Look.”
I turned to see. The X-ray showed one white tooth in an ocean of black. It was an upper tooth. He barely touched it, withdrew the metal hook, and didn’t say anything. I was too deranged by excruciating pain to ask him to do more before he began to conclude the examination.
Finally, I said, “Do you see the swelling on my face?”
“No,” he said.
I raised my voice and said, “You don’t?”
“Maybe a little.”
My left jaw was twice the size of my right.
I realized the problem: He believed I was drug-seeking. He must have seen this all the time. He made his judgment immediately. He wanted the vagabond out of there. I got a cursory examination and denial of suffering. He was not going to offer pain medication.
I said, “I was a newspaper reporter. The reason I’m poor is I was stricken by severe manic depression. My teeth are bad because I can’t afford dental.”
He turned to his computer. He typed and looked for a while. Clicked the mouse. What was he doing? It occurred to me that he may have been Googling me. Was I telling the truth? Was I a reporter? He was on the computer for two minutes, reading in silence.
He wheeled his stool back to my side and looked me in the eye. Now respectful, he said, “I don’t see anything, but I can give you antibiotics.”
I picked up the antibiotics at CVS. He also prescribed ibuprofen. The pain overwhelmed consciousness. I saw dancing white lights. The maximum daily dose of ibuprofen didn’t alleviate the pain. I alternated it with the maximum daily dose of Tylenol. I could tolerate the pain for the first two hours after each dose. Then it surged. I couldn’t sleep through the night.
By the third day of antibiotics, my chin had ballooned. I pressed it. It was hard. A stream of pus shot out horizontally and hit the rearview mirror. My jaw was infected. Soon after, I saw my internist and shared the story of my dental experience. He said it was an abscess.
My jaw recovered, but the two lower teeth remain too sensitive to chew on. I have not been brushing my teeth out here. I could brush some of them, but it’s difficult to avoid the ones that hurt. I rinse my mouth with antiseptic mouthwash several times a day and before going to sleep.
Three months later, I awake in the car to a sudden pain in the tooth farthest back on the upper left. I look in the mirror. It’s split in half. The pain is severe. The inside half is loose. I can’t chew on the left side. I now have three upper teeth and two lower teeth I can’t chew on.
Eating is torture.
The American flag flies over Walmart. When I was young, I was proud of and found comfort in the flag. I felt fortunate to have been born in the United States of America, where every life mattered. I still believe this.
Many men and women fought and died for what the flag represents, freedom and democracy. My father was rocketed and shot at in Southeast Asia and came home a bomb waiting to explode. His nervous system was shattered. He could go from laughing to rage instantaneously. He wasn’t like this before the war.
As the police instructed, I sleep in the car in the Walmart parking lot. I park where they said to, in back of the building near where people pick up orders and the semis come in to unload. Inside I shop for food, including the occasional tuna fish and deli chicken for Lily, and nicotine patches. I use the restroom.
I begin parking at Walmart in November. The masses flood the lot to shop for the holidays. People drive fast in the lot, as aggressively as they do on the roads, whipping in and out of empty spaces while pedestrians walk in the low fluorescent glow. They make me nervous. People are economically squeezed, the stress of everyday survival and the fear of uncertain futures turning into hostility. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and many have no emergency savings—they are one crisis from homelessness. A job loss or an unexpected illness and they are where I am. They are on edge, driving bigger and faster and louder cars—a society speeding along as it disintegrates.
The store plays bland, agitating covers of classic Christmas songs, which are piped out to the parking lot.
It snows, a light covering, and turns cold, in the low 20s. The ground freezes solid.
I recline the driver’s seat every night and sleep on my back under a fleece blanket. I have a pillow. I begin to awaken cold and shivering, coughing. I start the car and turn on the heat. As the season progresses, I have to run the car every night and even during the day at the beach. Gas consumption surpasses what I budgeted for.
My girlfriend, Lane, gives me everything she can, sharing in the struggle.
She is the front-desk supervisor at a four-star boutique hotel by the beach in Narragansett. A night there can cost hundreds of dollars, even $1,000 with all the add-ons. She lives with her parents. She can’t afford a place of her own. Her monthly earnings are equal to the rent on a one-bedroom apartment. She is forty-nine and has been in the service industry for thirty years. Her hotel is highly ranked by some of the travel magazines and she regularly receives notes of appreciation from guests. She earns five dollars above minimum wage, the same as the dishwashers in the hotel’s failing restaurant.
I became homeless on October 16, 2023.
My devotion to literary work combined with the disabling manic depression sent me to the periphery for much of the past two decades—twenty rooms in eighteen cities coast to coast, banging out novels on a 1939 Smith Corona and fighting off insane rabble, wallowing in a stupidity they were unaware of.
I managed to avoid the street for twenty-six years after my diagnosis. The idea of homelessness was terrifying. When I faced it in 2019, I thought of which warm states I could go to and live in my car, and I had visions of which bridge I would jump off. I saw myself at the railing, looking down at the water, climbing over. Homelessness looked worse than death.
Then? A miracle. I met a wealthy entrepreneur while working on his vineyard and he liked my writing and he helped me. He said he would help me find a literary agent. I bought the Toyota and I could rent an apartment. I adopted Lily. She is my first dog. We have been together every moment since Lane and I signed the papers three and a half years ago. Lily was found tied to a fence in the August Texas heat, skeletal, with mange, flies buzzing her. Since then, she has gained twenty-eight pounds and become a most engaging, agile, and sensitive creature.
In 2023 the man ended his support “for financial reasons.” He didn’t help me find an agent.
We walk on the beach, Lily trotting ahead, nose down, looking for seafood. She chases seagulls, breaks into a sprint. The birds are wary, see how fast she is, and take flight. Running at speed, she once caught a seagull as it was taking off. She let it go but broke its wing.
Lily and I wrestle daily. She leaps in the air, going after my arm. I let her seize it in her sharp teeth and push her away with enough force to throw her off balance. She charges back, leaps for my arm. I withdraw it and she misses and falls back to the ground. She jumps in the air and grabs it. She restrains herself and doesn’t hurt me too much but has torn the sleeves of two leather jackets and a hoodie, and drawn blood. She’s smiling and I’m laughing as we battle ourselves breathless.
I drive over to the Warm Center, a shelter in Westerly. Inside, it is dark. A few resident men sit in chairs in the small front room watching TV. I ask about the shower and one tells me it’s in back. I walk through the room where they sleep. About a dozen scattered mattresses without headboards fill the small, dark room, close to each other. The beds are unmade. These people have no light and no privacy. An obese man in a wheelchair says hello. I say hi.
In the bathroom, one shower of two is functioning. A man comes into the bathroom. He seems determined about something, yet is sheepish. He doesn’t use the bathroom. He stands, glancing at me as I undress.
I shower. I stand under water as hot as I can tolerate. Heat hits my body, nirvana. Water has never been so comforting. I emerge calm, but energized.
I dry off with the towel I brought and change into clean clothes, which I typically either take to a laundromat or Lane washes at her parents’ house. Passing through the sleeping room, a man sitting on a bed says, “Believe me, I will fuck you up.” I walk out barefoot into the cold and put my dirty clothes in a plastic bag in the trunk. I find socks.
“Can you give me a ride?” a man says from across the street.
“No.”
I first called the Warm Center a few days before I became homeless. My goal was financial assistance to help pay for food and gas. The first woman I talked to referred me to another woman. I talked to her briefly and she said she couldn’t help me until I talked to an intake coordinator. I called him and asked about the assistance for food and gas. He didn’t reply to that request but mentioned the seasonal shelter. He said he couldn’t get me in until I talked to the state. I called the state’s central intake—they put homeless people into a database. The man, who said he was pessimistic, suggested a shelter in the city. I declined.
I called back the coordinator at the Warm Center.
“I can probably get you into the seasonal shelter,” he said.
“I have a dog,” I said.
“Male or female?”
“Female.”
“How old is she?”
“Three and a half. She’s sweet and loves people.”
“That won’t be a problem. I’ll call you when the seasonal shelter opens.”
“My cheap phone has never allowed me access to my voicemail.”
“Can you receive texts?”
“I won’t see them. You can email me.”
He said skeptically, “You’re living in your vehicle?”
“Yes.”
He never emailed me and, to my knowledge, didn’t call.
That is okay.
The despair in the shelter is contagious, and it wouldn’t be ideal for Lily. In the car, we have autonomy and privacy. In the car, no one is gawking at my junk or wanting to fuck me up.
We sleep in the Walmart parking lot for two months. During this time, police intervene half a dozen times, always in the middle of the night, when I’m asleep.
They bang on the driver’s-side window, awakening us, and shine bright lights in my face, just to ask, “Are you okay?”
I was okay before you woke me up.
The police are the ones who told me to go the Walmart parking lot. I park where they instructed. They know I’m here and see me in the same spot every day and night. Chief Gingerella knows who I am, that I have no criminal record, am a professional and productively engaged, am not a threat and keep to myself. When I’m asleep, I’m not visible, and my car is parked among other cars. They know which car is mine and come, and come, and come, systematically robbing me of peace and a sense of well-being.
In the early-morning hours on Christmas, I am jarred out of sleep by banging on glass. I sit up and lower the window. A police officer beams a light in my face and into the car. He is a young blond in a watch cap and a ski mask. The air is bitter cold and I see his breath as he says someone called the police. He implies the caller feared I had committed suicide. The alleged caller saw the car running, and it is Christmas, which I know is a popular day to kill yourself. I assure him I want to stay alive.
“The car is running so I can stay warm,” I say.
He says, “Okay.”
Then he says, “Can I have your phone number? I always ask. I’m not going to use it or anything.”
Half asleep and dazed, I give him my number. In the morning, I think about it. Why did he ask for my phone number? I didn’t have to give it to him. There is only one reason I can think of that he would want my phone number, which is so that the police could install some kind of stalkerware on my phone, to track me.
I look again at the flag above Walmart, a store packed with imported goods that has made its owners among the richest people on earth. People squeezed from both ends come to Walmart, where prices are lower. Their money goes into the pockets of the Waltons. But the more the Waltons take, the less people will have to spend until, eventually, they have nothing at all.
Late morning, parked in my spot, I am writing. A man and woman approach the car on the driver’s side. They look in at me, don’t come too close. They wear blue uniforms with badges sewn onto their chests. I roll down the window. They look afraid.
Walmart security.
“You have to move,” the man says. “We’ve let you stay here for a while.”
“The police told me I could be here,” I say.
“The police don’t own this property. I do.”
I give him a look.
“Okay, Walmart does,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “Do you know of any other places?”
“You can try the old Benny’s parking lot. Nobody’s there.”
The police chased me out of the beach parking lot. Now Walmart. I’m running out of places to sleep, and to be.
The definition of homeless is we have no home, no place to go. If “I think, therefore I am” is true, we are people who are. We are, and we stand on this ground. If you deny us ground, you are denying us our “I am.” Isn’t that negation of our existence? We are here and we are you and we are yours.
Many of you could be where we are—on the street—but for some simple and not uncommon twist of fate. This is part of your rejection, this fear that it could be you. You deny that reality because it is too horrific to contemplate, therefore you must deny us. And the moneyed reject us because they know they create us, that we are a consequence of their impulse to accumulate more than they need, rooted in a fear of life and the death that comes with it. Nothing good comes of fear, only destruction, and America has become a society of fear, much of that fear cultivated to divide and control.
A few months into homelessness, my feet begin hurting and the bottoms and sides turn red. It’s a deep pain and I don’t know what it is, but it hurts too much to walk normally. Maybe it’s circulation. The pain awakens me in the morning. I buy Neosporin and coat the affected areas every night. Neosporin cures a lot of things! After a week, the redness and pain subside. I stop the Neosporin. A month later, the pain returns. I’ll have to see my internist, who I already owe for unpaid co-pays. I also owe money to the psychiatrist who saved my life and I receive letters at Lane’s parents’ house, where I get my mail, from his office manager. I’ve known my doctor since 1997. If I lose him, I will be in a bad spot, because he is the only one who understands how my unorthodox medication regimen works.
I move on.
I drive eighteen miles north on Route 1 to South Kingstown. This part of the state is where I grew up and went to college. My parents moved us here from New York City in 1968. It’s pricey now and I struggled to be here when I was supported, but it’s home.
My childhood must have looked normal from the outside. I grew up on an island off Newport, a nice place to grow up. Ocean, beach, fishing, woods. Good for an adventurous kid. My mother was a nurse and my father was an engineer and an inventor. He could be abusive. He was abused by his mother when he was a child. I think he resented how my sister and I changed his life, and while he was mechanically brilliant—one of his inventions was advertised during the Super Bowl—he only had empathy for frogs and lizards.
My parents never gave us money, not even when we were kids. The unspoken rule was “Don’t ask.” I began cutting lawns and working on boats very young. Today my mother, and my sister and her family, live in northern Rhode Island. My sister drives a Lexus SUV and owns a house, but she has her own set of challenges. She and I have just begun to see each other for the occasional lunch after years of distance. I don’t want to ask her for anything.
The first night in South Kingstown, we sleep in the town-beach parking lot. It’s an isolated area of Matunuck, a quiet hamlet on the sea. The gravel lot is enveloped in tall hedges and trees. There are no houses in sight, and in all the years I have come here, I have never seen police in the lot.
It is very dark.
Nobody else is here and the night passes calmly. In the morning, Lily and I spend time on the beach. The day is uneventful, a relief.
That night, I park in the same lot, but farther in, out of sight of anyone who might pull in.
9:00 p.m. I’m writing when a bright light shines from behind and on the left side of my car. I turn and see the searchlight on a police cruiser. An officer walks toward my car. Closing in, he puts his hand on his gun.
I roll down the window. He looks in.
“You can’t be here,” he says.
“Okay,” I say. “I will leave.”
“Can I have your phone number?” he says.
“No.”
“It’s just in case if we need to call you.”
“Why would you need to call me? I know it’s legal for you to install tracker software.”
“Okay.”
A second officer appears, leaning toward the window. He’s big and has a shaved head.
He says, “We can cite you for parking here at night. The ordinance allows parking dawn to dusk. You’ll have to go to court and pay a fine. Or you can give us your phone number. That’s a small price to pay, a fair trade.”
When I was a kid, police officers were our friends. When I was a reporter, they were men who surfed and played in bands when they were younger. They were not out to ruin your day, or your life. They enforced the law with a sound sense of context.
We have never seen police in this lot. Many people stay after dark, in no hurry to leave. Two weeks ago, I was here until 2:00 a.m. talking to Lane. Common sense and courtesy says that if police found people parking after dark, they would simply ask them to leave.
I look at the cop with the shaved head. He actually believes he’s right. How do people get this far apart? We are arguably of the same class and live in the same town. He has no idea my empathy is with him.
I believe they will cite me. I can’t afford to go to court and pay a fine. I give them my phone number.
How did they know I was here?
Lane sometimes gets us a room for a night or two at a chain hotel on Route 1. The last time we did this, I arrived first with Lily on a leash. The looks on the faces of the women behind the desk reminded me I was rough around the edges. I needed a shave and shower. My hair was disheveled. I had been wearing the same clothes for days, living in a car. Every day, dirt and sweat made my clothes baggier. I was wearing a blue hoodie that needed to be washed.
A few nights later, I sleep at the park-and-ride on the highway. At night, coyotes howl in the nearby woods. Semis roar past. Raccoons emerge from the darkness to rifle through the garbage. Lily growls. In the morning, I go to the Mobil across the highway, get coffee, and use the restroom. Finding bathrooms is a never-ending quest.
The park-and-ride can be a despairing place. It sits next to a stoplight, and cars accelerate at unnecessary rates when the light turns green, blasting aggression out dual exhaust pipes. I witnessed an opiate overdose, a man sprawled on his back unresponsive who was saved by two doses of Narcan. The ground is littered with trash, beer cans and cups, discarded food, and full garbage bags that have been dumped. It pains me to walk a dignified dog here.
The woods adjacent to the park-and-ride are nice. There are paths back there that Lily likes to walk, sniffing out the rabbits and deer, raccoons and coyotes. Sometimes she tracks down a rabbit and it bolts. Once I went back there to relieve myself and was startled by a flock of turkeys that I surprised. They yelled at me and stood their ground, a giant tom staring with his beautiful tail feathers fanned open.
In the morning, the panhandlers arrive in a green dual-cab pickup. It has a Connecticut license plate. They work during the day, standing on a median, showing cardboard signs to drivers stopped at the traffic light on the road that connects to the highway.
“Homeless. Anything helps. Thank you.”
Their clothes are worn and dirty, and so are their faces. They do not smile. Their speech is profane. They walk between stopped cars staring at people with menacing eyes, as if they’re trying to scare them out of their money. They must have some success, because they always come back.
Sometimes they spend the night and sleep sitting upright in their truck, which runs poorly and is loud. The driver is the leader of the operation. He’s an older man with long blondish-white hair who never looks anyone in the eye. He never panhandles. He rarely gets out of the truck. They defer to him. Lane and I joke that they are the panhandler mafia.
One morning, I’m at the park-and-ride and writing. The sun is bright and it’s a warm day for February. I hang my black rain jacket in the window to block the sun from shining on the computer screen. I hear a loud voice outside the window. I turn and see a cop.
“Roll down the window,” he says authoritatively and impatiently. He’s a muscular guy.
I throw a hat over the beer by my side. I roll down the window.
“What are you doing?” he says.
“Writing a novel.”
He’s thrown.
I say, “My name is Patrick Fealey. I’ve lived here fifty years. I was a reporter for The Narragansett Times. I am homeless.”
“You’re staying here?”
“Yes.”
“It’s my job to know who’s here and what’s going on. Can I have your license?”
I give it to him. I wait, hoping he won’t tell me to leave. This spot has been all right and I don’t know where I’d go.
The cop returns with another cop. He hands me my license.
“Are you on assistance?” says the second cop, a young balding blond with a pleasant face.
“I just applied for Medicaid.”
“Have you tried the Welcome House?”
“I take showers there.”
“Have you tried Tri-County?”
“No. What is it?”
“They can help you with food and other things.”
These officers are trying to help. They don’t tell me to leave.
I call Tri-County to ask what assistance is available for the homeless. After navigating its extensive employee roster, I am able to leave a voicemail message. A woman calls back and says she can’t help, but will give my name to a woman who can. She calls soon after, speaks to me in an indifferent, lecturing voice. She rattles off the programs I don’t qualify for because I don’t have a dwelling before finally saying I can get food at its pantry. She mentions canned goods and other foods I can’t prepare. That’s it. I don’t go because driving there would use more gas than it’s worth.
It’s becoming clear how little help there is for the homeless. Here’s how things look from my car: Assistance doesn’t reach low enough. The social-services net is wide and catches many, but not the person living on the street. I asked the Warm Center, which specifically addresses homelessness, for ten dollars a day to help pay for the gasoline that keeps us alive and they responded with a hard silence.
We are all alone out here.
Back at the park-and-ride in South Kingstown. One night, a panhandler climbs out of the back of the truck. He zips up his fly. A woman comes out behind him. A prostitute? In the morning, she hangs around for a while.
She returns three days later.
She’s a faded beauty. Some wrinkles, a distraught expression, a great body in blue jeans. I recognize her. From where? When? I think about her. About noon, it comes to me. She lived across the hall from me in a Newport boarding house in the early 2000s. She was intelligent and soft-spoken, kept to herself, was a good neighbor until she met a woman. The two embarked on a romantic relationship. The woman moved in. Taller and weightier, the woman was an extrovert who tried to assert dominance in conversation.
They fought. Bad fights. One night, I heard a body slammed into the wall. Screaming, running, the body slammed into the wall again. I opened my door. There was blood on the floor outside their door. The fight went on. One was beating the hell out of the other. I called police. The police arrived and broke it up. They were evicted.
Years later, I was at a soup kitchen when a woman accosted me. It was the bigger woman.
Now my old neighbor is in this park-and-ride with the panhandlers. How did she hook up with them? Where does she live? Does she recognize me? But she is not the same. She sits in the truck all day, nodding. When she comes out, her head is down and she moves slowly. She has a habit.
It’s Monday, February 19. I have $20 to make it to the end of the month. It’s a leap year, too. An oil change, paid for in cash, wiped me out. Lane said she can help on Thursday, when she gets paid.
The minimum I need for a day is $20. I pay for coffee and food with my supplemental nutrition card—food stamps. I receive $160 a month. It was more when I wasn’t homeless and was paying rent. Lily has plenty of Blue chicken-and-rice dog food and we have a gallon of spring water. I have enough peanut butter and jam. But gas and beer are everyday expenses. I’ve needed to run the engine for heat. The $20 will go toward gas. But the gas will not last until Thursday. I will run the car as little as possible. I will go to sleep without heat, under the blanket. We will not be driving anywhere. No beach for the next two days. I will go without beer. I will withdraw, experience agitation and depression, sweat and shake.
Time for a PB&J.
I finally meet with the housing coordinator at the Warm Center. She is an older woman, her long gray hair braided on one side. She speaks softly and slowly but is alert and present. She signs me up with a state program for emergency housing. Receiving this help depends upon the availability of housing vouchers, and at the moment there are none. I heard there were no hotel vouchers for the entire winter when I called the state a couple months earlier. There are more than two thousand homeless people in this small state, a number that has more than doubled since 2020.
She and I discuss the affordable housing I will be applying for. She asks what areas of the state interest me. I mention towns, all in southern Rhode Island. She asks if I’m willing to live in Providence. She advises I apply to as many places as possible throughout the state to enhance my chances. I don’t tell her I will not do this, will not live in an urban setting, will not walk down some streets. I’ve been attacked on the street, and I am wary. It’s a visceral response, a survival mechanism, not an idea. I never felt it before. Also, Lily and I have a life here in southern Rhode Island and the beach is integral to it.
She gives me a booklet listing the housing by city and town, with phone numbers. My job is to call and request applications. She tells me I will be waiting years, though I might be able to get into one place in Westerly in just over a year. She says the Warm Center “might” be able to help me with the first month’s rent and deposit, which would be $640.
I say, “If there is any financial assistance available for food and gas through Warm Center, I’m in a tough spot and could use the help.”
She doesn’t look up and says nothing.
There is not.
I leave the Warm Center with little more than the booklet listing the housing, something I could have gotten from the state. I’ll be calling the housing places, asking for applications, filling them out, mailing them back, and waiting years to hear back.
And can I truly afford to live in affordable housing? Based on my past experience, rent is about one third of your income. My SSDI is $960. Paying $320 a month in rent, I would be left with $640 to live on. I would have to get a job, maybe at a gas station, a job I might be able to handle. Out of every $100 I made at this job, the housing authority might take $33. If I’m paid minimum wage, $14 an hour, I might only keep about $9. To make up for the original $320 subtracted from my $960, I’d have to work about thirty-six hours. Nine hours a week doesn’t sound like much, but I know that I would struggle to perform the job well enough to retain employment. And then I’d have no more money than I have now, and I’m not making it. I’d have to work more hours for what amounts to $9 an hour. But I can’t work many more hours without jeopardizing my SSDI. How many other people are in this position, too ill and poor to afford affordable housing?
And too poor to be homeless?
It’s May 8 and pouring rain at the park-and-ride. I’m writing and the raincoat I put in the window to block the sun earlier is soaked and dripping into the car, onto my arm and mouse pad.
I’m hit by a lower-bowel emergency.
I grab the toilet paper and hurry into the woods where the turkeys and coyotes live. I find a spot under an overhanging shrub, as out of the rain as I can get, pull down my corduroys, and go. Squatting, waiting, the primitivism comes over me with the rain. I’m saturated by the absurdity of this twenty-first-century moment.
What comes to mind?
Luciano Pavarotti.
Foxwoods, 1994. At the sublime power of his performance, my eyes welled with tears of joy. God makes his presence known in some men, and I was in wonder at the mystery of him. I saw and heard him sing from twenty feet away. The more I studied him in those moments and the more I read about him, I sensed something troubled him, that he lived in conflict between the public image his handlers chose, the happy family man who enjoyed pasta, and who he truly was. He was caught in a commercial whitewash that didn’t allow for the man. I wrote this. The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera sent the piece I wrote for the Southern Rhode Island Newspapers to Pavarotti himself, who wrote to me to say, “Great job” in Italian.
In the woods I think of the red velvet and gold in the Met in New York when I later attended Puccini’s Turandot and witnessed its moving aria “Nessun Dorma.”
I never sleep. But I am not alone.
Lane has a gallery opening in Newport tomorrow night. The Spring Bull Gallery is well established yet open to the avant-garde and exhibits many styles. This exhibition is abstract art.
Lane will cut my hair at the beach. I will shower and shave at the Welcome House and put on my best clothes, beige corduroys and a white button-down dress shirt. Lane left the hotel job. It was making her sick and she was getting nowhere financially. She has no resources at the moment, but has taken a leap of faith, has the courage to do what she was born to do. I believe in her and her work, an advancement on the abstract expressionists, employing their spontaneous subconscious methods but often fulfilling Pablo Picasso’s insistence that a painting include an image we recognize from life, however deformed or abstracted.
And here is the weird dichotomy in our lives: A few nights after the triumphant opening, Lane downloads the DoorDash app and we set out to make some money. We work from 6:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., through dinnertime. We receive no cash tips. Everyone makes their tip on the app when they place their order. They don’t have to face us. Tips are one dollar to two dollars. Three fourths of the people ask for their food to be left by the front door. We make twenty-seven dollars. DoorDash made billions in the first six months of this year.
Our last drop is at a house near the beach. Some college kids are having a party. Their cars in the driveway are new, nice, and expensive—a Jeep, an Audi, reflecting how college tuitions have risen beyond the means of those like myself at that age. Lane is carrying an order to the door; a kid comes out and dismissively grabs the bag of Mexican food from her. It is a trigger for me. Darkness moves in. Lane and I are more than twice his age, have lived accomplished lives, and to an inexperienced kid whose parents are buying that food, we are invisible.
In the morning, I have a message from my sister. I had asked her if I could borrow money to fix the car. I wasn’t optimistic. She said money was tight, but she would see what she could do and she would ask my mother for help.
Suicidal ideations break through. I see myself on the bridge. I’m afraid. Sometimes suicide looks like the best idea. But this time, it’s not good. It’s no inspiring cure but a pathetic out. My senses are acute. I recoil at the sounds of drivers flooring the gas at the light. The aggression translated through machines kicks me into a tailspin. What the hell is wrong with these people? They’re cornered and desperate. They may not be conscious of it, but they feel it. I take extra Depakote, a mood stabilizer that will hit my brain like a sun-shower, and lie motionless in the dark. Will misdirected anger ever stop? They take it out on themselves, on each other, when the problem is the predators and the politicians who enabled them to suck most of the wealth out of the common economy.
Later that night, Lane comes to the park-and-ride after work. I rarely go to her house. Her father and I don’t get along.
Lane is exhausted.
I’m in Mobil when I see a page-one story on the homeless in The Providence Journal.
I pick it up and read.
A small group of homeless people have been living in tents on vacant public property. Residents in the nearby neighborhood have been complaining. They must be “concerned.” The article says that the mayor’s policy is to “break up every encampment that forms.” One of the homeless interviewed said she doesn’t know where she will go.
I awake in the dark. Check the clock. 3:18 a.m.
A car drives up on the road adjacent to the park-and-ride lot. A man gets out the passenger side. A hitchhiker? He isn’t a commuter or student. He stands on the grass between the road and the lot, the lights on the highway silhouetting a man with a shaved head holding a small bag dangling by a cord. The bag is cinched at the top and just big enough to hold a pair of pants and a shirt.
I think, Vagabond. A transient on the move.
I find my cigarettes and light one. I look out the window and the man is gone. Maybe he has walked up the road and is concealed by the trees in the middle of the lot.
I have to take a leak. I get out of the car, walk around the front, and head for the woods. I usually piss somewhere in the lot, like a lot of people, but the last time I did, at 2:00 a.m., an unmarked police SUV blasted into the lot and did a hard brake beside me just after I put my gear in my pants.
I am just about to the woods when Lily lets out a loud bark like I’ve never heard: “Woof-YEHHP!!” I am a little annoyed at what I think is her separation anxiety, so I turn and say, “Lily!” And coming straight at me, ten feet away, is the man with the shaved head. He has been behind me, silently walking toward me at a pace faster than I am walking. That chill people talk about, when the hair on the back of your neck stands up—it is real for me in that moment.
He sees me see him.
I cut for the car. He passes close on my right, agile and strong looking, and says, “Hey,” like it was just another sunny day in the city.
I say, “Hi,” like all is well. He is white, about thirty, five-foot-eight, wearing jeans, neat and clean.
I look back to see him turn right toward the watchtower.
I get in the car and lock the doors. “Good girl,” I tell Lily. “Good girl.”
The significance of what has just happened reveals itself. No one walks that close to someone in a large area and in the dark without making a sound. And how did he get so close so fast? He was not present when I got out of my car. If he was behind the trees, he had to hustle to get that close. A chilling realization: He was not holding the bag as he had been, hanging down by the cord. He was holding it at his midriff, the free cord in his hand. He was going to strangle me from behind with the cord. He didn’t want a fight. He wanted to get rid of me in a sneak attack and take my stuff.
A dog left to die in a vacant lot a thousand miles from here, the companion who’s been by my side for four years, has just saved my life.
You Might Also Like
