She Spat On Me

On Being Homeless and the "problem" of unhoused people

Sep 03, 2024

This is the first part of a series on homelessness, to be published every other Monday for the next eight weeks. This one is free for everyone; the next three will be paywalled. Thank you so much for reading.

I ran away for the first time when I was twelve.

I was in sixth grade— my mom had just moved us into a pool house in a wealthy Seattle suburb, one move in a series of many, many moves throughout my childhood. She couldn’t afford apartments anymore.

On paper we weren’t poor. She had worked her way up from high-school dropout to secretary to project manager. In the late 80s and early 90s she made about 35k a year. That was a decent salary back then. But she spent it all on nice clothes for herself. On makeup and perfumes and alcohol. We got our food from the food bank. We drank powdered milk. We moved so often that I can’t recall all of the schools I attended. My childhood memories have taken on the quality of scenery rushing by, as if viewed from a fast-moving train.

But this memory is crystal:

I was skipping school.

We’d moved in the middle of the school year— not unusual. In an instant I went from a sixth grader at an elementary school to a sixth grader at a middle school. By then I had stopped trying to make friends; I’d surrounded myself with a fortress, practicing my scowl in the mirror so no one would speak to me. I rarely smiled. There wasn’t much to be happy about.

My mom came home.

After leaving work early she had swung by my school (for the house key, which I always kept) only to discover my absence. I’d been forging my her signature for months.

Her car pulled into the carport and I cowered behind the small partition that separated my “bedroom” from the rest of the tiny space. There was her bang on the door; her rage-voice, always deep and booming, OPEN THE DOOR. I darted out from behind the partition, unlocked the door, and darted back, as if I’d released a wild animal into the house.

If her rage got its hands on me, I might not survive.

I stuffed clothes into my school bag and yelled, “I’m running away!”, hoping this would calm her down. When I emerged she was red-faced and breathless, her lips like a flat white scar; hands fisted.

“Fine,” she said. “Run away. I don’t want you here.”

She plunged her hand into her purse and opened her wallet, extracting some cash and tossing it in the air. “Good luck!” she said.

I lunged to grab the cash, waiting for a blow to land on my back; my head. None did.

That was the first time I ran away.

I had thirteen dollars.

I’ve told that story before.

Have I told you about the woman who spat on me?

I was sixteen. God, this is such a long and complicated story— how I finally left home for good and ended up sleeping under bridges and in awnings and on the shoulders of highways. For the sake of expediency, let’s say my mom got married a year after that first time I ran away. Let’s say her husband was an alcoholic. Abusive. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They were a good match. Let’s say I ran away again and again, because running away was the only thing I could do that made my mother love me enough to stop abusing me, even if only for a week or two.

I was sixteen when I climbed out of my bedroom window— a different bedroom in a different house. Our lives had transformed after the marriage: her husband came from money. that’s when I learned that rich people aren’t any better than poor people. Sometime they’re worse.

I climbed out of the window for the hundredth time, but I was leaving for what I hoped would be the final time.

My mom and stepdad had taken my bedroom door off its hinges. Called the cops on me when I hit them back. Read my journals and made fun of me for what I wrote. Called me names no one should ever call another person.

It was autumn, and I was supposed to go back to school, except school was hell. A literal hell. I had spent the summer living in a hippie house and in the woods and sleeping on couches and in the park.

What was I running away from?

I was running away from the person my mom and stepfather needed me to be, which was their problem. Without me as a problem they would have to reckon with their own problems— their alcoholism and rage and contempt for each other and themselves. So, I was the problem. A fucked-up stupid kid. A waste of energy.

I wanted something better. So I climbed out of the window and hitch-hiked to California.

Here’s what I learned when I was homeless:

Women never pick up hitch-hikers, even when the hitch-hikers aren’t men.
Men pick up hitch-hikers, especially if they are young girls.
Some of those men want something from the young girls. Some are polite about it. Others aren’t.
The sun on the side of the freeway is hotter than anywhere else.
When you are stuck at an on-ramp and it’s dark and cold, you will take a ride with anyone, even if they’re scary. But if you take a ride with the scary person they might kidnap you and if you escape you will never feel safe in the world again, and you will blame yourself for decades.
The dry places beneath bridges are a refuge if there’s nowhere else to go.
Homeless shelters are often less safe than simply making it on your own.
Some people will spit on you, call you trash, curse at you, scream in your face, throw trash at you, dump soda/beer/water on you, offer you money for sex, leer and sneer at you, and avoid looking at you at all costs.
Some people will look at you with pity.
If you are homeless long enough, pity starts to feel like love.
If you are homeless long enough, you start to believe you are, indeed, something to be spat on, and less worthy than the people doing the spitting.
If you are homeless long enough you learn that there is a clear divide between the people who have enough and yourself, and you start to believe that the divide is your fault.
There is no “choosing” to be homeless. It is never a choice. It is often a last resort.
There are kind people in the world.
When you are homeless, every single droplet of kindness feels like an ocean of love and revives your hope that someday someone will come rescue you.
When you are homeless it is easy to believe that you cannot rescue yourself. Often you cannot rescue yourself without someone helping you believe that you can indeed rescue yourself, which is a kind of rescuing in itself.
When someone spits on you it’s always surprising. When a woman in a business suit spits on you while you are asking for spare change outside of a grocery store it lands on your cheek and you can smell the mint from her gum, or breath mint, or breath spray. You laugh and wipe it away. What else is there to do?
When you are homeless you learn that people will be kinder to you if you have a pet. They want to make sure the pet is taken care of.

I spent about 16 months of my adolescence homeless. This was technically my choice. My mom and stepdad did not kick me out. But it was also not my choice, because living with them felt like putting my life and soul in danger. And no one believed me when I tried to tell them how bad it was.

Currently Gavin Newsom, California’s Democratic Governor, is taking a hard stance on razing homeless encampments.

He has frozen funds to cities and towns until the encampments are gone.

But the encampments are not the problem.

I repeat: the encampments are not the problem.

It is not homeless and unhoused people who are the problem here.

It is the social stratification of American society.

It is the greed of real estate investors and landlords.

It is the failure of our public education systems.

It is the increased taxing of the lower classes and decreased taxing of the rich.

It is trickle-down economics.

It is racism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and child abuse.

It is the lack of a social safety net.

It is the greed of for-profit health insurance and medicine.

It is the lack of affordable housing.

It is a refusal to confront drug and alcohol addiction with any complexity or strategy on a federal and state level.

The homeless crisis is a national crisis. It is not about homeless people. It is a canary in the coal mine warning us that all of our systems for care are failing. And we are ALL vulnerable.

I am not here to solve this problem, but as a writer I can look closely at some solutions that have worked and may work, and at the issue that seems to be at the root of many U.S. issues: an inability to find common ground, and the prioritization of profit over everything else, including individual and societal health.

Over the next eight weeks I’ll be sharing more of my own story while also engaging with the current state of homelessness in the United States and abroad.

In case you need me to say it: NAVEL GAZING is back.

If you expressed interest in the WEIRD ESSAY class, don’t fret! Details are incoming within the next week!

This space will become more active and engaging, but I promise not to clog your inbox with anything superfluous. <3