There's more to homelessness than living on the street.
Trust me, I know about this. I've been homeless four times in the past twenty years, but I've never spent a night outside or under an overpass.
The people we encounter on the streets, begging for change or pushing shopping carts filled with recyclable cans are the most visible face of homelessness. They're the people we think of when we hear the word "homeless". They're the people most at risk, who deserve the most attention, the most care.
But I maintain that homelessness is increasingly a problem that's become a problem for the working poor and the lower-middle class. It's becoming all too easy to lose your home and all to hard to find a new place to live.
In 1985, I was living with S____, the woman I loved. And then things went south. We had our first and last fight on a warm spring night. I left our $350/mo. 1 bedroom apartment in Boston's Fenway neighborhood.
We'd been together for five years, and were the envy of all our friends, most of whom were hard pressed to hold a relationship together for more than six months. I was 25, and too proud to admit that it was over to my friends, all of whom would have been happy to give me space on a couch until I was back on my feet.
I spent two weeks living in my band's rehearsal space, a windowless cell in a basement of a building in the Fenway. Because of the roach and waterbug problem, I put a pair of roadcases (long wheeled coffins for storing and moving gear) together and unrolled my sleeping bag. Two weeks later, L___, a female co-worker invited me to stay with her. We lived together for a year and a half.
My day job while I played in a rock band was as a taxi dispatcher. L___ was a cab driver with a Percocet addiction. Instead of paying the $7/pill street price, she forged prescriptions and filled them at local pharmacies. Her friend P___, who worked at an architectural firm and had access to a stat machine for duplicating blank prescription forms was her co-conspirator. I was in on the scam, too, as a getaway driver.
Eighteen months later, P___ got busted. L___'s perc supply ran out, and she couldn't afford the street price. L___ didn't handle withdrawal well. The night she woke me up by pummeling my face with her fists was the night I decided to leave.
This time, I wasn't too proud to do the couch circuit. My friend M______ put me up for a couple of weeks, and when one of his roommates decided to leave, I had dibs on his bedroom. I stayed there for about a year, until the landlady decided to convert the apartment into a condominium.
I had plenty of time to move, so I found a one bedroom apartment in Brookline, MA. Nice place: big bedroom, good kitchen, enclosed porch. Unfortunately, the landlady was borderline psychotic. The day I moved in, she decided that I had "too much stuff" (all I had was clothes, books, and a stereo). She freaked out on me and tried to get into the apartment in the middle of my first (and last) night there. Her rant had so freaked me out that I barricaded the door, so she couldn't use her key.
The next day, I rented a truck and moved out, putting all of my stuff in storage. After a few more nights in our new rehearsal space, which was above ground, had a couch, and was not as roach infested as the last one, I found a rooming house on Hancock Street on Boston's Beacon Hill. I lived there during the summer of 1986.
All of this took its toll. In August, 1986, I contracted pneumonia, and was out of work for a month.
I found another rooming house closer to work later that year, staying there until June 1987. That's when I moved into a big old Victorian house in Allston with a bunch of friends. I stayed there for sixteen years.
It was the best sixteen years of my life. I had a place to live, and later work as a freelancer: my band rehearsed in the basement, and I built a recording studio there, wiring the house with audio lines that snaked from the third floor control room to the basement, with tendrils that reached out to the kitchen (where my piano lived) and bathrooms (which we used for isolation booths).
In the early- to mid-'90s, I branched out into video production, multimedia, graphics, software development, and the Web. Video and Ethernet cables and a multi-line phone system augmented the audio lines strung through the house.
This wasn't just my home and workplace. This was a house with a nervous system.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. The landlord informed us that he was selling the house. We'd have bought it, but there was so much termite damage that it would have cost us almost as much to repair it as to buy it.
So, in September 2003, at age 43, I found myself homeless again.
This one was on me, though. I was homeless by choice.
The two months prior to September 2003 were spent culling through 16 years worth of accumulated cruft and placing the rest into storage. I saw this as an opportunity: I'd been in the Boston area for 25 years, having gone to school there after growing up in Manhattan. The dot.com bust had put me nearly out of business; I had just a handful of clients left.
So, after filling a 9x12 storage unit with the remnants of my life, I left Boston, armed with a cell phone, a laptop, and a shotgun. Why a shotgun? I had created a safe space for myself, and thrived in it for a decade and a half. Now I was rootless, homeless, a wanderer in a Ford Festiva. Besides, my Kalashnikov was in storage.
I bounced around the Northeast for a couple of weeks, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, looking for an opportunity, a modern-day Okie looking for a patch of land to work. I ended up on Cape Cod because I had a craving for fresh Wellfleet oysters. I really like seafood, so I decided to stay on Cape Cod and see how things would turn out.
Unlike the Eighties, I had money in the bank, which translated to time to make a new life. This meant two months in various motels.
I know that this stretches the definition of homelessness, but consider the fate of Katrina survivors, living in FEMA-paid lodgings. A motel or hotel is not a home. It's temporary lodging. Not that I mean to compare myself with someone who had to evacuate from NOLA, but after having to leave my home of sixteen years I can tell you that I emphasize with them.
Eventually, I found a job and a place to live, and not a minute too soon. Actually, I found two part-time jobs and worked six days a week, until one of my employers hired me on a full-time basis. I am now VP Operations for a company that does system and network administration for small- to medium-sized businesses on Cape Cod and the South Coast of Massachusetts. I leveraged skills that I didn't have when I was in my twenties (though I was gainfully employed when I had been homeless back then and didn't need to find work).
Cape Cod has a fairly large homeless population. They live in the woods, in tents. They live in shelters. They live in motels. They live in cars. I had associated homelessness with cities, but it's a problem everywhere. Homelessness is more than living on the streets. It's staying in the foundation of a house in New Hampshire, while you save enough to construct the home that goes on top of that foundation. It's living in an RV in Iowa, hoping that a tornado doesn't come your way. It's living in a tent on Nantucket while you buss tables at a restaurant during the summer. It's living on your friend's couch while you get your life together. It's living in your band's rehearsal space.
Jeff Seamann doesn't have to live on the street or in a car to know what homelessness is all about. I respect his effort, and don't really see this as a stunt, but he should understand that the street people we see are just the tip of the iceburg, the most visible manifestation of a problem that affects all except the wealthiest among us.
Karlo Takki
Hyannis, MA