Being Homeless is not for Sissies

I’m here where I am and I’m hurting, I'm raging-terrified all the time -- I stay fighting mad as well. I’m a forty-six year old woman, whatever you may think, although I really can’t stand to think about all of that myself. All I can do is stay as mad as I am at the world and the people in it. Everyone I see is an enemy; and I’m sure as Hell theirs, too. There’s no one I’d dare pick a fight with, and make that person give up and shut up – although maybe I’d feel better if I did.

The truth is, they’ve booted me right out of where I was and onto the streets of Denver, Colorado, and that’s where I've got to try to stay alive. I was living in a really cheap, wonderfully fancy Victorian hotel -- but now I’m not living anywhere, of course. Except that I may have just come here on my own. I don’t really know – I get confused.

But I'm sure that I’ve got nowhere to live, and no decent way to stay alive. I was getting this never-big-enough check from Social Security every month, but now they’ve stopped sending it. I was supposed to answer a letter they'd sent me but I never did -- I think I never got it. And I think what they did is an awful punishment for not answering a letter.

And of course my family – my mother and my sister – tell me, “No way, Diana, how ridiculous!” and “Please don’t ask me again,” whenever I'm dumb enough to ask them for anything, especially money. I hurt a lot in my mind and sometimes I get suicidal --except that I hate thinking like that. The awful urges and destructive thoughts never leave me, though -- I really want to be in a mental hospital again.

Sometimes l walk all the way from here to Denver General and flat out beg them to let me in, but they always tell me to just hurry up and go somewhere, and to please get lost.

I can’t be anywhere but where I am, though --although everyone I meet wants me to somehow be somewhere else, to be anywhere but where I am. They mostly want me to go away somewhere. But of course that always makes me feel worse than I did before.

I never stand around a trashcan in a vacant lot with a bunch of people like me, all of us staying warm watching a bonfire, telling bad jokes; borrowing strategies -- borrowing hope and encouragement from each other. It’s too early in time for people like me to be standing around any bonfire anywhere. I’d give a lot to have a friend I could care about and talk with, someone who’d care about me as well. But I wouldn't want to know anyone who was even a little bit like me, and no regular person would ever spend time talking with someone like me, either. I guess I don’t really know anyone who's at all like me anyway; I’ think I'm probably pretty unique.

They’ll have a name for us soon, though – they'll call us “the homeless;” they'll call some of us “homeless mental patients.” Some of us will sleep wherever we can find to sleep; even on the streets, regular people will want us to hurry up and go away somewhere. We’re not a problem to them yet; we're not anything they need to worry about -- but we will be soon. And really, “Homeless mental patient” – did anyone ever hear anything as awful as that?

The year is 1981. Or maybe it’s 1982; I know it was 1981. They’ll soon be opening shelters, places we can stay at night; I’ll no longer have to find someone to beg for a place to spend the night. Doctors and nurses and priests will come out and help us; being alive won’t terrify me as much it does now. Life will still be terrible, of course.

Everyone needs to have his own place; his own home. I still want a home and a family to love – I grew up in such a home, I remember well that I did.

They told me, years ago, that I absolutely had to go to the state hospital; to be there a long time, too -- I was so very angry back then; bad things had happened to me. I sat in day rooms and lined up for meals and for pills; I went to Occupational Therapy and hammered out more than one pathetic-looking copper ashtray. I forgot how to think; I became a state-hospital patient. And I became a good patient, but not at first. But eventually I learned to get along with the doctors and the nurses and the attendants; they said I was mentally ill -- although I’m not really sure about that; I think it was more that was too angry to be anywhere. They committed me here and there, and off and on, for ten years –they now tell me I’m “unemployable.” So that’s how I've come to be here today.

I haven’t always walked angrily here and there like this, here in downtown Denver. Actually I know most of La Boheme by heart and “Butterfly” as well. I was going to study Don Giovanni next, but I never got downtown to buy the recording. Beautiful things were all around me once, though; I always thought of us as “upper class.” That's not true of me any more, though. I went to a good college; I taught school; I’ve studied the best poets and not to be here at all, actually.

I never have to spend a night outside or on the street, though. Instead I find someone I can impose on -- someone who's got a living room sofa or an extra bed. I stay in a mission or I'll hire on as a housekeeper or a nanny -- I always find someone kind, someone who wants to help. The terrors of the night never find me outside on the street at three a.m. trying to sleep on the sidewalk; the terrors never match my rage or threaten m just because I’m outside where they can find me at two in the morning.

I try hard to get a job, of course – I look everywhere I can think of to look for paying work. But I don’t get hired. I get hungry, of course; sometimes I can’t stand to be as hungry as I am. I get angry and I can’t stand that either – it's as though I have no right to eat. In the evening, though, when I can’t stand being as hungry as I am, I go to my special place, on Sixteenth Street across from the Denver Dry and I stand on the corner and say to everyone going by there, "I really hate to ask you but would you give me a dollar or two so I can eat tonight? I’m already hungry enough that I can’t stand it.” A few people will put a dollar or two in my hand; later I walk to the Waffle House and order my dinner. I expect the waitress to refuse to wait on me; I’m not one of the “regular people” who come in the restaurant. I leave her a tip if I can -- maybe one day we’ll even be friends.

I’ve got to get myself into the Psychiatric Unit at Denver General; anyone would think that no one would get chased out of there more than once, but really, it happens to me pretty often. I just can’t believe they won’t help me. So again I walk all the way over there, to the emergency room, and I tell someone again that I badly need to be to be admitted. And I hear this awful woman say, again, her voice mean and harsh-sounding. "We’re not going to admit you, Diana. Not now, not ever. You’re not sick. WE understand that you're unhappy, Diana. But “unhappy” is different from “sick.” We know that you were in quite a number of hospitals. But they didn’t help you a lot, though, those hospitals you were in, did they? Anyway we aren’t about to admit you; I can have Security show you out if I need to. You’ve got to leave the premises immediately."

"But my mind races -- it races all the time and I can never make it stop,” I say. “I‘m terrified all the time, and I can’t stand to think at all any more. I’m afraid of starving to death; and sometimes I get suicidal. I need to be in the hospital so I can learn to live again. After all once I’d been committed, I never could get a job: I couldn’t then and I certainly can’t now. I need to be in the hospital -- but how can you possibly say I'm not sick? Time was I couldn’t stay out of the hospitals; now I can’t get in one. And you’re eager to have “security” show me the door. Somebody’s crazy; that’s for sure!”

I walk out and into the parking garage and I sit down on a cement ledge, next to where a policeman is sitting. Maybe he’s kind, I think -- maybe he's someone I can talk to. So I tell him what’s just happened, and that I badly need to be in the hospital.

"I heard about you!” he says, practically shouting. “You got to get away from here; find somewhere else to go, and do it right now. No one wants you here. Just get the Hell out of here! Get out of here and bother someone else.

“That’s so very ugly of you, “I say. I can’t stand another minute of this and I reach past him; I grab his gun from its holster. And I sit staring hopelessly at the gun, at the strange and terrible thing in my hands -- I only sort of care if he grabs it and shoots me or if he doesn’t. He just grabs it back, and he pulls me to my feet and grabs me by the shoulder, and then he marches me to the street, yelling, much too loud, I think.

“You get on out of here – Nobody wants you here!” And he shoves me into the street. And now I’ve got no idea as to where I should go, so I start walking on Eighth Street toward the part of Capitol Hill where I’ve lived before; back to the places I know.

It’s 1983 now, and a couple of back Social Security payments have found their way to me. And I get on a Greyhound bus heading east -- I intend to get as far away as I can from Denver, and from what they’re now calling “homelessness.”

And amazingly, my “geographical cure” actually works. And I have some money, and when I've gotten as far as Hampton, Virginia I can go into good restaurants; the ones that serve wine. And I do that a lot -- I love to sit in a lovely room, relaxing and drinking good wine, pretending I don't mind being alone. I drink too much, and much

too often – before long I can tell that not only am I considered crazy, I’m an alcoholic.

An AA treatment center lets me in, and there I determine that I need and want to remain sober for the rest of my life. And I meet a man I know I can love; I still do love him; we’re still married. He’d been homeless; he was a dedicated drunk for several years. He realized he had to learn to live sober, or it would be game over for him.

So we continue sober; we’re homeowners, and keepers of dogs and cats, still living happily ever after in our two-story Victorian, a house built to last forever in 1908. He's an amazingly good carpenter, and an accomplished woodworker; and an expert in the restoration of old furniture.

As for me; I‘m a news-junkie; and I’m trying to write my story; even make it readable. I think it could help more than one person avoid the kid of pitfalls that have plagued my life; and I may even make sense of the things that happened to me – of what I did to make things happen the way they did -- maybe one day I will.

Diana Strelow

=> =>Return to Reading Short Memoir