Excerpt From New Novel III: Homeless America

LA was another terrible bump in my life that put to the test my greatest convictions.

I would get to know the marginalized and rejected, the addicts and the hustlers, the pimps and the prostitutes, the mentally ill and the most marginalized and forgotten people of all: The homeless of America.

Who are they really? What is their story? How did they end up the way they did? Like a journalist on a mission from Seymour Hersh, I sought to find answers to these unasked questions, to make the most of my deteriorating situation.

My story? A lawsuit I took my life away. A lawsuit I had no choice but to be involved in. The poor classes have no rudder in life and aren’t given any real tips when dealing with lawsuits and entertainment lawyers and crooked judges. Class warfare.

I made every mistake in the book that I was never given because when I looked outside my tenement growing up, I didn’t see a picket fence or afront yard with purposeful plants made from loving responsible hands.

I didn’t inherit the book of life and so I never stood a chance dealing with demons in Armani suits. I honestly thought I did. I thought I was smart enough. I was wrong.

Without the experience you are dead on arrival.

So the floor fell away beneath me and I ended up crushed and alone in sunny Southern California.

LA was another terrible bump in my life that put to the test my greatest convictions. I completely lost my mind. I can still hear the hammering of the pickaxe to wall, the pickaxe in my blistered hands, when I realize I am utterly and absolutely alone, hacking away in the distant mines of Mercury. You can’t hear a whisper of life anywhere around you and you keep tunneling because that’s what keeps you alive.

I also realize I’ve never truly been alone before. The fear of loneliness was something I always teased and scoffed at with disdain. Now it had me by the throat and I couldn’t fight it off. I always claimed to be stronger, but loneliness won that day. And it wouldn’t be the last win.

In high school I laughed at those whom rather be with someone bad than alone. Now I understood the fear, but it wasn’t emotional abandonment (that would come later), it was about being alive. I couldn’t look after myself. No Ichy Thump. I am listed as ‘dependent’ on the forms. No true identity of my own. An expired visa, an expired life. Who am I? Does Jackie Chan know? Who am I? Does anyone know?

I’m someone with nowhere to go. I’m someone who is headed nowhere. Where am I? In the Mines of Mercury, forgotten and alone, where the only sound is the pickaxe slamming against the wall. I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day, but I would again.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I suspected it was brutal bad. My girl Jessica wasn’t texting as much. Sometimes days would pass and I was crushed with panicked worry. Something had happened her. Something terrible.

I remember not sleeping for a week for the very first time. In Vegas I had only gone four days. I was raw and exposed. My mind begged me to shut down, but i couldn’t on the streets, nowhere safe to sleep. Cops and robbers on high alert. Not sure who to be afraid of more. In Hollywood you can only be a teenager to find a shelter to sleep. Everywhere else was too far to go, no money to get there, dire times. I walked so much. I walked til my right foot ripped open and bled without me knowing it.

In Vegas, I had my shoes on for a week without taking them off. New woes. I finally found out why my shoes suddenly smelled like the Red Death. I had been bleeding after continuously ripping away at my foot. I tried to take them off and air them out at a casino but the attendant gave me the eye and followed me in the bathroom. What is wrong with casino employees? They remind me of self important windbags from back in Florida. I tried to be fast but his wingtips were outside the stall.

“Excuse me, is everything alright? There are people waiting.”

“I’m fine thank you.” I cry out in the bathroom stall. “Just a minute.”

“You have two minutes. Then I’m going to have to call security.”

I was barely able to dry my feet. I frantically put the shoes on and exited the stall when I noticed he left to answer someone’s question. I sneaked by him and walked at a brisk pace. Mission Impossible theme was playing. Everyone seemed to eye me suspiciously.

By the front of the casino I broke into a run and saw that the enterprising casino employee had followed me with a couple of faceless security. I ran as fast as I could and changed my shirt as soon as I was out of sight. APB in progress. Looking for a Hispanic male, age 32, in dire need with no options left. But I dodged them, thank God.

That night I sat on a bench pelted mercilessly by freezing desert winds. Not the last time that would happen. I sang the songs I wrote one after another to keep my mind off of it, as cruisers passed by, feeling too sorry for me to haul me to jail. I shook with cold and my voice sounded like a speedfreak singing, but I got through that terrible night.

LA was definitely better than that, even though it had its own horror shows. Like this one:

What happens when you stop sleeping? A depression bigger than a hurricane slams your psyche, a desolation so intense that you break down in front of strangers. The bleeding foot needs tending, but I still don’t know what it is yet. A week in Los Angeles. I talk to Jessica but not much. I’m afraid all the time. I spend the night at bus stops until the coffee shops open early. I still hadn’t figured out my survival routine in LA yet.

A public library, the stench of feet and that sour smell of spoiled milk. It’s the homeless, the dejected, the transients, all trying to pass the time in relative comfort, with the cops staring them down. Don’t go to sleep! I’m in a Freddie Krueger waking nightmare. Why can’t they let me sleep?

Something special happens to your self-worth when you start to smell, and when the people avoid you because of it: what a terrific sorrow! When even the fucking bums are wondering… what’s that smell? Can you feel any lower? Only in your coffin, six feet deep…

So you start to cry when you find out you’re the worst smelling of the homeless Brady Bunch. Library employees are scoping out where it’s coming from. I see people in the periphery pointing at me holding their noses. The staff are spraying an air freshener and pump up the AC. It gets chilly. I cry harder. What did I do? What did I do? Monsters roam free every day, but here I am in the smell of my failure and spilled blood pooling in my socks. I tried to do the right thing my entire life when others laughed at the idea and never did. So, why am I here? Why is this happening? The sorrow perforated my heart and my mind was collapsing. I’m not sure what happened after that. I suddenly looked around and the whole library was there, many faces in concern and fear. I thought the cops were gonna take me away to a sanatorium, but they look… sad. LA is a miserably sad city and we’re all under the bridge in some way.

That LA public library felt my grief that day. I wept like they were laying my parents into the dirt. Some kind stranger told the cops to back off but I can’t remember the face. Was it a man? A woman? A kid? The mysterious stranger is trying to convince the cops to let me sleep or at least let me go. I look around. Pitying eyes. Even the bums are uncomfortable. So I stumble out, and the cops make no attempt to stop me. They felt too sorry for the poor kid in way over his head, abandoned in the mines of Mercury with a smoking ship that’s beyond fixing.

The brain plays tricks on you when you don’t sleep. Dreams and real life collide and confusion is the only currency. You fall asleep wide awake and the two realities turn you into a zombie that can’t quite wake up.

What just happened? Oh my God, I caused perhaps the biggest scene in my life but it’s so hard to recall. Flashes of memory is enough to know it happened. I walk blinded by the LA sun in Hollywood, still wondering.

Then, I sleep as I walk and in my dreams I follow a long procession of people, other zombies like me. Whether we’re headed to salvation or the slaughterhouse is a complete mystery but it’s the only way to go. The scene is reminiscent of totalitarianism: sharp edges, dark colors, dark neon, and we are all wearing the same thing, walking with the same stare devoid of emotions.

“Stop following us!”

“Huh?”

I suddenly come to and a teenage couple is looking at me. The girl is afraid and the boy is madder than hell. It took them quite some time to build the courage to tell the weird kid to stop following them.

“I didn’t, I wasn’t – I mean – I’m sorry…”

They storm off and I look around. How long have I been following them without realizing it? Poor kids. I felt terrible.

Santa Monica Boulevard. How did I get here? I was always fascinated by the splintered mind as a teenager. Now I had the inside scoop and it was more terrifying than I ever imagined.

So was LA really better? I like to think so. Still I was cursed at, spit on, tripped on one occasion (unsuccessfully), threatened and nearly killed. But I was never afraid of people’s violence. Is dying really so bad when your life is like mine? I was afraid of my own self, of my own broken mind and hemorrhaging heart. I was afraid of what had happened to Jessica. She deserved a better life but karma doesn’t work in this world the way it’s supposed to. Can anger explode a star? Mine could. Are natural disasters just cosmic beings invoking disaster because they’re so despondent at how the universe works? Then death is only right! Then the end of the Universe is only right! To hell with this dimension!

By the time Jessica finally came, I had hell down to a routine. I hung out at the library all day til close, then went to the soup kitchen in Hollywood to have my only meal, then walked for 2 miles to the Mall on Hollywood Boulevard to take my second daily dump.

Two years later, I’m back in LA and I notice how much more homeless there are, and the entry level employees have had enough. I’m including the supervisors too. The dead-end dive jive. It seemed like everybody was poor and getting poorer and more pissed off by the minute. I noticed familiar faces, ones that made a pain for me and Jessica years back. Still in the same job? No creativity, only in relationships. Gotta keep that fire burning, ya know? Oh well. If it gets you horny and it’s consensual then go with God, just let me be.

Anyway, this waitress made hell for me the second time. I developed the habit of going to Dennys to avoid the unusually cold weather that had me paralyzed in chill. There was this one nice security guard from Ghana, who spoke English with a very thick accent who let me hang out. Nice man, warm and compassionate. He took a shine to me and told me to try to stay awake so the Dennys managers leave me alone, no easy task.

I sat in the Dennys waiting area – perhaps in the same diner Quentin Tarantino pitched the script of True Romance – and pretended to wait for Jessica, who I knew after a few times that she wasn’t coming.

One time that damn waitress told me I had to leave or she’ll call the cops. It was 2 in the morning. No one was there. But she hated me the minute she laid eyes on me. Some lesbians hated the very sight. I think it was unwanted attraction. I am very androgynous and can easily pass for a provocative woman if I dressed the part.

After having a loud fight with her girlfriend in the back who also worked there, (I found this out later) she came out and said:

“I’m sorry you have to go.”

The weather outside was 39 degrees and I didn’t have a jacket, but off I went. Once again I focused on music so I wouldn’t freeze. Every muscle in my body was tense from the unrelenting cold. I just jammed on my ipod to whole albums, doing a shivering dance at the bus stop to kill away time and hopefully live to see the sunrise and warmth again.

In the terrible beginning, I walked all the way from the Greyhound station near downtown to Hollywood, getting lost many times. My feet were about to rot away. I’m not sure what I was thinking. Oh yeah, now I remember: I’m going to need that $2.50. So in a way, I knew it was going to be rough, but I just waltzed in there.

The bad things were awful, like worrying about what happened to Jessica. Car accident? Fire? With her I had hope for a future. Without… what would happen to me? I would be completely stranded in the mines of Mercury. And then… I would have to turn that pickaxe on myself.

But the good things… potential. This one distinct time – I’ll never forget – I walked with my tight jeans, and wallet chain proudly, even though I was homeless for days, backpack and all, and I saw the rich goons on the sidewalk with their arm candy, getting out of their Maseratis. I kept my stride, locking eyes with any girl I could, something I never did before. Two gorgeous bombshells in tight shimmery dresses stood near one of the clubs and one of them looked in my direction. I watched her nudge her friend to check out the emo rocker kid from another lifetime, now replaced by hipsters.

I walked by and smiled as they smiled back.

How is it that those women look at me that way, but I could never get a lay from a common hoodrat? I wondered that walking by. They were completely mesmerized and never stopped looking to the point others began to look. I was so proud and so annoyed. What can I do in that situation? Sure, I can rock the sheets but I’m Thomas O’Malley, the alley cat, no home in sight. It wasn’t something I could hide with no cash in my pocket. I couldn’t take another disappointed look of someone when they realized I had nowhere to go. So I just kept walking, back to the Starbucks that closes at midnight on Hollywood and Vine with my old cup I pretended to buy so the entry level staff wouldn’t give me dirty looks.

The everyday life of the homeless of America. I’m chronicling how it really is here, how many forgotten poor are roaming the streets. They are not all drug addicts. They are not all hustlers. Most are people screwed over by the maw of unregulated capitalism, by the movers of the world that care more for profit than keeping bees from going extinct. The EPA is O-U-T. And mother nature is fighting back with raging fires, more earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, you name it. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a stock market report.

I read somewhere that during the 1890’s, an enterprising journalist took pictures of people living in New York in absolute squalor; horrific images; people piled on top of each other on cardboard boxes, children eating trash, babies frozen blue with cold. He pulled together the biggest richest families of New York at the time, put them all in a room, and surprised them by showing them the world they had neglected for Operas and snuff boxes.

Some wept at the images. Others got angry. Some even – I suspect the Morgan family – sat in stony silence and sighed because they knew this was going to cost them.

That was when the super rich of New York took a giant bite of the shit sandwich; the sandwich the rest of us eat three times a day our entire lives.

And it made America better.

On Turning Thirty-Three

I just turned thirty-three and I’m anxiously waiting for my crucifixion.

Bureaucracy in Heaven is slowing things down. What’s different in Heaven? People have halos and wings but that’s about it. Bureaucracy is a necessary stain in this Universe. The Milky Way is spilling, and the insects are getting hungry. They’re attracted to failure, of those that get close, so close, so damn close, but no cigar! No sir! Then the insects come, galactic insects as big as Lexx, floating in the vacuum of space, attracted to the scent, affecting your mind.

You lie there in spoiled Milk and Honey waiting for the worms, for the Old Ones, for the Lovecraft nightmare to digest you… and you finally look through the cracked looking-glass of a servant.

You were never a God. You were never a blip. You were a servant the whole time and you didn’t even know it.

Know your place. Stasis. Enoch says it isn’t time yet. 33 and it seems like light-years away. Forever stasis. Forever dependent. Control is an Illusion. Control is a psychotic break. Control is a Soul Mate in her tailormade prison. She followed the blueprints to a T. Signed on the dotted line. And Fate sped that result.

People talk but no one engages. Must be a computing error. Brains are similar to computers that way. Tech has made people socially impotent. Very little exchange. The self important ones drone on and on. I find it pathetic. Don’t they know how they look for fuck’s sake? How they sound? How embarrassing they are? Even if they’re doing important things? I hate them so much, yet they surround me, smelling the lies and the stink of failure.

And I serve them. Always serving them.

They smoke me out, give me free drinks, and of course try to teach a thing or two. The horrible realization is I need them in my life. Why? Without them, loneliness would kill me where I stand. Without them I fade away to nothing.

I meet better types but they usually end up ditching me. They are right to leave me behind. I would leave me behind. For the first time in my life, I’m getting used to the notion. Know your place and so I do. I will submerge myself in liquid nitrogen and wait for the tech to catch up; revive my downtrodden brain. Maybe I’ll be better then. Maybe I won’t be what I am now. Maybe I can be something I can respect and love. But how do you love an epic failure? How can you embrace a Supernova? Kiss a Black Hole Sun? You wait until the ice melts. You give up the ghost.

That’s what I have done now. Whatever I am, I will be. And whatever I will be, will be Power. I know my place at this moment but I never lost my power-lust. I have a world to save. But I’ll keep my head down. I’ll serve. I’ll take the hints and passive aggressive words. I’ll rub their backs and wash their feet. Never send a Cat to do a Dog’s job. But that’s the best they got. So I go and do as best I can, which isn’t very good. I am trying god help me. But it isn’t very good.

It’s hard to keep your head down when you’re so exposed though. People are curious about me. Prying eyes. I feel them. I meet them. I alienate them. Pitying eyes. I might be frozen in Amber but I want dignity. Is that too much to ask for? Keep low. Exposed and in the open. Opportunities flower, blossom, then turn to glass and shatter. Expect the unexpected! How do you stay positive? Is being positive another trick the devil pulled?

Evil is attracted to a broken heart. It’s not fair. Are atheists right? Are the nihilists right? Before, I thought it was a way to avoid thinking about the unexplained, about the undiscovered country, about a future with too much progress and too little wisdom to handle it. Even THINKING is filing for divorce.

Let the computers worry about our minds. Let the pills worry about our emotions.

I am the Voyeur Absolute. I live outside the world. A slow-going Pornhub ecological disaster plays and replays. Dissolution is the only solution. But this goddamn EGO! How can I kill my nurturer? Why would I break free from my only freedom?

Had a seizure moment last night. Programming error. My legs gave way underneath me, but all I saw was a still image of the hostel lobby in front of me.

“Dude are you alright?”

I look up and see the young guy at the front desk looking so worried I’m nearly touched. State of confusion. What happened? Why does my body hurt? Mr Robot shit. And it happens again in the bathroom, twice. Second time, I bang my head so hard, half the hostel is at the bathroom door. I had tried taking a piss, and blip! I’m on the floor with a howling pain in my head. My junk was out for the whole world to see. Look at the drunken buffoon at 33 years old. Look at the very personification of failure. I was scared of getting kicked out. But the kindness of strangers is something that I’ve always been able to rely on in the wicked Miami Beach. One silver lightning.

Two picked me up off the floor and took me into the stall. Asked me all the usual talk to the wasted: “ Do you need to puke?” “Are you bleeding?”

The genuine concern swelled my heart. I wanted to be pulverized by the Sirens of Titan. I wanted to be a satellite. Forever stasis. Swallowed by shame and regret. I was an apologizing machine, but they gave love in return. Is there a lesson here?

“You have nothing to be ashamed about bro. It happens to the best of us. We’ve all been there yo,” That’s the hostel manager. Salt of the earth no bullshit homo sapien. Gives as good as he gets. A man of his word. Never a shamer.

“It’s ok man.” That’s the Dominican New Yorker. Another genuine soul; a vegan with the ambition of a meat-eater. Very smart and really into theology. “Nothing to feel bad for.”

Maybe there ARE good people in this world. Have I not been looking hard enough?

Skip to the future. I’m making deals with these men. I’m shaking hands. We’re signing Contracts together. The stasis ceases. But for now, they’re picking me up from the literal floor.

The New Yorker insists he saw me hit my head against the floor with brutal force. I believe him but he doesn’t know how hard my skull is. I’ve fractured it on many occasions. Just a bump remains, to remind me that I have to take care of my brain; that it doesn’t work the way it should; that it’s compromised. To remind myself that age makes it harder to live with epilepsy.

I am not afraid. No doom and gloom. I take things as they come. Easy come, easy go. Go forth into the great unknown, with or without your consent. Better with. I am a breadcrumb of identity in an endless sea of identities, bigger than Andromeda. Everything is alive, more alive than the living, more human than human, more awesome and terrifying than we could ever conceive in our feeble inept 3 dimensional brains. You know that feeling when you see a horror-creature for the first time? A spider? A snake? A jellyfish touching your skin? That’s what I mean. We are constantly being dominated by the unseen knitting hands. Little monsters no bigger than our hands can determine our fate. Do we really have control in this life? Or are we being slowly digested, like Lovecraft believed?

In my case the literal truth is in the facts: A stacked deck. Not even a pair of twos. All I have is my bluff, which is the worst bluff in history. No one buys what I’m selling. No one ever does. Some come close, but when other people come into the mix, they toss my hand away in shame. What’s the use of a vexed hand? I was born with a deformity called poverty, from a deformity called bureaucracy, from tension between two nations that I had nothing to do with. Fate decided my path before I was born; when an ancient black woman stared at the fire Prometheus gave, and saw the face of a curious blinking boy thousands of years in the future, staring back.

Some have the life of choice, everything choice. But I wasn’t in that category. No matter what choice I made, no matter where I went, the weavers of life had different plans. Enoch laughs, arms folded, sitting on a bench of toothache.

But not all is lost. I seem to be upgrading. The level of people surrounding me aren’t all shit anymore. For example, look at the guy coming in to check on me in the bathroom.

That’s Terrell, the nice kid from Trinidad. He stays in my room and shows me all the music that the Caribbean and Indians offer. We laugh at how promiscuous they are. He takes to me easily. He’s repairs air conditioners and freezers, an engineer who never finished school. Tyrell is in pain. I can tell. His eyes are trying not to hate the cruelty of the world and the fate weavers. He is an anomaly in Trinidad. I can tell. His parents were able to provide a better life for him than many of his friends. And the shame is there. I can’t blame anyone. But his father is dead, and his girlfriend and mother want him to stop chasing these silly dreams of being his own businessman, of being his own boss, of providing a better life to his country. He came on a 2 week Visa and found a job in 5 days. I love pumping him up. He was scared of not getting the job. I told him not to be too grateful, to prove his skills and be confident, to play the game without shame. He laughs and laughs with a giddiness only people from the Caribbean have. His one flaw is the flaw many Caribbean people have: worry about gays.

“Emulate the worst motherfuckers at the top, wear a suit, BE a suit, and that’s how you take that power for yourself. Take that power back from those greedy money makers.” I tell him. Words from a bum.

Whether true or not, this gives him confidence, a second wind he was losing when we met.

“I got the job man!” My heart is filled with relief and happiness for him. It’s rare when good people win. You have to celebrate that when it happens. We wax nostalgic about an unwritten future where we are running the world amid clinking glasses aboard planes and yachts. He wants to study to be a pilot but he doesn’t have the money.

“I’ll buy the plane and you can drive us around.”

Tyrell laughs with a grin bigger than Cheshire Cat and fist-pumps me with Caribbean enthusiasm. Days later I seem him hovering over me looking slightly disappointed but I don’t mind. He cares about me a lot. How strange.

“You’re wasting your life with drink man.” His accent pleasantly tickles my ears. His concern is real, not like my fake friends. That’s why it doesn’t piss me off like usual. He cares about me so it isn’t sanctimonious. I try to explain to him that I don’t always drink, that I’m epileptic and I haven’t treated it at all. He believes my words. How strange. What is this feeling? Of people caring about me? Are the times finally a-changing? Bob Dylan’s net worth is 200 million but he’s the voice of the voiceless. More computing errors. Life is a missing file; something deleted and only half recovered. Fate is shaped by sins of another life.

“Why do you drink the way you do? Why do you do this to yourself?”

I want to scream how much I hate myself, my situation, my so-called partner and friends and family. I want to wage war in heaven and carve pentagrams on the foreheads of Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel. Lucifer was right to be so fucking pissed off. And I’m there with him (or am I really him??) filled with rage, storming the Pearly Gates, calling for the spilled blood of the worthless angels. I will tear the bureaucracy down, brick by brick, bit by bit, ripping my hands open and not caring about the pain. Helter Skelter on the face of God, on the atrocities committed in his Name, on the chest of Hernan Cortes, on the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria, on monarchy and country and good morals and bad sense, on the history of the world, on Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, on the Romans that killed the Gnostics, on the scientists that split the atom, on the addiction of opioids and social media and the doctors that write the prescriptions.

Depression: the ultimate pre-existing condition. Sorrow is the links of a never-ending chain that wraps around our throats and hearts, that binds our wrists as we are herded to the New World like cattle. And here I am, pulling with desperation, slamming my blade against the chain as the ocean slams the slave ship, threatening to swallow me up. If I die tonight, my vengeance will bring me back. Spin the cruel wheel of karma! Break it off its hinges!

Tyrell goes back to Trinidad, decides to get the appropriate paperwork to work legally. He has to sell his pickup and refrigerating equipment but doesn’t want to. I wish him well and promise to keep in touch and for the first time I mean it. His road and mine are the same. Fly-by-wire in space. Good luck Tyrell. I’m rooting for you.

“Peace my bredrin.” He texts me when he gets to Trinidad. Shows me a pic of his truck and a video on FB of his house flooded by the unforgiving Tropical weather. Hang in there bro. Jah love.

It’s only appropriate coming back to Miami the second time, that all the people I hang with are foreigners and transients. A surprising number of them are running away from something; unrelenting responsibilities, exes, failed familial relationships, shattered hopes, frustrated sex…

Have I found my tribe?

CONTACT INFO: carvallodan@gmail.com