I was on such a good healthy diet earlier this year in Florida, eating raw almonds & carrots, no beef or pork, only skinless chicken breasts sauteed in olive oil or canola oil, millet bread, V-8 cut with distilled water, steamed cauliflower & broccoli. Being on the road in May & June shot that to hell, but now I have no choice at all what I eat since I'm dependent on the food kitchens. I still stay hungry all the time, even though I eat regularly, & have discovered I can eat a burrito & a side of rice for under $2 at Taco Bell if/when I have 2 bucks on me, so I can do that when I need to. But I still stay hungry all the time; it's like getting food consumes a lot of my time & thought. Aside to that, I have also not eaten a lot of sugar & have not drunk coffee for some time now. Sugar makes me not only mean but sick with headaches, & the bad effects of the ups & downs. Coffee does nasty things to my neurological system since I was about 40, so I've been off coffee for a long time. But now I eat the plentiful pastries offered by the food kitchens & I find myself drinking coffee because both kill the appetite temporarily.
I discovered that I have fellow campers at this campsite behind the strip club off 122nd Street at Glisan. (I move every third night or so for security reasons.) There's an old guy in a camper. He's got white hair & a white Santa Claus beard & a big belly. He's an old guy, kind of crippled, in his late 60s, I'd say, from the look of him. And there's a couple in a van; they come very late, like 2 a.m. every night.
Walking to a 7-11 on 122nd Street I was surrounded by a pack of wild dogs that were loose on the street. I had seen them up ahead of me as I was walking. They were roaming in & out of the traffic & people in cars would stop for them. They didn’t seem vicious. Then I lost sight of them & was glad they’d meandered off somewhere out of the way. But then when I came out of the 7-11 two of the dogs ran at me & started barking, I thought they might attack. They were big dogs — looked like they had Rottweiler in them but were bigger than Rottweilers. Obviously someone’s big dogs bred to be guard dogs or attack dogs. I froze in my tracks, didn’t know what to do. Nothing around on the ground to pick up to defend myself with. They barked at me for a few minutes — a few tense minutes for me. I was in front of an auto repair shop & yelled in at the guy in there working under a hood, I yelled “are these your dogs?” He shook his head no. I went inside the shop & said, “Mind if I stand here a minute till those animals get clear of the area.” The mechanic told me it was OK. This kind of thing doesn’t just happen to homeless people, but still, chances are good I might not have been walking on that sidewalk in the first place if I’d had gas for my car &/or an apartment to watch TV in. Being homeless is just like the rest of American society, except that I don’t have a place to settle in or sleep in except my car. This whole thing with the dogs became, to my mind, sort of symbolic of my present situation. And I guess you could say, the danger passed & is now gone, as all things pass & change into their opposites. This is all making a philosopher out of me.
Got a touch of food poisoning from one of the kitchens yesterday or the day before. You haven't lived till you've had diarrhea & vomiting & fainting spells while living on the streets. My god, when you think it can't get any worse, it can.
I could continue this diary, but it would be more of the same. I finally did get a job at a Bi-Mart but continued to live out of my car because moving into an apartment takes deposits & a bankroll. An average apartment, say a studio for $475 a month, would've taken about $1,500 to move into. That's the first month's rent, the so-called “last month's rent,” and a security deposit. No way I had $1,500 on me, and my $8.50 an hour salary meant it would be a while before I could save that much. So I continued to live in my car, hiding this fact from the people I worked with.
I thought about moving into a hotel downtown, there were rooms for $110 a week at one place I checked out. That would have been doable. But I chose to stay in the car. Finally, in mid-November, I couldn't take it anymore. I called a friend in Northern California & asked if I could come crash at his place till I found a job. He said OK, so I moved to California, arriving the day before Thanksgiving. My friend said I looked frazzled & beat, so he said I should rest through the weekend & not bother to look for a job till the following Monday.
On Monday I went & applied for two jobs. The second place hired me on the spot, the manager put me to work that very day for four hours. The first place called me later in the week & hired me too. I'd gone for months trying to land a job in Portland & then here I was in California & I got two jobs in what my friend called “record time.” So now I'm working two jobs, one full-time at $9.85 an hour, and the second part-time (20 to 25 hours a week) at $7.50 an hour. And I found a room in a house here without a lot of trouble. The landlady kindly agreed to let me pay the deposit in increments as I get paychecks, so it's all worked out.
I'm employed & I've got a roof over my head. I wish it could have worked out better in Portland because Portland is a good city, but it still baffles me as to why it was so hard to find a job in a city that big. The town I'm in now in California is only 15,000 people, you'd think it would be harder to find work here, but that's not the case. Go figure. I have many notes on my homeless stint in Oregon that maybe I'll knock into shape eventually, though right now I don't even want to think about it. It was not a pleasant experience & I can't help not looking back until there's some distance between me & what all happened.
