by Brianna Karp
The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness
The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness
a memoir
Brianna Karp
To Brandon, Sonia, Vicki and Sage
home·less (hm’ls)
adj. Having no home or haven.
n. (used with a pl. verb) People without homes considered as a group. Often used with the.
§11302. General definition of homeless individual:
an individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence; and
an individual who has a primary nighttime residence that is a supervised publicly or privately operated shelter designed to provide temporary living accommodations (including welfare hotels, congregate shelters, and transitional housing for the mentally ill);
an institution that provides a temporary residence for individuals intended to be institutionalized; or a public or private place not designed for, or ordinarily used as, a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings.
—Federal Definition of Homeless, United States Code Title 42, Chapter 119, Subchapter I
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
A Reader’s Guide to
Discussion Questions for The Girl’s Guide to Homelessness
Resources
Prologue
The Walmart lot was cold in the night air, even for southern California. I hadn’t brought enough blankets and would need to swing by the thrift store and pick up a few more. Everything was well-lit by the streetlamps and eerily quiet. There were maybe a dozen other trailers around when I arrived, but no sign that actual people might live in them at all. I had once visited Calico Ghost Town, an old abandoned mining settlement in the hills outside San Bernardino, and this had that same sense of deathly desertion. I knew they were there, perhaps even peeking out their windows at the newcomer, but I couldn’t see or hear any of them.
Were any of the others like me? Were the rest of them just passing through? Was I the only one idiotic enough to think I could pull off a stunt like this?
Irrational fear swept through me. How could I sleep? I was more weary than I’d been in a long time, but I flicked on a solitary flashlight and tried to read a book, although you couldn’t exactly call it reading. It was more like staring blankly at the page, eyes racing over the words without comprehension as my mind created scenarios one after the other, each more horrible than the last. What if I awoke to the brisk tapping of police batons on my windows? What if they knew I was planning on staying here longer than a night or two? What if they could sense it? What if I awoke at a tilt, all my boxes hurtling from one end of the trailer toward my head, as a tow truck dragged me away, screeching for help, muffled and buried under hundreds of books?
I had never much thought about homelessness or homeless people. Sure, there was the occasional “hobo” on the street, perhaps lounging on the sidewalk outside a 7-Eleven, begging for change, ragged, perhaps with a worn ski cap on, maybe missing a few teeth, with scraggly hair and a wizened visage.
“Don’t make eye contact with them,” my mother would say, jerking me to her side, not even bothering to whisper or even lower her voice. She spoke about them as if they couldn’t hear or understand her, or as if they had no feelings to hurt. I never really thought to question that. It was just another stereotype repeated to me, ad nauseam, from infancy.
“They’re just lazy bums. Too lazy to get a job. Don’t look at them, don’t talk to them and don’t give them anything. Half of them aren’t even really homeless, you know. They’re just faking it to make money without actually having to do anything.”
I had never thought about how those homeless people ended up there. I had never once thought to ask, “Why would a lazy person choose that life?” It seems like a really hard, scary, uncertain life. It seems like the last kind of life a lazy jackass would choose.
I was ashamed of myself, thinking back on it. In a way, this was my atonement, my penance for being so self-righteous all those years. Serves me right, I realized wildly.
It was Thursday, February 26, 2009. I was homeless.
But then, it’s not really enough to tell you that I’m homeless, is it? You want to know who the hell I am and how I got here.
Chapter One
I’m trying to decide whether it’s fair or not to say that insanity runs in my blood.
Certainly it’s a statement with which many of my family members would, shall we say, take umbrage. But I don’t know that it’s much of a stretch, from an outsider’s perspective. I’m not talking about the kooky, madcap, adorably dysfunctional brand of crazy, either. The Moonstruck-style family with their over-the-top yelling and gesticulating, followed by reconciliations and hugs and kisses and banquet-reunion meals. The bighearted kind of crazy.
That’s not my family. My lineage runs more along the batshit-fucking-nuts crazy train.
As you might imagine, this is enough to give a girl a massive mind trip. There’s always that underlying paranoia—wondering whether I have miraculously broken the mold and escaped the curse, or whether the insanity is buried and brewing just below the surface, lying dormant and awaiting the inevitable breakout.
I was born a fourth-generation Jehovah’s Witness. There wasn’t much choice in the matter. On my mother’s side, the JW heritage goes all the way back to my great-grandparents— Polish immigrants to Canada who met on a bus one day in the early 1900s, discovered they each thought the other looked pretty spicy and married a week later. Mary and TaTa Mazur would later convert to the “Bible Students,” renamed “Jehovah’s Witnesses” in 1931, and pump out nine devout Jehovah’s Witness children up through the Great Depression, one of whom was my grandmother, Iris, the youngest and the black sheep and hell-raiser of the family.
The Mazur clan would later tell stories of their persecution as Jehovah’s Witnesses during both world wars, including the ban on the religion in Canada from 1940 to 1943, when members organized an underground resistance. My grandmother would affectionately relate stories of her father’s imprisonment when he was caught distributing JW pamphlets, only to find himself the first known believer to be thrown out of jail for singing religious hymns in Polish at the top of his lungs (and horrendously out of tune), distressing prison guards and inmates alike.
I know, I know, it all sounds very charming and “warms-the-cockles-of-your-heart” so far, doesn’t it? Believe me, there are plenty more stories where those came from. JWs thrive on the martyr complex, since they believe that the Bible prophesied that members of the One True Religion would be greatly persecuted. Therefore, I’ve heard every variation of the chuckle-worthy tale in which oppressed Jehovah’s Witnesses pull one over on their tormentors.
But.
My great-grandparents also claimed to be “of the anointed.” In JW-speak, this means that they believed Jehovah God had spoken to them and revealed that they were among the elite 144,000 chosen ones, selecte
d to go to heaven and reign alongside Him as kings once He brought about a prophesied New Order of Things. This new order, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe, involves the brutal destruction of every nonbeliever at a bloody, apocalyptic Armageddon showdown, and the subsequent building of a Paradise Earth populated solely by—you guessed it—the rest of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the ones not chosen to reign as kings in heaven. They don’t tell you this stuff on your doorstep, do they?
So. Two ancestors hearing voices and with delusions of kingly grandeur. Check.
My grandmother, Iris, despite a few young years of running wild, raising Cain and living something of a double life few Witnesses would have approved of, remains in the religion to this day. She attends a Kingdom Hall (JWs don’t call them churches; they consider churches “pagan” and “of false religion”) in California, where she moved and settled down with my grandfather, Jeremiah. They are now divorced, but he is also a Jehovah’s Witness and lives a relatively sweet, unassuming life under the radar in Alabama with his second wife.
Iris Wallingford, née Mazur, carried on the precedent of crazy and inflated it to (apologies in advance for the pun) epic biblical proportions. According to family lore, she abused her three daughters physically, mentally and emotionally. Legendary tales of her heaving vacuum cleaners through the air at their heads, dragging them along the hallway by their hair until it came out by the roots in clumps or grinding pencil lead deep into their knees as they squirmed and fidgeted during two-hour Kingdom Hall meeting sessions were a staple of my childhood. This is all, of course, merely what I’ve gleaned from multiple sources’ whispered tales, including those of family members and friends…but do I believe there’s at least some truth to it? Yep. All three girls were destined to run away from home at a young age. First Louisa, the eldest, split for Hawaii, followed by my mother, Linda, at age sixteen. Mom dropped out of high school, took her GED exam and lived on Oahu with Louisa (who had spiraled into drug use) for a year or so before returning to California. Charisse, the youngest, possibly had it the worst—she was afflicted with a severe, lifelong form of alopecia, which caused her to lose her hair and endure torment at school as well as at home. Upon leaving home, she searched for solace in the arms of men, hopping from one to another and sinking two marriages with kind, loving (and non-JW) husbands due to compulsive infidelity. As of this writing, she is imprisoned in Illinois for a period of twelve years, convicted of vehicular manslaughter committed while driving under the influence for the third time. I have not seen her in ages, but, according to family members, she has also had problems with illegal drugs for years and has been “disfellowshipped,” or excommunicated, from the Jehovah’s Witnesses at least twice. Her two young children are cared for by her non-JW ex-husband, so I hold out hope that they may yet have a quasi-normal life, despite everything.
My grandmother, meanwhile, spends most of her time in a rocking chair in front of the TV at home. Once a slim, lovely young woman with mischievous eyes who attracted men like flies to honey, she has ballooned to ghastly proportions and relies on a walker to get from place to place. Her house is in a condemnable, Grey Gardens state—decades of hoarded trash and junk piled from floor to ceiling, with the exception of walking paths hewn out from room to room. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen McDonald’s containers in there dating back to the 1960s. You think I’m kidding? In Iris Wallingford’s warped mind, every bit of junk is a treasure or a memory to add to the magpie’s nest. In the past, I have attempted to spend time with my grandma, but could only ever handle her in small doses, as her grating chief hobby is living in the past, reliving imaginary grudges and slights dating back some seventy-odd years. Many of these are against her own brothers and sisters, all but one already passed on—respect for the dead means nothing to her. She and my mother hate each other with a passion. Although they attend the same congregation, they don’t speak, but always have an arsenal of nasty digs on hand ready to fling at the other. Despite Iris’s extraordinary disregard for her own health, which would seem to invite the most massive heart attack in the history of heart attacks, my mother jokes grimly that Iris will outlive us all out of spite.
I tell these stories because I think it’s important for me to establish up front, before I go into my own saga, that I believe I understand, or at least try to understand, why my mother is the way she is. For much of her life, she was indeed victimized—pair cult indoctrination from birth with unabated abuse by a bitter, raving 350-pound maniac, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. To this day, I don’t know exactly how much of my mother’s own particular instability is a product of nature or nurture, but I’ve got my suspicions that one didn’t exactly help the other.
Having returned from her less-than-successful jaunt to Hawaii, which left her broke and disillusioned for such a young kid, my mother endured a brief period of abuse again at home with Iris. At eighteen, by Jehovah’s Witness standards she was actually an old maid, though she was young, lovely and vivacious—popular at school, something of a class clown in compensation for the dark home life of which she was so ashamed. She finally escaped (or so she thought) by marrying the first man she could at nineteen, and getting pregnant with me right away.
Bob Neville. Bob was not short for Robert. Just plain Bob. He was a gawky, scarecrow-esque kid a year older than my mother, most often said to resemble Peter Pan. He definitely didn’t look like a monster.
Mom met him at the moped repair shop after an unfortunate accident in which a neighbor backing out of his driveway neglected to notice her coming up the street and ran over her scooter. She would later point out to me the hedge that had obscured the driver’s vision: “If it weren’t for that hedge, you would never have been born!” She would come to regret that damn hedge.
Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t date non–Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they definitely aren’t supposed to marry them. They view it as marrying a walking corpse—what’s the point of falling in love with someone the great and powerful Jehovah is just going to roast with a flaming meteorite at Armageddon, anyway? Members can be privately counseled, publicly reproved, disciplined or even disfellowshipped and shunned for pursuing a relationship with a nonbeliever. Ergo, Bob accepted a “Bible study” with my mother, toward the goal of conversion, and they married quickly and furtively. I was born March 6, 1985.
Bob turned out to be the classic wife beater, belying his sweetly youthful appearance. My mother claims that a week after their wedding, he woke her up in the middle of the night, accused her of cheating on him, bundled her into the car and drove her out to the desert in silence, pausing to open the door and shove her out into the sand, dumping her in only a T-shirt and no underwear. Then he drove home and went back to sleep while she walked until her feet were bloody, finally hitching a ride home from a concerned passing motorist and his wife around dawn. Other stories centered around the time Bob put my mother through a wall in their house, leaving a perfect Linda-shaped indent, and when he picked up a set of heavy stone coasters from the coffee table and started bashing his own forehead in during an argument until blood spurted and coated the furniture, all the while screaming at her as though bestowing an unavoidable curse.
“Look how much I love you! I’ll even hurt myself for you! Look what you’re making me do to myself! Look what you’re making me do to you!”
I hurt you because I love you. Of course. It was a constant refrain of his, definitely not the most original line ever thought up by an abusive husband. Interestingly, it would turn out to be a recurring theme in my own life as well, that persistent, lingering stench you just can’t get rid of no matter how hard you scrub.
My mother became pregnant again with my little sister, Molly, mere months after my birth. My sister was born on May 7, 1986 with a congenital defect requiring open-heart surgery, which set the local congregation elders in a tizzy. At that time, only a handful of infants had ever received bloodless heart surgery, and Jehovah’s Witnesses apply the archaic biblical command to “abstain from blood”
(Acts 15:29) to the ultimate possible literal interpretation—blood pudding isn’t the only no-no! The command was previously misapplied to organ transplants, considered cannibalism, for many years. However, “new light” from Jehovah eventually revealed to the old men in the head honcho seat in Brooklyn, the Governing Body of Jehovah’s Witnesses, that—oops!—organ transplants (and later blood fractions, though not whole blood itself) were OK after all. Sorry about all those faithful Witnesses who died (or allowed their children to die) under the “old light,” folks. Move along, nothing to see here.
At the time of my sister’s birth, however, even the use of medical treatments utilizing blood fractions, such as plasma, albumin, immunoglobulins and the like, were not an option for members (they didn’t become a “conscience matter” for Jehovah’s Witnesses until 1989, when Molly was three years old), and my mom, barely more than a kid herself, was beset upon by elders waving power of attorney forms in her face. Molly’s primary hospital insisted that she required a blood transfusion, and that they were prepared to go to court to seek and enforce an injunction making sure she received it. The circus reached its peak when my mother snatched my little sister from the local hospital and took her to Texas, where Dr. Denton Cooley, the world’s foremost “blood-free surgeon” (and at the time, one of only two in the United States who performed such procedures on children), completed the two operations that would save Molly’s life and leave her with her two scars: a thick, ropey one all the way down from sternum to belly button, and a thin crescent-shaped one under her left breast, toward her armpit. Though only a year old at the time, I distinctly recall the sight of my frail, emaciated sister in a hospital crib, wailing, covered in tubes and surrounded by stuffed animals my mother purchased for her. Her crib and hospital apparatus were all covered in large stickers bearing the words “Jehovah’s Witness—No Blood!” Moll’s recovery and success story were heralded by Jehovah’s Witnesses everywhere as a triumph of Jehovah over Satan, and proof that their religion’s ways were the best after all.
