The Girl's Guide to Homelessness

by Brianna Karp

  “You should take the TV,” she responded. “They might want it.” I doubted it, but wasn’t much in the mood for argument. Feeling like a vulture, I held my breath and darted back, reaching behind the splattered armoire and unplugging the television. I reached up to pull it down, and it caught on the corner, which to my surprise jiggled open. It was then that I realized: The top bar of the armoire was a shallow, secret pull-out drawer. It wasn’t immediately obvious; Carol would have missed it. My washcloth hands probed inside, and came up with sheaves of papers—vehicle registration titles, insurance cards, bank statements, checkbooks, receipts, mail…a wealth of information. My eyes bugged into Ping-Pong balls, Muppet-style.

  The titles were for two old Wave Runner Jet Skis, a beat-up dirt bike we found in an outside shed, a large GE delivery/moving truck with an electronic lift, a fourteen-foot Bayliner boat and the Dodge Ram. All these vehicles were on the premises. There was also a title for a thirty-foot Fan Coach trailer, which was not. All the items were older, mid-’80s to early ’90s, except for the 1999 Dodge Ram. The locksmith we had hired cut new keys, and I clambered into Bob’s former Dodge as my parents hooked up the boat and Jet Skis for towing. It felt strange to be sitting there, in a dead man’s truck. It was filthy; buried in dust, paperwork and random odds and ends. I began sorting, throwing out the trash and keeping little items I thought might prove sentimental or meaningful to Patty and Penny: a pair of sunglasses, a wristwatch, a baseball. I also analyzed the bank statements and checkbooks. From what I could tell, there was no money left in any of his accounts, including the joint ones he shared with his mother. He had not only blown every last dollar of his own, but her entire hard-earned life savings.

  Disturbed, I continued my methodical digging through the truck. In the center compartment between the seats, my hand brushed against a Walmart photo pack. My heart skipped a beat. I pulled out the photos. Bob with hunting buddies. The bed of the truck down, tiny decapitated doves lined up as trophies. A deer carcass. I flipped past these impatiently, squinching my eyes shut, perceiving tinges of cruelty from him even now. Photos of the inside of a trailer, which I guessed was the Fan Coach, possibly for insurance purposes. And then…I had them. Images of Patty and Penny, wearing orange life jackets, astride the two Wave Runners on the lake. All toothy smiles and gangly limbs. He had loved them. Again, I thought back to Molly, bursting into tears on the phone. I had told her about Patty and Penny and she wanted to speak with them. Perhaps she wondered why he could love them and not her, dying in a hospital crib, a “Jehovah’s Witness— No Blood!” sticker humorously stuck to her soft infant forehead. I hoped against hope that such a thought would never occur to her, although I feared it already had.

  Patty and Penny decided that they would like to have the Jet Skis. They would be towed out to Texas, a tangible reminder of their father. The dirt bike and boat would be sold and they would also receive the money from the sale. My mother and sister would take the delivery truck and sell it, keeping the proceeds from that sale. Molly also expressed an interest in the Fan Coach camping trailer, but couldn’t come up with the time or funds to have it towed to her in Arizona, so she gave up on getting that. The entire division of property was settled quickly, in a completely amicable way and devoid of resentment or greed, for which I was thankful. That left me with the Dodge Ram and the trailer, if we could ever figure out where the trailer was stored.

  The truck could definitely come in handy, I knew. But what the hell will I do with a damn trailer?! It was the proverbial big white elephant of Bob’s property. Meh. Probably sell it, when I get a chance.

  Dennis called me a couple of nights later, the evening before he was to fly up to San Francisco to audition for admission to the Juilliard School of the Performing Arts.

  “Wish me luck, babe.”

  I did so, quietly. We began a long talk in which I regaled him with my adventures swanning through a suicide scene, laughing bleakly at the absurdity of the whole thing.

  And then he told me that he wanted to move on with Mysti.

  Tears. Anger. Accusations.

  And finally, “Look, Bri, I want you in my life. I’m not opposed to us trying again at a later date, if this doesn’t work out. But this is what my heart wants. I know it’s wrong and I know it makes me a bad person, and I might despise myself for it. But my heart wants it, don’t you understand?”

  Fuck you. Fuck you to hell, I cried out bitterly, deep in my splitting rib cage.

  “Yes. I understand, Dennis.”

  “You’re my best friend, Bri. You know more about me in so many ways than anybody else. I don’t want to lose this closeness, this amazing friendship we have. I want you in my life. Please stay in my life.”

  Fuck you, you goddamn son of a bitch.

  “Yes. I’ll stay. I love you and I’ll wait.” I hated myself for my weakness, my pathos. I should have been stronger than this and I knew it. Looking back, I probably didn’t even really love him—I was just a sap who couldn’t lose my final tenuous grip on the possibility of happiness and love.

  Pause.

  “OK, then. I’ll call you when I get back from San Francisco. I promise.”

  I believed him.

  He didn’t call.

  I never heard from Dennis again.

  Chapter Three

  I had chosen to leave home as soon as I was legally able to at eighteen, but was once again grudgingly living with my parents. The only reason I had returned was that suddenly, and unexpectedly, I was unable to continue making rent payments following the loss of my job, despite my struggle to do so using my unemployment checks. If I had felt I had any choice in the matter, I would never—never—have returned to that house, the site of so many deeply rooted, discomfiting memories.

  It was an incongruously gorgeous day, the afternoon I was laid off. I had been the executive assistant to the VP of Human Resources and admin to the entire HR department at Kelley Blue Book for just under a year. And I loved—loved—my job.

  I had held many positions before this one. At the age of ten, I was sent by my mother to work at a tanning salon she frequented. They were looking for a front-desk girl. At first glance, it was easy for me to pass as a little older than I was—maybe fourteen. I carried myself well and was a quiet, solemn kid with a formidable vocabulary for my age. Nobody ever questioned it. I was paid under the table for eleven months and proved myself capable of taking on ever-increasing responsibility, even being left alone in charge of the salon. One day, I wheeled my bike into the building, direct from my routine sixth-grade schoolday, to find movers shuffling out hairdressing stations and tanning beds like blubbery white whales. Lily and Tina, the two stylists who had become my closest friends and confidants, hovered helplessly, fuming and confused. Rachael, the salon owner, had decided to return to her home country of Israel. Without notice, the three of us were out of work.

  I went on to work for my mother’s husband’s company, Hill & Canyon Aquatics Services—a pool/pond/waterfall maintenance service, which also operated a store called the Koi Pond Shoppe, dealing in various brands of koi fish. All unpaid, natch. I learned administrative and accounting principles from the ground up by trying to balance the books of my dad’s chaotic office, buried under invoices and files dating back to the late 1980s. I even learned how to give medical injections to new shipments of fish added to our inventory, without feeling squeamish at gripping their glistening, flapping wet bodies in one hand and plunging a needle in with the other, before flipping them into their new tanks.

  The Koi Pond Shoppe eventually closed down due to lack of business, but I continued working with koi. Hill & Canyon had performed the maintenance on Disneyland Hotel’s ponds and waterfalls for several years, and I took over the Disney account at age twelve. My mother obtained a work permit for me and persuaded Disney security to provide me with an employee badge. Disney would not hire employees under sixteen, but the technicality was that I worked for a subcontractor, so the Happiest Place on Earth did
not bother to check my age. I ended up with a photo ID of myself, heavily made-up with dark lipstick and mascara to make me look older, and free access to Disneyland at any time.

  I also found myself performing a koi fish feeding show at the hotel pond one to two times a day, depending on the season. This involved answering (or at least, making up plausible-sounding answers to) the most common questions that guests asked about the fish, and trying to keep people from flooding the feeding platform. “One person at a time, please!” “I need you to stay behind that line until it’s your turn, please, ma’am!” I became used to shouting above the din of tourists bedecked in white jean shorts, purple fanny packs and Mickey Mouse ears. One by one, guests would step onto the feeding platform, take a fistful of food and lean out above the pond. Three hundred koi, ranging from a few inches long to a few feet (my favorite, fondly dubbed “André the Giant,” was the largest at nearly four feet long with a smooth, abnormally bulging yellow forehead—a freak like me, I thought), popped their mouths open and closed expectantly. It was at this point that many would lose their nerve and simply toss the food in. The bravest, who chose to believe my assurance that the fish would not, could not hurt them, would thrust their hands into the sea of sucking fish and generally let out a squeal of delight and/or surprise at the sensation of the Hoover-esque mouths drawing the food from between their clenched fingers, accompanied by a very satisfied smacking noise that made the crowd laugh. Flashbulbs went off, capturing laughing relatives and, more than once, screaming children insisting that the fish did have teeth and were biting their fingers off (yet, they always stood in line for a second turn).

  One might rightfully wonder just how I made my way to work every day. My hometown of Fullerton bordered Anaheim, but it was still a good ten-mile drive to the Disneyland Hotel. The truth is, I started driving at twelve. My mother, sick of driving me to work and losing valuable sleep time, taught me to drive an automatic transmission. This was not as easy as I initially supposed. The mechanics of operating the car were easy enough—I was a tall kid and could reach the pedals—and I quickly grasped the rules of the road. My mom’s teaching skills, however, left much to be desired. I vividly remember an incident on the freeway where I, not seeing another car in my blind spot, signaled a lane change and found my mother’s hand snarled in my hair, my face smashed over and over into the steering column as I screamed in pain, desperately grasping the wheel and holding it as straight as I could to keep from swerving all over the road. Eventually, I managed to pull off to the freeway shoulder and weep hysterically, shaking, as my mother continued crushing my head against the wheel and window, blood flowing from my nose and smearing my bruised face. Finally, she stopped, instructed me to start up the car and continue driving to our destination. She would only snap shortly, “Don’t ever do that again. Watch where the fuck you’re going.”

  Once I was thoroughly trained and trusted with the car, however, I was sent out daily to work, or to drop off and pick up my sister at school, or just to run the odd errand for my mother. I was only told, “Don’t get pulled over.” And I never did. In the beginning I was terrified that a cop would catch me and that I would be in huge trouble for operating a freaking piece of heavy transportation machinery a full four years before I was authorized to get my license. It never really occurred to me that my mother could get in trouble for this. My mother might as well have been God, for all I knew. If anything, I assumed that if I were found out, she would tell police that I had stolen her car. Eventually, though, I got more comfortable with the whole arrangement, even cocky. I became an incredibly safe driver and stopped worrying about being caught. I wasn’t allowed to take the car out on my own wherever I liked, but I would often stay for hours at the Disneyland Hotel, far longer than it took me to complete the koi feeding show, leaning on the locked gate and staring down at my fish. They knew me, I liked to think. They would conglomerate into a great mass and stare up at me with buggy eyes, wrestling and bumping each other to get closer to me. Probably hoping for more food, I knew, but in my fantasies they had built-in, individual personalities in each of their fishy little brains. They were happy to see me when nobody else was. They were my friends. They were calm amid the hurricane.

  Throughout my teens, I continued to work several evening and weekend part-time jobs. I was a restaurant hostess at Bobby McGee’s, parading through the foyer, soft curling ostrich feathers flopping in sausage-curled hair, grandly waving a fake wooden shotgun as “Sinful Sal,” the resident saloon girl. A customer later complained about the implications of an innocent, blue-eyed, fifteen-year-old proclaiming herself “sinful,” and I was renamed “Shotgun Sal,” which was somehow apparently much better and more tyke-appropriate. I proudly kept two more cap pistols in satin garters next to my fishnet stockings, which I would pull out at inappropriate moments to fire at other servers or at small children. I went on to host at Orange Hill Restaurant, a four-star affair perched atop a winding hill with a breathtaking view of Orange County. I worked as a receptionist for a veterinarian, for Blockbuster Video as a manager, for an insurance company, for a law office and for another salon as a shampoo girl. My tenures averaged one to two years; I simply worked two or even three jobs at a time in addition to attending school full time. The more I could work, the less I would have to be at home. I didn’t get to keep much of my earnings—every pay period I would sadly watch my paycheck swallowed up into my mom’s hand. “You know we need this, Brianna,” she would say, catching my eye once or twice as I gazed sadly at the $15 or $20 she would hand me back as spending money with which to buy myself clothes or school supplies. Why won’t you work, too?! I always wanted to ask. Why do I have to support all of you? Why do I have to be so tired, work so hard and watch it all disappear—all for nothing? I tried to console myself with the thought that the money was buying food for Molly and me. But oftentimes Mom would simply go on a manic spending spree and bring home something beautiful but completely impractical and unnecessary. My money bought that, I would realize, too exhausted even to be indignant.

  I was twenty-two when I hopped onboard at Kelley Blue Book in 2007. My boss was Liz Haut, VP of Human Resources and all-around Mama Bear of KBB. Liz was easily the most beloved person at the company. The year I was hired, she celebrated her fortieth year of employment with KBB. Liz knew the name of everyone at an expanding company of over five hundred people, and they could enter her office at any time with problems or in search of a shoulder to cry on, and they would find it. Human Resources tends to get a bad rap. They’re viewed as the superficial, uncaring, empty-headed bimbos of the corporate world. HR, I have come to find out, is often all about how to screw over an employee with a smile plastered on your face, in favor of the company itself. It was not so with Kelley Blue Book. Despite its sheer size, there was a family feel to the place. Coworkers liked and respected one another; in the time I was there, it was very rare to see personality conflicts or egoist pissing matches. Perhaps best of all, the Human Resources department cared about seeing everybody happy. It was new for me to work for a company that I believed in. I had never done that before. While there have been both positive and negative aspects to every job I had ever held, it was all just filler until I could find my permanent position. I knew full well that I wasn’t going to be a shampoo girl or a receptionist forever. When restaurant managers would encourage me to work my way up from hostess to server, I would recoil in horror. There was nothing wrong with serving—it’s a good, honorable profession—but I didn’t love working in a restaurant or in retail. It didn’t thrill me to my core and make me think This is it. This is where I’m going to work my way as high as I can go and then retire.

  At KBB, for the first time I did think that I could see myself working here until I was old and gray. I could still enjoy coming into this company, to these people, ten or twenty years down the road. I didn’t want to leave. Running committee meetings, planning company Halloween and Christmas bashes, the thought recurred to me: I. Fucking. Love. My.
Job. I had made it. I had arrived. I was twenty-two, pulling in $50K a year, for the first time working only one full-time job instead of three part-time ones, and it could only go up from here. I had the entire package: boyfriend, home and a killer job. I plastered my cubicle with a collage of artwork—funny photos that spoke to me, stills from old black-and-white films, animals, acquaintances, me and Dennis at county fairs. I established my mark, my permanence. This cubicle would always be my area, my sanctuary—I wouldn’t allow myself to lose it.

  I rented myself a tiny six-hundred-square-foot craftsman cottage in Costa Mesa, California, boxed in by tall, carved Indonesian gates. I also adopted a giant, slobbery, jowly Neapolitan Mastiff puppy as my companion and guardian.

  The dog was listed on Petfinder.com by Karma Rescue of Los Angeles under the name of Dre. He had been turned into an LA shelter by a furtive couple who swore, with averted eyes, that he was not theirs—they had just found him running loose. Honest. Dre was about a year old, wore a rather expensive black leather collar studded with silver spikes and was still in possession of an impressive pair of swinging balls. The shelter was hours from putting him down when Karma Rescue pulled him out, swiftly neutering the goofy lug and placing him in a foster home with Barbara DeSantis, wife of director and TV writer Larry Charles.

  A large-breed dog lover, I was passively searching for a Great Dane or Newfoundland when I came across Dre’s photo. It was love at first sight, and my passive interest immediately became an active one. I fired off an email inquiring as to his availability and waited tensely. I was lucky. Karma had posted Dre’s photo online mere minutes before I stumbled across it. Mine was the first inquiry, and following a meet-and-greet and a home inspection, I was approved to adopt him.