I turned to find Fleet, but she had already left. I couldn’t keep standing there. I wasn’t thinking how lucky we were that the car stopped in the street, instead of hurtling onto the sidewalk. That’s what you think later. I just wanted to get away. The crowd stayed on the corner and murmured. Ash kept talking and gesturing, everyone pushed up around him.
“He could have fucking killed us,” he said. “Or her.” He pointed at a lady pushing a stroller on the other side of the street.
The next day I pulled out one of Cade’s cards I’d found on the sidewalk and called. I didn’t want to use Dave’s phone because Ash had it with him, stashed in the bottom of his pack. I waited until dinner and called from the shelter. No one noticed because Ash was still telling his story. He’d even told it to a news station, which was putting it on TV, he said. They were going to call him and the kids from Portland the homeless heroes.
chapter 27
The room had a single bed, a dresser, and a miniature refrigerator. The uneven wooden floor was painted pale blue. Root snuffled around the edges of the room and climbed onto the bed. Cade said the room was mine, I could stay as long as I wanted. I probably looked like I didn’t believe her because she said that yes, it was a two-way street. I had to demonstrate that I could make good choices and, eventually, I’d have to pay some rent. The program could only go so far. I could live in the room forever, but there were rules. Everyone had to be in school or rehab or have a job. And there would be chores and a mandatory support group. I told her it seemed like a lot. It wasn’t that bad, she said.
“Did she use the line about giving people fishing poles instead of fish,” Ash said, when I went to 40 Hill to pick up some of my stuff. “It’s what they told us in Wyoming. You give people tools instead of a handout and then they can take care of themselves.”
He said go ahead if I wanted, he was not signing on for another program where people were checking on him every day. When did I become the kind of person who’d go for that? I didn’t tell him that it was when that guy in the car pushed his pedal all the way down and drove straight at us. I had no idea what was going to happen. I felt that way all the time. Something was coming for me and would never stop. Maybe the car had nothing to do with it and I was mixing everything together. But I could not keep jumping out of the way.
He headed off to the shelter for dinner and I almost yelled at him to wait for me. Root and I trailed behind, all the way to the bus stop. I stood there, holding a bag of dog food, my jacket and extra sweatshirt. Ash didn’t turn to look back, so I sat and waited for the bus.
I said I would move in for a month, which is how long you had to stay if you took a room. They said it was part of the investment you had to make. I filled out the forms with fake information, the same way I did at the Valencia. Cade said not to worry, that no one was checking. There were some secrets I was not ready to give up, so I wrote what I wanted.
Father: deceased
Mother: unknown
Last address: the world.
I left the sections on goals and job experience empty. Who do you want us to contact in case of emergency? I left that blank too.
Ash pretended nothing had happened when I came by the park. Sometimes I spent the day with him. I told him he could come by my room and check it out. I wasn’t going to trick him into living there. The program didn’t have a curfew like Jay House. No one hassled me about when I got back. I had my own set of keys and I could come and go when I wanted. There was a guy downstairs in a gray uniform and badge, but he acted like they were paying him to play games on his phone. He seemed to know me by sight; he never asked for my ID card before hitting a button under his desk and letting me in.
For two years I’d never slept all through the night, not even when I stayed in the shelter. I thought it would be different when I moved inside. I would sink into a bed in a room that was my own and the next thing I knew it would be morning. I liked the room, the color of the floor and the bed pushed against the wall, the way you like something because it’s yours. But I couldn’t get used to it. I thought someone was going to bust in the door so I’d lie there, listening, or I woke up sweating and didn’t know where I was. One night I dreamed I was back at Karen and Chip’s hiding under my bed, waiting for Karen to find me, and I woke up shouting. Then I lay in bed, hearing car tires whisking along the street, music from a boom box. Red and green lights from the street signal flashed against the blinds. I heard doors opening and shutting, the weird ticking and breathing of the room, but otherwise it was quiet. It should have comforted me, but it didn’t. I couldn’t stay in one position long. I turned on my side, then on my back. It didn’t seem right to look up and see a blank ceiling instead of trees outlined on the night sky or to roll over without feeling the warm slight body of Ash.
Every week I had to go to a meeting downstairs. Cade sometimes came to lead it. She’d go around the room and ask everyone how they were doing. You could skip your turn and go meet with her later, which is usually what I did. You were supposed to say what had happened since last time, but she had a rule about including one good thing. If there was nothing good that had happened, you could use something from a few weeks, or even years ago. It was important to leave positive energy behind, she said. You could talk about slipping up and using again or being too bummed to get out of bed or look for a job, but then you had to offer up something good. My first week, the guy who lived next door to me said he came out to his mother and she said she never wanted to see him again and then he missed a meeting with his probation officer, so he was on double probation. But he ended by saying that there was an opening at the bakery around the corner and after he applied, the owner said she was going to see what she could do. She’d hugged him on the way out.
When it came to me, I said I didn’t have anything, but everyone piled on. “Come on, Maddy, step up.” Root lay by my feet, like he was the only one on my side.
Cade told them to give me time, which made me want to tell her to stay out of it. She didn’t know me as well as she thought. I said that a friend kept giving me a hard time and I didn’t know what to do about that. But I was in my old neighborhood the other day and people said hey, like I’d never left. I could go back there any time. What I didn’t say out loud was I wasn’t sure anymore. I hadn’t even seen Fleet or Hope. The people in the room looked at me like they already knew who I was. Maybe I could get used to that.
“Thanks, Maddy,” they said.
When everyone else left the room, Cade came over and told me good going, that it would get easier. She said I reminded her of the way she used to be, which she thought might not be fair.
“Easier how?” I said. It seemed like everyone tried to take up all the space, at the support group then the house meeting, where we had to decide everything by consensus and if one person disagreed, we had to start in again on finding a solution. We had to agree on what tea to buy, how to stack the plastic chairs, where we should store the extra toilet paper, how often we’d clean the shared kitchens on each floor. I couldn’t make myself join in.
“It was easier after I made myself tell the truth,” said Cade.
I walked back to my room and sat on the floor, looking out the window. No wonder Ash didn’t want to live here. He didn’t want to be told what to do. Cold air seeped in from outside so I put on another sweatshirt and then I started pacing around the room to get warm but also, I could not stay still because even I had to see that Cade was right. Except I wasn’t like her. I didn’t know what was true.
Ash came over the next day and said he’d signed up for a biology class. If he was going to take three buses for an hour and sit in a classroom, he wanted to learn something that wasn’t obvious, that he couldn’t teach himself. He said he could figure out computer coding at the library. He’d smoked so much that the smell came into the room before him. I’d have to tell the group that it wasn’t me, even though they wouldn’t rat me out. No one cared. I almost wished I could go to the biology class so I
wouldn’t have to pick an activity. Technically I had to do something. I could not go sit in a library, which would have been my first choice. There was a list of classes at the front desk, which took place all over the city. Easy Cooking, Mindful De-stress, Money Matters. I signed up for a photography class because it met downstairs. I didn’t want to hike across town with Root to the community college. I’d stopped making him wear the muzzle they’d put on him at the dog jail, but he’d need it over there. I couldn’t stand to look at him, shaking his head and rubbing the muzzle against the wall. And he barked if I wasn’t with him in my room. He used to sit next to Fleet’s rabbit and do nothing, but he went crazy if he was alone and heard someone outside in the hallway. Cade said that was normal, that he would adjust. She’d started taking him to her office while I was in the photography class. Maybe he’d end up being a therapy dog and help people recover from trauma, she said. That was fine as long as he remembered when he needed to protect me, I told her. I didn’t want him forgetting that.
The first day of class the teacher asked how many of us had experience taking pictures. “Even with one of these.” She pulled a cell phone out of a square canvas bag on her desk. “These are fast becoming the tool anyone can use.” I was one of the only people who didn’t raise a hand. She said she used to carry heavy cameras all over the world and was angry when everything went digital. No, actually, she was insulted, she said. It meant anyone could use a camera and the art of photography was lost. But then she started thinking the opposite. Film was expensive. New cameras were lighter. If they were more democratic, maybe that was a good thing. She turned off the lights and projected some of her pictures on the wall so we could see for ourselves, she said.
The first pictures, in black-and-white, showed people and the things they owned. Someone had paid her to go around California and document people standing outside with their furniture and clothes and dishes and cooking pots. I wondered how she convinced them to haul it all outside, to make those trips back and forth for someone they didn’t know. She said she learned that possessions were important, but they weren’t what defined people. When I looked at the people in her pictures, I thought they seemed annoyed that some lady with a camera had made them act like a moving company. Not many of them were smiling. One man stood with his hands on his wife’s shoulders, his two little boys in shorts and bare feet, in front of a table and chairs, two mattresses on a frame made from thick ropes, stacks of plastic bins full of rice bags, cereal boxes, powdered milk, and canned food. He was looking right at the camera, proud, like he was daring the photographer to try and take it away.
Then she showed us pictures of people who lived outside, posed next to their stuff. She had asked them to arrange it however they wanted. Some piled everything in carts and others sat in the middle of a mess of sleeping bags and blankets and clothes. They didn’t seem to notice she was there or they were thinking who cares, one more person seeing what they want. She said she felt more intrusive with people who lived outside, so she started handing out cameras and asking them to take their own pictures.
The guy who lived in the room next to me stood in the hallway, craning his head to watch. The teacher asked him if he wanted to come in and he sat down loudly in a chair near the door. When she turned on the lights, it took a minute to see clearly. The eyes were slow to adjust, she said, while cameras could change in an instant, which should be a reminder. They were not interchangeable. Don’t forget that, she said, while she began handing out small black cameras to all of us.
She said we were going to spend the first week learning how to use them. She snapped a picture of us sitting around the room, then walked around and showed it to us. You might not recognize yourself, she said, but this shows the beginning of our relationship. People don’t know what they look like on film. They are always surprised. She told us to take pictures of whatever we wanted. Don’t think too much or censor yourself, she said. Everyone started to mob her with questions: What were the two buttons on the side for? Where were the batteries? Could we just use cell phones if we had them? She held up a hand to shut us up. We didn’t need to know anything technical, she said. Push the button on the top right to take a shot whenever we felt like it. Start off like that. Concentrate on what was in front of us instead of what was in our head.
There was only one big rule, she said. We could keep the cameras if we showed up and completed the class. Miss a class without permission and you have to give up your camera. They’d been donated by some company downtown, so try not to lose them, she said. The guy from next door was turning his over in his hands like he was figuring out how fast he could sell it on the street.
I hid my camera under my sweatshirt when I went outside and took it out to take pictures in the neighborhood. At one corner, there were six signs jammed on a single pole saying where the freeway entrance was, what time you could park, when the street would get cleaned, all yelling different directions like someone too mixed up to make up his mind. I pointed the camera sideways, then straight on, trying to catch it all. I told myself not to think but I wasn’t sure how to do that, to stop talking to myself.
I could not take pictures of people. I knew what that felt like, someone coming up and aiming a camera at you. People believed what they saw, but it was not the same as what was really there. The teacher said I should try to get out of my comfort zone. I should introduce myself, I’d be surprised how many people wanted to be open. If only she knew. There were so many people who had my face stored on their phones. Homeless girl. Gave her money on Haight Street. Told her not to spend it on drugs. I didn’t talk to them, but I took their quarters and dimes and dollars, their quick sorry looks.
One day I went over near the park and took a photo of Jax. I thought it might be easier than going up to strangers. He was parked on the sidewalk outside the corner grocery with two of his buddies sitting against the wall. He was halfway through a bottle of vodka, but he looked like someone had taken him inside and given him a bath. His face was sunburned and swollen. “Girlfriend,” he said. “Is the world getting better or worse?”
“Still rotating,” I said and took the bottle he offered. The gulp of vodka tasted like acid. I held up the camera so he’d see it before I started snapping pictures. I thought he would say something, but he acted like he didn’t notice. I took shots of his face from where I was standing and then close up. His eyes were crinkled into slits. There was a long scar along one of his ears.
“Am I going to be on the news?” he said. “Because it wouldn’t be the first time. You know I was in Vietnam. That’s how I hurt my foot.” Then he laughed and started coughing. “But you know I’m a liar.”
“We all are,” I said, and I took another few pictures.
“But he’s a hero just for going over there,” said one of the guys sitting against the wall. “Unlike a lot of other people.”
“Don’t listen to him,” said Jax. “He drinks.” I couldn’t remember if his bad leg was always bandaged. The wrapping was partway off, covered in dirt. He saw me looking at the hospital band on his wrist.
“Reminds me who I am,” he said, jiggling it. “I had an infection, but they cleared it up.”
I kept my camera up in front of me, so he’d have a chance to tell me not to take more pictures. He argued with the other guys about who was going to buy the next bottle.
“You want to get a round?” he said.
I told him sorry, I didn’t have any money either. He and the guys kept talking, and I stood close and took more pictures like I was one of the tourists who couldn’t stop. I had planned to erase all the pictures of him as soon as I got back to my room, but I kept them so I could show Ash. He was already giving me a hard time about taking the photo class because where was it going to lead? But he would get how it felt to watch Jax and know what he was thinking, which was that he was taking care of getting what he needed. He wasn’t thinking about me.
The next week, the teacher told us to take pictures in our own rooms. S
he walked up and down the hallway, making suggestions. Lie on your stomach and look up while you’re shooting. Stand and look down. Look away and then turn and shoot quickly. Try and look at all your possessions and see them for the first time. Spread them around the room, then put them in a neat pile. Decide for yourself, she said, if you want to be in the picture.
I didn’t have much, but I piled all of it on my bed next to Root: clothes from the free box, packages of ramen noodles, Root’s food dish, one of Ash’s signs, need food. I took pictures from every side of the room. I went out to the hallway and looked at the mess of my things and then sat on the edge of the window, until the teacher came in and told me to stop, I was going to fall. She put her arms around my waist and gently led me away from the window, but I hadn’t even looked down at the street. I was too focused on my stuff and how, when I saw it through the camera, I wasn’t sure I recognized it. Even Root, staring at me, looked different, a medium-size dog, mismatched eyes, an expression that said he was not surprised.
“Don’t get disoriented,” said the teacher, loosening her arms. “Everything looks strange when you hold up a camera. You don’t see what’s there. You see your take on what’s there.”
I went to the park and brought back what I’d left there and took pictures of that too, still in plastic bags, except for the letters to my mom. I spread those on top of the rest of my things like bread you’d throw out to birds. You couldn’t read what I’d written. It was out of focus, so no one would know what it said. I took more pictures while Root found and ate a power bar with the wrapper still on it. I caught a photo of him with it hanging out of his mouth, full of drool. He was looking me in the eyes—you caught me, you know me, guilty as shit.
The next day in class the teacher held my photo of Root up for everyone to see. When she asked who liked it, everyone raised their hands.
“Why is this so good?” she said. She didn’t wait for answers. “Because you can see this person’s relationship to her belongings, especially the dog. You feel like you know her in some small way.”
At the Edge of the Haight Page 22
