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EASING ON DOWN THE ROAD

TO SKID ROW

Part Two of  EMANCIPATION

by Derrick Harrison Hurd

December 2010

“Just say a lot of crazy things and the government will give you money,” Adam tells me as he takes yet another hit on his magna-bong, “worked for me,” he adds, but leaves out the fact that he really has dementia.

A long time survivor of HIV, he had not survived entirely intact, which made consistency in conversation sometimes difficult, and he rarely remembered things I had said; and importantly in this case, what he had promised…in point the thousand dollar loan he had offered to save me from eviction.

“God never closes a door without opening a window,” he told me in response to my reminder about the eviction; which was true but not exactly comforting given the bullet that I had hoped to dodge but which was now headed straight for my head through an open window.

It was, of course, unreasonable and a testament to my chronic sense of entitlement that reliance upon friends to bail me out had caught me so off guard. I threw up on him and then passed out...not intentionally, of course, but he had just had back surgery and tending to my rancid fallen corpse put him back in the hospital.

As I bid the EMT’s adieu and left the apartment that Adam and his lover had retreated to when bankruptcy took the big house I was shuffling and besmirched with my own vomit. Thus I greeted day number ten with five days remaining of having a home to return to. It was a beautiful day, exquisite really, but as it faded with it went even the delusion of redemption to be replaced with an unwelcome morass of blind fears.
  

The walk home from Adam’s place took an hour and a half to walk under the best of circumstances…these were not the best of circumstances and it took me more than three hours to finally…finally, reach home with a combination of desperate need for a bed and rapture that when I opened the door I could put all of my fears briefly behind me.

Any doubt I may have had about my roommate’s intention to vacate the apartment we had shared for six years was summarily withdrawn with the sight of stacked packing boxes and a note requesting that I move all of my possessions to the back of the apartment to make room for the movers who were coming for the furniture (all of which, with the exception of a television, was his.)

“What do I do now?” I said out loud, standing on the balcony overlooking the trees and beyond that the red RENAISSANCE HOTEL a mere two blocks away. The bluster of wind on my face seemed to echo Adam’s comment about open windows and for the first time I let go of my denial and accepted the reality of what was happening; not the responsibility yet...that takes more time.

But I had saved some time by vaulting over the other four proscribed stages of dying (as proposed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in ON DEATH AND DYING). I had lingered as long as possible in denial, right up to the final days, so I really didn’t see the need to traverse the entire spectrum: anger, bargaining, and depression, and skipped right to  “what the fuck” stage.

After five years of not being able to find a job and having exhausted even the extended unemployment benefits I was now in the unenviable position of visiting old friends I had not seen in some time with my hat in my hand, so to speak. Among my current group of friends I was the best off, meaning I actually had a roof over my head and was able to come up (more or less magically) with enough money to feed my cat and keep myself in cigarettes (my two unswerving priorities, in that order).

I had published a whole series of articles about the lifestyles of the young, gay, homeless population in Hollywood, which had turned out to be more about how good-looking straight guys were keeping themselves well supplied with drugs by catering to older men with nice houses. In other words, although technically homeless, they never went without housing and often even found themselves overbooked and pressed for time.

I had interviewed a number of these very intelligent, articulate, and even charismatic boys – all of whom were expensively dressed by their various “mentors” and usually had very large collections of shoes, I noticed. Shoes and Blackberries were hallmarks of the boys I interviewed as their plied their trade.

Gabriel was one of these when I met him at seventeen, but unlike the others, my relationship with him had endured long past the point where the interviews ended. I fell in love with him…everyone did, he told me that himself at our first interview. He counted on it. I had told him that I wouldn’t, but we both knew better. The thing is, though, I think he loved me too…but I would, wouldn’t I? I mean making people fall in love with him was his job, and he was very good at it.

I did not provide drugs for these boys, in this way I distinguished myself in Gabriel’s eyes, that and that I never made a pass at him, or reacted to the ones he made at me (mostly because they were comically blatant and obviously performed as a rote protocol of manners: upon arrival you take off your clothes, dance around a little, do a few hip thrusts emphasizing your estimable physical attributes…and the evening is off and running). After a while Gabriel replaced this tribal right of introduction by saying “Can we skip it this time?” to which the answer was always yes, until after a year or so he stopped asking.

In the last of my life in Hollywood, Gabriel’s nocturnal visits (usually to let me take care of him for a while as he went through the agonizing process of recovering from the binges that were beginning to cost him some of his self-esteem, and more important, were beginning to affect his motor control, his right hand had begun to shake uncontrollably) had come to an end, a stunning end at which he unveiled for me a testament to an unconventional love: my name and his beautifully splashed across the walls of a concrete dam.

Now torn between his male lover – who genuinely loved him and who provided an endless supply of the drugs for him, and his girlfriend – who genuinely loved him and had gotten herself off of drugs in order to save him, he would disappear for months at a time only to return broken and disillusioned. To this day I don’t know which of his two lovers he loved the most…the drugs and absence of them made that difficult to distinguish.

Gabriel was an artist and he did a lot of his best work at my place, so my walls were covered with wildly imaginative pictures and drawings and the various portraits of him that I treasured, almost as much as I did his visits, which were filled with laughter and real connection…at least that’s how I saw it. He probably wasn’t nearly as committed to me as I was to him, actually this was made obvious by the fact that he could leave as easily as he did and be gone for as long as he was.

As I was facing homelessness I realized that Gabriel was practically the only friend I had left and turning to him for help was clearly out of the question…although he would have done what he could; I never asked where the food and cigarettes that he provided me with came from, but I knew that he shoplifted the cat food; he was proud of that…especially when he produced things like cat jungle gyms and rather large stuffed toys for her.

But…when faced with homelessness, and having run out of options, I decided to hit the fund raising trail and call up some old friends…how bitter a pill this project would turn out to be.

In general, having now had this experience, I would suggest the following: an inconvenient friend will be met with just about the same enthusiasm as an inconvenient truth. When I was rich I was the kind of guy that took in strays of all kinds, I did this with the kind of generosity that is only possible for the rich; none of the people that I had taken care of were rich now… and I was not a young pretty stray (which I now realize they all were at the time.)

I could rail and rant at the injustice…but unfortunately understand it. I had mistakenly thought that my willingness to beg and humiliate myself would endear me to the list of people that I called out of the blue to ask for money, or housing, or a job, or some kind of direction.

One of my “friends,” the only one who truly owed me a debt of some consequence (which he had often acknowledged in casual conversation) said to me, “it would be like throwing money in a ditch to help you out.”

Another took a deep breath and said with deep sincerity, “God help you if I am your only hope.” He also suggested that I contact this person, and that person, all of whom in his opinion owed me more than he and hence bore more of the responsibility of me. I did not tell him about the list, or the fact that he was the first name on it.

Every one of these calls was an individual and singular experiment in devastation, after which none of my calls, not even the routine and innocent ones, were not returned at all. But…as I say…I do understand it and so will not mention names. The names I do want to mention are the exceptions, and they were a real surprise to me.

As I crossed off the names from the list, about half-way through…sometimes made blurry by the tears shed during the anguished process of making the calls…I decided to concentrate on finding a home for Katchi, my cat, which I now realized I would have to do and mistakenly thought would be an easier task.

Day by day there was less and less of my world to hold onto. The one thing I had was my cat. Katchi was given to me because although she somehow walked all the way from San Pedro to Hollywood to return to a home, the family currently residing there did not want her.

Instead she had been poisoned and her back leg broken in a trap. Mange-ridden and cloudy-eyed she could barely drag herself around my apartment when she first beheld her new home.

For two weeks I woke up bloody because she would snuggle up against and purr all night long digging her claws into my flesh…and no amount of pain could compel me to stop her. Her delight at having traveled so far and suffered so much to find me made the pain and the blood a small price to pay.

We had been together for two years and her greetings at the door whenever I returned from pointless interviews and broken hopes was all I really needed to fortify myself for our diminishing resources and whatever anguish I came home with. She never went without food (three meals a day) even when I had to and she always knew that I loved her absolutely and that she was the most important thing in the world to me.

By the time the last five days were upon me Katchi and I were living in an empty apartment without electricity and anything else that made it truly habitable. We played, we caressed each other in sleep and I told her every night, “lay little head down sweetheart, lay your little head down and sleep unafraid of tomorrow, I will always be here for you.”

When the tomorrow came that I had kept at bay with this lie, I surrendered her to a friend of a dear friend who I knew would take care of her. But…I was failing her and of all the really awful things that were happening to me, failing to keep my promise to her was the worst.

I had been lucky, she was safe and being homeless with an animal is something I couldn’t trust myself to do justice to. Now it was time to find a place for me, and this turned out to be impossible…but far less painful.

I miss my cat more than I thought I could miss anything. My computer was gone. Most of my clothes were gone. My bed was gone…my photographs…my things all gone. I can honestly say, though, that I left those behind without a thought…but to this day and every day since I handed her to a loving stranger I hate myself a little more for this betrayal of a sweet innocent and truly devoted pal.

On the fifteenth day, after one friend after another had disappeared and the options that were few to begin with had dwindled to nothing I stuffed as much of Gabriel’s artwork as I could fit into my four heavy bags and began the trek to Skid Row.

It was Patricia Nell Warren, the landmark author of THE FRONT RUNNER, and a dear and venerated friend of mine who came to my rescue with Katchi. I realize that this is name dropping at its most blatant…but I believe that one should never pass up the opportunity to be a hero, and I learned that from Patricia, who elevated the concept of homosexuality out of the category of mental illness and gave a lot of us in 1976 the first real hope of the possibility that shame was not a necessary element of love. She wasn’t even on my list.

To be continued in January. Patricia Nell Warren has also written an article about homelessness in LA to be found at:

http://www.bilerico.com/2010/11/adult_lgbt_and_homeless_few_of_us_care.php#more