Every once in a while I am asked a question like: "How
could an articulate college-educated person like
you end up homeless?" To which I might give some quick
retort like, "Since when has a liberal-arts
education equaled money?" I said this to a cop once,
and he was at a loss for an answer. It does tend to
make people stop and think, for a few minutes at least,
but it's not really a complete enough explanation.
The immediate economic circumstances that led to my homelessness
in Boston are only a partial
explanation as well:
1) At the time of my eviction in 1991, my rent was $700
a month. (And mind you, this was a very low rent
for Boston at that time. A lot of the apartments in that
neighborhood of Allston cost nearly twice as much
by then!)
2) The man I had lived with for eleven years, who was
the primary breadwinner, moved out and went his
own way.
3) Some of the jobs I had worked at previously, in the
freelance theater field, no longer existed as they had
been cut from the city budget.
But below the surface of these facts lie some deeper-rooted
explanations which had their inception at much
earlier times in my life:
1)They didn't offer woodshop to girls when I was in high
school; otherwise I might have become a
carpenter.
2) The jobs I could get when I first entered the workforce
were the very low-paying, unskilled, "female'
jobs where we were expected to put up with a lot of harassment,
sexual and otherwise.
3) Even more basic: I had the kind of upbringing that
taught me to use my brain, not my hands (except to
play the piano.) And how many jobs are available to women
that allow using their brains and aren't too
degrading? (Other than teaching, which I couldn't do
because I never got a master's degree in my field of
filmmaking.)
This leads me to an even more fundamental question: How would my life have been different if
1) I had been born male,
2) I'd grown up in a working-class family,
3) I'd lived in the country instead of the city,
or all of the above?
One very clear answer is that I certainly would have learned
more about manual labor (other than typing
and housework) and more likely would have learned a trade
of some sort. I could still be the artistic
dreamer I am, but would probably have created a more
concrete material foundation for my life. Like my
teenage fiancee who was an aspiring writer but also learned
auto mechanics so he could support both of
us. (Only we didn't get married after all.) Or maybe
like my cousin who studied art in college, then got a
degree in library science so he could support himself
as a librarian while still painting in his spare time.
But as it was, I was never pressured too hard to find
a "practical" way to make a living. Instead I was
encouraged to follow academic and artistic pursuits while
living in a household where the mother was
supported by the father and was therefore "secure". In
the 1950's it was much more possible than now to
have a comfortable middle-class life, in a big house
with wall-to-wall carpeting and beautiful furniture, that
was supported totally by an academic profession such
as my father's. The college-educated mother could
stay home and bake cookies while the father was teaching
his classes and writing in his office. And if there
were only girls in the family as there were in mine,
it was assumed that we'd all find husbands in college so
we could also stay home and bake cookies, and never have
to "work" unless we wanted to.
So that's the environment I grew up in. But this still
doesn't explain why I ended up differently from either
of my sisters, who also grew up in that same household
but had less trouble adjusting to the adult working
world than I did (and who now both live in nice houses.)
Or from most of my middle-class cousins either,
none of whom are homeless. The answers to this one are
much less clear-cut.
One thing I know is that neither of my sisters or any
of my cousins ever tried to take on the cutthroat rental
housing markets in New York and Boston as I did. They
always lived in places where the rents were
much lower and the landlords were still semi-human. This
meant they were also willing to make other
compromises, like work for more years at those mindless
low-paying jobs if it meant continuing to pay
their low rents. For me, there was only so long I could
stand to work at those kiss-ass secretary jobs to
pay for my room in an SRO (single-room occupancy hotel)
in Harlem, where my neighbors were "welfare
bums" who were very noisy at night and had no regard
for my need to sleep so I could go to work in the
morning. And there were also the professional muggers
who preyed on all the women in the hotel, and I
felt my life was on the line every minute I was there.
A white woman can only live in Harlem for so long
and remain that genteel and middle-class in her thinking...
...But what else in my experience also taught me to see
things more in raw political terms than any of the
others? Of this I'm still not sure. Most of my relatives
still seem to believe in The System, because it's given
them enough of the"good life" that they see more reasons
to embrace it than reject it. Some of my cousins
were pretty rebellious when they were younger, but it
seems that was just a "phase"; they eventually settled
down to more conventional lives...
And why am I telling you, Dear Readers, about all of this?
Maybe to show how inappropriate it is to put
such a generic label as "homeless" on any one individual
whose story they have not yet heard, as if such a
word could define a person's entire being. Because, on
one level, there are as many reasons for
homelesesness as there are homeless individuals--the
basic economic facts only tell part of they story. All
of our lives are as complicated and multi-faceted as
everyone else's. And probably a lot of us, like myself,
are still in the process of trying to figure out how
and why our lives have turned out the way they have,
and haven't come to any certain conclusions yet.
But we have the right to keep on living while we're figuring
all this out--of that much I am certain. All my
cousins would be greatly grieved if I were to perish
in the gutter--and it's partly for their sakes that I'm
determined to stay alive, even if they don't yet understand
what I'm doing or why.