My homeless year began in early October1985 and ended on the last day of August 1986. I was thirteen, and then fourteen, and it’s a story I’ve never told, in part because I slept so many different places that year.
I slept in the broom closet of a friend’s apartment building. The closet was just inside the entryway, past the eight slotted mailboxes. It was the size of a single bed, crowded with mop buckets and cleaning solutions, and I could stretch all the way out and my toes would just touch the door. The building itself was a tan/yellow brick four flat. Kwan lived with his parents and grandmother in a two-bedroom on the second floor, part of a wave of Korean immigrants arriving on the north side of Chicago in the early eighties on their way to the suburbs along with the Kurds and Russian Jews. When I would come over to visit after school his grandmother would clutch my head in her bony hands and pray for me. “She wants to know if you’re going to church,” Kwan would interpret. When it was time for dinner Kwan would politely ask me to leave.
I had a leather bomber jacket my father had given me in one of our better moments, and some clothes, and I wore all of it when I slept there. It was just as hard and cold in the broom closet as it was outside and it was winter in Chicago and I was thirteen. I could see my breath pooling in the dark and woke shivering in the middle of every night. I had a watch so I knew it was usually three and then I waited until six and I went to the Laundromat on California Avenue and sat there trying to get warm. But after a while I couldn’t get warm and even in school I was shivering all the time, vibrating in my big jacket.
But this isn’t about school (I was in eighth grade). And it’s not about my father handcuffing me to a pipe and leaving me there in the basement of his old house. And it’s not about the hotel room I ended up in one homeless evening with a white man in a nurse’s uniform and a wig giving head to three black men, lines of coke spread haphazardly across the table. All of that is true but this is just a list of the different places I slept. It’s the only way I can get any perspective.
I slept at home. I went home several times. I had a large bedroom and the walls were covered in wallpaper that looked like an open sky full of birds and clouds. I had a down comforter and two pillows in Charlie Brown pillowcases. I had a manual typewriter I banged on and I taped bad poetry all over my walls and listened to Pink Floyd albums on the cabinet record player. I made dinner from endless cans of Chef Boyardee and stacks of frozen steaks. If I was to guess I would say that counting rapprochements with my father I slept at home a full month out of the eleven I spent as a homeless child in Chicago. Friends who ran away would climb in through my window and sleep beneath my bed.
I turned fourteen in a basement I had broken into with my friends Albert and Justin. Justin was often homeless that year and he slept many different places as well. The floor was blue cement and we sat up most of the night against the wood storage sheds working our way through pints of vodka and confessing to things like masturbation. In the morning the police woke us with flashlights and boots and sent us back to the streets.