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Today is “Chapter 3” of The Homeless Game. If you missed the first two, you can get them at https://substack.com/@fledabrown. Chapter 1 gives the history of this project.
I might mention that mostly the names have been changed. Occasionally, people asked me to use their real name. You won’t know which is which.
Claudia
I had this idea I’d start by pointing out how much Claudia and I have in common: both grandmothers, about the same age. Why is it I always want to imagine similarities before I see what’s actually there? Between us, my husband and I have four children and ten grandchildren. Claudia has four children, not all by the same man, a bunch of grandchildren, plus one great-grandchild. Some have been real problems. Her youngest son Derrick’s child is the one she’s focused on now.
Derrick had already broken up with the mother, Chantelle, when Chantelle found out she was pregnant. But when the baby was born, he was still living in the basement of her townhouse. Chantelle’s mother, Derrick’s mother-in-law, so to speak, was worried sick after the birth—she didn’t want her mentally ill daughter alone with the baby. Chantelle had quit taking her medication when she got pregnant, and now, one minute she flew off the handle, the next she was lethargic or sleeping. She’d get up at night and start vacuuming, she’d throw things, yell into the baby’s monitor. She ran away and hid in the woods with him a couple of times. She’d take him into the bathroom, lock the door, and coo, “What’s the matter, Buddy?” when he cried. Finally one night a neighbor called the police. When they arrived, she’d climbed in bed with the baby and lain on top of it. Protecting it from what, herself?
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Derrick asked Claudia to move in. The mother wasn’t letting the baby nurse long enough, so Claudia found a wet nurse. It was agreed that the baby could stay with Chantelle as long as Claudia and the father remained in the house. Chantelle was allowed to have the baby alone only four hours a week. Lutheran services sent a woman who practically lived with them.
An army of helpers made Chantelle begin to feel extraneous to the process of baby-tending, and she began to work furiously to get more milk. But when she gave the baby a whack on the bottom because he wasn’t “obeying” her, protective services abandoned their in-home efforts and came to pick him up. Claudia and Derrick moved out. Derrick began a round of house-surfing with friends and acquaintances, while Chantelle kept calling Claudia, threatening to kill her. Claudia went to live way out in the country with a friend. No car, no transportation. Derrick had a car, but the starter was broken.
Remember, you’re hearing all this through me. I could just let Claudia talk, just let you try to piece her tacks and digressions together. But this is about me, too. Why did I get started on this? Curiosity? Some need to save my own soul? How does that work? I get lost in her story, not knowing exactly what to do with it except to stay here with her story, to not let up on my involvement in it.
I wonder what the people I interview here will think when they read their words, and my thoughts. I wonder if some will be angry at my comments, or pleased to be included, or will feel misrepresented. I wonder if any of them will feel more visible, more recognized as a true voice, a real person.
These people I’m writing about—Claudia, for example—I wonder what I mean by real. When they tell me their stories, they invent themselves as they go, no matter how utterly “true” the story is. And I invent them, each one a character shaped for our mutual interest. Is my own story “true”? Is the past I picture the “true” one? Is my future anything but a movie I make? I can’t even swear I have my own story right.
It’s time to return to the beginning, to Mobile, Alabama, where Claudia was born, to see if I can pick up the thread of her life, make sense of it, or at least find a few cause-effect relationships. But it will do me no good to return there. I will find no birth certificate. The courthouse has burned down with all its records, and the hospital where she was born has since been torn down. She’s had trouble even getting a driver’s license. How does a person prove her existence? Who will believe her stories? Her story is that her mother worked in a restaurant and in a bar at night. She had two brothers and a sister, and when she was barely old enough to walk, her mother gave up trying to take care of her youngest three children and put them in an orphanage, where they remained for four years.
There are still orphanages in the United States. Proposals to reinstitute funding for orphanages have appeared with surprising regularity. In the mid-1990s, the Republican Party and Representative Newt Gingrich endorsed orphanages as a key component of their proposed Contract with America and the Personal Responsibility Act of 1995. The way it was going to work was to limit benefits under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and use the savings to establish and operate orphanages for poor children.
In the orphanage, Claudia and her brother, eight, and her sister, seven, were placed in separate buildings. Her sister, who had taken such close care of her that she would often ride her around in her bicycle basket, went on a hunger strike to be allowed to see her—she was afraid Claudia had been adopted out.
The years must have gone by then, after that, unrecorded in any detail in Claudia’s young mind except for the brief visits with her sister. They’re unrecorded here, only a pause to imagine, based on old movies, maybe, or the sinking feeling we all get in the pit of our stomach when we’ve been left alone, maybe a memory of some early fear, our father walking out of the room, maybe, leaving us at nursery school. That’s me, what I remember. One portion of my anxious soul.
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Then one day, Claudia’s mother showed up with her new stepfather, and they all went home. Actually, this is a fairy-tale ending to this chapter. It turns out that the stepfather was a wonderful father. He worked hard, paid his taxes, didn’t believe in welfare. He was strict but giving. And it was a good thing. Claudia had become a bit wild in the orphanage. She did not like rules. But in her new home, she got good grades in school and went to church every Sunday.
Her stepfather had given up being a truck driver to become a turf farmer in Mississippi. They were poor, but so was everyone else. What is poverty, anyhow, without a TV to offer an alternative, without slick magazine ads? They had no TV. They had no running water, only an outhouse. Claudia was happy then, until she was ten years old. The land was wide open: a farm, a creek, crops in perfect rows. She remembers them as perfect, a horizon marked with the care and dignity of alignment. Her stepfather let her ride the mule. He carried her on his shoulders.
Too young to do chores, she spent a lot of time alone, trying to stay out from under foot. She found snakes—her stepfather came with a hoe. She dug around in the dirt, gathering pill bugs and watching the miracle of their retreat into tight little bundles.
It’s easy to idealize rural life, since few of us have lived it. Or to reject it, as we drive by shacks and rusty trailers stuck in the middle of bare fields, blank-eyed children in the yard. In between idealizing and rejecting, I imagine, is a real life, hard and sometimes mean, but full of the ordinary wonders of crops coming up, cattle bobbing toward the barn, chickens reluctantly giving up their eggs. The meaningfulness of the ordinary.
Then when she turned ten, her stepfather decided they’d better move north so he could get a job that paid enough to let him retire someday. How to imagine, or illustrate, the radical shift in consciousness that must happen when an entirely other world, one not dreamed of, suddenly becomes the only world? Like a move to Mars. He found the family two rooms in a boarding house in Flint, and returned to auction off the house. The whole passel arrived in Flint like the Beverly Hillbillies, in a big red truck, riding in the back on top of the mattresses.
There she’d be, walking down the sidewalk, passing a stranger. She’d go “Haaah there!” in her caramel Mississippi voice. The stranger would keep walking. “He must be hard of hearing,” Claudia would conclude.
After high school, she went to beauty school, met a guy. All her friends were married; he asked her, so she said yes. They had two children. He started drinking. They divorced and she went home to Daddy. She always called him Daddy. She found a job, met a fireman, and married him. He was a lot better husband. Her family loved him, the children did, she did. But it turned out he was a secret alcoholic.
Anyone by now would detect the thread of alcohol running through this story. How much attention shall we give it? When should it become elevated to main character, when should it remain a bit player?
Meanwhile, Claudia was losing weight and felt sick all the time. Tests were run. She was in the hospital for weeks. After they found some lumps that looked suspiciously like Hodgkins disease, her husband dropped the children off at her mother’s house and took off. He said he loved her too much to watch her die. That was the end of that marriage. Claudia’s weight dropped to 77 pounds before her surgery—she isn’t quite clear what for.
This, I see, is the limbo of the poor, of those who enter the system as statistics, those who are shuffled through, those the doctor mumbles to in generalities, not at all confident that what she says will be understood or adhered to. Those who enter hospitals and leave with no clear sense of what happened, except that they hurt, that they have this bottle of pills to take, that they’re to come back in two weeks.
No, that’s not fair. Claudia’s no dummy. She enrolled at a community college and was on the Dean’s list for all three years of a four-year nursing program. One day at the beginning of her final year, a plumber cut through a wire and her apartment building burned down—she lost her wedding ring, watch, uniforms, books, clothes, children’s things, everything. No insurance. After she moved into a new apartment, she got pneumonia.
She was in the internship semester of her nursing program, in labor and delivery, so intensive a work load that she decided she’d better drop out for the semester to get their lives back together. But she was never able to manage returning to school, even with loans.
But—notice how often “but” appears in this story, turning our corners abruptly for us, assuring us of some happy new development, or plunging us back into an abyss—she was young, feisty, and good-looking. She got some good jobs, ones that more than paid the rent. She did the books for a CPA, learned to write insurance estimates. She bought a new trailer, got a new car. Her credit was good.
She’d decided she was no good at marriage and was raising her kids alone, doing all right. Then she met a man who reminded her of her stepfather, a good family man. Her children adored him and he did them. They mixed their families and planned to get married, but when it came right down to it, both of them got cold feet. So Claudia and her children moved back to her trailer. “We’re just going too fast,” they said to each other.
Then Claudia found out she was pregnant. She was 44, her youngest child was 19. “God had just made this monumental mistake,” she said. Here she was, unwed, pregnant, a Sunday School teacher. But as churches often do, they took her under their wing. “Well, all right, we’re going to have this baby and love him,” she said.
Her partner had a brand new motorcycle. Coming around a curve, he lost control, crashed, and died instantly. Claudia was seven months pregnant, and since they weren’t living together at the time, she wasn’t eligible to collect his Social Security or insurance. Nothing could be done.
I try to figure how things can go from bad to worse for some people, if this litany of bad breaks, we might call them, or this string of tragedies, has any thread to follow. And, if I discovered it and could wind it back up, would I run into one small knot somewhere near its beginning that could be unknotted and relax the future’s tension? For me or for any of us? If the teeth quit grinding, for example, would the gums be saved, and if the gums were saved, would the teeth last, and if the teeth lasted, would the face be prettier, and if the face were prettier, would the job be saved?
When her son Derrick was 3 ½, she slipped on the ice picking up the mail. She stumbled back into the house, vomiting. She’d fractured her skull. She was in the hospital for seven weeks and was unable to function for months after that. She lost a lot of her memory—couldn’t read, couldn’t add, couldn’t remember past two numbers. When she went to the grocery, she’d let others get ahead of her at the checkout line while she desperately tried to add up what she’d put in her cart, to make sure she had enough money.
One day she started to write the check. “What day is this?” she asked.
“It’s the sixth,” the cashier said.
“The sixth of what?”
The cashier told her the month.
“What year?” Claudia asked.
The cashier burst out laughing. Claudia took Derrick and left the store without her groceries.
On their walks, she and Derrick often passed a nursery school/kindergarten. Derrick would repeat, time after time, that he wanted to go to that school, and so Claudia stopped in to talk with the administrator. “Can you teach me how to read a calendar?” Derrick asked her. “I need to know that,” he said,” so I can tell my mother what day it is.”
The next month, due no doubt to the sympathetic persuasion of someone at the school, he was enrolled. He began right away learning the calendar. Claudia, meanwhile, was recovering slowly, with no physical or cognitive therapy ever suggested to her. Derrick gave her the shots she was supposed to have. She couldn’t remember anything. She’d forget and check the mail over and over. When she had her terrible headaches, she would tie a rope to Derrick’s waist, give him six feet—enough to get off the bed and put a movie in the VCR, but not enough to reach the stove or go to the front door.
I took her five years to get disability payments. She simply was not clear-headed enough to figure out how to apply for disability earlier, and she had no advocate. Welfare seemed perfectly happy to continue sending her food stamps.
She would read to Derrick as she could, little by little regaining her ability and her concentration. Derrick got a paper route—much too young, but the supervisor saw the situation—and delivered papers within their apartment complex. With his paper route money, Derrick bought all his own supplies and occasionally took his mother out to eat.
At last Claudia was able to get a job at a downtown shelter in Flint, where people got shot and beaten up outside, and crack was everywhere. She was able to buy a car on a five year plan, the kind that if you don’t make the payments, they just take the car back right away.
These are just images, you know, to break up the print. None of these is authentic.
But she had her trailer, a place to retreat. There was a basketball hoop in front where all the kids would congregate. But there were fistfights, and one day one teenager sprayed shot against her trailer. “That’s it,” she told Derrick. “We’re outta here.” They packed up and went to live with a niece in Gaylord, later moved to Traverse City.
She misses her grandchildren and great-grandchild in Flint, but she’s happy here, now, starting over at the homeless shelter. I think of my own life, running parallel in time, each of us oblivious to the other, each of us entirely engaged in our own version of how to survive, our own imagining of the peace and security we call Home. I think neither of us would say, “It’s been a bad life.” I can almost feel the invisible muscles we’ve each built from the accumulation of moments when we’ve said, “Oh shit, what now,” and figured out what. There’s a kind of rush in terror, a gathering of forces. Are her terrors worse than mine? There’s no measuring stick.
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Claudia says Derrick brings his son to see her for an hour a week. She gets that hour. But, she says, the foster parents are wonderful, all bouncy and cheerful, and the child is happy.