Living Life Under a Bridge is His Choice
The reason my best friend choses to be homeless
I get off the freeway a few offramps earlier than I normally do to visit my friend Keith. He lives in a homeless encampment under the freeway. I park my car a block away from the high school we went to together. There’s low chain link fence next to the freeway to I need to hop over to get where I’m going.
The other people living in his encampment don’t know who I am, and this is their turf. As I get closer, I’m spotted by scary looking dude who’s staring me down. Best thing to do is say hi.
“Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here?” he asks.
“Sup. I’m Hogan, Keith’s friend. Just here to say what up. Is he around?”
He points to a tent, “Over there.”
I open the flap on his easy-up canopy converted to a tent by attaching tarps on the sides. I don’t want to wake him, but I do.
Keith ruined his life with a bad decision that he tried correcting with an even worse one. It almost cost him his freedom. What he lost was even worse. His daughter.
Keith and I grew up together. We met the first day of high school and were inseparable for the next 4 years.
Both of us loved to party in all definitions of the word. I’d go to his house for the weekend, and we’d smoke weed all night under black lights while blasting heavy metal.
High school ended but the party kept going. We went to the same junior college and took the same classes for a year until we stopped going.
In his mid 20’s Keith got his girlfriend pregnant. He moved into a house with her in another county. After his daughter was born, I didn’t see him much. The relationship ended a few years later and he moved back in with his mother.
An ugly custody battle ensued. Keith hired an expensive lawyer to try to win full custody.
The mother had a job and the house. Keith had nothing. She was accusing him of all kinds of nasty things like being a drug addict and verbally abusing his daughter.
She was late showing up for the hearing. The judge saw right through her bullshit and awarded Keith full custody.
Keith was a great father. He took her everywhere in Los Angles a kid would want to go and fought to get her into the best schools. He made friends with people we knew in high school with kids and arranged play dates. His life revolved around her.
He had his daughter full time. I was still partying. We drifted apart and lost contact.
I was stoked when I ran into him at a mutual friend’s party 8 years later. He told me he recently let his baby momma have their daughter on weekends. Leaving him with free time for the first time in 8 years. We started hanging out every weekend again.
I was using meth regularly and he liked to party as much as I did. So, we partied. There’s a chance I wouldn’t be writing this story right now if I didn’t bring it around him. That was my bad.
A girl we were friends from high school had a kid the same age as his and another daughter who was older. We’ll call our high school friend Sheena. Sheena and Keith would take their kids to the zoo or Universal Studios for the day. They had seasons passes to everywhere. Their daughters were inseparable.
One day Keith tells me he’s been fooling around with Willow.
“Hold on, isn’t that Sheena’s older daughter?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Bro, what the fuck?”
“She’s eighteen.”
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t fuck your friends' kids. How the hell did that happen?”
Keith said it started at his house when Sheena and her kids were over. He’s sitting on the couch and Willow sits on his arm on the arm rest and starts grinding. He shooed her away, but it only made her more determined.
One day Willow asked her mom, Sheena to drop her off at Keith’s house. Alone. For some reason she did.
While it wasn’t technically illegal, it was scandalous. He was more twice her age. The fact Willow’s developmentally challenged was just the icing on a fucked up cake. He claimed when they were being intimate her speech impediment went away.
“Why are you telling me this? This is something you should tell no one about. Not even me.”
“I had to tell someone," he said.
I could empathize. Keith hadn’t had sex with anyone since he left his baby momma almost a decade ago. Willow was a tall glass of water and a fresh tart.
If I was in his shoes, I’d have a tough time saying no but it was what he should have done for his daughter’s sake. It just wasn’t worth it.
The outcome of his trysts was worst possible scenario. Willow pulled a Lolita.
About a month after he dropped that bombshell, Keith texts me that Willow is threating to say that he took advantage of her if he doesn’t come pick her up and get a hotel room tonight. He asks me to come over because there’s something he needs to give me.
I drive to his mom’s house. When I get there, he hands me a folder. Inside is copies of transcripts from their text conversations and pictures.
“I don’t want to read this,” I said.
“You don’t have to read it, it’s for you to put in a safe place as a backup in case something goes down. But I want you to also see that it was her who pursued me. I didn’t rape her.”
Keith wasn’t a rapist. He was shy and naive. Not aggressive at all. He only had had a couple of girlfriends and it never lasted long.
Just for due diligence I thumbed through a few pages. Although Willow was barely literate, she was definitely the instigator. Keith wasn’t discouraging her.
He showed me the page where Willow threatened to tell on him. She told him his daughter would be taken away if anyone found out. Her language was course, but she knew what buttons to press.
“I mailed a copy of everything to Sheena and her husband a month ago,” Keith said.
“You did what? You’re kidding. Why the fuck did you do that?” I asked.
“Because they need to know.”
“Know? Know what! Not the sex talk between her daughter and someone she went to high school with. No parent wants to see that.”
“They need to know that their daughter is trying to blackmail me and get my daughter taken away,” Keith said. “I tried calling Sheena after I sent it, but she wouldn’t respond. After a month I sent a certified letter in the mail to both Sheena and her grandparents.”
I was speechless. To this day I have no idea what he hoped to accomplish with that. It was the worst idea ever.
This is the reason I mentioned that we were doing meth. Meth causes this kind of erratic behavior. It also turns your sex drive into turbo mode. It’s the only explanation I can think of for his thought process on mailing the transcripts.
Meanwhile Keith’s daughter kept asking why she didn’t get to see her best friend anymore. He kept giving her excuses. Keith’s daughter is super smart and perceptive. She knew something was up.
Keith wasn’t contacted by the police, but he did have an advanced persistent threat on his computer. We formatted the hard drive, reinstalled Windows and there was still something there. This was nation state surveillance grade stuff.
He was a wreck the next few months. Not knowing when and if anything was going to happen.
Sheena may have no sold the initial letter, but Keith made a big mistake sending it to the grandparents. The grandfather was very well connected in Los Angeles.
It all went down 5 months after it started. He was driving to pick up his daughter from her mother’s house on the freeway when he saw all the lights behind him. They did a multi-police car felony stop that closed the freeway and arrested him. The charge was rape.
Being in jail is bad. Being in jail for rape is dangerous. He was booked on Friday and out on bail by Saturday night.
His baby momma told his daughter what was going on. Why she hadn’t been able to play with Sheena’s daughter. Where her father was. Everything.
Keith’s daughter wanted nothing to with him after that. There was nothing he could do to fix it. He talked to her on the phone one last time and she said she hated him. She was old enough to make that decision.
Keith never saw his daughter again.
It broke him. He started doing meth all day every day then drink on top of it. He’d be up for days smoking till he passed out on his feet.
Keith was fucked. The case never went to trial because there was no case. All the evidence proved it wasn’t rape. However, his criminal record showed that he was arrested for rape. He was turned down for Uber and Door Dash. He couldn’t get a job anywhere.
He refinanced his car and missed a payment. They repossessed his car.
He started getting weirder and weirder. Hanging out with homeless people in the park. I spoke to him less and less.
One day his mom kicked him out of the house. He hopped over that low chain link fence next to freeway and that’s where he’s been for the past 3 years.
In his tent we listen to music. I take few hits of meth for old time's sake. This why I don’t visit him that often.
While I’m there I tell him that understand why he left home. He was stagnant. No money, no hope, no future, no daughter.
Living in a tent was better for him than sitting around his house getting yelled at by his mom. There’s always something going down in a homeless encampment. It’s like camping. Keith is the leader of the encampment. The enforcer. People look up to him. He’s needed and valued.
When I first heard he was living on the streets I wanted to come down and give him a pep talk. The more I thought about what I was going to him the more I realized that this was his choice. I get it.
He told me that just recently he’s been able to talk about his daughter without crying. He’s accepted what happened.
I try to slip him a few bucks as I leave but he won’t take it. He’s always been proud and stubborn like that.
We hug goodbye.
Sometimes the best way to help someone is doing nothing. You can’t help those who don’t want help. This is his choice and the best thing I can do as a friend is to be there for him.
I can’t give him his daughter back.