When My Past and Present Self Met
A homeless man introduced my two selves
“Can you give me a ride to Long Beach?”
My thirteen-year-old son and I pulled into 7-Eleven, and this guy with a matted, disheveled appearance, rumpled up clothes, and a limp approached me. We were on a 10 p.m. sugar snack run, and the guy was looking for a ride.
Long Beach was 15 miles away, and not in our direction or plans.
“Sorry, we’re not going that direction.”
My son got a pink-frosted donut, and I got these mini-cinnamon donuts, and the guy approached me again as we walked out of the 7-Eleven.
“I’ll give you $20 for a ride.”
Bad idea, I thought. Sorry, I said.
Then we ate our donuts on the drive home.
The next day, I looked in a bin of books as I was getting the Christmas ornaments in the garage, and I found artifacts from my life 20 years ago.
Yellow newspaper clippings. “Ode to a Scholar,” a poem read at my dad’s funeral. Old notebooks with notes from the few college classes I liked.
Then I saw it. A college magazine called Scene with a feature story about me.
It was about me as a homeless student.
A conscious decision
“Jack was an average English major in the fall of 1991. He got up early for his eight o’clock class and went to lunch with his friends. During the afternoons, he napped in the library or caught up with his studies. What made Jack (not his real name) different is that after his classes he had no place to call home. He was a homeless student and, remarkably, it was a conscious decision.”
I had lofty ideas about education back then:
“What’s the point of going to school when you don’t have time to study when all you care about is next month’s rent? I guess I felt it was a choice between a real education or not having any time to study. I opted for the education.”
I was haunted by this ghost of my past self, and a memory popped into my mind of going on a date at a Korean restaurant and telling her to drop me off in front of an apartment building near the campus where I told her I lived.
It was 11:30 p.m. I lived in a building where I put three chairs together in a classroom and slept after studying till midnight.
A cold night
On that night the front door to the building was locked. I thought it was too late to show up unexpectedly at a friend’s apartment. I didn’t want to wear out my welcome by calling them or knocking on their door around midnight.
So I curled up under a bush to sleep. But it was shivering cold outside.
I was in a nature area, several trees and bushes and a dirt path going through it, and my hands shook in the morning as I drank coffee in a styrofoam cup at a donut shop. It challenged my romantic notion for becoming homeless.
“I didn’t like the place that I was staying at the time. I guess I’ve always been open to experience, and that’s why I didn’t throw the idea to be homeless out when I got it. I was reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I figured if Huck can float down the Mississippi River, then I can make it bumming around campus. I guess I saw myself a 20th-century Huckleberry Finn.”
That’s what I told my friend, Dave, who wrote the article. I laugh now because I based my decision to be homeless on a literary character. Huck didn’t quite float down the river, but Mark Twain probably did as an 1840’s River rat kid.
Road Warrior
“Jack might have felt like the adventurous Huck Finn, but a lot of students would disagree with such a romantic view. Homelessness to them is not an epic adventure, but a precarious predicament. They might consider the Road Warrior a better analogy, having to scavenge for shelter between friends and hidden spots on campus and relying on one’s wits to make it through each day.”
Thirty years later, I realize Dave’s description of my life was pretty accurate. My experience was a combination of a romantic Huck Finn-like adventure and Road Warrior experience in relying on my wits to make it through each day.
“For the most part, I changed in the locker room. I had a locker for all my clothes in the gym and another one at the library. I showered at the gym or sometimes at a friend’s, a girl’s, or an ex-resident advisor’s. Showering was never a problem. If I didn’t get sweaty, I would just skip taking a shower and no one was the wiser.”
That was the Huck Finn part. But it could turn into a Road Warrior movie.
“I kept on bumping into the same janitor at 5 a.m. every morning. He used to wake me up and tell me to clear out. Then he realized that I was just trying to sleep, so he told me about a room in the women’s restroom. It was right off to the side as soon as you opened the door in a separate room. ‘Just get out before anyone comes in,” he told me.
My past and present self meet
When I read this I thought about the homeless guy who wanted a ride to Long Beach. It was out of the way, but I doubt I’d have given him a ride if it was closer, and I thought how the janitor had shown more compassion to me.
“I never ran into any police…except once. I was in a classroom trying to sleep one night when an officer came by and said, ‘You gotta move out, Chief.’ It was 2:30 in the morning, and I didn’t feel like calling a friend, so I moved to the john and sat there with my legs up to hide. I wound up crashing right there like that.”
A year later, I became a cab driver to write a book about all the weird, strange people I met in Los Angeles. I met a Vietnam Vet who bought a bottle of vodka and tried to give $20 bills to people outside the window of my cab. I picked up the retired secretary from my high school, and she invited me into her home for pizza and showed me a picture of herself. Naked. I jumped off the Hermosa Beach Pier with three guys I picked up at a bar and nearly drowned
I graduated and met my wife serving in a homeless ministry at our church, and we became friends with many of the homeless men. I was the guy who gave rides and visited homeless people at the park, and we once drove a guy to the veteran’s hospital in Long Beach and she sang crazy on the way back.
As I read about myself, it was like my past self was meeting my present self. My past self told my present self that I wanted to live in a run-down hotel and be the manager of a thrift shop owned by a man at my church. I had seen an index card on a board at church looking for “a missionary to Wilmington.”
My first thought was, no one at this church would live in that hotel. We went to a church with mostly wealthy people. I had visited a few people in the hotel, and it was the kind of place cockroaches might skitter across the floor.
Few people went to feed the homeless on a Saturday. But the words on the index card felt meant for me and what my heart wanted to do, but I knew the optics wouldn’t look very good if I wanted or planned to marry my girlfriend.
So I became a teacher at a Christian school.
“Certainly, there is a romance to being homeless in getting by daily, but there is a downside. After his experiences, Jack has reverted to working days and paying rent. “It’s nice to know you can sleep without worrying someone is going to wake you up and kick you out,” he says. “It was an interesting period of my life, and it was a high point for my creativity because I had time to write. But I don’t think I could go back. I’ve seen that world, and I’m ready to move on.”
Or had I since I thought of becoming a missionary two years later? my present self was saying to my past self. Yes, they were talking again. I think my past self was trying to show my present self something about my present self.
As my son and I drove home, I thought I should care more for a homeless guy at 7-Eleven with less privilege than myself — that’s before reading the article about myself the next day and my present self remembered this thought.
Maybe, reading this article about my past self will change how my present self regards the homeless. Maybe recalling my shaking hand as I drank a cup of coffee after I slept outside under a bush will change my attitude. Maybe hiding in a bathroom stall will remind me what it’s like to be a Road Warrior who has to survive by relying on his wits to make it through a day.
Thanks for reading my story. You might like some of my other stories.
