I LOVE YOU
I AM YOU
STAY LOST
FOUND
YOU WANT A PERFECT LIFE BUT WANT TO DIE
FOUND
STAY LOST
I’M SORRY.
Words are written on newly painted walls near the dumpster in the alley outside where D works. Under the balcony, a torn-up sofa turned over, two mattresses on the cement, another placed upwards against the mattress to form a better wall from people passing by. Another mattress on the other side, still above the balcony, below the door that leads out to the dumpster.
Social workers that are meant to help people that are homeless and have never been homeless go to take out the trash for the first time in a week. The outreach center reeks of wasted, rotten food that had been stockpiled in the refrigerators, never given out to anyone. So much food that’s donated goes to waste, dumped in plastic bags, tossed into a dumpster, and torn open like a buffet stand for those that are ten levels below Maslow’s Hierarchy. They say it smells like shit out there because people are shitting by the dumpster. And they’re pissing there too. They can’t comprehend why anyone would want to sleep near a dumpster. Seems like someone might even be living inside it. It’s made loud and clear that if they, these workers, lost everything, they’d never do anything of that nature, they’d never go that far as to eat, sleep, and shit near a dumpster.
Call the landlord tomorrow and see if he can have someone get rid of all the moldy furniture and force them into a different alleyway, like the one across the street, ‘Crack Alley’, they call it. He sees that same girl over there having meltdowns every week, flashing her tits at cars, selling herself for as little as fifteen dollars. They’re scared of her too. D holds conversations with her sometimes, even when she’s speaking word salad, flailing her arms around, tardive dyskinesia, screaming fuck shit in my pussy you can eat my ass out too bitch. Signed her up for housing, but who knows where the fuck that would go. A two-year waiting list? After his shift is over, he takes the leftover food that would’ve been kept in the fridge until it grows mold or begins to smell like shit, places the Styrofoam trays near the mattresses near the dumpster, along with hygiene items and papers with local resources. He continues down the alleys to leave more food in spots he knows people are sleeping at night.
Thought we were here to help these people. But you become what you hate. Get radicalized by your class status and sucked into judging everyone. Most of these workers, just older straight white upper-class women that had daddy pay for their degree. Sometimes a token, non-straight, or person of color, but still coming from a higher level of social status. Never anyone that’s lived the street life.
D tells his coworkers about how he used to live near places that had air-conditioning inside of dumpsters. Sleeping in an alley where anyone can walk on by, there’s a high chance that you’ll get beaten-up, raped, and killed, especially if you’re a woman, a young person, or noticeably transgender. Better to sleep in a bath of worms and rotten trash. Better to shit and piss and eat out of one too. You’d be surprised what you can find in a dumpster. He knows this because he’s experienced it. Not specifically living on a rain-soaked mattress in an alley, but sleeping in a broken car in the dead of winter while it’s snowing, windows broken, fearful of going home, might have an alcoholic uncle punch him in the stomach and the face or some shit. He’s eaten out of dumpsters too. Not so bad. Some of the food was still warm.
Various parts of the south side of are being renovated so quickly that one day D will see an abandoned store a couple of his clients were living in, now transformed into a well-designed, minimalist, pop-up location of bookstores, coffee shops, fusion food, even a craft brewery. Millions of dollars coming from a rich slumlord invented all of this. He might as well own the fucking city. On television, he told the media that his goal is to clean the streets of the homeless, the grime, so to say, and recreate it into new districts of fine dining and shopping for people that live on the west side, far out in their luxurious houses and mansions. Where people went during white flight, when they turned their dilapidating homes into rental spaces for the poor, then they thrived off of it. Carry that lynching history. The old market, gentrified and a best-known fine-dining spot of the city, is where they lynched a black man. Ignoring when the white supremacists burned an entire black community to the ground.
Camps are set up outside of homeless shelters. Outside of rehabs. In the woods. By train tracks. In small tight crevices under bridges that offer barely any room even to sit up. D listens to people complain about shit on the streets of San Francisco and gentrification but people ignore that it happens in their own fucking community. If the services here were any better, people wouldn’t travel so far out to the bay to seek help. People slam and smoke and snort just as much meth here as they do there, it’s just better hidden. Put a tent up in public and it’ll be slashed down by the end of the day. So you sleep in the woods with strangers, hoping you don’t wake up with someone on top of you. Take it or I’ll fucking kill you, knife to your throat as the stranger is thrusting, not knowing what disease he’s giving you. Maybe give you a fucking baby, too. Whatever. You’ve been raped and attacked so many times by so many people that you trusted that it means next to nothing now.
She sleeps in a shed with an emergency heat blanket D gave her a few days ago. Others are squatting in the bando, burned up two years ago, charcoal shithole ready to collapse any day now. She’s twenty-two now and her boyfriend is in his sixties, barely speaks any English. Sometimes he’s vanishing, out smoking meth in some other camp that took over a dilapidated children’s park. ‘Crack City,’ they call it. Not the people there, but the social workers that should be advocating for them. And oftentimes, she wakes up being raped, vaginally and anally, blood soaking up the jeans she’s been wearing for a week or two now. On her period too, to make it all worse. Schizophrenic, meth-addicted, suicidal, been homeless and seeking shelter in the arms of older men since she was sixteen, after her foster parents kicked her out when they found out she was into girls. Terminate her fucking rights and hand the child over to another broken system. Put her in a transitional living program with no case managers until she ages out and ends up homeless again. Wearing two heavy backpacks over her shoulders full of food and clothes, whatever she can get from agencies that won’t turn her away for being high on meth and speaking to voices. All of that help leads to this moment, with a stranger on top of her, bashing her head in, blood on both of their genitals.
Waiting on housing but not ready for it. Waiting on a system that’s going to let you slip through the cracks.
Heads out to Jones Street to wait around for men who are interested so she can make money for her next fix. Hopefully, they’ll be gentle, not too violent, give her the money she asks for, and she won’t get raped or killed by them.
D remembers giving her a ride. She lied, saying she was going to a friend, but once he pulled up on Jones Street, he knew what this meant. Didn’t want to be complicit in this shit. Felt betrayed, anger, something you shouldn’t feel for a client, but D is only twenty-three years old, how the fuck do you ethically handle this situation? D keeps driving and stops the car in a random parking lot. She argues to him. You don’t know what it’s like, this is what I have to do, there’s no other option for me, take me back, it’s hot, you’re seriously going to make me walk, you’ve never been raped as a kid or homeless or
And then the young social worker who hates his fellow worthless coworker’s snaps. You don’t think I know what you’ve been through? I’ve been the only one giving a shit about you since I first got hired. Everyone else, they think you’re impossible, there’s no sense in doing anything, but me, I still have hope in you. I know what it’s like to have been raped as a little kid for years and thrown out of your home, raped by strangers, abused by people you loved, I’ve lived that drug life, too, and I’ve seen enough shit in my life to know the outcomes of what you’re doing. You keep this shit up and you’re going to end up dead, not some fantasy overdose, but by the hands of some sex-offender that rapes you and shoots you to death and leaves your body in a ditch. You want to know why I say that? Because I’ve fucking seen it. Three fucking clients. Get out of the car. I’m not taking part in that shit. You can walk your fucking ass there and see where it gets you, but when you’re ready for help, I’ll be there. I’ll be there because I give a shit, I know these systems are broken, I’m fighting them too, and nobody else believes in you or gives a fuck. But I do. I do.
She’s couch surfing for a while and eventually finds a trap house that’ll take her in. Rented out apartment by this twenty-year-old couple in an abusive relationship, the four-year-old left unattended. The man goes to jail on domestic violence charges, she has an open CPS case for child abuse and using meth around her baby, so she leaves the apartment as well. Leaves the kid there. He can be watched over by the five or six meth heads squatting there.
A child that age shouldn’t know words like pipe, twist, and rock. When the neighbor brings the kid to D, he calls CPS and the police, staff said it should be him that does it and nobody else because he knows how to handle these kind of situations the best, and the kid shows them how to smoke meth out of a glass pipe properly. They find out that he’s been raped multiple times, too. Police get there and arrest everyone inside. Prostitutes helping pimps to help sex traffic children while selling meth and fentanyl-laced shit. A couple of months later, the mom goes to jail, a few more months pass, and the child is back in her hands. Daddy gets out of jail. The girl and the four-year-old boy have new bruises.
Who the fuck sold out my kid for drug money?
She sleeps in a shed, bit by spiders every night, sobbing her eyes out, tapping her forehead with an empty liquor bottle. One day, she’s walking down an alley and has the shit beat out of her by a group of gang members. The dad to the child was a crip, and when he found out who was letting his child get raped, he knew he’d have to teach her a lesson, even if he slapped and kicked the living fuck out of the kid himself from time to time.
The landlord comes by, everyone else that’s supposed to be here for their shift is missing, for who the fuck knows why. Landlord asks D about the mess by the dumpster and wants confirmation if they want it to be cleaned up.
Where else are they to piss and shit? For all he cares, they can shit in the center of all these newly gentrified streets. That’s not my decision. I’m not comfortable with that kind of power. You’ll need to speak to my boss about that.
Schizophrenic man that’s homeless knows that if his one spot is stripped from him, he can just walk down alleys and probably find used furniture sticking out a dumpster. He lifts it all out by himself and sets up his new spot, knowing that it’s temporary, like everything. Finds aluminum trays of food to go with it. When it rains, he strips naked and showers in it, using the worthless travel-sized shampoo, conditioner, and body wash bottles that people donate to outreach centers and shelters. But it’s not his home for too long. Other people ban and barred from dry and wet shelters seek solace in his comfort as well. They put together nets to keep bugs away. Bucket for shit and piss. Few other people form a group further down the alley, sleeping on the pavement without any sleeping bags or blankets or mattresses, paranoid murals of underground Illuminati organizations painted on a garage wall behind them.
The city comes by and removes all the furniture. They paint over the graffiti again. Trash is left behind to dance across the alley, dirty clothes, empty hygiene bottles, a single blanket. These workers that D surrounds himself with, he knows they’ll come and go, replaced by others just as unprofessional and clueless of the population they’re serving. In a few months, adults banned and barred from shelters and young kids kicked out by their parents for not being straight will take over the alley again. Maybe they’ll set a space up on the roof like they did two years ago. Or pass over the gates and under a satellite tower.
D does what he can even when he’s told not to help people they’re not meant to serve. He begins to empathize with those he once hated. Men that beat women. Rapists. Hardcore drug addicts with severe and persistent mental illnesses who have no hope of ever getting housed or clean. Pedophiles. Gang members. Killers. All of them. He freezes in the middle of the hallway at work and begins to pray for what seems like an hour. Eyes closed. Bending his upper body forward, then back up again, knees bending, whispering prayers for hope, forgiveness, impossible peace, tears and snot soak his face. G-d, please, bring peace on their souls, help them see that there is hope and a future that isn’t filled with constant drugs and abuse and homelessness, that they can survive, G-d, help me to continue helping them, I don’t know how much longer I can do this anymore, I can’t even help myself, G-d, Jon, please show them that there’s more than this, that I can have hope and a future too. Feel so weak and powerless.
A nineteen-year-old girl is watching TV in her slum apartment when a group of men that want to beat the fuck out of her boyfriend break in and start breaking shit. They take turns raping her, kidnap her, and nobody knows where the fuck she is. She’s in the same tower, two stories up, getting drugged and raped for a whole week. People can hear, but nobody cares or is too scared to do anything. Just the way it is. Sewage leaks down the stairs and rats bathe in it. When they’re bored with her, she just goes back to her apartment, pushes the sofa against the door, sleeps with her boyfriend on it, and prays they’ll be safe until they can find a different shithole, another slum tower to hide inside of.
D paces around his apartment, walls painted black, stupid nasty fucking garbage apartment from a slumlord, all his money going to a man gentrifying the neighborhoods and streets that he works six days a week. There’s no other way out. Can’t make jack shit helping people so he starves and takes food from the pantry that he helps put together. Gets his essentials from there too. Smokes two bowls, blowing smoke out his window as it rains at night, and stares at PornHub, flaccid, waiting on approval notices that say he can own a gun. Bottles of antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, benzos, something for nightmares, all on the nightstand. This time, nobody is here to protect him from himself.
There’s always somebody screaming down the hallway or banging on shit. People conversing outside his door. Always smells like weed. Slumlord won’t let him add locks to the door, even with people constantly breaking into all the apartments.
D puts his two-week notice in. He continues dropping leftover food off in the alleys that are spattered with shit and reek of piss. Shares jokes with them. Tries to offer them some sense of hope. Tells them where his necklace came from, from his boyfriend that has gone to heaven, and yes, he wears his yarmulke proudly.
Nobody needs to know his name and what he’s done. Never did any of this for himself. He sells his books, wipes his computer clean, and sinks into his bed, one last time. At home. Not the one he wanted, the one he had no choice but to take. Thinking that the world is one big dumpster as he drifts to sleep, kissing the heavenly white abyss.
///
Damien Ark is a self-taught outsider writer that specializes in transgressive LGBT+ work. Damien has no degrees in literature and has taken no workshops. Their first novel, Fucked Up, will be out by Expat Press in 2020. You can locate their work on their Neutral Spaces page below and they can be solely contacted through Twitter.
https://neutralspaces.co/damienark/
https://twitter.com/damien_ark
HARSH 