Courtesy of a racist sixty-year-old neighbor still living with his mother; a virtually nonexistent housing inventory due in turn to Jeff Bezos, Mt. Rainier, and murky multifamily home regulations; the less-than-shining precedent set by other groups of male, twenty-something renters; and a healthy dose of my own selectivity and procrastination, I have been rendered, once again, homeless.
I’m typing this in Shari’s, where I paid seven dollars for late-night wifi, warmth, and a place to charge my phone—plus bonus buffalo wings—after spending the evening in a library and showering at a gym. I’ll spend tonight in the Shari’s parking lot. Probably in the back seat of my car, once I stop deluding myself that this time, sleeping shotgun will actually work out. I’ll brush my teeth and change clothes at a coffeeshop tomorrow morning, and then I’ll face another day of working from home without a home.
This might end next week. Or it might stretch deep into the following week, or even deeper into March or early April, depending on tomorrow’s house showings, and depending on the success of my steamroll-the-landlord-with-the-most-goddamn-professional-emails-he’s-ever-read strategy. In the meantime, I’m sharing a 10’x15’ storage unit with another homeless, male, twenty-something would-be-renter, a supposedly bigger-than-necessary unit we managed to stuff to the ceiling with bookshelves and beds and couches and more bookshelves and a motorcycle. At least I’m saving money, I suppose, even counting the storage unit, coffeeshops, and midnight restaurants.
I don’t need to sleep in my car. Not really. I stay some nights with my parents as yet another reluctant victim of the boomerang generation, some nights with a friend who lives within driving distance of work meetings, some nights with older friends from church. But it’s freeing. And like leg day at the gym, or like a fourteen-hour all-night work session, tossing and turning in my sleeping bag is a masochistic form of fun.
It helps that this isn’t real homelessness. There’s an end in sight, even if landlords and leasing agents keep repainting the finish line farther and farther away, and I’m not shackled by disability or addiction, or by a felony, or by the impossibility of supporting three kids with minimum wage. My type of homelessness comes with a gym and clean clothes. It comes with a livable income, even by Seattle’s standards. It’s fake, I’ll admit—like slumming—but nights in my car reassure me.
I don’t need a storage unit full of luxuries. After this last year of stability, in which I steadily collected possessions and paychecks in the same way, as a kid, I had once collected worthless glass bottles just to fill space and trick myself into thinking I had built something, I had started to worry. Had I gone suburban? Was I a suit? My dream of independence had melted, once I had it, and for want of a safety net and better beer, I had traded writing hours for working hours, late-night discussions for late-night productivity. And as I looked ahead, farther down that rapidly urbanizing road of health insurance, Roth IRAs, and the financially wise shift from renting to owning, I saw that trade getting even worse.
I still see it.
I’m still worried.
But this bout of homelessness has reignited another future, one that I thought my cul-de-sac had banned alongside bonfires and backyard barbeques. It’s a future with a canopied pickup or a hatchback outfitted with a bed, cooking set, and a few suits for the occasional work meeting. It’s a future in which I park under the stars and trade lawn mowing for writing, dish washing for rock climbing. It’s a future that would even let me divert money away from rent and into savings, satisfying the Is it practical? part of my brain that keeps getting louder every year. It’s a future I can get excited about.
I just need a few years to save up for it.
Every man has a retirement picture in which he does these things he never had time to do—makes the journeys, reads the neglected books he always pretended to have read. For many years the sheriff dreamed of spending the shining time hunting and fishing—wandering in the Santa Lucia range, camping by half-remembered streams. And now that it was almost time he knew he didn’t want to do it. Sleeping on the ground would make his leg ache. He remembered how heavy a deer is and how hard it is to carry the dangling limp body from the place of the kill. And, frankly, he didn’t care for venison anyway. Madame Reynaud could soak it in wine and lace it with spice but, hell, an old shoe would taste good with that treatment.
~John Steinbeck, East of Eden
NPR called Josh “a modern-day Jack Kerouac” after he wrote about his 7,000-mile, no-money hitchhiking journey through the United States. After hitchhiking, he found homes in the Pacific Northwest, the Episcopal Church, and the post calvin. He now helps authors introduce their books to the world as the marketing manager for HarperCollins Leadership, builds websites as the owner of Branded Look LLC, and makes trail maps as the owner of Where We’ve Been Trail Maps. Josh’s writing has appeared in places such as The Emerson Review, Front Porch Review, and Perspectives.
