mercuryfern

We drove past a Panera Bread the other day, and I was reminded once again of my abiding love for the high falutin big box chain.

Stay with me here.

I'll tell it to you like I told it to Abby.  When I lived in Chicago, the weather was very cold, I was working very long hours, and I was very homeless.   At first I was just a little bit homeless, staying in a dirty nasty hostel.  Then I was a little more homeless, spending nights on a coworker's living room floor.  Eventually I was all the way homeless, sleeping in my car.

Did I mention I was working all the goddamn time? As a union organizer I was paid (significantly) less than minimum wage once you divided my stipend by the number of hours I put in.  Though I made enough to pay rent in one of the working class South or West Chicago neighborhoods, I certainly was in no position to scrape together a security deposit.  Apparently full time employees are the fastest growing group of homeless people.  Makes sense if you think about it, what with the bottom dropping out of entry level wages while housing stock of all grades continues to soar in price.  Recently, an article in my local newspaper business section recommended buying row homes in working class neighborhoods and renting them out because the profit margins are higher on such rental properties than for more expensive ones.  Ah, yes, just as I suspected, the prices for poor people are more jacked up than for anyone else.  Who shall I tell to go fuck themselves in this instance?

And why aren't I doing the internet research and linking to the sources for the outrageous claims contained herein?   Because this is not a serious political blog. This is me telling you a story about why Panera Bread makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

There are many things to love about my itinerant life.   I will not whine here, as I was wont to do a few years ago, about how I feel adrift in the world without a geographic identity.  No, if I wanted that badly enough, I could have made it happen.  If I move a few hundred miles in one direction or another every few years, I must like it.  To compensate for the resulting sense of disconnection, though, routines are serious business for me.

Thus it was that I found myself at Panera Bread most nights in the spring of 2002, curled up in a firm easy chair next to the gas fireplace, reading a newspaper somebody had left behind.  Even at the time, I was aware that the faux living room was a Disney World fake approximation of a coffee house, meant to be looked at, but certainly not actually sat in.  I should have been offended by it's co-opting of the urban experience, should have been insulted by a franchise that attempts to reproduce but only ends up mocking what independent dives have been doing so much better for so long.  Instead, the too perfectly coordinated fabrics and the carefully subdued atmosphere became a homey way station between my long evenings making cold calls and my early mornings doing paperwork or recruiting members door to door.  It was like listening to the radio with a teenage broken heart and finding comfort in the most insipid pop songs.  Your mind knows such trash is degrading the cultural landscape, but there you are, embracing the clichés, singing along. 

I stayed until they closed and then found somewhere to sleep.   Nobody spends their evenings in public spaces anymore, certainly not reading for hours, so I expected the employees to kick me out eventually.  I dreaded it, really, because I didn't want to look for another place to go.  Clever homeless people have four or five locations where they distribute their time, so as not to make a spectacle of themselves, so as not to wear out their welcome.  On leaving the office, I couldn't stand to strategize one bit more.  I ached to sit the same way in the same place, to find solace in any ritual.

You might suspect that in such a situation a twenty one year old girl would get to feeling a bit despondent.  The opposite happened for me, though.  Panera Bread those cold rainy nights was like my first long car trips; pride at my independence and resourcefulness overrode anything else I might have felt.  I carry what I need where ever I go.  I am my own home.

Rides Various and Sundry

Have you ever noticed that blogless rodents come up with the best memes?  Well, they do.

I rode horses first.  In the earliest recesses of my memory, where things are a jumble of contextless sensation, there is the repeated image of two small children in addition to myself piled in to the western saddle of a palomino named Peanut.  The horse belonged to my aunt’s fiancé.  Later that year, she left the man for his best friend.

When horselust hit me at seven my parents (claimed they) couldn’t afford lessons (so what’s with the trips to Cancun?), but they did send me to riding camp for two weeks every summer.  I was the only girl my third year who could jump.  Now matter how I begged my aunt, now a dairy farmer with the husband/best friend, to keep horses that I might fulfill my destiny as a great horsewoman, her stalls stayed empty.

I’ve ridden waves on the Jersey Shore in the days after a hurricane, a rectangle of styrofoam carrying me repeatedly onto the sand too fast too fast; such quantities of seaweed and primordial corpses to contend with.  By the end of each annual week, I fancied myself an expert on reading the undulations, on knowing just when to turn my back and launch.  Getting too far ahead meant that, rather than being propelled forward with all the force of the worlds largest body of water coddling you to a safe thrill, the board would suddenly catch on the fast approaching sand then your stomach, allowing the water to exhaust itself dragging your ten year old face across the high tide line.  For the rest of the summer, strangers stared horrified when I wasn’t looking but cringed from my gaze.  It didn’t heal in time for school pictures.

I’ve ridden a candy mogul’s rollercoasters shouting obscenities with my dearest pierced friends.  It meant less than the annual Catholic High Fair, lasting only a week each June.

I’ve ridden poems like luck dragons late into the night when pubescent rage and an excess of spine kept me from taking any small blue pills.  The words came to me but not from me in a torrent of snot and angry tears to give me resolve.  It would be broken.

When I got out, my grrls took me first thing to our hometown’s annual hosting of itinerant gravity defiance.  We got the bracelets and rode all night.  Danny didn’t come, though I called him.  As he took the phone in his hand, the older brother mumbled that some white girl was on the line.  Waiting for the pirate ship, I ran into a cheerleader who was wont to punish herself with impressive feats of starvation.  She’d gotten out weeks before and hadn’t heard from anyone.  Our posses eyed each other menacingly and declined to borrow lighters across clique lines while we embraced.

I’ve ridden trains two hours each way; pain the tuition myself at fifteen because I wanted to spend my days in a place where my passions could be honed rather than quashed; even if I had to labor at the greenhouse four days weekly; even if there was always a critical mass too busy smoking snorting injecting to revel in learning without coercion.

I’ve ridden in cars; but come to think of it, usually driven when the miles went to three and four digits: back and forth between New England and Amish Country for college and breaks; to the southwest instead of Christmas with our families; fast and sleepless weekend trips, the tiny Geo Metro seats full to the brim with dissidents journeying down the eastern seaboard to register our complaints in crowns of fifty sixty one hundred thousand.  The papers always underestimated.

I’ve ridden my bike through summer traffic in Philadelphia, through all seasons of double decker highways in Austin, through a union organizer's spring in Chicago.  I do not block traffic.  I am traffic.  Live more; drive less.  Cars are coffins, etc etc.

I’ve ridden Navy Pier’s cheap sentimental Ferris Wheel; the city that fired me tiny below the slow peak.  Teenagers jockeyed for romantic position on all sides of us.  I did not cry for the quotas I missed on crutches; shock at the futility of hard work in the face of petty office politics emptied me of any emotion.  People who devote their lives to big causes are as small in their daily interactions as everyone else.

I rode the clumsy circle that night and others, let it spin my injury into knowledge.

Public Spaces

Libraries are especially comforting when you are homeless.  Granted, my current unmoored state is the cushy houseguest variety, not the edgier sleeping in the car sort.  Not that I am unappreciative of the opportunity for regular showers, but in Chicago I think I ended up with better stories, besides deriving some comfort from my responsible member of society/ employee status.  Unemployed academic drifting has not the same romance.

You find yourself dreading the hour that the library will close.  Working long hours helps.   Again, I'm at a loss without a job this time.  The weekends in Chicago were like today; I made them pass by heading to Panera Bread at five.  That gas fireplace!  Those cushy chairs!  Who can say why I found such comfort in the contrived upwardly mobile aesthetic.  The evening naps I stole there could not forever delay the inevitable strategizing over a safe evening parking space.   I came to prefer the working class western suburbs, the small houses in those neighborhoods seemed more humane than Evenston's rigid boxwoods.

I gave a bum a $10, the last of my cash for the week, after one of  those spine torturing nights.  With such a nice suit, and a too well told tale of wallet theft, I suspected at the time he was actually a con artist, though I've heard panhandling pays somewhere around $10/ hr, so who knows.  I told him I was homeless, so I understood.  His face went white and he tried to give the money back.  No, keep it. I explained that I had a full time job and a credit card; I wouldn't starve.  What I didn't tell him was that I wanted him to feel guilty about pretending at crisis if that was what he was doing.  Giving that bill was a win win for me.  Either he needed it and would spend it on whatever would help him, or he didn't need it and would be ashamed at accepting charity from a *real*bum.

I should be showing my hosts gratitude with my presence, but it's hard for me to relax in another person's house, no matter how much I love them.  So I'm at the aggressively climate controlled library, trying to get used to the idea that for the next few months, however fragrant and well fed I be, noplace I sleep will be my home.