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Herald Flashback

S.J.F.D.

By Lee Vilensky

I’ve been homeless twice in my life, so far. I can’t imagine ever being in that situation again, but then I couldn’t see it coming the first two times either. The problem is I’ve always lived close to the edge with little concern for money. These two actions can cause a reaction, factoring out exponentially into the number zero, rather abruptly. Zero puts you outdoors.

The first time wasn’t really my fault. I put my trust in someone I didn’t know and got burned. I was about 20 years old at the time and moving around quite a bit.

My mother told friends and relatives that I was a young man filled with “Wanderlust”, but really I was just searching for a place where people were strange, like me. I didn’t want to wander at all. I wanted to find an Art/Sex commune and live there forever. Sell my car, never more to roam.

I wound up in northern California. Santa Clara County. I was being pulled in by the San Francisco freak magnet, but didn’t know it yet, so I found myself sharing an apartment with my stepsister in Cupertino, 50 miles south of the city.

Before Cupertino, I’d tried settling in Newark, Del., Hilton Head, S.C., and Boulder, Co. I was installing waterbeds in the Boulder/Denver area, when my stepsister, Lou-Ann, called and convinced me to move to “Silicon Valley”, and get a job with a future. She sold lawn and garden furniture. So I loaded up my ‘69 VW Bug and headed west for Californy. I didn’t really know Lou-Ann, but she sure sounded nice on the phone.

Well sure enough, there were thousands of jobs in the computer industry. This was 1979, and Santa Clara County had the lowest unemployment rate in the country. I found a job right away, installing waterbeds. Lou-Ann was furious. She called me an idiot and accused me of using all the butter. I was an idiot, but I hadn’t used all the butter. She was acting very strangely, so I loaded up the Bug and split. I’d been in Cupertino 3 days, and was now living in my car, with all my belongings.

My new job started in 3 days. I had 20 bucks and 72 hours to kill. The only thing to do was try and sleep, a lot. I drove into the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains and set up camp. I played both the songs I knew on my guitar and stayed awake for the better part of 3 days, and 3 long, lonely nights. I was homeless. Woodie Guthrie, Boxcar Bill, Jack Kerouac -- they were all full of shit. They forgot to write about the mosquitoes. Those 3 days have marked me for life. I still feel them, like an old football injury on a rainy day. And there were more sleepless nights to come, but those first 3 were the hardest.

My first day of work, I became friendly with a guy working in the warehouse. That night I slept on his couch. The next morning, two of his housemates told me I couldn’t stay there, and to amscra.

I was back in the Bug, where I was always welcome. Thank God that car never broke down, or I would have been in deeper shit than I already was.

I got fired from the waterbed job for not shaving and smelling bad.

I’d accumulated one week’s pay and checked into a youth hostel in the hills, just outside of Saratoga. I was the only hostler, and it turned out to be quite a nice set-up.

I wound up exchanging room and some board, for work on their roof, and other smaller projects. I got clean and sane, well fed, and even well oiled a couple of times.

The managers were Christian folks who were very kind and hardly ever there. They’d hired a guy, about my age, to be a live-in super. He was a small black cat, training for the San Jose Fire Department. An intense guy, but very sympathetic to my housing problem. We hit it off right away, and when the work at the hostel ended, I was still living there for free, thanks to him.

I think his name was Matt. He played a little harmonica, so we’d smoke some weed and jam, always in the key of E. He had a girlfriend who’d come by with her retarded daughter. The girl was about 7, and Matt seemed to love her very much. We spent many nights laughing, and talking, maybe smoking a little, and playing our two or three Jimmy Reed songs for the girls. It was like a family. We were alone in the beautiful redwoods and eucalyptus, with no one to bother us, except an occasional European traveler, and the banana slugs.

One night I was alone with the girlfriend and daughter. We’d had some wine and I was reading to the girl. Everything was very mellow until Matt came back from wherever he had been, drunk. I’d never seen him drink before. Not even a swallow of beer, and I was about to find out why.

He was different. His face looked different. The bright eyes dull, the kind smile a leer. It was someone I had never met before. The alcohol had possessed him. Really more of an allergic reaction than an intoxication.

The girlfriend grabbed her daughter, and their coats and toys, and left without a word. Matt watched them go and made no move to stop them. I decided that she was not a person I wanted in my foxhole. Matt and I were alone. No one to bother ‘cept for the banana slugs. He was staring at me.

“What?”

“Did you fuck her?”

“What the hell kind of a question is that?”

“She likes you. I can see that. I’m not stupid.”

“You’re acting very strange, man. What’s wrong?” I asked him, trying to sound concerned, but probably sounding scared.

“What’s wrong is I have a whore for a woman. Are you a whore too?”

“Look Matt, I’m going to say this one more time, and then you can think what you want. I have never had sex with your girlfriend, nor have I ever wanted to. We’re friends. I thought we were friends, too.”

“She sleeps around. God made her daughter retarded.”

“Alright. I’m gettin’ the fuck out of here.”

I went to the back bedroom and gathered up my shit, rolled up my sleeping bag and was out the door.

“Wait a minute.”

“I’m leaving Matt. Thanks for everything.”

“Did you fuck her?” He was crying now.

“Absolutely not.”

“You don’t have to leave.”

In his lap was a red axe with S.J.F.D. stenciled on it.

“O.K. I’m just gonna go in town and get some beer, and be right back.”

“What kind of beer?”

“What do you like?”

“Coors.”

“Coors it is. Get your harp out. I’ll be back in 7 minutes and 13 seconds.”

I walked slowly to the car carrying my sleeping bag and a backpack. I stopped and put the backpack on, figuring the blade would hit dirty laundry first, flesh and bone second.

He didn’t move. I could see into the room, and he was sitting cross-legged, staring at the wall. He looked like a 4-year-old watching cartoons on Saturday morning. I got in the car, and let it coast down the hill, away from the hostel, about 150 yards. It started right up and I was outta there.

I slept in the Bug that night, and it wasn’t so bad. I remember thinking that people in California seemed much different from the people I had known on the East coast.###