I thought it likely that I would die before the money ran out.
That wasn't my plan, but I am a heavy smoker, at least ten stone
overweight, and in my late forties. But it is beginning to look
like I will survive my money after all. The money came from
Travels with Lizbeth, my book about my experiences as
homeless person with a dog. The book was well received on these
pages and by The New York Times Book Review and so
forth; it took me—much as I wanted to remain at home once I
had one—to London, Copenhagen, New York several times,
Baltimore, Sacramento, Dallas, Los Angeles twice, Honolulu, some
place on Maui, Tucson, and San Francisco; it put me on "CBS Sunday
Morning," an obscure documentary on PBS, Sky TV, the BBC World
Service, and on the pages of People magazine; and it
did about as well as a little literary book can do, especially one
that fails to win any of the prizes it is nominated for.
There has been other money too, of course. I've done four books
since, despite the traveling I had to do and despite wasting six
months on several treatments for an ill-starred movie project, and
if I finish the trilogy I am working on now within a month or so,
the advance for it may extend my housed condition until sometime in
the early spring of 1996. But the prospect of renewed homelessness,
sooner or later, is clearly with me. I mention this apropos of an
ordinance the Austin City Council has passed on first reading and
almost certainly will finally pass sometime before Christmas. It is
an ordinance to make camping on city lands unlawful. I don't know
how afraid of this I ought to be.
"It is a crime to be poor." So the homeless people around the
University of Texas told me when I spoke to them as their peer.
Even without the ordinance, the necessities of homeless life
violate existing laws in several ways. Perhaps like existing laws,
the new law will be used arbitrarily by the police to remove
individuals that particular officers dislike particularly. Or
perhaps there actually will be an attempt to jail all of the
homeless—I cannot think there is enough jail space for this,
but who knows. Perhaps jail camps will be instituted.
The council has moved against the homeless many times. The main
reason cited for outlawing public drinking in certain areas of the
city was to cause the homeless to go elsewhere. No doubt the
council has discovered that the homeless can do without drink, but
everyone must needs be somewhere. Trespassing on private property
is already a crime, so perhaps the council thinks that banning the
homeless from public property will cause the homeless to vanish.
Could the council think the homeless will come to believe that
Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are better places to be
homeless?
It is a myth that the homeless are transients who might as well
go one place as another. The studies are poor, but almost all
studies find that more than 60% of the homeless population in a
city became homeless in that city. The homeless are nothing more or
less than the poor, made visible by their lack of housing (and
hence the title of Joel Blau's fine academic treatment of
homelessness The Visible Poor).
Curiously, this latest assault on the homeless occurs just as
the housing market in Austin has become tighter than anyone can
remember. Austin dropped twenty-odd places on someone's list of
best cities in America to live in, and enormous rent increases were
blamed for that. Of course the poor fall out of the bottom of the
housing market in such a situation, but it is more than that. Some
agencies now require prospective tenants to be bonded in addition
to providing a large deposit. A substantial rent increase at the
renewal of a lease is a certainty and there is almost no hope at
all of finding cheaper quarters, so rare are vacancies in
affordable housing. It is a curious effect of psychology that the
more people who are threatened with the real prospect of
homelessness, the more those who are already homeless are despised.
William Burroughs has called this the smallest monkey effect. When
the big monkey attacks a smaller monkey, the smaller monkey does
not strike back, but instead finds yet a smaller monkey to
attack.
But at the bottom of the chain is the smallest monkey. When the
landlords squeeze the tenants, the rage must be vented somewhere,
and the homeless person is the smallest monkey. Is a downtown
merchant threatened by the vast malls? Attack the smallest monkey.
It is the homeless, he concludes, not his high overhead, that drive
away his customers. A silversmith in Austin's open-air market near
the University of Texas was interviewed about the homeless. He said
they drive away his customers. This was what the merchants in the
nearby stores said about the merchants in the open-air market some
twenty-five years ago when the market was established. The homeless
must be driving away the craftsman's customers, no matter that
business in the market always has been marginal except immediately
before Christmas. There is a smaller monkey for everyone, except
for the smallest monkey. It is only logical that as the misery
index in Austin rises the city council would pommel the smallest
monkey a bit themselves.
I find it very difficult to believe that anyone on the council
really can be sincere in saying that help is provided for the
homeless in the programs that the city funds. Perhaps I have
underestimated the ability of the comfortable to delude themselves.
Perhaps I'd be explicit: the city's programs for the homeless are a
sick joke. Not as much as a dime on the dollar of the money the
city expends on these programs is delivered as something of
material value to the homeless. Of course lavish amounts are
expended on hiring counselors and social workers to hold the hands
of the poor and to counsel them and to give them good advice, but
for raising roof beams or dispensing bread and blankets, there is
very little. Programs for the homeless are still predicated on the
theory that the homeless have some other problem than lack of
housing.
When Travels with Lizbeth was still fresh off the
press and I was considered the golden boy of homelessness, an
official of the Clinton administration came to Austin to explain
Clinton's plan for dealing with homelessness. (You may not know
there was a Clinton plan for the homeless because it was a smallish
headline one day and forgotten the next.) In any event I was
invited to attend an informal briefing in which the plan was laid
out for representatives of various agencies.
Of course there would be less money overall—the nasty
Republicans were to be blamed for that, but according to the plan
there would some block grants and an increase in the earned-income
tax credit. A representative of one agency suggested that much of
the money from the block grants might go for WIC a food program for
Women, Infants, and Children. A representative of another agency
thought the money might better go for day care. It was, of course,
not too difficult to detect that the advocated program was in each
case connected to the spokesperson's own agency.
Everyone glared at me when I pointed out that two-thirds was the
least estimate of the proportion of the homeless who are single
men—some estimates are much higher. (The estimates are lower
if homelessness is taken to include those in shelters as well as
those living in the rough.) Single men are ineligible for the
earned-income credit and for the WIC
program, and have no use for day care. Or in other words, the three
most-discussed aspects of the Clinton plan for the homeless, as it
might be implemented in Texas, excluded from any benefit at least
two-thirds of the people who are living in the rough. No bureaucrat
will thank you for discussing reality when there is a budget to be
divvied up.
It is in the spirit of these bureaucrats that the Austin city
council suggests that the homeless take advantage of the programs
the city funds for the homeless. Such a suggestion is nothing more
or less than "Let them eat cake."
At least once a day I look around my writing room and wonder
what it will be like this time. What will it be like, when with
Lizbeth on her leash and all that we can keep on my back, we step
out the door of our home for the last time and are homeless once
again. In the early spring Lizbeth and I will both be eight years
older than we were when we first set out on our homeless
career.
Perhaps I flatter myself to think that I will have found some
University to receive my papers. I look at our busts—they are
really brilliant likenesses, but they are just fired clay. Will
anyone care to preserve them? Perhaps I will find someone to drive
me to the secondhand book store and I'll dispose of this library as
I disposed of that other library eight years ago.
I'll have a few dollars in my pocket when I hit the street. But
the fine for existing on public land will be passed and enacted
into law by then. It will be five hundred dollars. I won't have
that much.
I remember when I was in college, a young man in my dormitory
always referred to his birth certificate as his license to exist.
We thought that was amusing. But I won't have a license to exist
the day I leave home again. I won't have the means to exist on
private land. And it will be unlawful for me to exist on public
land. What place is there to exist that is neither public nor
private?
How long will Lizbeth and I exist on the streets this time?
Maybe Lizbeth won't be killed when I am arrested. I think there is
an animal shelter in town now that does not kill the unclaimed
animals—and surely a very old dog with patchy skin and a
cauliflower ear will be unclaimed. Maybe they will take her to that
shelter and not to the pound. I don't know where the dogs of the
newly-criminal homeless will be taken.
Will it be raining that day? No doubt they will know to look
under the bridges when it is raining. If I don't set up a camp and
I move every night, will they find me? No, no, that won't work. The
fire ants will find me if I don't return every night to a spot I
have secured from them. How long can I carry my gear on my back
these days? I think it is doubtful that I could even make it to a
hidden spot along Shoal Creek in one day.
No, probably not anymore.
You see, I just sort of thought we would both be dead before the
money ran out.
