Sleeping Rough in San Diego Part Two

Surrounded by My Brother

Peg drove. Tommy rode shotgun. I sat in the backseat watching them, the street, surveying every sidewalk we cruised by an eye out for Baby Brother. Trying not to stare too long in one place, into any one face, hoping it might be him, afraid it could be him, knowing it could be any one of us too.

The Jack In The Box sacks were gone before we’d traveled a block. Peg would slow to an idle by the curb, Tommy would jump out, hand a sack to a man or a woman or a couple and show them our brother’s photo.

“Have you seen this guy?”

‘Narc!” was his answer. “Get out of here, narc!”

Tommy, Peg, all three of us were well dressed, clearly well fed and taken care of. How could the people we approached know where we’d been, where we’d come from, any more than we could understand the path they’d had to travel. There were dozens of makeshift encampments on the streets of downtown San Diego. Long lines on one sidewalk in front of a large rescue mission, the line outside the entrance so long I thought it must be close to dinnertime.

Peg parked. Tommy went inside the mission. Peg and I got out of the SUV to stretch our legs and look around. I stood in the middle of the street and did a 180, turning to take in the flood of movement on the sidewalk, the chaotic street, and the foot traffic in and out of the mission. I stood and stared surveying the scene. Closed my eyes for a dizzying moment and that’s when I felt his presence. I opened my eyes in time to see a slender man riding an old blue bike, pedaling past me going fast, then faster. I turned. Caught a look at the rider’s face. Kept watching. Watched as he glanced back at me. Something about the way he looked back at me, at us, at Peg and I, as his ghostly bike pedaled past, the way the man stared at me in particular, gave me bathtub goose bumps.

My brother. That man might be my brother.

I was surrounded by my brother, right and left, on every street corner, in all the tents, any man on the street might be my brother, any one of the wizened men Tommy was busy asking: “Have you seen this man? Do you know where I can find him?”

Tommy was relentless.

Every time he hopped back into the SUV he reminded us: “I need to find my brother.” He had to fly home Sunday morning. Today was Friday. He had to find him. This can’t have all been for nothing. He needed to see his brother again, a man he hadn’t seen since Tommy was seven and Baby Brother was eighteen. Since the day Tommy was picked up for shoplifting in Wickenburg, Arizona and taken into police custody and then into foster care. Meant to get caught and carried away and when he was he carried his older brother in his heart, a brother lucky enough to have a father who rescued him from years spent on the road, beaten and starved.

“Stop the car,” Tommy said. “Now.”

On a street lined with blue tarp tents tethered to the chain link fence separating property under development from people in need of housing, Peg pulled the SUV over to the curb. Men and women sat on the sidewalk outside flap openings, talking and smoking and laughing. Watched us idle. Tommy jumped out and strode over to a couple. They sat in the liminal space of their tent opening, the woman holding a baby, a toddler girl beside her. Tommy towered over them, leaned into the dark mouth of the tent. Pulled a roll of money out of his khaki pants pocket and crushed the cash wad into the man’s hand.

I couldn’t take my eyes off of the woman. Her clothes fashionably drab in that vegetable dyed unevenly dyed upper class kind of way and her hair a marbled jazzy Rastafarian salad. She could be a Dot COM Gen Xer from one of the nearby industrial low rises back home from an entrepreneur’s start up. Her head vibrated. She sat too deliberately at an angle too awkward, as if she were trying to not be seen. Anxiety had the best of her I thought. Then I realized she was talking earnestly to a very specific no one, not the man beside her or my brother or her own children. The repeated bobbing movement of her head guided the forced projection of her speech. Oh, I thought, she’s like Mama. Just as that thought formed in my head, the line of the woman’s head unhinged from the right angle of her rigid sitting self and she looked at me, into my stare; looked me evenly in the eye and smiled.

It was a singular recognition.

“I can’t take it,” Tommy said. Slammed his car door shut. Looked down and wagged his head back and forth, over and over, as if his head were too heavy, his neck broken. “I can’t take seeing the kids out there.”

Homeless children set him off. Triggered all three of us. Children of women who couldn’t or just wouldn’t settle down.

By eight o’clock that evening The Downtown Café in El Cajon was already full. Hard twang blasted the room. Live bands played every Friday and Saturday night. Regulars came for entertainment and dancing and drinks galore.

No cover. All ages. Dine. Dance. Rock.

The hostess took us through the dance floor to a booth under the windows. We looked at menus: beer margaritas, old fashioned and whiskey sours, fajita skillets, potato skins, guacamole and chips. We ordered food. And drinks. I was too nervous to eat. Blue too. And apprehensive, but I didn’t need to be. My niece’s stepfather had been so kind to the three of us, strangers to him, when we’d walked up to his chain link fence that morning yelling “anybody home?”

Tommy and Peg drank margaritas, and I sipped on a glass of sour sangria while we watched the couples on the dance floor jump and sway to the music, all eyes shifting in the direction of the bar entrance on the lookout again, a shared dream in all our hearts, to undo some of the harm done. All three of us so different yet so similar, silent in a memory house of childhood horrors. Tommy’s brown eyes surveyed the room; his bravery and his driven determination were evident in his protective posture. He and Peg chatted about the day, our first day of looking.

“Hey, look, an escape plan!” she said. Our booth was under a window wide open to the street. Peg’s brutally funny asides had always lightened my heaviness; her instinctive good humor was a balm, as always, since we were small children coloring on the floor.

Once in the card section of a grocery store where I’d gone to buy shampoo and a get-well card for a coworker, I found a greeting card she had written. A mass-produced message to mothers everywhere. Printed in careful script on the front of the card: Mom, how can I tell you how much you mean to me.  

My phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.

I’m here. Where are you?

I maneuvered through the busy couples two stepping. Headed for the front door looking for a woman in her late thirties or early forties, close to my son’s age, a cousin she had never met and might never meet.

I found her in the middle of a floor of couples dancing to her stepdad’s bar band music.

“Hey,” she said. Recognized me just as I recognized her.

Time slipped way. Jennifer’s face was heart-shaped like Mama’s, her coloring just as dramatic, her eyes, green, like Mama’s too. But Jennifer’s skin was a translucent white. Mama had a freckled complexion. Angels’ kisses. Beauty marks. Mama had lots of them: little reddish dots covering her arms and neck and even her legs. Mama was of medium build; Jennifer was petite, like me. Jennifer’s voice was soft and gentle, not forced or driven.

The steady back beat of Jennifer’s stepdad’s band playing one of their signature songs: East County Woman. Jennifer slipped into the booth beside me and across from Tommy. He motioned the waitress over for another drink and a menu for our niece. Hands in her lap under the table beside me. Nervous.

“You’re like him,” she said to Tommy, brother to her real father, the man we were here in haunted San Diego to find.

“What do you mean?” Tommy asked.

Jennifer gestured toward Tommy’s drink glass. “How long are you guys here for?”

“I’m flying home Sunday morning,” Tommy answered.

He only had so much time. We all only had so much time if what stepdad told me was true.

“He’s not well,” I said. “We need to find him so he can be treated.”

“For what?” Jennifer asked.

“Cancer,” I said, and immediately regretted it. It might not be true. And I didn’t want her to worry. But of course, she did. She brooded and worried like me. I could see it in her face, her body. The way she flinched.

“I want to come with you,” Jennifer said. “I want to help you find him.” She knew where he hung out, how he traveled. Where we might find him at last. She worried about him.

San Diego wasn’t safe for someone sleeping rough. San Diego led the nation in violent crimes against the homeless by the “housed” assailants.

“Park the car,” Tommy said. “I want to go up there.”

An encampment scattered on the hilly public space between two freeway overpasses, cut off from the flow of traffic by a network of busy on and off ramps. To get Tommy close enough to walk in Peg drove down alleys and access roads. She positioned the SUV as close as she could get. He ran across a section of freeway, jumped the railing and wandered through an ad hoc tent city looking for his brother.

“My dad’s not there,” Jennifer said to Peg and I. “He’s probably in La Mesa. Why won’t Tommy listen to me?”

Why would he listen to any of us? None of us knew what it meant for a brother to look for a brother. Boys who’d never had a loving mother to help them grow, see them change year by year and take delight in their becoming. 

Mama only seemed to love the road. The freedom it gave her.

It’s the romance of escape, not the study of a map that gets you going. Even corny songs on a late-night car radio can trigger it. The destination doesn’t matter because the compulsion is rooted in the past. It happens to me when I am being driven anywhere. The driver may be sure of the route and mindful of the surroundings. All the while I think about opening the door and simply tumbling out onto the middle of the wide gray road. I remain an outwardly compliant, even grateful passenger. Inwardly I know I am lost.

Jennifer was right; we didn’t find Baby Brother downtown that day.

Late afternoon back at the hotel we four sat around the pool with drinks and a shared order of lobster nachos. Fragrant air, cool in gusts, blew through eucalyptus trees, palms and designer cactus. Pool water glistened. A waitress came periodically to refresh our drinks.

“This is so bougie,” Jennifer said.

Tommy laughed. Peg and I exchanged looks of mutual recognition.

We had all aspired to a higher class than the one we had come from. We grew up poor, not middle class, dirt poor is where we came from.

Chronic homelessness, chronic exposure to stress, years on the road, in a car, in tight spaces with no privacy, or quiet place, we all three had had to make do in the backseat or the front, in temporary shelters, a motel, a strange man’s apartment or house. Living on fast food, tacos and hamburgers in the car, the pocket food of vagrancy. Dragging our few belongings in and out of the car, our bodies from one place to the next.

I was sixty-one. Peg was fifty-nine and Tommy was forty-eight years old. We’d all worked hard for acceptance and inclusion. We’d all three gotten our abandoned butts through college. Despite scalding shame, emotional isolation and the stop and start of a one-step forward one step back recovery from childhood poverty, trauma and abuse, we’d earned degrees and jobs and the trappings of social respectability. Not without difficulty. All three of us still suffered from our mothers’ self-hatred, a legacy they’d projected onto their kids: scapegoated and rejected. Burdened. Shot into society striving to be good enough; none of us took material comfort for granted.

“You can’t believe what it was like,” Tommy said. “I’m five, six years old,” he began. Like Mama, he was a born storyteller. He set the story up well. “And she stops at this truck stop for gas and asks me to go in to get her some coffee.”

Something Peg and I can well imagine; we’d both been the kid sent in for coffee, for food, the child told to steal what Mama wanted, what she asked for, and told to not bother coming back to the car, your only home, without.

“So, when I see those little packets of Ex-Lax by the cash register,” Tommy continued, “I get this idea.”

A boy in a car made to work for his lunch, his oldest sister and brother gone, the next in line sibling crazy cruel to him, the others angry and hopeless, weak with fear and longing for normalcy.  

“We didn’t get a mile down the highway,” Tommy said, “before she’s screaming ‘what’s happening, what’s happening’.

“What happened then?” Jennifer asked.

“She pulled over and ran into the ditch to shit.”

I laughed so hard I lost control. In public I began to piss my brand-new Paige jeans and they were a dark wash. It would show but there was nothing I could do. I let loose and I couldn’t stop. In the wide open, I stood up from the patio table by the pool and ran for the door to the lobby, then to the closest elevator. Rushed inside the elevator thankfully alone as it flew upwards, hands between my legs trying to keep it all in until I made it to safety. I held my crotch like a child, my hands soon wet, wetting myself the way I did so many times in the backseat of the car pleading with Mama to ‘stop, please stop I have to go.’

She never stopped until she needed to stop. Loss of control her least favorite feeling.

In my hotel room I peeled urine-soaked jeans and panties off of my body, threw them inside a dry-cleaning bag, and buried the bag at the bottom of my suitcase. Then I washed myself and considered whether or not to go back downstairs. I didn’t want to miss out. I wanted to hear more stories from Tommy. Watch my new niece listen wide eyed with wonder. Share knowing looks with my cousin Peg.

I slipped on a clean pair of jeans and went back to the poolside table where my family members were still sharing drinks and stories.

Peg asked, “Did you change?”

“She wet her pants,” Tommy stated, flat out not surprised. Just reached for another chip.

Sunday night we dropped Jennifer off at her car parked in the now dark Fashion Center Mall parking lot and took some pictures of us all together before we said good-bye. One of Peg and Jennifer and I, arms around one another standing in the in between of two parking spaces. One of Tommy and Jennifer, Tommy’s arm around her shoulder, both of them smiling. One of them a close up with Tommy’s hand over his face, peeking out, surprised to be there with blood family in the town where he was conceived. And one of Tommy and Jennifer and I, Tommy in the middle, me on his right my head against his strong shoulder, Jennifer to his left, Tommy’s arm pulling her in close.

“Don’t share them,” Tommy told us. “Please.” He didn’t want any of our siblings or Peg’s to know his goings on or whereabouts. Understandably cautious, careful about where and when and with whom he spent his time, fearful of being found by those he’d left behind.  

His birthday was in a few weeks. Peg and I wanted to share it with him. He had seldom celebrated that special day when he was a child.

On our last night together, Peg and I took Tommy to a steak place in La Jolla Cove, an upscale area with a great view. We ordered oysters, wedge salads, and an expensive bottle of cabernet. Peg ordered scallops and swordfish for herself; I ordered tuna poke and Brussel sprouts, and Tommy ordered a twelve-ounce New York steak. Our server Judy was attentive, the food delicious and my stomach smoldering with disappointment.

I’d finally made it out, aged out of foster care and childhood. We all three had aged out in one way or another. And that was something to celebrate. But what about Baby Brother, what about my younger brother, who or what would save him?

“Hey, let’s have a toast,” Peg suggested. “To us.”

“Happy birthday to you,” I said to Tommy. “About time.”

We lifted our glasses to Tommy that night. Sad and sorry we had not been able to find the boy we came to find, but thrilled to find ourselves together, each of us grown past the harm.

“We’ve got to accept that he didn’t want to see us,” Tommy said. “He had our numbers, and he didn’t call.”

We wanted to tell him he was cherished in this life even if his one and only Mama hadn’t loved him. But you can’t speak those soul saving words to someone if they can’t be found, if they don’t want to be seen.

“Maybe he will call later on,” I said to Tommy. So set on finding his older brother, the boy in the baseball cap all those years ago. “You left your number behind. Maybe he will call you later on after you’re home.”

Back in his territory, in the life he had heroically made for himself.

Next morning when Peg and I got up Tommy was gone. Checked out early but not before he’d paid the hotel bill for all three of us.

On our drive back to L.A. stepdad called to tell me that Baby Brother had called him, excited that his brother and sister and cousin had been looking for him.

“Then why didn’t he call us while we were there?” I asked. “Tommy wanted to see him. We all wanted to see him.”

“He was afraid,” stepdad, explained. “He thought maybe Tommy was a narc. Maybe you guys were tricking him. Maybe you were the cops.”