Middle Aged Men, Living in Cars

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Patrick Fealey is a year younger than I am. I learn this reading his now-viral longread in Esquire: The Invisible Man: A Firsthand Account of Homelessness in America. Fealey was twenty-nine in 1997, the year I turned thirty. A celebrated journalist, novelist and art critic, Fealey was suddenly stricken with adult-onset Bipolar Type One. He rapidly lost everything: career, relationships, and the capacity to earn a living. “My psychiatrist actually said to me, ‘You are the worst manic depressive I have ever seen,’ writes Fealey. All these years later, the disease still ravages his brain, the worst of it kept at bay by a formidable number of psychotropic prescription drugs.

Fealey and his dog, Lily, live in his 2013 Toyota Corolla. He describes their routine, their diet, their search for a safe place to park. The description of homelessness rings very familiar. I lived in my car from October 2017 to October 2018.I showered at my girlfriend’s, and on rare occasions, when her roommate was gone, was allowed to sleep over as well. Still, I reckon I spent perhaps 320 out of 365 nights that year trying to sleep in an old and battered Mercedes C300. I will never forget it.

In January 2014, just months after resigning my teaching job and while still in a sober living home, a friend wrangled me a job working as a file clerk for a Beverly Hills tax accountant. I ended up working in that office for more than three and a half years. My employer was convinced I had the makings of a CPA, or perhaps an Enrolled Agent (someone licensed to represent tax clients to the IRS). I was desperate to make a living, and still in complete shock at the scope and scale of all I had lost when I’d blown up my career. I convinced my boss I understood more than I did. It took him years to catch on to the fact that I’d been feigning an understanding I did not possess and could not, despite my best efforts, acquire. On October 4, 2017, he finally fired me. Unable to pay my rent, I gave away most of what I had and moved into my car.

Three weeks later, by some miracle, I landed a job at Trader Joe’s for $15 an hour. It was enough to buy food, to buy gas, to pay back some debts, and to cover auto insurance. It was not enough for rent. It wasn’t even fully enough for food; I often skipped meals. When I’d been younger, I’d often starved my body in order to achieve a certain look. This was different. I was fifty before I knew what it was like to be hungry not out of vanity but out of at least a temporary poverty. It was terrifying.

Within a year, I’d start to make a little money freelancing. I began to sell my blood plasma as well, and that brought in another $500 a month. Combined with the TJ’s income, I finally had enough to move into a one-bedroom apartment with my girlfriend. When that relationship (which became my fifth marriage) ended in June 2023, I spent just one night sleeping in my car again. It was awful, largely because I was sure this new divorce meant I’d tumble all the way back down the hill I’d worked so hard to climb. I was lucky. It was just one night.

Patrick Fealey has not been as lucky as I have been. (His fortune, though, may also be changing: a GoFundMe, established just days after the Esquire article ran, has raised more than $150,000. The money will help get Fealey on his feet.) My mental illness is less disabling than his. Far more importantly, I come from a large and (remarkably) forgiving family. There is only so far they would let me fall. The only reason they allowed me to tumble all the way to living in my car, skipping meals, and selling my plasma was because I had exhausted their patience. They hoped that one day I’d find a way to make better choices. Unlike so many of the homeless, I was able to make those better choices. Unlike so many of the homeless, I had people quick to offer me assistance once it became clear I was committed to rebuilding a life. Unlike so many of the homeless, my brain is not so damaged by injury or addiction that I cannot support myself and my loved ones.

Homelessness is generally a consequence of both bad luck and bad choices. My friends on the left emphasize the former. My friends on the right stress the latter. It is true that we have a housing crisis. It is true that rents have rarely been less affordable. It is true that the American safety net, such as it is, has rarely been more frayed. It is true too that drug abuse is -- at least in part -- a decision. As they say in AA, no one gets “struck drunk” while walking innocently down the street. Economic precarity, mental illness, trauma, and racism are all very real factors in homelessness. Bad choices, like the decision to abuse street drugs or to stop taking prescribed antipsychotics, are also factors. I do not have a policy proposal to offer. I just know that one can be both a victim and a volunteer.

I have been both a victim and a volunteer. Those who despise me deny the former, and those who are fond of me sometimes explain away the latter, but I know. I suspect Patrick Fealey knows too. The ratio may vary among the throngs of the unhoused, but it is rarely 100/0.

A story:

Friday, June 15, 2018. 7:37PM.

My daughter is supposed to be at her mother’s Shabbat table, but she’s heard something from an adult guest and has slipped away to text me from her iPad. At this point, Heloise is nine, going on thirty. For as long as she can remember, I’ve been in and out of her life for one reason or another. For nearly that long, she’s been asking me why. She has another question.

I am stocking soup in the dry good aisle when my phone buzzes. We are not allowed to text while out on the floor, and by the time I do get a chance to text my daughter back, it’s too late. She doesn’t reply the next day either. We don’t talk again until Sunday, when I come over for Father’s Day. Over breakfast — just the three of us at Nick’s Diner — I ask Heloise if she has any more questions. My daughter shakes her head no, but when we climb into my car later, she changes her mind and produces a small flurry of queries.

“Do you sleep on the back seat?” (No, I recline the driver’s seat.)

“Do you have blankets?” (Yes, I keep them in the trunk.)

“Where do you go pee, and brush your teeth?” (This is David’s question, and I concoct a white lie about a very clean public restroom. In reality, I brush my teeth leaning out of my car, using a water bottle to rinse. I pee in an old Double Gulp cup that once held Diet Coke. Sometimes I get the angle wrong in the night, and I pee on myself. I do not tell them any of this.) Patrick Fealey centers the problem of finding a place to safely relieve oneself, and that rang right. It’s bad enough to be hungry. It’s far worse to be unable to find a toilet.

I exaggerate how many nights I can sleep over at my girlfriend’s. I stress that this is temporary, that daddy will make more money soon and have a nice apartment, maybe one they can visit. I hate making promises I might not keep, but it seems unkinder not to offer a vision of imminent redemption. Children need to believe their papas are always scheming to better their circumstances.

I tell them that there are fun things about sleeping in the car. “Daddy has snacks on the passenger seat, just waiting. So, if I wake up, it’s right there!” I imitate being half-asleep, extending a zombie-like right hand to clutch an imaginary handful of chips. The kids giggle. In truth, there are very rarely snacks in the car. I can’t afford them, and those I do have are never rationed, but rather scarfed down as soon as acquired.

“I want to sleep in the car too, abba! Can I, sometime? Maybe just us?” David looks at his sister. He very much craves alone time with me.

I’m at an absolute loss as how to play the answer, and Heloise bails me out. “Ugh, no. Your car is so dirty, daddy. Neither of us will sleep here.” David pouts. Heloise continues: “But maybe someday soon, you could come sleep on the couch at mama’s place?” David cheers.

I assure them that will happen. Eventually, as that relationship with their mother heals and trust builds, it will.

And before I change the subject to soccer practice, I tell them how I fall asleep every night that I’m in the car. I recline the driver’s seat, open the moon roof, and look up at the stars. “I take a long time to decide which star is for Heloise, and which one is for David. They need to be special.” My daughter wants to know if I have a star for Victoria (my then-girlfriend), or Eira (their mother). “Yes, of course, they get a star.”

And soon they recite all the people they love that I must include in the star search, and I promise to remember cousin Ka’Liyah, and baby Felix, and the rest of the family. After several minutes, they grow tired of listing names who deserve remembering. I promise them there are more than enough stars for all the loved ones, both here and beyond.

I lied about the stars just as I did about the clean restrooms. I did open the moon-roof as I fell asleep each night in the Walmart parking lot. There were no stars, only the intense glow of dozens of streetlamps. Even on nights the moon was full, the light pollution was far too bright to see it.

A few months ago, I told the kids the truth about that time, a season they remember all too well. I told them that when I fell asleep at night in my car, I thought of the stars I could not see, and I wished upon them, and I thought about the future I could not yet glimpse, a future where we would fall asleep under the same roof as often as not. That future came, and I am so very grateful.

Not long ago, an acquaintance objected to my description of myself as having once been homeless. “You had a car to sleep in. You had a job. You knew that sooner or later, your family would take you back. You don’t get to compare your situation to that of people living on the street.” I didn’t argue. There will always be self-proclaimed authorities who treat suffering like an Olympic event, awarding gold, silver, and bronze medals to those with the best stories of anguish. Just like at the real Olympics, these judges will attempt to disqualify some competitors altogether. For the likes of me to claim the title “former homeless person” functions as a kind of stolen valor. They say I wear a gold medal — or a Purple Heart — that is not mine to wear. I have finally lived long enough to know not to argue with the gatekeepers. I know what I knew, and I read it in Patrick Fealey’s story.

I have known what it is to be lightheaded from hunger because I chose gasoline over food. I have known what it is to be woken, night after night, by cops rapping their flashlights on the driver’s side window. I have known what it is to search in vain for an open toilet, and when none were available, to slip into an alley and shit behind a dumpster. Even those who wished me ill would not have wanted that for me.

Please, read Patrick Fealey’s article. His is just one story, and I leave it to you to decide how many universals you can extract from his particulars. Your compassion is needed – but your acts of kindness towards the despairing and the vulnerable are no substitute for smart public policy. As even a cursory glance under the overpass – or at the Walmart parking lot – will tell you, that smart public policy may be on someone’s drawing board, but it is not yet in effect.