Nowhere to Live

Categories: Travel , Rediscoveries , Outdoors & Nature

I've never really bothered about locking my door, because if anyone wanted to get in, it wouldn't be that difficult to break a window, and then I'd just have to have it fixed.  Before you look up my address, though, note that I've kind of rearranged my position on the lock issue since this morning, when I went downstairs and found an apparently homeless guy sleeping on the futon in my living room.  He'd eaten some soup and drunk a full bottle of vermouth.  He stole $40 from my purse and made me drive him to Price Hill, so that's why I was late.

I think a lot of people would have been more upset than I about this--actually, I felt ashamed about how long my grass was and was glad I'd stayed up late steamvaccing the rug.  Probably I would have been more upset if I hadn't already started my Travels With Lizbeth blog. 

You've probably read this wonderful memoir already, but read it again.  It's the story of Lars Eighner's three years on the streets and on the road with his dog (Lizbeth).   

Eighner had been publishing stories in gay men's magazines for years when he lost his job as a mental-health worker and eventually found himself homeless in Austin, Texas.  He hitchhiked twice to the Los Angeles area and back, in a futile search for work as a magazine editor or screenwriter.  His writing style is erudite to the extreme (e.g. "I spent several days on Roy's sofa, making reconnoiter of his refrigerator as Sherman made of Georgia"). 

The book also contains Eighner's essay on the art of dumpster diving, with tips on where to find the best pickings (near universities) and what's likely to be safe to eat (usually cheese, if you just cut off the mold) and what's not (anything home canned).  Despite the subject matter, the book is often very, very funny.  Almost everyone who picks him up as he hitchhikes is a strange and interesting character, and his language is full of surprises.  (He refers to the items he picks from the dumpster as "orts," for example.)

Eighner designed his own Web site (see above), and it's gorgeous, but he says he's probably going to leave the Internet soon.  He's got a MySpace site.  He got $100,000 for Travels with Lizbeth in 1993, but within a few years found himself homeless again.  You can run through $100,000 pretty fast if you don't have a real job, and his health problems and inability to drive made it impossible for him to find one. (Eventually, friends came through and got him an apartment.)

Joblessness, followed by homelessness, can happen to anyone, even someone as smart as Lars Eighner.  If I were homeless, I'd probably break into someone's house and drink their vermouth too. (Eighner is not himself a drinker and believes that addiction is often the result, rather than the cause of homelessness.)

Okay, maybe I'm a bad person, but I have to admit that I'm thinking now about getting a security system (or at least a security-system sign) for my house.