WHISPERS THROUGH AMERICA

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

– Frank Herbert, Dune 

The kid sat on the hard, narrow seat of a toilet in the back of a gym in San Diego, tolerating the damp and sour smell because this was a safe place where he could stay for a while. He could squat on this toilet for an hour or more, probably, before he got noticed and thrown out. He could squat on this toilet until his conviction to get back out there and use the equipment just withered away and died. He could plod back to his locker, retrieve his bag, and walk out. He would be ashamed of himself, but he’d been ashamed of himself many times before, and he’d lived. He’d survive this too. But one of the promises he made to himself before setting out on the road was to walk towards fear, not away from it. He found new comfort zones again and again, but he would not allow himself to hide within them. He would go forth. He would face his fears. 

The kid read Dune when he was a teenager. The “Litany Against Fear” had become a friend in the darkness, the final push he used to convince himself to step into an ice cold shower or to stick his thumb out on the side of the road. It was a weapon against the paralyzing fear that had afflicted him all his life. Sometimes the challenge was so huge it seemed impossible, but this time the challenge was just to exit a bathroom stall and walk out onto the floor of the gym he had just signed up for. 

The kid shut his phone off, took a deep breath, pulled up his pants and walked outside. The gym was full of people who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. He found a stationary bike away from most of the crowd. He spent a few minutes staring at it and pushing random buttons like a moron, sweat beading on his forehead and the heat of embarrassment warming his neck and ears, before he realized that you don’t turn it on: you just start pedaling. He was still more embarrassed than relieved, but he clung to the steady rhythm of the pedals and warmed himself up. He picked up some small dumbbells later and did a couple dozen sets of curls. Simple, unambitious, merely what he needed to accomplish a burn and to use his time in the gym productively – he had paid for it, after all. Why only shower when he could also build a habit of working out? It would be a way to kill time indoors in air conditioning, give him a reason to walk in and out of the gym to allay suspicion that he was only there for a shower, and it would simply be good for him. 

He pulled on his black pair of jeans and his black denim jacket when he stepped into the cold outside. It was the coldest night of his life so far, but he endured it not only with satisfaction but also a kind of grim joy. He’d searched through the satellite image on Google maps to find a wooded area by the San Diego river that looked thick enough to hide away in. He took the train there, and walked under the elevated tracks beside the road until the traffic thinned enough for him to slip down into the brush. There was a flat ground covered in litter which he avoided, favoring a gnarl of hard roots surrounded by bushes. Nobody would find him there, he figured, not even the other hobos. He huddled under the warmth of his army camouflage blanket, but it was not enough. He woke up three times to piss into the stream a few feet away. He woke up at every small noise, and he woke up every time a knobby root dug into him for too long in the same place. He shivered so hard at five in the morning that he decided to stop trying to sleep. 

He stuffed his gloved hands in his pockets and walked around the back part of the town he found himself in, where it was all commercial buildings and offices that were still closed and deserted, and the sidewalks were wide open for him to aimlessly wander. He was still shivering. He still couldn’t feel his fingers. He hadn’t planned for this kind of cold, and he didn’t know about how the cold air pools in the wet valleys and clings to your bones, even in the tropical paradise of southern California.

He walked into a McDonald’s for breakfast almost as soon as they opened. He told himself he needed warm food and a warm place to eat it, but what he really needed was a place that felt like home. McDonald’s was the same thing all over the country – the same tiles on the floor that he remembered from the town he grew up back in Illinois, the same smells, the same menu, and the same break from all the chaos going on outside. It was another sanctuary, just like the gym, where he was allowed to relax for an hour or two at a time. 

That morning, his rest was interrupted when two guys got into a fight at the counter. The kid eyed them warily, but kept to himself. The cashier was already calling 911, and besides, the kid had never been in a fight before. His shoulders were up around his head as the hair stood up on the back of his neck, but if it came down to it, he still figured he’d just bolt and make a run for it. They never noticed him, and they moved outside after throwing a few half-assed fists at each other, fleeing before the cops arrived. The kid wondered what he would have done if he had been given no choice. One of the resolutions he’d made before he hit the road was to experience the full breadth of a human life. 

“Out of the ‘Four Fs’, I’ve only ever Fled, and Fed. I’ve never Fucked, or Fought. Well, this year I’m going to change all that. I’m going to do everything I’ve never done before.”

But it wasn’t that day, or the next. The kid let his mind slowly settle as his primal instincts told him to beat his chest and remind everybody how big and strong he was, and how he’d totally win a fight if somebody pissed him off, and how he wasn’t scared, no sir, not him. He let the shame of hiding in the corner slowly collapse onto itself. He sipped on the Coke he’d brought on his way out of McDonald’s, and he kept walking as the sun warmed the streets and he began to forget the heart-pounding stress of the fight. His purpose in life was to get to the PeopleReady office. That, at least, was simple.

When he arrived at the PeopleReady office in a strip mall beside a golf club, he was three hours early. The sun was already white-hot. His purpose in life was to walk in when his appointment came up at noon. His purpose in life was not anything else. So for the first time, the kid contented himself with waiting. He crossed his legs on a sunny sidewalk beside the building, closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind. He used to hate waiting. He used to hate those quiet moments when his mind was unoccupied, and all the nightmares of the future and the stresses of the day all came flooding in and made him feel trapped under a helpless burden. He still feared the unpredictable chaos that his future had become, but today his path was clear and so his mind was able to relax. There was nothing else he could do until the office opened. There was no need for stress. He was doing all he could do. He sat and waited. He spent a while digging dirt from under his fingernails, which had become a favorite hobby in recent days.

At noon, he went inside. Victor opened the door, giving the kid a brilliant smile. He told the kid to throw his bag anywhere and make himself at home. The kid tried to look like he didn’t care about the gym bag, enormously heavy and bursting at the seams, which contained everything he had in this world. He set it down and nudged it under the desk at his feet. He and Victor had seemingly both agreed to ignore the fact that he was homeless. Maybe it was the look in his eye, the way he was dressed, or just the presence of a large bag and the reputation around Southern California for rampant homelessness – most people knew.

But Victor took care of him. The kid had seen more trouble checking in at hotels than signing up for PeopleReady. He would need PPE in the form of a hard hat and steel toed boots, Victor warned, for most of these gigs – but if he could get there and work a full shift, it was the most surefire way to get paid. It was good, honest work. It was like his own personal American dream – the promise that if you show up and work your ass off, you get your money at the end of the day.

The kid was exhilarated. He had decided that he lived in Hollywood now. He would go back to LA, where all the gigs were to be found, and look for work at the Venice office, like David had advised when he first told the kid about PeopleReady, literally shouting it from the rooftops at his construction site when the kid had been walking down the coast. The kid was still shocked and ashamed of his own behavior when he’d found the edge of his own personal world at Ocean Beach. He had squared up with the universe, and been smacked with the harsh truth that he would never be satisfied with his own downward spiral – that no rock bottom would ever be enough. He would never want to change, unless he chose to. There would never be any salvation except through his own active and sustained effort. It was all up to him. Death would never present itself as the easy or the honorable choice, and the kid would never be given a golden ticket to some kind of effortlessly purposeful life. The choices were all up to him, and he would have to account for them all on his own.

“This is no longer a matter of fun or adventure. It's a matter of survival.”

He took the Surfliner train back up, feeling like a VIP. This was travel with purpose, now, not just running from things. The kid was going to have work to do in LA. He was back in what had already rapidly become his new home – his place of refuge, his turf, his stomping grounds. It was a city full of romance and opportunity, the center of the West Coast, the antithesis to everything he had experienced before in his life. Sure, it would do. 

 “It makes my throat tighten to be getting into LA with the sun going down, but I'll survive. I've just got to turn that fear into excitement.”

The kid stepped off the train feeling like hot shit. The station in the old Art Deco style makes you feel like royalty, or at least a movie star. And he thought he knew the turf. LA was his now, or so he told himself. But even as early as February, in the few short days since he had left, the turf had changed. He found his way back to the old spot he remembered in West Hollywood that he’d sheltered in with Blake and Eli back at the beginning of January, the secluded back garden of a fashion shop. He slid into the bushes and settled down, ready to rest after an exhausting two days with barely any real sleep. Then someone walked by and the kid heard the footsteps come to a halt. He saw the shadow of them stooping down to look into the bushes. He heard them dialing something on their phone. Had they seen him? Yes, definitely. The kid couldn’t say for sure if they had called the cops or whatever other busybody thing, but they had definitely looked right at him. The spot was burned. 

It felt like some people just had an untouchable aura that cut through anything the world threw in their way. Some men could stand in front of a lion without pissing their pants. Some men could think twelve steps ahead in a game of chess. Blake had possessed that kind of untouchable aura when he led them to this spot last month, but the kid did not. The kid couldn’t just insert himself into any situation and expect things to work out. He was apparently not confident enough in himself to brazenly sleep in any location he fancied, or maybe it was just the wrong time of year. Either way, he had a lot left to learn. 

He cursed himself for stupidity, and he was right. He had never liked the feeling of that place. It wasn’t sketchy enough to sleep in without drawing attention. The kid had ignored both his gut and his mind because he was clinging to the familiar and the safe. He cursed himself all the way back to Hollywood. He cursed the LA bus lines that he gave up trying to ride after getting into an argument with another guy on a street corner about it and deciding he was too tired and frustrated to keep trying to figure it out, so he just walked on sore and blistered feet until it felt like there were knives cutting his heels with every step. He got angry, and he told himself to use it as fuel. He kept walking until he found a quiet side street near the Motel 6 where he had stayed a month ago. It was a nice area in front of a swanky apartment building, but their yard was hidden by a high hedge and a locked gate, and there were planter boxes dividing the wide sidewalk from the street. On the street side of a planter, someone else was wrapped in a sleeping bag. 

The kid couldn’t believe it, almost didn’t want to – thought he might have to walk all night, or give up and lie down in whatever alley he found himself – but here was this guy sleeping in a beautiful spot, and there’s a planter between him and the planter where the kid was standing. He let his bag slide off his shoulders and sank onto his ass. The solid concrete felt better than a king-sized bed in a palace wrapped in silk. It felt like home. Sure, he’d fled here to yet another source of familiarity, in a neighborhood where he knew he’d be able to find a place to sleep, but for tonight it would work just fine. The locals did it all the time: homeless people wrapped in blankets were a common sight sleeping beside the golden stars on the Walk of Fame. He would fit right in.

That next morning was a cold and misty paradise. He shuffled along down to the boulevard with a dozen other blanket-wrapped bums, shivering and laughing together about the damned cold. The sunlight glinted gold on the shop windows of Hollywood in the biggest tourist trap the city had to offer. Today it was dead quiet. The kid made his way to McDonald’s for another hot breakfast. He looked through the PeopleReady app on his phone, but the job listings were scarce. He browsed Google maps while he stretched out his meal for an hour. He decided on another 24-hour fitness down in the south of the city, near Venice. 

This time he cashed in on the one-hour personal training session that had come free with his membership to 24-Hour Fitness. It was another hour that brought him the luxury of being told what to do and how to do it. The trainer was cheerful and kind, disarming the kid’s anxieties. He said the kid was more flexible than most, but he needed to work on keeping his hips, shoulders, and head aligned in the same straight posture, and learning to condition the smaller muscles that would keep the heavier weights stable when he finally learned the squat rack and the bench press. The kid was humbled and emboldened at the same time. The trainer encouraged him to keep on coming in and learning more. The kid said he would. It was a white lie – he was still determined to ward off any suspicion that he was homeless. 

The walk from there to Venice Beach was only a couple hours. It seemed easy. He took a bus to a library nearby first, but their outlets put out a disappointing voltage that barely charged his phone or his power bank. It was getting close to sunset when he decided he had to be on his way up the coastline towards Venice, where last month’s camping on the sand was already a fond memory. He tried not to get his hopes up about seeing Eli, or the drum circle, but he did. 

Street after street between him and his destination began to get to him, and just at the worst possible moment, he got a call from a janitorial job he’d applied for a couple weeks ago. He’d applied during his days contemplating suicide on Ocean Beach, and had nothing better to do. He’d called and emailed them, to no reply. Now they called him up and the man on the phone was asking for a decision as if the kid should be grateful. The kid was not. He needed that job two weeks ago. He didn’t need it today. The job was in San Diego, which he had just left yesterday after despairing at finding any work there. The kid’s blood rose to a furious boil. He feebly grasped at the opportunity for a job, but began to politely turn it down when he realized he had absolutely no desire to go back to that shithole in the south when he had no guarantee of a job there either, even if he accepted the offer for an in-person interview. 

“I don’t want to waste your time,” The kid began, but was interrupted. 

“I don’t want to waste your time either” the interviewer said, and promptly hung up. 

I came within half a second of pitching my phone across the sidewalk, but I was walking by a bus stop bench and just set it there instead, moving my hands away and stepping back. I ran my fingers through and across my hair, thought about punching a wall or a palm tree, and realized I didn't want to make a scene in public. Homeless people losing their shit doesn't go over well in swankier parts of town, populated by lily-white rich kids that never had to deal with this kind of stress before in their lives and can't imagine what it would take to make them want to punch a concrete wall. A few months ago, I couldn't have imagined it either, but here we are. Now I know how fucking frustrating life on the bottom of the ladder is. 

The kid got a hold of himself and continued his walk, finally dipping west between buildings to find the sand of the beach. The sand was cold on his bare feet, and the whole sky was dark. He had let his hopes rise high for the drum circle, at least, but the beach was deserted by all but bored teenagers. The quiet night left him feeling numb with despair. Would anything go right tonight? 

He missed a bus on his way back to Hollywood, a last resort to get some sleep that night. He waited a half hour for the next one, and then found himself stranded at an unfamiliar stop at a dark highway underpass trying to make a transfer to the next bus line going north, but something was going wrong. The buses were either delayed or the whole schedule had been changed. The kid got tired of waiting. 

There was a tent nearby selling hot food on the street corner. They made him a chicken burrito big enough to feed him for two days, but when they wrapped it up and handed it over, they asked for cash, and the kid had none. He dug in his pockets and found spare quarters from his visits to the laundromat. He counted out seven dollars in quarters. Two dimes and a nickel had to substitute for the last, but it was enough to pay for the meal. It seemed his luck had finally swung round again.

He was stupidly giddy as he caught a bus that finally came through just a few minutes later. The kid had already given up on seeing one, and the driver had obviously not planned on stopping, but he let the kid on anyway, and he rode up all the way back to Hollywood where he knew he had a place to lay his head. Yucca Street had already become home.

Sleeping on the street was simpler than he’d imagined. There was no need for a tent in Los Angeles, just a blanket to cover himself, and his bag for a pillow. He learned quickly to buy a bottle of Gatorade to piss into in the middle of the night, hunched inside his blanket so nobody would see. The best part was that after his days spent walking around the city, all he had to do to sleep was lay down and close his eyes. 

The next morning he went straight to another gym, and spent another long while on the toilet. He wondered what he had left to fight for. Why should he keep struggling? What was the need? 

I could stay in this bathroom, take a shower, then go. I could just … I don't even have to take a shower. I could just go. There are a lot of people here. It's crowded. I think it's the most crowded gym I've been in so far. I'm scared. I don't want to see and be seen by all these people. I don't want any of them to know or suspect that I'm homeless. I don't want any of them to be bothered by my social awkwardness. I don't want to be bothered by them, either. So I'm here, in a bathroom stall, sitting on the toilet, trying to ask myself what the fuck it is that I want, and how far I'm willing to go to get it. 

I said I wanted a workout, and … I am very fatigued, though. It would be good just to get some sleep. I don't have to work out. I don't have to do anything. 

I want to work out because I want to feel in control. I want to get bigger and stronger so I can feel in control. So I can fall back on violence, or intimidation at least, when I feel powerless. 

It's not just that I'm afraid; it’s that I feel guilty for being afraid. Social anxiety shouldn't stop me from doing anything! Especially now! Haven't I done enough work to step out of my comfort zone and gain self-confidence? When will it ever be enough? 
   
Will it be like this every time? Will my every social interaction be as brutal and frightening to me every single time? Will I have to achieve an unparalleled mental toughness just to do something as simple as walk out onto the floor of a gym and pick a machine? 

If I do, then so be it. “Eye of the tiger, baby. Eye of the tiger.” 

I've made a promise to myself that I'm going to try something new every time I go to the gym. It doesn't matter what it is. Just one try on one piece of equipment I've never used before, until I know gyms like the back of my hand, better even than the gym rats that intimidate me so much now. This time it was the treadmill. The one I picked was broken. By the time I figured that out, all the others were taken. So I made it a stairclimber instead, and worked up a good sweat on that. Then I tried the sit-up bench, and did what I could there. Then I did seven pull-ups without dropping, and a few more of those and some chin-ups. By the time I was done, I was soaked in sweat. I did some leg stretches to cool down, even as embarrassed as I was to do them out in public. I need to get back into doing the Shaolin workout every morning, even if people see. Even if they stare. Even if they ask questions. It's just a workout and it's good for me. 

The kid took a shower and let his phone charge for a few minutes. He left and found a laundromat, and succeeded in getting a room that night at a Super 8 in Culver City. It was a celebration of everything he had achieved so far. He got a pizza, bought a movie on YouTube, and enjoyed it like he had never enjoyed anything before.

I finished The Big Short. I'm gonna miss that movie. I'm gonna miss most things. When you're out here, good movies and good food, they mean something. They're not just cheap trash to sort through and grab what you like. They're luxuries to savor slowly and to remember afterwards. 

His anxieties returned in the morning. He woke too late for the hotel breakfast, and took out his frustration by combing through his bag again and throwing away everything he figured he could spare. He threw out his blue jeans and kept the black ones. He held onto his father’s army bandana from Afghanistan – one last concession to sentimental value, held in an object of just enough functional use for him to justify keeping it. 

That day he spent making his way aimlessly up towards the hills, where he took the shuttle up to Griffith Observatory. He missed the sunset, but got the chance to look out over a breathtaking cityscape that stretched as far as he could see in both directions and all the way to the shoreline in the distance. While the lights deadened the sky above, they made up for it by making a glittering carpet in the darkness spread out below. The kid thought about sleeping up there in the hills, but there were too many tourists still wandering around for him to feel comfortable enough to slip through the cracks, and he wasn’t getting cell service anyway. He returned to his new home on Yucca Street. 

The next day was another blank slate. Every morning he looked through the job listings on the PeopleReady app, and decided they were too far away, or they required things he didn’t have. The first thing on his list was steel-toed boots, so that became his next mission. The shoe store on Sunset Boulevard had nothing he wanted to buy. The kid caught buses down to Torrance, a place he remembered from his first journey down the coast last month. There was a work-boot place there that sold him a pair of steel-toed Doc Martens that he didn’t know any better than to buy and be satisfied with. For all he knew, steel toed boots were supposed to be terribly uncomfortable. 

That night, he slept behind a hedge near an abandoned building on the outskirts of a mall. He watched the Ip Man movies – more luxuries for himself to savor – and tried to draw on the strength of the stoic, noble warrior. He brushed his teeth in the bathroom at a Target, found a different library the next day to charge his phone and sit for a while, and made his way back up to Hollywood. 

He took a day to visit the Getty Center, a spectacular art museum up in the hills. It was a way to spend a nice afternoon, and a way to pretend for a while that he belonged, that he was normal and civilized. He felt like he was getting one over on polite society if people believed he wasn’t homeless when he chose to walk around in fancy places. 

That location gave him the idea to walk up to the Murphy Ranch Trail the next day, where he found a narrow staircase leading down into the canyon of the old ranch. He avoided the graffitied sheds and crumbling foundations, wandering into the woods where he sheltered against a low wall. He was still terrified of being discovered and still listened to every odd noise with a quiver of high-strung nerves, but he reasoned that all the curious teenagers were in school this time of year and probably wouldn’t be wandering down into the dark canyon at this time of night. No cops or security would bother patrolling down here either. He began to relax. He he had come a long way from cowering on that sidewalk down in Hollywood. He had finally learned how to navigate the city, how to find peace and quiet, how to survive and how to have fun with it. He determined that the next day would not be another placeholder, but that he would finally make forward progress on getting a gig somewhere.

Tomorrow I'll go to search for a job, and god knows where I'll end up. I'm tossing it all to the wind again, going to seek my fortune, with only the barest of plans, and only my own wits to rely on. Let's rock and roll.

He woke to a clear, bright morning. The birds were starting to sing. He was euphoric. It felt like he had gotten one over on the whole world. Fuck you, world. Fuck you all. I win. The kid lifted up his head and sang out loud, one of his favorite songs:

“It was an early morning yesterday

I was up before the dawn

And I really have enjoyed my stay

But I must be moving on

“Like a king without a castle

Like a queen without a throne

I’m an early morning lover

And I must be moving on”

– Supertramp, Goodbye Stranger