TWO – Homeless
Most guys who threaten to kill their boss either follow through with that . . . or for sure, they get fired! I guess I understand that now. If I could undo those rash and angry words of April, 2013, I would certainly do so. But it was an acrimonious moment when they almost forcibly pushed me out of the building, pink slip in hand. The one-year lease on my apartment still had three months to run. The monthly payments were $1015 and I didn’t have the proverbial two nickels to rub together. I went to the landlord’s office, my heart in my throat, and it didn’t take much acting skill for me to look abject.
“I hate to ask, but I’ve been fired and I’m broke. I’ve got to move out. Any way you folks could release me from the lease?” I’d memorized a pat phrase about an “unresolvable conflict,” which is Latin for I just got canned and don’t have an income any longer.
The lady peered at me. “Huh?”
“I can’t afford staying here! I’m flat busted. Can’t you cut me some slack? Rent the place out to somebody else if I clear out real quick?”
Well, the management team for sure had memorized their own contracts right down to the last wherefore and thereunto. Sure, I could leave, but the agreement I’d signed specified a lease-breaking penalty of four grand! It didn’t take me long to do the necessary math. Hmmm. $4000 vs. $3045. I didn’t have either one and since living IN the apartment was more comfortable than living OUT of it, I decided to ride the lease out and scratch along the best I could. Maybe I’d win the Colorado lottery.
I actually did have a few dollars saved up, but despite hoarding my stash the best I could, I burned through the savings rather quickly. Looking back now, I was forced into another boneheaded decision. With so few dollars available for groceries and such, I also defaulted on my car payments.
By now I was desperately juggling spare change and the looming dates of destiny. I submitted an intent-to-vacate notice on the anniversary of the lease. The contract would be up on July 7 and I was staring right at a blinking billboard with just one word emblazoned on it: HOMELESS!
If that wasn’t enough, I got a terse call from my credit union. “Mr. Younggreen?”
“Yeah. That’s me.”
“You know you’re behind with the car, right?”
“Yeah, a little bit.”
“No, sir. Not just a little bit.”
“Well, I lost my job! What am I supposed to do about that?”
“Well, Mr. Younggreen, I understand that things happen. But we’ve got to cover our costs here too. You’ve got our car there and we’re holding the paper on it.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
The guy had heard it all before, of course. The line flickered and then he lowered the boom on me. “Sir, if we don’t receive two payments’ worth from you, some sort of something, by the 31st, then we’ll be forced to send somebody by to pick up the vehicle.”
I still remember that I was staring right at a calendar when he said those words to me. May 31? Today was the 28th! Was five hundred dollars going to just fly in the window in the next seventy-two hours? Would God offer me such a blessing? Oh, yeah, almost forgot. I don’t believe in Him these days.
Feeling like I’d been socked in the stomach, I told him in a numb voice: “Well, send your guy then. Do what you’ve got to do.” I hung up without a very civil goodbye, and then just sat there staring at the hostile numbers on the calendar. Three days to doomsday.
It took me down close to zero, but I used my last precious greenbacks to prepay the June 7 to July 7 apartment rent. Then with all the emotion of a sleepwalker, I packed clothes, food, medical emergency supplies, my prescriptions, gallons and gallons of water, and some pillows and blankets in the car.
And that’s it. I left everything else behind: kitchen supplies, dishes, furniture, TVs, computers, family heirlooms, pictures, awards, expensive art, everything. It was rash and it was foolhardy and it was irrational, but at this point I was an admitted zombie. I couldn’t envision a future with any reality to it, and it was all I could do to separate my broken life into these two piles: the stuff in the car and the treasures in the abandoned address that was soon to be no longer home.
The first of June was a bright and sunny Saturday, but for me it was nothing but ominous clouds in front of the car windshield as I slowly wheeled my way out of Denver in what was now essentially a stolen car. My worldly portfolio had been reduced to this: I had exactly $168 in my pocket, this heisted late-model Pontiac G6, a stack of clothes piled up in the back seat, and more food and water than I could carry if and when the time came to walk.
Oh, and my passport. I’m not sure why it helped to have that along, but as the skyline of the Mile High City shrank to a dot in my rearview mirror I did have the comfort of knowing that little blue booklet was in the glovebox. I didn’t honestly have any sort of survival scheme here. I suppose my unstated intention was to drive as far as my money would allow, then pack what I could carry and continue on foot, abandoning the car at the side of the road. I didn’t have a destination in mind. But hey, with a passport in my hip pocket, perhaps I could just cross the border into Mexico and see what awaited a crumpled character like me.
It is a bizarre sensation to drive along our beautiful American Interstate freeways in the full reality that every mile, every sip of petrol as the engine cylinders rock up and down was pushing me closer and closer to doomsday. What was I going to do? How would I survive? Huh? Huh?!
But as if in a trance, I and my purloined red convertible eased along the sun-dappled ribbon of concrete, Interstate 25, southbound into New Mexico. I had never seen Santa Fe or Albuquerque but had visited the cliff dwellings in the northwest corner of the state. I’d toured the painted desert of northern Arizona and the great sandstone monoliths of Monument Valley, Utah, and thought the isolated loneliness of the desert would be an ideal place to disappear and die. It was a poetic reverie I was experiencing, and I managed what passed for a wry smile. I did pause in Santa Fe, which, by the way, is beautiful.
I was determined to spend not a single penny on anything but gas, and there were enough groceries tucked into every nook and cranny that I could subsist on sandwiches for quite a road trip. But each time I gassed up and watched the digits jump on the pump screen it felt like an approaching death sentence. It was hard to not glare at the hood of my car as if GM was literally sucking the last dribs and drabs of life out of my wallet. But yeah, when you spend your money solely on gasoline, it turns out you can pack quite a few miles on a journey. After deciding that Albuquerque was too hot, even for dying, and that travelling further south or east was just going to get more and more inhospitable, I reversed direction and headed toward Arizona on the I-40. I poured my last dollars into the tank somewhere in Indian Territory and entered Arizona on my final tank of fuel. This is really it. Yow. The last gallons, and then just a pint left, and a cup, then a teaspoon . . . and then there’s gonna be a moment when this sucker just plain conks out. And then I’m really done for. Jesus, are You out there someplace? Do You know I’m here at this convenience mart without even one blessed dime left in my pocket?
I was driving gingerly, of course, trying to mentally coddle the metaphor of a fragile egg between my foot and the gas pedal. Come on, baby . . . good mileage good mileage good mileage. Just then I saw a road sign for the city of Winslow. Which immediately jolted my brain. It took a bit of humming before I flashed back to the song lyrics by the Eagles. Well, I’m standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and such a fine sight to see. It’s a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford. Slowin’ down to take a look at me.
Well, Yours Truly was the author and architect of three busted marriages, so there wasn’t anything particularly poignant about that. But as I crept toward my destiny in this godforsaken part of America, I did find myself murmuring the signature line from that classic rock song. Take it easy, take it easy. Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.
So okay, I decided to check out the meteor crater near Winslow and then get off the Interstate so that when I had to abandon the car, I wouldn’t be leaving it in a place where it would be discovered too quickly. My GPS app showed a small road near the crater that headed off in the general direction of Phoenix.
It turns out the Meteor Crater is privately owned and costs $16 to see. I was short by, let’s see . . . $16. I was more disappointed than I should have been, I suppose. Leaving the crater, I found the road that headed southeast. It was a dirt track, clearly marked and in good condition, but the plum-sized stones were too large to drag my suitcase over when it came time to walk. Even as my stolen ride’s shelf life ebbed down toward zero, the car’s on-board computer was still working fine. Up till now I’d been getting really superb gas mileage, and according to those numbers I estimated I could drive about a hundred more miles. I drove on for perhaps ten miles, at which time the computer hiccupped and revised its estimate downward. Okay, now I would be good for perhaps another eighty miles is all.
Clearly, I wasn’t getting the same gas efficiency I’d been scoring on the Interstate; at this rate, I wouldn’t make it to Phoenix. I decided to turn around and make Flagstaff my final destination instead. By the time I reacquired the freeway, the onboard computer was estimating fifty miles remaining. And by then Flagstaff was exactly fifty miles away.