Monday, December 21, 2009

On Her Own


By Michael Warren

When I met Shaaron that spring, she was living in a shelter for the homeless.

Before her, I had met homeless people mostly of the seamier variety--drug-addicted zombies, panhandlers, foul-smelling bag people.

But Shaaron was different. She was intelligent and funny. She was a college student, like me.

And in talking to her I wondered why she allowed me and a photographer to intrude into her life during a crisis. (Others had, understandably, seen the cameras and said forget it.)

She came to Los Angeles because of a fashion school she wanted to attend. Her parents had told her not to come, but she was in her early 20s and decided she could make it on her own.

The trouble began when her roommate, who was assigned by the school, decided to skip town with Shaaron's personal belongings, including her money. "I barely had a bag of clothes left."

Homeless and without work

Without close friends to stay with, she was eventually out on the street. "I couldn't afford it anymore so I left [school] and decided to look for work and I couldn't find any. That's basically how I ended up in a homeless situation."

Her first taste of a homeless shelter was a drug- and rat-infested place where she spent a couple of weeks. Finally, she said, "I told them I wasn't going to go back down there 'cause it was, like, really scary." She laughed. I spent an afternoon in the shelter she was talking about, and laugh was one thing I didn't do.

So she decided to live in the Hyundai that her brother gave her when she moved. One afternoon she was sitting in her car in the Salvation Army parking lot trying to figure out what to do. She didn't have enough gas to get far. With the window opened a crack she dozed off.

"I woke up to tapping on the window," she said, "and I looked up and there was a man there, and he was drunk. He started banging on the window. He was yelling in the crack, so I pulled my seat up and started to turn the engine on--I don't know what he had on top of the car, his liquor or whatever--and I started driving and it fell off... I heard him yelling, and I didn't know if it was because I ran over his feet or because his liquor fell."

After that she parked and slept in the emergency lot of a hospital because it was safer. She used a fast-food restaurant rest room to clean up before job interviews.

Once when she went to the store someone stole her car stereo and ruined the door lock. After that, she had trouble sleeping.

Humor and depression

I asked her: "You seem to have kept such a good attitude. How did you do that?"

"I just have a great sense of humor about things," she said. "I'm not the type who gets those attitudes, who really gets worried."

"It's an experience, it really is." She said her past six months have been enough to write a book about. "I get depressed lots of times. I've sat in here and cried lots of times... but it's a lot better than sleeping out on a sidewalk like the rest of them."

The shelter where I met her was one of the best in Southern California--a remodeled motel. She'd been there three weeks. "In the time that you get, you really have to get out there and get on interviews."

It's no easy task, though. She made the mistake of giving some potential employers the shelter's phone number. When they realized they were dealing with a homeless woman, they hung up.

"That's the only reason we're homeless is because we can't get hired," she said.

I asked her why she didn't just call her family and have them come to her rescue.

"I wouldn't want to," she said, "because I was bold enough and determined enough to come out here on my own.

"Basically they don't know because I haven't told them. Because I feel really bad."

She had a week left of her free month's stay at the shelter, but she didn't have a job yet.

"It is kind of scary, but like I said, there's a book coming out of it," she said and then laughed.

She called her experience "research," the same thing I was calling it. Only her research was more difficult than mine, I thought as I drove home that evening.

Editor's note: Shaaron had a lot going for her when she left home. Runaways--homeless teens--have far less.

Taken from Youth 90 magazine

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