Rose

When the pandemic lockdown restrictions were first enacted in March, Rose and her boyfriend were suddenly locked out of the park they called home. They couldn’t lounge in the shade, use the bathrooms, trade food and information with friends. She spent most of that first day hanging out in front of a local Jack-in-the-Box, moving every few hours since the police kept showing up telling them to move along. The irony, Rose said, is that since they were barred from their usual park, there was no place for them to actually go. The cops told her to try the convention center, but friends warned her that the quickest way to get the coronavirus was to go into an enclosed facility with hundreds of strangers in close proximity. So they hung out in an alley behind a butcher shop most of that first week.
The worst part was not being able to shower for long periods of time. If you were getting pretty ripe, and the bathrooms were open, you could scare up a bird bath type of washing. Or, if you had a pair of pliers, you could open up any random water spigot. Once in a while she manages to get a shower at a friend’s home.

Rose has a positive outlook on life and aspirations to succeed, not in retaliation against a world that hasn’t valued or granted her opportunities, but because that’s just who she is. Yet she has every reason to feel abandoned. Her adoptive parents, a gay male couple, moved from Santa Monica to San Diego while she was in her junior year of high school, poised to be the captain of her golf team, and lauded for her talent on the viola. She begged them to find a way for her to stay and finish high school in Santa Monica. After all, she was about to become the first person in her birth family to graduate high school. She was excited about the opportunity to secure a golf scholarship to college with the title of having the longest drive for a female under the age of 15 in California. But in San Diego, there was no golf, her parents sold her viola, and many of her extracurricular credits didn’t transfer. She was miserable. Her adoptive parents paid for her to participate in an Outward Bound program. But she intentionally missed the plane and went to stay with her boyfriend for a couple of weeks. She knew that her parents were planning to take a job in Seattle and that when she returned from the program, if she’d gone, she could come home to no one and no home.

Her birth father, hearing about her situation, sent her a Greyhound bus ticket back to Portland. She thrived. She got a pet piglet she named Bacon, a hedgehog, and a guinea pig. She got a good paying job, and she got to be a big sister to one of her younger sisters who was being bullied in school. On her birth mother’s side she has a sister and a brother, each from a different father, and on her dad’s side another two sisters, each from a different mother. But she wasn’t sleeping; she missed her boyfriend. She went back to San Diego to visit for a week that stretched into forever. Several attempts to live with either his family or hers were short lived and ended with the two of them being left on the side of the road with just the belongings they could carry.

The couple had a van they bought together, which they moved regularly, but one day after spending hours gathering recyclables, they returned to the van just as police were having it towed for out of date registration. They had 15 minutes to retrieve anything of value from the van, so they began tossing everything they could out onto the sidewalk. “We had to downsize pretty quick” Rose said. Now that the coronavirus restrictions have been lifted enough to allow them back in the park, she feels comfortable sitting with friends under a tree till her boyfriend comes back from applying for housing, taking photos of a vanity mirror so she can sell it online, and sharing her stash of colored pens and pencils with a fellow artist. She told stories of what she encounters every day when she works hauling whatever people want to get rid of, like tables, buckets of putrid liquids, etc. On this day, a table shattered the truck’s windshield at an abrupt stop and she was covered in broken glass the rest of the work day. Rose laughed it off. At least she has a job, and she’s a survivor, and she has hope that soon both she and her boyfriend will find housing.