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Homeless Bound
By: Tracy Porter
Copyright 1999
My whole life I have been on the verge of homelessness, and it is only by sheer luck or divine intervention that I have not ended up on the streets of some major world city.
I was born an identical twin, totally unexpected because my sister and I had the same heartbeat. It seems that from the very beginning my existence was causing problems for people. My mother had picked out a name for one girl, and the arrival of two girls caused her to have to rethink the naming of the two babies that she never wanted in the first place.
Because my parents’ marriage was based on the impending birth of my elder brother, it had not basis of mutual love or friendship and therefore was not destined to last. I was still a toddler when the divorce came, and shortly thereafter my mother married a maniac who tried to murder her several times and beat my siblings and me every day. It did not take my mother long to tire of her second husband and she divorced him as well.
The only respite that I had from the pervasive turmoil that surrounded me was when I stayed with my grandmother, who gave me a sense of normality. Without the stability that my grandmother gave me, I have know idea what state I would be in today.
My first year of school went by in a haze. My mother had hired a babysitter to look after my siblings and myself after school, so I rarely saw her. Although I was only 6, I was responsible for getting up without the aid of an alarm clock and getting myself down to the bus stop while my mother slept in the other room.
My first grade teacher tired of my sister and I sitting in the same desk, so they solved the problem by separating and moving Cindy to another class room.
From what I understand, the social services was prepared to take my siblings and myself away from my mother because they could see quite clearly that my mother was not capable of looking after us. To solve the problem we went to stay with our grandmother for two years, and for the first time we had a semblance of what normal life was like.
Our utopian dream, however, was not to last. Around my ninth birthday my mother remarried yet a third time, and it was agreed that we would live with her even though her new husband was not interested in the least in being a father to us. We lived in a rented house for the summer, and when school started we moved into a double wide trailer.
It did not take long for my mother to become disenchanted with domestic bliss, as the cracks in her marriage had already begun to show. Whenever my mother was upset about something, she would always take her frustrations out on her children. One warm afternoon, in a fit of temper, my mother told me that she would make me go live with my father, but he didn’t want me either. I cannot even begin to tell you what all of those hateful things she said to me did for my self esteem.
Not content to live in a double-wide trailer, when I was 13 we all moved into a huge house on the outskirts of town. This house, my mother believed, would be her dream come true. When my mother got her heart’s desire, however, she was never there as she had found some friends from God knows where and proceeded to relive her lost youth.
Our family was not a complete entity, but fragments composed of each individual. With such a dysfunctional set-up, it was only a matter of time before something would transpire to disrupt us. The upheaval occurred when I was 16 and my brother had a near fatal motorcycle accident. Because my mother could not cope, she again took her frustrations out on me, and her madness culminated in beating me with a leather belt when I was unclothed and other such atrocities that would have been considered criminal in Europe. To this day, I will never be able to understand what sort of pleasure my mother gleaned from committing such acts, but it is she who will have to answer to the Creator for what she did, not I.
I simply could not carry on living with my mother after she discovered she could do whatever she wanted to me with impunity; there was no way that I could live with her any longer. It is for that reason that I asked if I could go stay with my grandmother, and I suppose that it was a dream come true for my mother. I think my mother’s decision to get me out of her life was hastened by the fact that my grandmother spoke to my step-father and told him that if he laid a hand on me, she would phone the police and have him arrested. Had it not been for my grandmother’s intervention, God only knows what they would have done to me. On any account, before I left my mother told me that if I left home I would not be able to come back. As far as I was concerned everyone in the house was a raving lunatic and there was no way on earth that I was going back there, but I allowed my mother to wallow in the comfort of believing that she had kicked me out, which is in fact what she did.
I stayed with my grandmother for about six months, but was very unhappy there because it was the countryside when I yearned to be in the city. I therefore went to Little Rock as often as possible and ran away with my boyfriend on a couple of occasions because I simply could not cope with the isolation of living in a remote area of Arkansas. I left for good when my grandfather told me that I was going to turn out just like my mother, slipping out in the middle of the night. His comment hurt me deeply. I was the victim of domestic abuse and was coping the best way that I knew how, and I certainly did not need my grandfather to speak to me like that regardless of how strongly he felt.
My boyfriend convinced his parents to let me stay with them, so I was allowed to live there for about six months. My boyfriend’s mother, however, was not happy with me living in her house and must have told his father that if he didn’t get rid of me then she would leave. So there I was, homeless again, but what else is new. If anything, my leaving escalated the marital tension in the house because my boyfriend’s mother left within a couple of months of my departure.
At only 17, I found myself in a one bedroom apartment with my boyfriend. Happiness did not last long, however, because within a couple of months he left me as well. With nowhere to go, I rented a room for a couple of weeks, but found that set-up intolerable because the woman who owned the house was always telling me what I could and could not do. I therefore decided to rent a small trailer with a friend, but since she was barely able to hold down a job I usually ended up paying the rent. What I find to be quite odd is the fact that my mother could see very clearly the difficulty that I was having, but she never once stepped in to help me. I suppose that just as long as I wasn’t getting in her way, she wasn’t particularly bothered what happened to me.
One day I was having an extremely bad day and on a whim, decided to join the United States Air Force. Although the lifestyle was not something that I was particularly compatible with, the organisation did afforded me with a bit of security that was so lacking in my life. Therefore, for the next 15 years I was able to enjoy a sense of stability that I had never before experienced. I did however yearn from the freedom to make my own decisions, which is something that I had to forfeit while in the military, and that reason I made the decision to get out of the Air Force, move to Basingstoke and marry an English man.
Unfortunately, the relationship that I had with my husband was very destructive, as he was not prepared to admit that there were any problems with himself. The union was fraught with difficulties, and I even had to leave him and force him to decide who he wanted to be with - me or his mother.
In retrospect, if I had been thinking properly I would have run a mile the moment I realised just how many problems he had, but a part of me loves a challenge so rather than cutting my losses and walking away, I hung in there and fought my ground.
It would take about three years for me to fully comprehend the complex personality disorder of the man I married. During this time I discovered that he ran up enormous debts ringing telephone sex lines, paying prostitutes for sex and joining dating agencies, all of which I knew nothing about. When my husband was picked up by the police for exposing himself in public I realised just how badly he needed help for his problem. Instead of my husband deciding that he had a problem that needed to be dealt with, however, he blamed me for everything and told people that I had driven him to commit such acts. Although my husband called his activities his lifestyle, even he knew that he was subject to scrutiny and therefore took a job and flat in London.
Needless to say, by this time I had fallen into a deep depression. Although I had a job, it was so low paid that I did not have the confidence to make the move. I had two cats, and in desperation was clinging onto them because they were the only things that I had in this world. Wherever I went, I wanted my cats to go, and that posed a very serious problem indeed.
Finally, I met a friend, and he gave me the strength to file for divorce on the grounds of my husband’s unreasonable behaviour. In retaliation, my husband gave up his flat in London and moved back into the house, leaving me no alternative but to move out.
My first residence was in the home of Sue who, by her own admission invited men into her home to pay the mortgage and satisfy her physical needs. Because Sue obviously had worked through a large chunk of the single men in Basingstoke, she found herself in debt and moved me in, supposedly for a period of six months to a year. The minute Sue found an available man to move into her house, however, I was told to move out.
In tears, I confided my problem to a friend at work, and she said that I could move in with her and even stay as long as I wanted and money was not an issue. Unfortunately, after a short time it was discovered that my friend had claustrophobia and I was therefore excess baggage yet again. In order to ease the extreme anxiety that this friend was exhibiting by having to share her home with another person, made arrangements to move out as much as possible. A week after I left, I received a call from this ‘friend’ telling me that I owed her money, as I had lived in the house for a week and had not paid any rent for it. So much for the ‘money is not an issue’ sentiment that I was told when I initially moved in.
I stayed for one day the next home that I went to. When I finally arrived because the mover that I had booked had let me down, I was not allowed to use the telephone and I was told that I could not have any visitors. Not able to live with such unreasonable people, I stayed with a friend for a couple of weeks until I could secure alternative accommodation.
The next residence that I lived in was with the mother of a friend. After speaking to the woman on the telephone, I had serious reservations about her because she did not strike me as a particularly nice person. My friend Lynda, however, literally begged me to move in because, unknown to me, the woman was living off the benefit system and could not advertise for lodgers because she was not legally allowed to have them.
The day I moved in, the woman took advantage of my vulnerability and raised my rent by £20. In addition, as each day went her behaviour became more and more bizarre. Finally, one Sunday morning the woman shoved a letter addressed to a ‘Jackie’ in my face. When I read it, I discovered that I was being evicted. One of the reasons why the woman was evicting me was because she imagined that I had broken her antique washing machine by putting jeans in it - when I didn’t even wear jeans at that time.
After my eviction notice, I woke up one morning to have the woman yelling and screaming at me to get out of her house. I was told that I had 12 hours to get out, or she was going to have someone physically removed me. The reason, she raged, was because I was deliberating antagonising her, even though I had made a point of staying out of the house as much as reasonably possible.
To my amazement, when I approached my friend about her mother’s behaviour and suggested that maybe she needed medical treatment, Lynda told me that it was nothing to do with her. Just like Pontas Pilate, Lynda washed her hands of the situation, even though she literally begged me to move into that madhouse. It should therefore come as no surprise to the reader to learn that I am no longer friends with Lynda.
Out of desperation, I next moved in with a single man, Neale. Neale used me in a pawn in a complex game to make Neale’s girlfriend jealous, and succeeded. Whenever Neale’s girlfriend was around the atmosphere was very tense, because while she did not want to actually live in the house, she had no qualms about stirring up trouble. After several months of having to put up with open hostility, I decided that the time was right to move on.
At the time of this writing, after having become totally disenchanted with lodgings, I have decided to live in a houseshare. While lodgers are at the mercy of the landlord who generally makes the rules up as he goes along, housesharers are seen as equals. Housesharing, I would like to point out, is not an ideal situation either. What would be ideal would be for single people to be given affordable housing, that that is another story altogether.
* * *
The above story was written shortly after I moved out of Neale’s house. I moved into his house because I simply had no place to go. I paid him to live in his house, but he treated me just awful. He was a heavy drug user and had access to date rape drugs. Every morning when I woke up I found find that my night clothes would be shifted all the way up or taken off my body entirely. Although I have no recollection of what happened, I do believe that Neale sexually assaulted me. It was no point going to the police because everybody knows that the police don’t protect anybody from anybody.