I am a total misfit...Part 3

Part 3

I was working for my cousin for $100 a week and I got food stamps too, while I continued to look for a better job. I did not have clothes or money to buy them, in order to interview. I had my old things that I had brought with me. I had not really thought about that when I was running from Colorado. When I left Longmont Chick, June, I just left.

That was a bad situation. June claimed to be someone she was not. I had known her for several years. She had an agenda for me that she did not tell me about until I was living there. She wanted me to side with her against her 15 year old daughter. Her daughter was a mess. She was experimenting with ways to shock her mother into actively caring about her.

She was trying a variety of different techniques, and her mother was not budging. June was an executive director of a non-profit to help people coming out of prison to get jobs. Her daughter is a sweet girl, but she had always been "good", until she hit 15 when she began to question what was going on. Her mom basically ignored her all the time. She was trying "being a lesbian" to get mom's attention. Drinking and smoking weed. Getting arrested. The things teenager's do.

June was what Mark Passio would call a "Fake-Ass Christian". She was all about helping people who were in a bad situation for her own ego and to look good to the outside world, but what I found out when I moved in was that she did not want to help her own daughter. She did not want to love her by spending time with her. She had her on a cocktail of pharmaceuticals for "bi-polar" to keep her quiet so that Jen could play video games -

I am not a super clean freak, which is a problem. I am an artist and my mind is right-brained and not very organized. Hence, my house is not very organized either. June is a super clean freak who likes to keep the house a cool 60 degrees, year round.

About 2 weeks after I moved in there, June's daughter Sheri ran away from home and did not come back for 6 months. I actually helped her. I thought it was going to be a one-night thing like I used to do - you sneak out through the basement window after everyone is asleep and come back through the basement window that same night. No big deal. But Sheri did not come back. She had met some boy online and had been texting him for 6 months prior and then met him and went to live with him and his family somewhere across town. She would not tell us where.

This put quite a damper on our living together. As it turned out, June's agenda had been about getting me to side with her against Sheri, and once Sheri was gone, June did not want me there. She became cold and mean. She would not talk to me. I was no party either. I just wanted to make art all day long. When I am highly stressed like that, that's what I do to calm myself and get centered is make art. I made all this stuff while I lived at June's...









And I made a mess while I was doing it...Jen did not like that. I also did not get a job. Jen really did not like that either.

It was my fault. I knew it was not going to work out when I moved in, but I had to go somewhere and I was still avoiding the shelter. I stayed there for 8 months, and then I just could not take it anymore. In August, I left and went up to my property for about 10 days and slept in my tiny truck trailer I had sitting on the ground, without plumbing.

I kind of lost my mind down there. I befriended a guy across the street, Jim who liked my artwork and wanted to help me sell it.

Jim had grown up in NYC and had left when he was about 20 and gone off the grid down in Villa Grove, CO. He built an earth ship out of crap he found in the landfill. It is an incredible house. He has a solar run shop, solar shower, indoor green house, it's beautiful.

He eeks out a living making stuff, and he lives down there by himself. In the end, it turns out, he does not like to make friends because they always leave...as I did. But he made friends with me when he saw the artwork - he thought he could help me sell it.

We took it to Crestone and we tried to sell it in various places. It did not sell. The Mirage Coffee Shop in Mirage, CO (don't blink you'll miss it) took a couple of pieces and sold one at some point. The lady at Villa Grove Coffee Shop wanted to help me too and she told me to make greeting cards out of the work and she would sell them in her store.

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I did and she did, but still there was no cash flow to keep me up there through the winter.

I asked Jim, if I could stay in his spare room through the winter, pay rent with food and whatever I pulled in, and he said, "I don't let women stay here unless we are in a relationship"
Wow that was weird. I get it - but it just wasn't the kind of situation in which I could just "decide" to be in a relationship to GET housing - that did not feel right. I mean, if I had had time to get to know him that would have been one thing, but I had only known him for about 3 days.

… and so I went back to Longmont, packed up my stuff and put it in my friend's basement in Kiowa, CO, and left for California.

So there I was living in San Pablo, 10 mi inland from Berkeley, in the same situation, slightly more self-supporting than I had been in Colorado, in an incredibly competitive economy and completely unable to compete. I know I know - you take yourself with you, and you are the problem. I had not quite learned that yet.

I did something that I do when I am in the worst situation I could possibly be in and I have no idea what to do - I try to help others. I went to find a place where I could try to volunteer and help people in need. I went to the Berkeley Senior Center. I just basically went over there to hang out and spend some time talking with the homeless, of which there were so many that I could not believe it.
Berkeley is so different now than when I grew up there. The free-spirited hippies who used to sell their wares on Telegraph Ave between Dead Tours are sleeping in doorways and going to the University Ave Lutheran Church for meals. They are living in Tilden Park and selling their meager wares at the Berkeley Flea Market. They are doing nothing but walking miles and miles from free breakfast to free lunch to free dinner to finally end up finding a place to shelter them from the elements - a doorway or a kind church rectory, stopping by the Senior Center to sit in the air conditioning and possibly get a class in, or talk to each other for support.
The city of Berkeley's solution to no homes for the homeless is to get the dispensaries to give away free weed to the homeless so they won't feel so bad on the street.

This is where I met Charles.

Artwork © 2017 Joanna Whitney
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