Here it is, removed from AlterNet, reprinted here:
Story and Photos by Kay Ebeling
Every morning there was a period of deep quiet, after the helicopters stopped and before morning deliveries began. Then I’d hear runners in Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety vans pull up near us, double park, then footsteps ran up to front porches around us. Lizzie and I would stay hunched down low, but I imagine after several nights, the neighborhood had seen us sleeping out there in our parked car. But no one said a word. You become invisible when you are homeless.
This
particular morning I started the car and the heater, we stretched, pulled onto
the street, and headed to the Welfare office, kinda grateful you don’t sleep
late when you’re living on the street. It was good we beat the traffic,
good the ride was mostly downhill, from Franklin near Highland down to McArthur
Park “human services” office, as the car was literally running on fumes.
Paying
for motel rooms over three months, we’d gone through our move-in money, run up
every credit card I had, and finally even maxed out the gas card.
In
those two months we’d gone to probably every homeless program on the west side
of Los Angeles, sat in waiting rooms, sat through lectures, attended mandatory
classes in things like, How To Do A Job Interview. My daughter and I
still had no address but a 1995 Ford Taurus. At night we liked to park in
the Hollywood Hills, where it felt safer than down on the boulevards where the
homeless people who don’t have cars walk and walk through the night.
If we
ran out of gas, we’d end up on the boulevards. The only thing keeping us
from slipping totally through the cracks by February 2004 was that Ford Taurus
and once it was out of gas, it was no longer an asset.
Tip
For Living In Your Car: Park pointing uphill, or you will fight gravity all
night, falling onto the steering wheel trying to sleep.
That
morning we had an appointment at the welfare office to apply for the L.A.
County homeless program. I found in my notes, “I feel like we are covered
in dirt. We probably are covered in dirt.”
I had
taken to relying on air showers to wash up.
You
stand in a breeze, hold up your arms, and the air cleans your skin as it blows
through the fabric, a crocheted top is best for air showering more places, a
very … efficient way to wash without water. Afterwards you crawl into
your car and go to sleep.
I also
learned when using public showers a technique for washing my clothes at
the same time i wash myself, a practice i still carry out to this day.
You’d be surprised the tips a few years of homelessness will add to your normal
life, if you ever make it back to normal life.
Bomb
Scare in the Welfare Office
There
was a long line just inside the entrance at the L.A. welfare office. My 15 year
old daughter Lizzie let a man with a baby get in front of us.
Then
there was a bomb scare and everyone had to evacuate the building. It was
February 2004, and the initial paranoia from Nine Eleven still permeated public
buildings. Everyone in the welfare office, caseworkers and clients, had
to go across the street to a parking lot.
We got
to know a mom who was there with her two toddler aged kids. They had
walked seventeen blocks from the shelter where they were staying to the welfare
office.
With
all of us in the parking lot from the bomb scare, the caseworkers had to
continue business outside, or the line of people would just keep growing and
growing. So the caseworkers leaned over and had people sign documents on
their backs so they could go on their way back onto the streets of Los Angeles,
still homeless.
The
lady who walked 17 blocks with two kids would have to come back because they
didn’t have an appointment. There in the parking lot the welfare workers
made an appointment for them, and they left to walk the streets of L.A.,
meandering around until 6PM or so when they could get back into the shelter,
and plan to come back for homeless assistance from the county another day.
That
day since we had an appointment, we got onto the official county of Los Angeles
County program for homeless families right there in the parking lot.
Here
is how it worked back then in 2004.
If
you can prove you are genuinely looking for a home, the county gives you enough
money for a hotel room for two weeks.
Only
you can’t and they don’t and it’s not.
They
give you vouchers that should last two weeks in a hotel, but they don’t, and
that’s so the county can help you move into an apartment, but only if you
can find one for $454.00 a month. Even the caseworker said, “You won’t
find a place for $450 a month,” so the whole program was basically a
charade. My caseworker had a Central European accent. I wondered if
he was a direct descendent of Franz Kafka.
You
went through the motions, pretended look for housing, when really all you were
getting was a hotel room for two weeks that would actually just be six or seven
nights, but one does not turn down any help once one gets desperate. So
each day I would leave our motel and do the charade of looking for anything we
could possibly rent for $454 a month in 2004 in L.A., a room behind a shoe
repair shop with no bath, anything, but even an SRO downtown cost more than
that.
It was
a charade, a program that existed on paper, but no one even expected it to
work.
The
first night we were in the L.A. County homeless program, the hotel I found that
would take our voucher and was in a neighborhood I knew, was on Sunset
Boulevard near La Brea, called the Studio Inn, if I remember right. It
was near Hollywood High School, run by two Pakistani men who I begged to let us
stay at the weekly rate, explaining we were in this County program and they
nodded like they’d heard it before, and gave us the better rate. We
finally got out of the car and into a room.
Few
minutes later when I opened the door to go get ice, the two hotel guys were
waiting outside our door, panting, like now it was time for us to do them a
favor.
Since
we turned them down, they said they could not let us have the room at that rate
anymore. “This is Hollywood Studio Inn on Sunset Boulevard,” they
explained, “on weekends rooms rent for as high as 90 to 200 dollars a night.
“This
is one big party, Sunset Boulevard on the weekends,” the hotelier said as he
placed our Welfare vouchers among a stack in his cash drawer.
Most homeless teenagers aren’t still living with their parents.
So shelters aren’t equipped for a mom with a kid over age 12. That’s why it took us so long to get help,
So shelters aren’t equipped for a mom with a kid over age 12. That’s why it took us so long to get help,
I told
the welfare worker next visit that the hotel owners were trying to get us to
prostitute ourselves for the difference between a weekly and daily rate, and he
broke down and gave me enough vouchers for the rest of our two weeks to
actually use them and live in a hotel for two weeks. So we spent those
nights in luxury at the Hollywood Seven Star Inn, then moved back onto the
street south of Franklin near Highland, waking up to the delivery of Hollywood
Reporter and Daily Variety to the residents around us.
A few
weeks later, around the time the car was about to die on the street, we got
into a temporary shelter, a Christian run place. They were donation run
only, didn’t take government grants, so they could bend the rules and let my 15
year old daughter and me stay there together. Every other program in L.A.
insisted we’d have to separate, her go to a teen home, me to a women’s place,
as that’s the way most grants are written. We just couldn’t separate at
that time in our lives.
The
private Christian shelter didn’t have rigid structural guidelines like
government projects, so when we found Hope Again Mission at 5161 Sunset
Boulevard, my daughter and I finally got into a shelter, then 11 months later
into a transitional shelter, and now we live in a neighborhood right around the
corner from Hope Again, a part of town that up to November 2003, I would never
even drive through.
It’s
East Hollywood, and today it’s home.
***
Post
Note: In notes I found recently from this period, which sparked this series, I
wrote this about our nights at the Studio Inn on Sunset Boulevard: “I’m so
grateful that men asking my daughter to appear in a sex video for hard cash
scare her, rather than tempts her. I must have done something right.”
Post
Note 2: I remember the day a few week earlier, when I pulled into the parking
lot at PATH, People Helping the Homeless, a well-known homeless agency near
downtown in our 1995 Ford Taurus. The people waiting outside gave an
audible group sigh when we pulled up in that hunk of dented metal, because to
them a car means security, a movable shelter, we had more of a home than they
did. That car was our last platform keeping us from the final bottom,
landing on the street, sleeping in a cardboard box, or on a bus bench.
We
don’t have a car anymore.
One
More Post Note:
I was
working when we become homeless.
I’m an
independent contractor and have to set up my own equipment in my home to work,
so while we were homeless, instead of working freelance, i had to take a staff
job.
I
Was Homeless Working On The Dr. Phil Show
I was
working on the Dr. Phil Show, on the Paramount Studios lot, when my daughter
and I were homeless and living out of our car in Spring 2004, and then
later while we lived in the first of two homeless shelters. Even working
fulltime there in the basement of the Dr. Phil Show building on the lot, doing
a job that is critical for production of the show, the pay wasn’t high enough
to get us back into even a small studio apartment.
April 2009 Sunset at Normandie, photo by Kay Ebeling
Every morning there was a period of deep quiet, after the helicopters stopped and before morning deliveries began. Then I’d hear runners in Hollywood Reporter and Daily Variety vans pull up near us, double park, then footsteps ran up to front porches around us. Lizzie and I would stay hunched down low, but I imagine after several nights, the neighborhood had seen us sleeping out there in our parked car. But no one said a word. You become invisible when you are homeless.
It’s a mutual invisibility. They pretend not to see you and you pretend not to see them.
This particular morning I started the car and the heater, we stretched, pulled onto the street, and headed to the Welfare office, kinda grateful you don’t sleep late when you’re living on the street. It was good we beat the traffic, good the ride was mostly downhill, from Franklin near Highland down to McArthur Park “human services” office, as the car was literally running on fumes.
Paying for motel rooms over three months, we’d gone through our move-in money, run up every credit card I had, and finally even maxed out the gas card.
In those two months we’d...
***
Oroginally Appeared April 2010 on Page One of AlterNet in SoapBox now removed.
From Kay Ebeling, Producer, The City of Angels Is Everywhere
POST NOTES after photo BELOW:
Being middle class, I approached becoming homeless like a problem
to be solved, a project, like finding a job. If I just work every waking moment,
I thought, I’ll find a new place to live. But we became homeless November
2003 and it was November 2005 before we moved into our own place again.
Recently I came across the notes from those first weeks after we lost our
apartment in a chi-chi part of West Hollywood.
With my fifteen year old daughter, we were paying weekly rent at
motels off Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards, as we raced against time, trying to
find a new apartment before the move-in money we had ran out.
Finding these notes was revealing. I knew I’d made a lot of
phone calls those days and these notes show it. I was up at the crack of
dawn and on the phone every day, and knocking on doors.
Since 2005 I’ve been
trying to find a way to write about the chaos of those years my teenage
daughter and I were homeless in L.A., and the notes I found recently show just
how erratic and frenzied those days really were, I’ve even scanned the notes in
and uploaded them here at City of
Angels 2 and you can
see the growing madness in the handwriting. Most revealing is what my
daughter and I discovered within days of losing our home and moving into
motels, that:
There are hundreds and hundreds of agencies, nonprofits,
government and private run groups, but so much of what they do is refer
clients from one agency to another. The real help going on is minimal,
while the hundreds of nonprofits continue to thrive, many of them to this day.
In one of the notes I call these endless phone calls “the phone referral go
round” where always eventually you are told to call the first agency you
called, then you start calling again.
Remember these notes are from November 2003 to early Jan 2004:
************
L.A. Housing
Authority 1800
731 4663
Menu item Shelter Plus Care under homeless. Left voicemail
messages
About going on STS or about Section 8 and explaining we need
Homeless Plus
Called five times as couldn’t hold the 30-plus minutes each time
on this phone.
Finally Left 3 messages
Housing Authority for County – Santa Fe Springs
Have 2 Shelter Plus Care of homeless programs. Get there by
1:15 (followed by a map from Hollywood to Santa Fe Springs)
FRIDAY
9 AM Call all the dailies (the nonprofits I was calling every day.
Early, before 8:30, go to PATH in person Ask for (NAME REDACTED)
Check out hotel with weekly rates on Ventura near Lankershim.
Make unmade phone calls
(FINISH EARLY, IT’S FRIDAY)
Call Info
Line 1
800 731 4663 menu item 2, One for
message, calling for Housing Plus Care Program, mother and child, both need
both.
[earlier accidentally left message about Section 8, which is
another issue
Leave two phone numbers this time.
Call Tuesday
House of Yahweh- they do interviews, first call on Tuesday at 10
AM
Tues 12-16-03
No space available, call again later in the month. (they
have small trailers, the reason they were encouraging earlier is they thought I
was a lady with three kids.)
TRACK DOWN THIS GUY, (Business card of police officer I found and
made this note, “these two police officers were helpful.”
- Go in person to Wilcox Station to try to contact?
12.03.03 Contacted Officer (NAME REDACTED) he said for me to “Call
with good results” when we get them.
December 1, 2003:
House of Yahweh, Martha said there are two sites, one in Lawndale,
one in L.A. One is a shelter and one is the administrative offices where
they do intakes. She said call back on Saturday, and hold lots of
minutes. “Hold lots of minutes, it takes lots of time.”
Calls next couple days:
M-F 9 to 5. Nope. Nope. (Rude)
No, have to call office Monday through Friday not here on
Saturday.
MONDAY
Check out motel at Vineland & Ventura, weekly rates
(SINCE I am one of the thousands of adult victims of pedophile
priests, I also tried different Catholic agencies. )
Catholic Worker
Voice of the Faithful
SNAP
Priests Of Integrity
(DIFFERENT REDACTED NAMES)
Catholic Charities
LA City Housing Department Section 8
Office of Rent Stabilization (address on w. 15th street, go in
person)
Valley shelter, 6640 Van Nuys Blvd
City of L.A. office of tenants rights,
THOUGHT I’D MADE A REAL FIND HERE:
Women’s Care Cottage: 6040 Shelter, can stay ninety
days. Case Managers work with you. Okay to transfer from one shelter
after 90 days there to another shelter 90 days there, and then back for 90
days. “Lots of women do that,” she said on the phone. Also in their
office is a free laundry machine, counseling.
Waiting List is two to three months long, but can come in for a
meal and a shower during office hours.
Hope
Again 323
661-4004 Go in person on Sunset near
Normandie (This is the agency that eventually did help us.)
Agape Mission (left message 12.8.03)
Burbank Family Services, no homeless services. Used to have
it. Do have services for counseling. Fee is $26.00.
4PM tried again to reach Shelter Plus Care. On hold at 4:20,
finally left a second voice message.
Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd on Sunset gives out
bag-lunches three days a week.
SNAP phone call (To regional officer for SNAP Survivors Network of
those Abused by Priests, one of many organizations I contacted during this
period time we were on the streets.)
Sunday 11.2?:03 Notes from conversation with SNAP:
Churches? She’ll send email out so people will know we are
still in trouble. Suggests I get on AFDC so can get on their homeless
program and apply for Section 8. Also try Voice of the Faithful as they
have set up a special project for victims.
Chicago Linkup? She doesn’t know anything.
There is a Catholic Worker Shelter in Santa Ana the SNAP rep can
help us get into but my daughter and I have an agreement that we will never go
to Orange County again, (a whole nother story).
Women’s Care Cottage, PATH, and Beyond Shelter are now phone
numbers on piece of paper I carry around so I could call at least once a day
and check in showing we still need help.
ANOTHER WEEK OF NOTES:
“Still To Do” These places were listed with phone numbers:
L.A. Homeless Services Authority
Valley Shelter
Women’s Care Cottage – You can come in and do laundry twice a
week, no later than two hours before closing. There is a 2 month waiting
list for the shelter. Showers available 2:30 to 5:00 PM. 5:30 on Tues and
Friday. Hot meals every day at lunch time. You’re welcome to come
in and do laundry and eat.
Jewish Family Services (12.01.03 conversation) Made appointment
and met with (NAME REDACTED)
Two possible shelters. They are the ones who told me about
Women’s Care Cottage. And Valley Shelter (they take you on a bus to a
church, you sleep in the pews, leave first thing next morning). If you can’t
find shelter and still need mental health help, go to (she gave me a list of
County Mental Health Clinics).
FOLLOWING WEEK:
Wednesday Musts:
Go in person: Post Office, p/u mail and fill out another
yellow form per Victor from our old mail route, it’s okay. Go to (NAME OF
COMPANY REDACTED), check and see about work (?) (NAME) never returned last few
phone calls)
9AM Info Line Emergency check in number (REDACTED)
Call Catholic Charities again re move-in money assistance? (They
say wait for HM to call back)
Per (NAME REDACTED) at Info Line (from phone call yesterday) “Call
Hope Again Again, but they will only take you though, not your daughter.” (Also
have to bring proof of income)
Call STS: Check on status of $240.00 check I’m due for the
Disney job.
You’re in the “Social Service Phone Referral Go-Round” where each
agency refers you to another until eventually, someone will refer you back to
the first agency you called. Then you start all over again.”
By Kay Ebeling, To Be Continued
(NOTE: In May of 2004 Hope Again bent their rules and let
my daughter and me move in together, even though she was fifteen, three years
younger than their minimum age. They could bend the rules because they do
not take government money, so are not tied in to grant requirements.)
Kay
Ebeling writes about the pedophile priest epidemic in the Catholic Church here
and at City of Angels
The original notes from this story are scanned in here:
Kay
Ebeling pioneered internet journalism by creating City of Angels Blog, where
she reports on the Pedophile Priest epidemic in the Catholic Church as one of
the victims. Today CofA Blog continues its muckraking tradition on several
topics, producing stories that are overlooked by mainstream media. Ebeling's
day job is all done online, so she is currently traveling the country while
producing City of Angels Blog, which started at http://cityofangels3.blogspot.com
in 2007.
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