Chapter 4
Clearly there was a stigma about being homeless. That fact was not lost on Kurt and so he hid it as well as he could. He did not stand at intersections with colorful signs pleading his case. He didn’t hang around gas stations pleading his case about bus fair or feeding his hungry dog. He tried to stay and look clean, keeping his beard neatly trimmed.
He’d heard the conversations.
“How does this happen?”
“How does someone become homeless?”
“Why don’t they get a job?”
For Kurt the reasons were obvious. His experiences, his preferences and way of life had led him here. They’d always been leading him here.
He had loved camping as a kid, he was a Boy Scout after all. Kurt loved exploring the woods and felt at home there. Several times he had freaked his Mom out by going to the woods, building a shelter out of tree limbs and mud and spending the night. It was peaceful. But it was a bit weird. Not telling anyone. The child therapist had called it antisocial behavior.
Then there was the army. He was square peg in a square hole qualifying as a ranger before joining delta force. He was designed for it, his long body roped with muscle from a young age was naturally inclined to a challenging life. He wondered about his mind. Two tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq had hollowed out a place in his head for the bad thoughts to go. At first he thought it was a bottomless pit where the bad memories, and the trauma disappeared. Every now and then they would climb out though. “Rears it’s ugly head.” That was a strange expression and an overused cliche’ but he found himself chanting it at night when he felt something awful rising. It was a talisman, a totem that he would hold against his chest when he felt the nightmares coming on. “Rears it’s ugly head”. “Rears it’s ugly head”.
He knew that anyone who saw or heard him saying it would label him a lunatic. One more crazy homeless in a city of crazy homeless in an epidemic of crazy homeless. Kurt was determined to have if nothing else the appearance of someone “KIT”; keeping it together.
He had to hang on, for Emma.
His daughter stayed with his Mom. One more cliche’ in a world of PTSD cliche’s.
His body ached at night and so he had to stay warm. He had at least three more holes in him than he had when he was a Boy Scout . Holes that had tried to heal but never really would. They had removed the slugs and shrapnel from his shoulder, hip and groin and sewn them shut, but they hadn’t healed right. He thought of them as knots in wood, sinew tightening around metal spikes hammered in by thoughtless travelers. The branches and the trees would never grow straight again. The pain didn’t keep him from being an animal. He had fought his homeless brothers on at least four separate occasions, and with only gruesome exception there was no contest. He’d been woken one night by a grizzly bear clawing at his neck, or at least that’s what his sleepy brain had told him.
He had spent a long time picking out his spot. While the widespread homelessness in San Gabriel had made the appearance of shanties common, Kurt was determined to remain inconspicuous. There were dozens of obvious tarpaulin huts in the industrial shamrock shaped meadows of highway off-ramps, but this was the product of laziness and more than likely the act of an unsound mind. Kurt after all was only technically homeless.
