Patrick Fealey
A.D. 2024—The United States
Twenty-seven degrees in a Port-A-Jon, the seat freezing my ass. I’m in the dark with a little flashlight. Chemically treated feces and urine splash up onto my anus. The wind howls, shaking the plastic structure. My hands go numb.
3:00 a.m., parked in a public lot across the street from the town beach in Westerly, Rhode Island. Just woke up, sleep evasive. It’s my first week out here. I pour an iced coffee from my cooler. I’m walking around the front of the Toyota I’m now living in when a car pulls into the lot, comes toward me. I see only headlights illuminating my fatigue and the red plastic party cup in my hand. Must be a cop. Someone gets out and approaches. It is a cop, young. I’m not afraid, exactly, but I’m also not yet used to being homeless.
“How you doing?” he says.
“Good.”
“Just hanging out?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need anything?”
“No.”
“Okay. Just checking. Have a good night.”
In the morning, I awake with back pain. Sleeping in the driver’s seat will be an acquired skill.
Sun-bleached fences wrap the perimeter of the dunes, blown over by the unrelenting winds off the cold Atlantic. I park at the beach most days and have spent all but one night here. Lovely Lady Lily, the sweet and wild angel with fur, is with me. The entire backseat is hers and she is adjusting to the car well, because I’m here and we are close. Her daily routine has improved in some ways. When we lived in the house, she snoozed on the couch, walked in the yard, and got to the beach, her favorite place, a couple times a week. Now she runs on the beach several times a day, hunting the tide line for shellfish. She crunches down crabs and tears the meat out of quahogs. And if there’s a fish? She found a single minnow on a beach two miles long.
Photo by PHILIP MONTGOMERY
The author was a reporter and arts critic for outlets including The Boston Globe and Reuters. Today he fills notebooks with novels, poetry, and stories. His guitar is sometimes a desk. (He props it upside down on his lap.)
My morning routine is taking gabapentin (an anti-seizure medication that also alleviates psychic and neuropathic pain and brightens my perception), lamotrigine (another anti-seizure medicine, but for me it helps my mental energy and cuts through fog, because gabapentin creates fog), fluoxetine (Prozac, an antidepressant), and Adderall (for focus and energy, because after the manic depression struck in 1997, my brain was a flat tire), walking the beach with Lily, getting coffee at the Mobil station up the road, and writing on an HP laptop I got two months ago that has already had one power-input jack fail. It sits on an upside-down acoustic guitar resting on my lap, a 12V/120V converter plugged into the lighter with the car running. I play the guitar first thing every morning, songs I’ve written. The rest of the day, I flip it over and it’s my desk.
When we’re on the beach early, we usually see John. Lily used to jump on his legs, and he didn’t like it. He’s about seventy and has the bearing and haircut of a military person. He walks the beach looking for sea glass.
I’m parked in the public lot across from the beach, sitting in the front passenger seat, working on a novel. An SUV police cruiser pulls in front of me, parks close, at an angle, as if to block me from a would-be escape. This officer is a young blond woman in a bulletproof vest with a pistol strapped to her abdomen.
She says, “We received some calls. People are concerned.”
“Yes?”
“They see you out here and are concerned.”
She doesn’t say who these “concerned” people are, but the only ones who can see me are the owners of large beachfront houses. Maybe they’re looking out their $3 million windows and seeing the consequences of their avarice.
She’s trying to get me to move along, but the lot is open to the public from dawn to dusk. I have every right to be here.
“Write,” I say.
“What do you write?”
“Literary fiction. I was a reporter.”
“Anywhere I know?”
“The Boston Globe.”
Her eyes open wide and she tosses her head back in recognition. She realizes I’m not dissolute and not a threat. She asks for my license and calls it in. Dispatch lets her know I have no criminal record or outstanding warrants.
“Do you need anything?” she says.
“Do you know if the homeless shelter will let me take a shower?”
She asks dispatch to call the shelter. Dispatch comes back. She says, “Yes.”
“Good,” I say. “Thanks.”
“You can’t stay here at night,” she says. “You can stay at Walmart, in the back parking lot.”
“Okay.”
She gives me her card. She leaves. I stay. I have every right to be here.
I go to Walmart that night and will sleep there every night. But the police will continue to come as if I’m some kind of one-man crime wave. Before I’m chased out of Westerly, I will meet, stand my ground, and lose ground to a dozen different officers, often at night, banging on my window and waking me just to ask, “Are you all right?” The question begins to sound like a pretense.
The officers are civil, but every encounter causes me apprehension and stress. I’m innocent of any wrongdoing, but the interaction between a citizen and law enforcement is unbalanced by nature. They are part of an apparatus that can take away a person’s freedom. I know it, and they certainly know it. When you’re homeless, you are even more vulnerable. You have no place to go, no kitchen table to sit at while you drink your beer, invisible to them. You’re always on their turf. It's unnerving.
I rented a beach house in Westerly for a year and a half. It had a chalet roof, high ceilings. Nice. I was most often alone, my then-girlfriend working in New York. Lily and my girlfriend’s dachshund were entertaining company, chasing each other around the house at top speed or snoozing on the couch while I wrote all day—freelance art criticism, newspaper articles, and novels. I ate takeout, mostly.
Early on, I write an email to Westerly police chief Paul Gingerella to introduce myself. I inform him I am a writer and recently became homeless. I tell him I feel his officers are trying to unlawfully disperse me. I ask him to treat me as “who I am and not as what people fear I am.”
He writes back, invites me to come to his office or call to discuss the ordinances his officers are enforcing. I had also mentioned drug deals going down in the Walmart parking lot. When he took office, he stated that a priority was fighting fentanyl.
I don’t call or visit.
A sunny afternoon. I’m in the passenger seat, writing. The 2013 Corolla has been reliable since I bought it in 2019. It holds all that I need for daily life and makes for a decent workplace.
A police officer approaches the car on the driver’s side. Very short, he looks overwhelmed by his bulletproof vest and all that’s attached to it. Cops these days don’t look like they’re here for domestic law-enforcement duties. They’re equipped for martial law.
The cop asks me what I’m doing.
“Writing.”
“We got a complaint.”
“The chief knows I’m here.”
“Who’s that?” he says, a quiz.
“Gingerella.”
His face eases somewhat, but his smirk is fixed.
He’s looking at my hand. I’m rubbing my thumb and forefinger together. The involuntary motion is tardive dyskinesia, a side effect of the bipolar medication.
He says, “Do you have Parkinson’s?”
“No.”
“Do you have any health problems?”
By now I’m guessing they have investigated me enough to know I receive Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). That’s probably where this question is coming from. As far as I know, the Social Security Administration doesn’t make public one’s ailments. I say no, to avoid the potential discrimination that people with mental-health challenges face, but add that “I do have chronic renal insufficiency,” to satisfy his suspicion that something’s not right.
He doesn’t understand.
“Kidney disease.”
“How do you get your money?”
“Assistance.”
“Call us if you need anything.”
Statistics vary by source, but last year there were a record-high 650,100 homeless people in the United States, many of them suffering mental illness and substance-abuse issues. Of course, most citizens suffering mental illness and substance-abuse issues are not homeless.
One of the primary causes of homelessness, obviously, is a lack of affordable housing. Wages have not kept up with escalating real estate values and rents, especially in major cities.
The number of homeless people has grown significantly over the past couple decades. An advocacy group in New York says that the rate there is the highest it’s been since the Great Depression. Across the country, most homeless people are male and almost half of us are white. Rates are much higher among non-white populations, with Pacific Islanders, Indigenous people, and Blacks all experiencing homelessness in disproportionate numbers. Twenty-two out of every ten thousand veterans are homeless.
In 1997, I was a twenty-nine-year-old award-winning art critic and journalist when I was stricken by a violent and disabling onset of manic depression. Bipolar I, rapid-cycling/mixed state, the most severe form of the genetic disorder and often fatal (by suicide). My psychiatrist actually said to me, “You are the worst manic depressive I have ever seen.” Together, we developed a unique cocktail of eight medications that enables me to function and has kept me alive for twenty-seven years.
The condition is a torturous gift, one imparting vision, and manic depressives historically succeed in all fields of human activity, from medicine to art. Theodore Roethke described these blessed sufferers as possessing “nobility of soul.”
Read the rest at Esquire.