Jake’s Life

Lots of time being covered here. Bear with me.

After being released from the hospital the next morning was when I first began to feel truly homeless. I had nobody to turn to for a place to live, I had not been to school in a few days, and was overall flabbergasted at what I should be doing. I went from a super-secret youth housing facility to a downtown emergency youth shelter. If you don’t know how these work here’s the skinny: They are usually open at only certain times (for example, 7pm to 7am). You arrive during a certain time, your belongings are searched for weapons, drugs, and porn, and for the first few hours you are allowed to eat provided food, take a shower, watch TV, and then bedtime rolls around and you’re sentenced to sleep. Staff wakes you up at a certain time, and you leave by a certain time. You were not allowed to store anything at the shelter.

Since I was still enrolled in school I filled the huge gap of time during the day by trying to go back and get things back on track. I tried to keep what happened from people at school but they found out anyway, like they usually do somehow, and I got a combination of sympathy and ridicule from students. I hated both sentiments and usually everything in between too. The only four people I really confided in were my CDC (Chemical Dependency Counselor, from the outpatient treatment for being found drunk at school), her secretary, my school nurse, and a school security officer. Most of the time when I was supposed to be in class I was either ditching and at the CDC office, the school’s nurse’s office, or the security office. I hated being around other students, I couldn’t focus in class, and my teachers were wearing on my nerves with their chipper attitudes. The CDC and her secretary took it upon themselves to look at long-term residential centers for me, and while low-end, found the best nearby my high school. They went to see it, took photos, and showed me during my next session with them. (Just to give you a clue about these groups, it was held at a hospital but mandated by the school, and was in a group format with others from my school. The youth ranged in “addictions” from alcohol, marijuana, to heroin and meth.) I figured that anything was better than the shelter so I went for it.

This facility held about thirty youth, with a floor for boys and a floor for girls, with 24-hour staff and volunteer coverage. There were structured chore lists, house arrest, “rent” (one third of your monthly gross income from work, which was required), counselors, and other activities. I hated this place. At this time I was in high school, working part time for a well-known GLBTQ youth advocacy program, and part time at Taco Bell. My first job took me around the country one Summer, speaking at different functions (ACLU, Center for Disease Control, various high schools and colleges, etc.) and left my shared room and belongings unsupervised in the home. I usually came home to find condoms and lube all over my bed (not lube packets, just flat out lube), the clothing rifled through and destroyed, and one time while in an after school photography class I had my leased camera equipment stolen (which was supposed to be locked in a staff storage room but they never got around to doing this). I was usually on house arrest every time it was my turn to clean the bathrooms because when people saw I was cleaning it they would do some effed up stuff to them before I cleaned them, and sometimes after to make it look like I didn’t. I would usually flat out refuse to do it and stay on house arrest for the next week rather than clean someone’s shitty ass marks from the walls and piss out of the clogged up sink.

Taco Bell, now that brings up a lot of memories, mostly bad. After working at Taco Bell for a few months the manager and her partner invited me to dinner one Thanksgiving. The staff at the shelter said that I could go, but since I was on house arrest I had to be back by nine that night. I was back before then and went to sleep to wake up the next day to them telling me that I had to leave. They said that I never checked back in the night before when I arrived and must have snuck in sometime during the night. They were arranging me transportation to the emergency shelter I was in before here when I called my manager and told her what was going on. She said that after the night before at dinner that she and her partner had talked about adding a new person to their household and asked if I wanted to come live with them, helping to save until I was eighteen and giving me a much better living environment. I went for it, obviously.

I moved in with her, her partner, and their two kids (one was 8 years old, the other was 2 years old). Before I get into the rest of the story I have to explain that I was a much different person back then. Considering what I went through I was at a low, emotionally and socially. Anyone who knows me know knows that what I’m about to explain would never happen to me now. Over the next few months things were great: I had a new home with welcoming “parents,” two new “brothers,” and a job. This was the most stable position I had been in for a while. I was with them for well over a year, from when I was almost seventeen to after I was eighteen. The first six months saw me working more and more shifts at Taco Bell, mostly doubles each day so that she could “spend time with [her] family.” I didn’t have adequate ID to open a bank account according to her so my paychecks got signed over to her and were put in a separate account, saving until I was eighteen and taking out enough to support me.

My doubles turned into triples, and off the clock so as to not flag anything in payroll with minor labor laws. She was either always sick and needed me to stay, graveyard wouldn’t show up and she couldn’t come in because the kids were sick, or the fact that I “owed” her for “rescuing” me. One night while we both were working there was a gang-related shooting in the parking lot involving an employee. She made a big deal out of seeing who she thought was the shooter and was afraid to come in for a few days. From that shift until the time I actually left the store was almost four days. No kidding. I slept in the back while graveyard worked, and all off the clock.

The first time I got to look down the barrel of a gun was here too. The fourth night I was there it was just after bar rush, the night crew wouldn’t come in because they were scared, and I was working alone. I was still 17 at the time. A man came in (I remember him to this day…black male, 6’2’’, 180, black baseball cap, and this horrid gold Adidas running suit) and told me that it was a robbery and to give him the money. I had been at the store for four days, the last 16 hours alone, was tired, smelled, and didn’t care. I laughed, tapped in a new order and asked what he really wanted. He took a handgun out of his waist band (one that I now know to be a Glock…good gun), stepped back, put it a few inches away from my face and told me to give him the money. I put my hands up and told him that my keys were in my right pocket and I needed to get them. After I got them I put them in the till, hit the panic button next to it, and removed the drawer setting it on the counter. He took every last cent.

While the police were there and I was being interviewed she called…and called and called and called. I finally picked up the phone and got bitched out so I hung up on her. This was a considerable amount of balls I had grown as before I could never stand up to her. Whenever I said or did something that was “wrong” she paraded the kids in front of me and demanded I tell them my mistake and why I made it (usually something to the effect of “I don’t care about either of you or your mothers, and I am not grateful for the help they’ve given me”).

A few months after the robbery her boss kept coming down on her about labor laws, wanted to know why I was the only person on, being underage, in the middle of the night. Soon after all of this heat a few deposits ended up missing. She was in charge of dropping them off at the bank although sometimes I did on the way to the bus stop on the way home. This time it was all her, and she prepared a written statement to the company saying that she dropped them off. All of a sudden she said that she found the deposit slips in my bedroom and decided to come forward. The company saw through the lie and fired her, pressing criminal charges along with it. At this point I was already 18 and went to her for the money out of my account to move out, and was told that there was no separate account and there was no money. I found some friends to move in with and left without any of my stuff.