I Was Homeless T

By Homer Lester Teabury

The Blogger Formerly Known as Homeless T

My path to nowhere began in December of 2005 when I fled my bewitching spouse after she hit me over the head with a heavy candelabra. Leading up to that crowning, she had made believe that she could no longer hear or see me; until I would turn my back when she would regain her senses and throw things at me. Knives. Icewater. Dirty dishes. The candelabra was the last straw.

I moved into a dilapidated mobile home. The landlord had hoped to collect a modest rent from each of four students that would share the housing. However, the trailer was in such disrepair that I lived alone for only $150.00 a month, and experienced there the disquietude that absolute silence will induce in some men. It was like living on the moon. That lack of sound! Over the months, the absolute silence drove me to take refuge. . . anywhere but there.

In October of 2007, I decided to kill myself. I abandoned, sold or gave away everything I had, including my entire, freshly cleaned wardrobe, family mementos, my unpublished manuscripts, 2” master audio tapes, etc. Everything went but my car and the suit on my back. I had chosen to do myself in on Halloween night, somewhere my corpse would remain undiscovered until spring, by which time I would have decayed, frozen, and defrosted into the grotesque spectacle that I felt like although I was still alive. I chose the away team’s dugout of a softball field on the far edge of a cornfield belonging my employer. It had been closed for the approaching winter.

I purchased a box cutter, blades, and a bottle of hooch (even though I had given up drinking long ago). After dark, I set about shucking off my mortal husks in that cornfield dugout. It was chilly. I slit open the sleeve of my best suit, and began razoring into the flesh of my forearm. The crunching sound made by the blade as it tore the layers of my skin and gristle below surprised me. Still, I dug in farther, and succeeded in lacerating something. Bleeding and thoughtful in the dark of the dugout, I sat drinking my fire distilled from corn. It occurred to me that the dugout was probably full of spiders. Might these arachnids[1] conceal my remains as they had protected the living Mohammed, hiding in a cave to avoid assassination by pagans? (Spiders had spun a web covering the entrance to the Prophet’s cave, making its entrance appear undisturbed for time indeterminable, misleading Mohammed’s pursuers to skip its search.) Although I fear spiders, I would never kill one. It’s bad luck. Don’t you kill them either.

I was mulling over such ancient legends when the more timely peripheral consequences of my act came rushing into my mind. I had been focusing on myself, never considering how my end would make one ruthless, Satan-crazed female jinn very happy. indeed. She would garner much sympathy, would get my life insurance. Neighbors would bake her pies and clean her house. Worst of all, she would become the custodian of my inheritance, pension, and any other posthumous monies accruing in my estate. My death would have given her orgasmic satisfaction.

Envisioning her delight at my suicide changed my mind. I dragged my bloody, bedraggled suit (and the fool wearing it) the half-mile back to the car, drove a couple of miles to a nearby hospital, and got myself sewn up. Following that, I checked into the psych unit for a couple weeks of rest and relaxation. I was still drawing salary and benefits, so I had some means left. Yet I chose to leave that place of sympathy, hot food, and a warm bed, where a young nurse would hold my hand each night until I succeeded in finding the balm of Morpheus.

Readers can imagine my surprise when I looked out a window at the bright crispness of the late autumn day I was scheduled to check out of the mental ward—and suddenly remembered that I had jettisoned all of all my worldly goods. I couldn’t run around town in the bloody rags I had worn into the emergency room. The hospital outfitted me with some old clothes they had on hand just for nut cases like me. Now I really looked like an Idiot Out Walking Around—or acronymically[2], IOWA.

That’s when the word “homeless” began to prey on my mind. I picked up some new old clothing at a second-hand store and continued to work, but clients began gossiping about the practitioner who hung his clothes in the car and probably slept in them too. I officially separated from my employer in December of 2007, confident of finding a position more appropriate to my lofty opinion of myself. In retrospect, I see that this stellar self-estimation was a necessary self-delusion to disguise my shame and lack of common sense.

Once back out in the real world again, I busied myself applying for lectureships, calling publishers trying to whip up some interest (and a cash advance) for my half-written book, and in general, developing a sorry variety of musculature by constantly holding reality at arm’s length.

I began to think, why should I limit my options to a field that was almost universally populated by ninnies? Why not work my way up to . . . best-selling author, or the luckiest high-rolling gambler ever? Or (with a bit of grooming and a penis-enlarging device) why not a Casanova-type who sweeps the fabulously wealthy princess of some small European country off her feet--or more realistically, a rich widow with a comfortable home in the suburbs of Chicago? All of these paths had been navigated by others successfully. Why not me? Calls, letters, come-ons, and job applications flew out like a fever of eagles, but to my astonishment, there came no affirmative responses. 

I couldn’t return home, because the Court had banned me from the family homestead, and my wife would start throwing things again., She wanted to kill me. She felt cheated by merely divorcing me, and worked with great effect to keep my life sliding down to the subterranean level. To keep my hollow person feeling full of something, I decided decided to conduct field research, and write about the morass into which I was sinking anyway—homelessness, with all its beat-up baggage: the swelling underclass, failing public education, and the horrid American popular culture then ascendant—the “Urban,” a sensibility modeled on too-big jail-house style pants hanging beltless over skivvies worn by mofos with their minds “siked every witch way” for crack rock and booty. Fuck the rest, pop a cap in its ass, slap da bitch upside the brain til she give it up, then burn down the ho. These and similar American urbanisms needed my scholarly interpretation. 

One Marxist critic made a claim—on first blush, pretty silly—that urban America’s burgeoning “gangsta” culture was nothing more than the nation’s poor and disenfranchised attempting to emulate the power practices long used by U.S. government top echelons. Who were the biggest thugs in the world, if not Bush and Cheney? They popped millions of caps into their rivals, burnt down the mofo Iraqi nation with impunity, then partied all night on the Saudi royal yacht with beautiful, pious ho’s. Dick Cheney practically lived on the Saudi royal yacht.

My planned exposition of this “trickle down thuggery” was a worthwhile, if impossible, challenge. Nobody had any real interest in an alternative gloss on sub-prime American politicos and their admiring thugs. The sophisticated scoffed at the ravings of a nobody like me, even if my rant contained truth. High-level thugs would kill any real threats, so I was safe. My horror at the new dualism of American culture was matched only by my personal unspoken horror terror about what was happening inside me--and being done to me on the outside by others.

I spent the years 2008 – 2011 shuffling between soup kitchens, free clinics, casino hotels, and weeks spent at cheap motels. I spent my days at public libraries and nights in homeless shelters. Before long, I moved to a distant city where I was unknown. I had become ashamed to let friends and family know what had happened to my life. I refrained from bothering residents of my former world. Homeless T, my internet mouthpiece, felt no such constraint, and kept writing through it all—at first, in tones of dismal self-pity, and later, in derision. By the time of my latter-day darknesses--like the Christmas Eve my shelter director ordered me back out on the streets in an ice storm because I refused to endorse his uncertified financial statements for a grant application he had me write--I could laugh about the unpublicized world of disenfranchised persons and their benefactors. I had become a character in an urban book, definitely neo-Dickensian. 




Homer Lester Teabury: 20 November 2016

[1] Arachnid=insect having eight legs, e.g., spider.

[2] A word or name made up of the first letters of several words or a phrase.