My Dad needed to find an apartment big enough to accommodate the three kids before he could move us in. Prior to the Pope’s visit, my Dad saw a posting on a bulletin board in the Cambridge Food Co-Op in Central Square. Squatters were living in a 4-unit around the corner and some homeless people lit a fire in the basement of one of the units. So the other squatters (which means living without paying rent or owning the property) made a flyer looking for new neighbors and posted it at the Co-Op. My Dad moved in. He wasn’t paying any rent, and had found himself a place that was big enough to accommodate the kids. I’m really not sure how long this arrangement lasted. As he told it, it lasted until the furnace broke. He and the other people in the building then tracked down the landlord, who fixed the furnace and they all started paying $125 a month in rent. A few decades later when he moved out of that same apartment his rent had only increased to $235. We did have a new landlord by then, a sweet and generous woman named Adeline who built a chicken coop under her kitchen sink when she first moved into the apartment upstairs from our own.
We had a rainbow sticker with a unicorn on our front window of the apartment. Buses that connected the neighboring towns and they would come together in Central Square down the street from our apartment and they would thunder by day and night. In those early days I would help him stuff envelopes to make extra money next to the open window, and of course, we all worked our shifts at the food Co-Op.
We did visit “the Bus” once in the junk yard where it rested after they made it to the Boston area. It was a school bus, grey, not full length, that a man meticulously converted to a camper. He installed a kitchen behind the driver’s seat, bunk beds on either side of the aisle, and a bathroom in the back. By then it had broken windows and had been stripped of its contents, still, it was so cool to me seeing it for what seemed like the first time. There were padded rails to hold the glasses in place in the kitchen cabinet and there were compartments under the center aisle which my Dad said had every tool you needed to work on the engine. I remember walking to the bathroom in the back, imagining what it must have been like to sit on the toilet and make eye contact with the driver following behind.
The bus went with them to California, and back to the East Coast. Across the front was the word “Redoubt” which is a word for fortress or secure retreat. The story he told the most was about the time the engine blew on the top of Mt. Shasta and he coasted down until they found a pig farm where we stayed until the truck was repaired. It was there that my mom lost her ring and my Dad, surveying the mud and pig excrement decided not to bother to look for it.
Until now, I don’t think I quite realized that for the next several years after the “I was born on a waterbed in a pink house" moment I was, what we would consider today, unhoused. Central Square, where I would grow up, seemed to always have homeless people present long after we started paying rent and I began to go to the public school. There was a little alley way next to our apartment and this frequently was a pee stop for drunks, a place for pick pockets to paw through purses and leave behind the unvaluables and our front stoop was a terrific resting place for those whose journey was neverending. For many years there was a methadone clinic and shelter up the street from our home, and when it moved out of the area the operators arranged for a daily van transport across the street from my stoop for its customers.
I was a latchkey kid, which means as the child of a single parent, I had to walk home from school, let myself in, make my own snack and entertain myself. And most of the time, with my key in hand, I needed to thread the gauntlet of addicts that were sitting on my front steps. The term ‘latchkey kid’ goes back to the 1940’s when the word ‘latchkey’ meant house key and both parents had to go to war or work in the factories. It came back with the rise of single parents and dual incomes in the 70’s and 80’s. And while it made me very self reliant, I was often terribly bored and lonely. I remember wishing with all my heart for a mom to be home waiting for me with hot chocolate chip cookies. I remember when I was very little and unable to pour the full gallon container of milk, for fear of spilling it, I would use water from the faucet in my cereal. It was disgusting.
One afternoon, shortly after we had gotten our first personal computer, I sat playing an ASCII game and startled when I heard a noise behind me. A sniffling and farting dirty old man emerged from my basement holding a blanket. He had grabbed one from my bunkbed and gone down to the dark basement to sleep. Another day, when I had also failed to lock the door behind me, I turned to see someone walking out the door with our new CD player. I chased this one down the street and grabbed it back in a fit of adrenaline with a toy wooden sword.
The apartment had two bedrooms, however you had to walk through one to get to the other. My brother and I had a bunk bed and there was a blanket instead of a door to this room. In 1981, when I was 5, my dad found a job in the Fuel Assistance office for the City of Cambridge and also enrolled in night classes at the New England School of Law. This effectively meant that he would come home after work and whip up dinner before heading to class about an hour and a half later. He wouldn’t return until after it was our bed time and this meant that we would miss the absolutely crucial “tuck in” which I felt was a massive injustice. Our solution was to create ‘booby traps’ and so before brushing our teeth and getting our pj’s on, my brother and I would string up beer cans and pots and pans behind the curtain to our room so we would be awakened by the clatter when my father finally came home and could be properly tucked in.
His room had a door which was never closed and his pillow was about 10 feet from my own on the top bunk. My active mind would race as I tried to sleep and it was always very difficult for me to drift off. I would lay in bed listening to my father’s breathing as he slept, reassured by his presence and the sound of my brother below. But at times my Dad’s breathing would suddenly stop and I would begin to panic. Was he ok? I would throw the blanket back and swing my leg over the ladder just as he would start breathing again. Love and trauma all at once.