How I Became Homeless, Then Not

Yesterday, I talked about struggles and how we overcome them. I have had mine, and most of them were caused by my poor selection of female partners. This is the story of my journey from divorce, homelessness, on to success. Maybe it can inspire someone who is struggling.

I’m going to mention a song today. It’s a song from a genre that I typically don’t like- rap. This particular song was popular while I was in the military, and the reason why I mention it is related directly to a period in my life when I was really struggling: the summer of 1999. Most rap “music” is simply someone talking over music while loosely rhyming. Typically, they are talking about their genitals, drugs, gang violence, or some other antisocial drivel. However, every once in awhile, one of them displays a level of societal truth, proving that they are the exception to the rule of rap being an annoying waste of time.

I had just gotten divorced, and things were financially rough for me. I was making $8.25 an hour as a firefighter/EMT. As a firefighter, you work a 24 on/48 off schedule, and this results in three different sized paychecks:

• The large paycheck has 106 hours of straight pay and 14 hours of overtime.
• The medium paycheck has 106 hours of straight pay and 6 hours of overtime.
• The small paycheck has 104 hours of straight pay.

The divorce was punishing. The judge gave her the car, the kids, child support, and I got all of the debts. Those debts would be taken out of my paycheck before I even saw it. By the time all of my deductions were taken out (including child support) I wound up making an average of about $525 per two week paycheck. Since the rent on my apartment was $535 a month, it wasn’t long before I was homeless. I just couldn’t afford rent, utilities, and all of the other expenses that went with living in an apartment.

I was sleeping on the couches of friends until I could save enough for a buy here/pay here car, then I began living in my car. This was probably the worst time of my life. It took more than 3 months to save enough for a down payment on a 10 year old Ford Tempo. I would go several days at a time without eating. At work as a firefighter, I would eat everyone’s leftover food, and for that reason, they started calling me catfish, because I was a bottom feeder (from the bottom of the pot, you see). I lost 25 pounds in three months. Finally, after 3 months, I was able to come up with the $1200 I needed for a down payment and for the first 6 months’ insurance.

That’s when the song came into play. It was “Bust a Move.” Here are the lyrics that really struck home with me:

Girls are fakin’, goodness sakin’
They want a man who brings home the bacon
Got no money and you got no car
Then you got no woman and there you are
Some girls are sophistic, materialistic
Looking for a man makes them opportunistic
They’re lyin’ on the beach perpetratin’ a tan
So that a brother with money can be their man

So there I was: homeless, broke, and living in my car. I was alone, and couldn’t even have my kids over for visitation, because I had no place to bring them. I was alone: no friends, no money, no place to live. Every day was a search for ways to make a better living. I got a second job, working as a janitor in a theme park. I had to keep that second job a secret from my ex-wife, so she wouldn’t take me back to court to have that extra income be used to calculate a higher child support amount. Things were a bit better, because the extra income from the janitorial work nearly doubled my take home pay. Things were hard, but I knew that I could make it.

I lived in my car for about six months, parking it in various places so I wouldn’t have the cops called on me. I showered at work: once when I got there, then again when I left. On the third day, I was able to shower at the city’s owned gym, because city employees got a free membership.

That lasted until I found a woman willing to rent me a room. She was s supervisor at the theme park where I worked who found out how much I was struggling and decided to help me out by letting me rent her spare bedroom for $200 a month. I lived there for about three months, until she moved to Montana. Now here I was, just over a year after my divorce, and had to find another roommate.

That brings us to the summer of 2000.

The place I was living wasn’t great- it was in the middle of one of the most dangerous, most crime filled neighborhoods in Orlando, but it was cheap, and it was all that I could afford. If I remember correctly, my share of the rent and expenses was around $400 a month, my car was another $300 a month, and by the time I was done with the “must have” expenses like gas, insurance, and the like, I had $200 a month left over for food and other things. While still rough, things were much better than they had been just a few months before. Sometimes, I would only have $30 to last from one payday to the next, and $15 of that went to gas to get me to work.

Meanwhile, I didn’t stop working to get myself out of the situation I was in. I was working two jobs and began going to school at the same time. I spent the next year getting my Paramedic license, and along with it, an AS in Emergency Medicine. That was a miracle for my monetary situation.

It was now the summer of 2001.

My pay in the fire department was so much better at that point. As a Paramedic, I was finally making $10.65 an hour. On the days that I was acting engineer, I got an extra 75 cents an hour. It was during this time that I moved out of my ghetto apartment, and moved into an apartment in a better neighborhood. I had two roommates in this new place, a woman and a man. It was a good arrangement for them, because my now three jobs meant that I only slept there one night out of every three. It was good for me because it was half a mile from my fire station, and I could have my kids over for visitation. I was still living there on 9/11. Yeah, that 9/11.

It was that experience that gave me a unique perspective on needs versus wants, as well as how to make your money stretch. I know what it means to struggle, I know what it means to know that your next meal is likely days away.

That’s why I become so offended when the current generation complains that the generations that came before had it easy, while complaining that they can’t buy a house. Bull crap, they just don’t have any idea what the difference is between a need and a want.

The world doesn’t owe you a thing. You can have the lifestyle you want, but you can’t expect others to give it to you, you have to earn it. Doing so requires hard work and consistently making good decisions. One of those decisions, perhaps the most important of them, is the person you choose to partner with. That is the decision that I have struggled with more than any other, and I am glad that I finally got that one right.