Confessions of A Peanut Butter Junkie

Being homeless is strange. I’m often waiting to leave nowhere on my way to nowhere.
Standing at a bus stop with my backpack on, the sun beating down. Waiting.
Then I’m on the bus and before I know it…I’m waiting to get off. Sometimes I’m even in a hurry. No reason why. I’m going nowhere. But apparently I wanna get there right away.
Anyway I found the C.H.I.P. center sometime in mid July of 2006. I had been homeless for approximately 3 weeks. I waited to get in. All day. I sat in the lobby at what is called “the day center”, and then I sat out back behind the C.H.I.P. center. Waiting to get in.
The best thing about the C.H.I.P. center is that it’s right next door to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. Homeless people eat better than I did when I had a job, and a decent apartment. About the only draw back is you have to wait in line, and you can only eat once a day between 9 A.M and 11 A.M.
For me the worst thing about being homeless is I never feel clean. No matter how much I shower. You get close enough to a guy that has been on the street for long enough, he has that look, and that smell. The smell is like a living thing. It’s alive. It’s really, really mean, and it assaults you. No matter where you are. It gets you. It jumps from him to you and it gets into your nostrils and it slides down your throat. It’s pissed off. And it has its way with you. You can’t react too much. What are you going to say? The best you can do is try and not breathe to much. If you are in an enclosed space-like on a city bus- the smell sets up shop. It gets to work.
Trying to eat at a table with a guy that has been on the street so long he has made friends with that smell is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Starvation made it easy though.
When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have to take a shower, and wash all of your clothes. So they start you off on the right foot. You are clean, and all of your stuff is clean. Only I never really feel clean. I get out of the shower at the C.H.I.P. center and right away every fiber of my being is demanding that I get the fuck back in there and lather the fuck up! Right Now!
It’s the smell. That homeless guy smell. The scariest thing about the homeless guy smell for me is the sick never ending fear that it’s coming from me. That that horrible pissed off stench is not wafting off of some other guy, but is oozing from the clogged up pores of my own unwashed skin.
And a couple of times it has been. I’m so sorry. But if you are living on the street sometimes getting clean is the hardest part.
People come to the C.H.I.P. center to get clean all the time. Both physically clean as in a quick shower, and that other kinda clean as in I have to dry out. No more booze. No more drugs. Everyone starts off with a shower and clean clothes. The rest is up to you.
It’s the rest that is the hard part.
Every day is someone’s first day at the C.H.I.P. center. Most days are someone’s last.
Weekends are big for violations. That’s what they call it when you break the rules at the C.H.I.P. center, a violation. People are always going out and falling off the wagon, hell they might even be diving off the wagon head first, and then they come back to the C.H.I.P. center and the administrator gives them the breathalyzer test and boom, they’re back on the street. That’s the biggest rule at the C.H.I.P. center. No drinking. No drugs.
For some staying sober is the hard part. Not for me. My problem is the work. See C.H.I.P. is a work program. When you get to the C.H.I.P. center you have 7 days to get a job. For me the job prospects are pretty grim.
I n summer of 2006, in July, I got to the C.H.I.P. center, and I had seven days to find a job. Before they would assign me a bed someone would be verifying my employment.
I think I spent more than a week sleeping on the floor. It turned out to be one of the best things to happen to me that summer. See after my car accident in 2004, the one that made me a convicted felon, I started to have some neck and back pain. It wasn’t really bad, but it was a pain! It would come and go. Sometimes it would really, really hurt, and others it would just be a minor nuisance. But it was something I was aware of. I sleep on the floor in a homeless shelter for a week and guess what? I’m pain free. No more neck or back pain. The cure was just a few nights on a tile floor in a homeless shelter in Clearwater Florida. I’m still thankful for that.
But things went wrong for me that first time at the C.H.I.P. center. I applied for work at a few places. Sun Microstamping and Hi Tech Electronic Displays are the one’s that I remember. But I never even got a call for an interview. So I wound up in the sewer.
Yup. Telemarketing. It’s the best I could do in seven days.
First Global Services. I would call people and try to get them to agree to attend a travel seminar. Sometimes the seminar was a timeshare pitch, and sometimes the travel seminar was a travel club pitch. People were always agreeing to attend and then just never showing up. I swear we would call them and try and reschedule them to attend the seminar. We called them no-shows! I had a couple of laughs at First Global Services. But it was grueling, thankless shit work of the shittiest variety. It was telemarketing.
They day I started at First Global Services, a homeless guy from the C.H.I.P. center started with me. His name was Mike Hardergree. Or maybe Hardagree. I’m still not sure if Mike pretended to be my friend, wanted to be my friend, or really was a friend. I just don’t know. The best thing about Mike was he had a truck. You could hop into that truck and get just about anywhere in no time. Remember in summer 2006 I had already been riding the bus, public transportation for over two years. Being able to get from point A to point B with out all the bullshit of public transportation seemed like a freaking miracle.
It really did. But Mike had his own brand of bullshit that made it way more trouble than it was worth.
Mike wanted me to move to Orlando with him. I swear I am not making that up. Just the fact that he asked made my skin crawl. I’m a homeless bum, I mean officially down and out and this dude is asking me to move to Orlando with him. And his plan involved another homeless shelter in Orlando. What the fuck?
They kick you out of the C.H.I.P. center every morning Monday through Friday at 06:30 A.M.. They wake you up at 5:30 A.M. and you are out by 06:30. I guess in a city that never sleeps, say New York city, or Chicago, or Los Angeles there may be something to do at 06:30 A.M. but in Pinellas county Florida, in Clearwater Florida, there is absolutely nothing to do. Not a damn thing. You are effectively homeless for a little while each day.
Mike and I would hit a McDonalds or a Burger King to get some breakfast. Mike likes to people watch. I do to, but Mike would start saying all kinds of nasty things about the people he watched, and it really got on my nerves. But what really killed any chance I had of being friends with Mike Hardergree was his mumbling. That’s right. He would mumble. He would start off a sentence and you would be able to hear him just fine, but before he would get to the end of the sentence his voice would just trail off and fade away. I was always saying, “What?”
“What did you say Mike?” I was always asking Mike Hardergee.
So one day Mike Hardergree yells at me because he is tired of hearing me say what all the time. I put my hand like a cup up by my ear. Kind of a universal sign for what? Hu?
What did you say?
Another thing that I disliked about Mike is I got the idea that he was hiding something from me. When we were having breakfast a couple of times he asked me a few questions about my situation and how I got to be homeless. I didn’t give him the long version, but I told him as much of the truth as I could. He never did tell me how he became homeless.
He held out on me. And it irked the fuck out of me. People are always telling you their story most of the time. Not Mike Hardergree.
Then finally I just told Mike Hardergee that I didn’t want anything to do with him, that he was a huge mumbler. He hung around the C.H.I.P. center for a while but then he just up and left. I still see him around Clearwater sometimes. Guess he never made that trip over to Orlando.
I was only at the C.H.I.P. center that first time for a about a month, a month and a half.
The reason I only stayed that long the first time is because I got to the shelter one evening and there was a message for me. John P. Donnelly had called and the message said he wanted me to give him a call. He had tracked me down.
My cell phone had died in a down poor I got caught in, and the phones at the C.H.I.P. center are not exactly convenient. You can only use them at certain times of the day and it just seems like more trouble than it’s worth to me. My point is I did not call my brother. The way I remember it …I was leaving the shelter one morning around 6:30 A.M. and guess who’s parked out on Park Street just down the block from the shelter?
My brother John P. Donnelly.
He wanted me to leave with him right then. He told me he was sorry for how things had turned out and that he was worried about me. He said I could live with him. Again.
Leaving just then was not an option for a couple of reasons. One I was on my way to work at First Global Services, and two once you leave the C.H.I.P. center you can’t go back inside until about 4 P.M. so there was no way for me to get my stuff.
But the next morning I did leave with him. I wanted to believe that he was truly sorry and that he was trying to help me. But he wasn’t. What a mess this turned into.
I stayed with my brother John P. Donnelly in his little two bedroom two bath house at
14216 Chamberlain Avenue Largo, Florida 33774 for less than seven days. Less than a week after my brother came to get me out of a homeless shelter he kicked me out.
But before he did that he did some other crazy things I should mention.
When I left the C.H.I.P center to live with my brother John P. Donnelly I had over 800 dollars in the bank. But 800 is not a very big number especially when you are talking about money.
John took me shopping. For clothes. For bed linens. Hell we drove to several used furniture stores until I finally found a bed I could afford to buy. John was a sport. He paid for the expensive part of the bed. The mattress. There are mattress stores all over Pinellas County and that includes in the city of Largo and Clearwater but for some stupid reason we drove all the way over to some place in St. Petersburg just to get a mattress.
I just can’t even begin to hint at how strange I thought this was. Why drive all the way to St. Pete? Even if we had been there and it was just a convenient stop, why not just drive back to Largo or Seminole and stop there for a mattress? I just didn’t get it.
But at least I had a small room and bed to sleep on. Now I needed a job. Moving into John’s house effectively made me unemployed again. Getting to the office of First Global Services was not doable from John’s place. But I didn’t fuck around. I went out and got a job. In just two days. It was still a telemarketing thing but it was work.
I took a job at a place called Consumer Energy Solutions. They offered a week or two of paid training. The place was owned and run by a Scientologist. I liked it any way because it was just a couple of hundred feet from the C.H.I.P. center and just as close to the St. Vincent De Paul soup kitchen. See in my heart I knew damn well my brother was about to do me dirty. I did not count on it being inside of a week though. So it worked out good that I found a place close to the shelter and the free food.
John started dosing me with the boner juice. The morning we started out looking at used furniture stores so that I could by a bed, John took me through a drive through at a McDonalds, and a little while after eating I was sporting wood. For the love of god.
I’m scouring Pinellas County for the cheapest twin size bed I can find and I have to do it sporting a boner? What the fuck?
I’ll avoid a fight every time. I don’t go looking for trouble like that. So I never said a word to John about the dick juice. I just didn’t want to discuss it with him. Not that morning as we hunted for used furniture, not ever. But during the week that I was at John’s place I was getting regular erections because he was poisoning me with something.
As if that was not enough of a burden for me John wanted me to decide on a life changing career. He wanted me to state with absolute certainty exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. But I had no answer for him. The best I could do was offer to take one of those aptitude tests. You know online. You answer a bunch of questions and a computer analyzes your responses and determines what you might be good at. What you might be happy doing. He called a couple of numbers in the phone book. He wanted me to “see somebody”. I was just as happy to do it online. So that’s what I did.
The test taken the answers analyzed the computer told me that I should be a writer, or a film editor. I scratched my head a few times. I needed a computer to tell me this. I have wanted to be a writer since I was about 16. I have wanted to work in the film industry since I saw Star Wars in 1977. I was 10 then. I don’t care how annoying movies and Hollywood can sometimes be, I love them any way. Writing is just plain fun. It’s a quick simple release. Not unlike masturbation really.
I printed the results and showed them to John. I’m not sure he liked what the computer had to say. He was hoping for Fire Fighter or Police Officer, or something a little more tangible I guess.
Now I’m kinda doing battle with him on two fronts, he’s poisoning me with dick juice,
and he is pressuring me to embrace a new career (apparently unaware or unconcerned about the fact that I am a convicted felon), and he attacks me on a new front. Four or five days after moving in with him he insists that I drive around with him and look for a place to live. I have depleted me 800 dollars to something around 200 and now I have to find a place to live? I have just started a new job in telemarketing of all things (you can never really count on making any money in telemarketing it’s simply a numbers game…sometimes the numbers work with you and sometimes they work against you) and the fool is forcing me to look for a place to live. I swear it’s as if he was deliberately
trying to push me over the edge.