No Place Like No Home?

I just read a report, Homelessness in America: 2020 .

One thing I got from the report is another reason to dislike the Beat Picture-winning movie Nomadland. Have you seen it?
It made me think of a review I read years ago: in some movies you might check your watch; in this one, you’ll wish you had a calendar. I thought it would never end. I could not wait to get out of the Frances McDormand character’s overcrowded, indubitably stinky van.

Plus, it’s unrealistic. It has too many female characters. According to this report, overall 70% of “the homeless” are individual men. ( Okay if you’ve ever been in NY or DC, you’ve seen “bag ladies”, but apparently they’re arent the norm.). In fact this was prompted by a segment I saw on the news this AM, about people living in tents in Austin, Tx. Not only was everybody in the film a man, they were all also very well-fed, not to say fat men.

I felt the movie romanticized the situation of these people. For instance, what about the excretory function? At one point our dour heroine parks and runs way off the road into what looks like a prairie to take a dump. Well, that’s ok, nobody’s ever gonna run into her leavings there. But then later she is shown sitting on a portable toilet IN her van. I wanted to 🤢. Plus, Um, where’s she gonna dump that? Of course for the urban campers we all know the answer: the sidewalk, or a park if one is nearby.

But here’s one thing I thought was accurate in the movie: this woman doesn’t lack for people who want to help her. They just don’t want to help her to live in a broken-down van. She’s not too proud or “independent” to ask for money to maintain the way she’s living; she does that several times in the movie. When the van becomes terminally ill, she calls her sister, who, in exchange for paying the $5000 auto repair charge , exacts from the protagonista the awful price of staying with the sister in her beautiful suburban home for a few days. Makes yer skin crawl, don’t it?

I experienced exactly the same phenomenon with our local homeless man,(yes to my knowledge our little hamlet only ever had one) someone I had known in my childhood as my big brother’s best friend, and the (illegitimate ) son of the woman who was EVERYBODY’S first grade teacher. I encountered him parked in our woods off the road to the state game land. It turned out even the truck was just on loan, from a well-wisher who said he could use it to try to find a job. The owner eventually became concerned because he knew the truck, which was still in his name, was not really road-worthy and he asked for it back. Its denizen came to us practically in tears, begging me to work some legal miracle to let him keep the truck. Of course at that point, we naturally (dont you agree?) began nudging him toward accepting the assistance of the Area Agency on Aging to find some more fixed abode. In desperation, we put him in a local motel for starters. Winter had arrived, and we ain’t living in the tropics up here. But it was all Not Easy. And lemme also tell you that at every juncture in the series of unfortunate events which had resulted in his losing the house where he had been raised by our beloved first grade teacher, the local people had also attempted to intervene, to no avail. (this, maybe you’ll remember from my comments on Liz’ thread a few days ago, was the gent who so impressed me with His familiarity with Gore Vidal.)

Another case: a client I had years ago, and older gentleman(and yes he was) who sought me out in connection with a car accident he was involved in. He did have counsel because he had car insurance, but he not unreasonably felt the insurance company lawyer wasn’t “his” attorney. Whenever he came to my office he was impeccably dressed, something of a dandy in fact. (“What, this old thing?” he actually said, when I complimented him on his raincoat, a vintage gabardine Burberry. “Good clothes last a long time”.) But to the point, I was later contacted by his son, who was concerned about him: even though he owned a house in one of the wealthy suburban counties, and also quite a bit of land, he was living in a small trailer in absolute squalor. I was shocked. This dapper courtly charmer with whom I had discussed Thomas Gray’s poetry? The son had two sisters and all three were concerned for dad, willing to help him relocate since it seemed he was getting less compos mentis, but…there he was. It took a long time and it ended in tragedy.

Currently, there’s is the case of a man I have known for years, very intelligent, very well off, and resident of a co-op in one of the boroughs of New York which has recently become very fashionable and expensive. But in my opinion this man is homeless within his apartment. He does not seem to own a trash basket or garbage pail. The place is literally a dump. There are several carts like you see the street homeless pushing around, stuffed with newspapers and plastic bags. The kitchen sink and bathtub are full of old mail, canned goods, cleaning supplies, unwrapped bars of soap, Gatorade, and empty containers of the foregoing. The toilet, at least, is accessible. The bed isn’t; he was essentially “living” in an old recliner chair which, “if shown on the stage to indicate squalor and penury, would be considered grossly,overdone” (a quote from Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.) And yet, his greatest fear during the onset of the illness which eventually landed him in the hospital was of being removed from this environment, and/or of having any one else enter it. Is he poor? No. Has he no friends no relatives? Yes he does. Did they turn their backs on him? No. But neither would he accept help or advice.

What’s with these guys? I mean ok yeah, a certain modicum of dementia (unless we’re really the crazy ones…?) . But I also know a young man, 45, who seems to transform any place he stays fior any length of time into the same kind of ..bolt-hole. So not dementia, necessarily—maybe a kind of schizophrenia…. but why would they choose a squalid micro-environment—a tent, a van, or even an enclave within an apartment— which they will defend with their not inconsiderable cunning and wit?

Poor, poor dear Lost Boys.