Homeless, Part III
I’m at my cousin’s place for the fourth and what might be the final time. If the paperwork goes the way that paperwork should, I will very soon have a place where my stuff will stay.
I won’t have to find an outlet to charge my phone. I can hang my clothes. I won’t have to pack my makeup into a travel case every morning because it can stay in front of the mirror. I will order things on Amazon and they will be delivered to me. I will have a grocery store.
The paperwork, once completed, will give me access to something I believe people call a home.
The last place I stayed in Vegas was nicer — cleaner and more spacious — than you would expect at $39 a night.
I’d picked it for its price and the fact that it just a half-mile from the airport. The cabbie, who had waited in a line of cabs fifty deep, couldn’t believe his bad fortune.
He had already slung my big bag into his trunk. “You gotta be kidding me,” he grumbled loud enough for me to hear.
I addressed him directly. “I can take it back.”
“What?”
“I can take my suitcase back. If you don’t want to drive me, you can give my bag back to me.” I stared at him with a calm fury that made him smarten up. He stashed my second bag.
As we drove, I explained. “I am going to move to Las Vegas,” I said. “I want to feel welcome when I do.”
“You are welcome,” he said. I needed him to mean it.
My job was to see the place where I might be living. By noon on Monday, I’d accomplished the task. Now. What to do between Monday and Thursday.
Let’s meet some boys.
My lead generation process works. My profile is dialed in, and when I sign on, the boys, they come a-runnin’.
Closing on leads is another matter.
My advice: don’t get the boys too horny too soon. They want to get off. Don’t let them. When they do, they will go back to watching basketball, or playing Call of Duty, or reading incel Reddits. You want to promise them an erotic experience; you do not want to deliver it.
I met this guy a couple of weeks earlier via my fave dirty girl platform, Grindr. He remembered my name. He pretended to remember that he had promised to take me out for margaritas and Mexican. He set a date with me for Tuesday night.
He’d pick me up at 7. He’d text me once he left. I had to get pretty and creative. Pretty because that’s my lifelong goal. Creative because I’m living out of two suitcases and I’m fucking sick of what’s in there. I chose a little summer dress, light yellow and a floral print, perfect for signifying innocence and curiosity.
At 7:01, I texted him. “Hi sweetie! I’m here — text when you arrive, k?”
By 7:45, I stopped waiting.
Still wanting Mexican food and still without a car, I walked a half-block to Roberto’s, a chain of taco shops. Just inside the door was someone I knew, though she didn’t know me yet. Shinnoah, a trans babe in a micro skirt and a halter top.
“I think I know you,” I said.
Of course I did; I’d seen her in porn.
We had a quick greeting then parted ways. I’d been planning to take a burrito back to the hotel. When our food came out at nearly the same time, it felt like we should at least eat together.
The conversation was simple, friendly. She mentioned Anthony from Jersey, an ex-boyfriend of hers, the ex-boyfriend of another friend of mine, and the same fellow who took me home one drunken evening in May.
(When I got home that next morning in the same dress and half my makeup. Corey laughed hard and insisted on taking a picture.)
“Let’s go to the bar where he works,” I said. “Let’s surprise him.”
“Free Zone is only a couple of blocks from here,” Shinnoah replied.
Las Vegas is small. When you first get here, you think Vegas is the strip. Later, you learn about downtown Las Vegas — Fremont Street. If you stick around and start exploring, you see the neighborhoods. You learn about Summerlin, about Henderson, and you think Vegas is big. But if you stick around, you’ll realize that everything is separated by, at most, a twenty-minute drive, fifteen if Shinnoah is driving.
The city is contained, and the population is too. That night, I was recognized from my Grindr profile by two people, one who messaged me, “I seen you at Robertos tonight,” the other a gay guy and his boyfriend staring at a phone and gently laughing at me from across the bar, owing, I think, to the disparity between my flower print summer dress and my face-down-ass-up profile pics.
Shinnoah and I stepped out of the bar to smoke a joint in the darkened parking lot. The bar was empty and Anthony from New Jersey wasn’t there. We leaned against her car while drag queens poured into the bar for the show. A man who called himself Captain approached us with a shopping cart full of high-quality eyeshadow and what appeared to be a defibrillator. He sold me one slightly used Morphe and one Charlotte Tilbury palette for $7. He offered them for free in exchange for a sexual favor. I handed him the $7.
Later that night, Anthony from New Jersey stepped behind the bar. He’s a big fella, and they bring him in to close. I asked him for a water. His face went from I don’t know you to I might be interested in you to do I remember you? in about five seconds. I smiled, told him I was moving to Las Vegas, and strongly implied that there was no way he was taking me home that night.
The night after, Shinnoah drove me to the Vegas Posse pool party then to Disco Transmission, a dance event put on by a couple of trans girls who are also porn stars. There I met Slutty Amy, or at least Sluttier Amy, and Hana, with whom I held hands the whole night.
Anthony and Krystin were there. I met Sabrina, a beauty and a power broker. How many more people are there to know?
Shinnoah and I had a late-night slice. We took photos in the alleys and in front of the graffiti. She told me I should have four or five poses that always work for me, and to always use them. “I have two hundred poses,” I said, “and none of them are any good.”
She drove her Mustang hard on the way home, though not as hard as earlier, when we fishtailed in the rain. I told her as I got out of the car that I hope we can be friends when I get back. “Well, we have a lot in common,” she said with a mischievous smile. I smiled back, though I was nervous about what she was referring to.
My desire to be not homeless — what’s the word for that, homed? — has not been that strong. If you consider how I’ve been living, it should not be surprising at all. The solution to finding a home is simple, if you have the means and the desire. You just pick one.
So why haven’t I? Evelyn, Kate and I had planned to move in together up in the Bay. One night Kate pulled the plug on me; now the two of them live together. Kate hasn’t reached out since she told me I could not move in with them, or even spend a night when I visited. I think she made her decision in part because of my lack of enthusiasm for finding a place. But I don’t know. I haven’t heard.
Am I just having too much fun? Could that explain my homelessness? I will say — I’ve had a good time. I’ve seen a lot of friends and family. I’ve made new friends. (I’ve lost a few too, but on the whole, we’re way up.)
If you know anything about me, you know I value my freedom. Being anywhere at any time is freeing. That’s probably part of it.
I got kicked into this mobile lifestyle by disruption. I had a plan. I would get FFS in March, recover in the Bay, get a tech job, look hot, get rich, find a husband, and embark on my next adventure a couple of years later. Two problems arose: my surgeon died, and I don’t want to work in tech.
Whether the plan had been a good one, those events were meant to happen in sequence. When the first domino didn’t hit the second one, the rest of them stayed right where they were.
Finding the “right” place has felt important, too. Long Beach is sleepy, San Francisco is techy and rich, Dallas is Republican, and Boise is right-wing. Minneapolis was home but isn’t anymore. Los Angeles is home now, but the traffic.
The “right” location — what does that mean? You know it when you see it. I hope that’s true, anyway.
Why does this place feel like home?
The last place I auditioned as home was Seattle — though to be fair, I had already made up my mind.
I spent a week there with Corey in May. We spent lazy nights snuggled on her couch. I slept in the guest bedroom for one night then moved into her bedroom. Stella, the French bulldog, slept with us.
I spent another week there in June. The paperwork was already underway; this visit was just a formality.
It was summer in Seattle, which meant that everyone complained about the heat. I think it reached 82.
It also meant that it was the time of year to get out of the house, enjoy ourselves. The first night, we went to the 30th birthday party of the beautiful Thai bride of Corey’s dad’s best friend Alan, a man-child who smokes cigarettes and plays with remote control cars. He asked after we left if either one of us had chopped our dicks off.
We saw Sidney, the gorgeous trans woman on whom I have a bit of a crush. We drank cocktails that, I am not making this up, ran $24 a piece. Sidney was in boy mode… which is worse, as I’m still more attracted to men than to women. We ran into another woman who shall remain nameless, a trans woman with whom I have a petty and unfriendly rivalry, a woman who, as a DJ that I really want to name, spun what was the worst set of music I have ever heard, and that catalog includes a dozen youth piano recitals and a techno show when the power went out twice. I don’t want to hate this woman, but boy does she hate me. Maybe she reads lips. Maybe she saw me, from across a dance floor that was emptying, say “this is the worst set of music I have ever seen.” There has to be a reason; you can’t stumble into hate like this.
This special woman forgot my name when presenting me with an award but remembered it when she scolded me for being late. She ignores me altogether when practical. I saw her at a bar where she is unofficially employed — she has an employee badge but is not compensated — and she said, “I haven’t seen you in forever!”
“Yeah, it was a month ago,” I replied.
“Is this your first time out?”
“What do you mean?”
I knew what she meant.
“Is this your first time out since then?”
“I’m Amie, full-time. I’m always out.”
I think of myself as a nice person, which makes it difficult to understand the space between that niceness and how badly I want this woman to feel bad.
Another woman, a passable trans woman in her 60s whose breath smelled like tuna, took me on as her friend that night. She ran interference between me and a boy, Nicholas, who approached me on the dance floor. I didn’t ask for that but didn’t really mind; Nicholas and I did not have a future.
On the way home, Corey and I ate a bag of Dick’s. This joke is required by law.
The next day, at Seattle Pride, I made new friends and bought them shots. At our third bar, Corey disappeared. I found her crying in an alley paved with new asphalt. As I held her, I thought I am a teenage girl, and I love my life.
How do you come back from homelessness? On a practical level, you gather all your shit. I had shit in Los Angeles, I had shit in Solvang, and I had a lot of shit in San Francisco.
Once you get good at living out of two suitcases, you find you don’t need any of that shit.
Alas, it is my shit, and no one else wants it, and I have place to store it at my new home in Las Vegas.
I recruited Hana to drive with me. She will tell you her name is Blasian, but I call her Hana, her middle name, because I cannot tolerate the adjective as a name. She reluctantly allows me that, though reportedly one of her friends is furious at me.
I paid for her to fly from Las Vegas to San Francisco so I could pick her up and drive her back to Las Vegas. I wanted the company.
The night we met, we sat in back of a club all night and held hands. We kissed, but just a few little pecks. Two weeks later, we were driving the state of California in a U-Haul. (I made the joke as we loaded my stuff up from the storage locker in SF that I had reached peak lesbian.)
The drive was long. I recommend, if you’re looking for a road trip companion, to ask first if they have a drivers license. We left the cool of the Bay to hit the warm sun of the Central Valley and eventually reached the summer glow of the desert. We stopped in Tehachapi for gas. I saw a neon sign so beautiful I had to stop for a photo. On the way back to the truck, I chatted with a hard-rode woman who was smoking a cigarette. I saw a sign for a restaurant so charming I insisted we eat.
And so two trans ladies sat in a diner in Tehachapi. We each had the chicken parmesan and a side salad. A young member of the support staff said, “I like your nails,” which is code for “I support you, trans person,” or maybe “help me get the fuck out of this town immediately.”
At midnight, we arrived at my new place. I was smart enough to pack the mattress last and dumb enough not to know where the sheets were. So we slept on a mattress with no sheets and no pillows, cuddled and blasted by air conditioning I could not control, in my new home, in Las Vegas.
I don’t count my underwear now. I had to, before. It wasn’t hard; it helped with planning. A couple of times I washed a pair in a Super 8 sink. I almost always had to extend the wear time.
Now I have a bin of underwear, a luxurious rectangular basket full of casually unfolded panties. I reach in and grab a pair, and they are always clean.
I have a pool. It’s my pool, and Guillermo cleans it, and I’m fancy, and I have been in denial of that — to you and to myself — the entire time I’ve been homeless.
I made a “bare essentials” trip to IKEA with Gia. Among those bare essentials: an orange juice carafe. Gia, who looks white but touts she’s half-Mexican, called it “very country club” of me. I told her I’ve never been a member of a country club, which is true.
“Yeah, but you’re a member of Club White.”
She asked the cashier to make her point.
“Excuse me, sir? When is the last time you saw a black person buy a carafe?”
He took a minute to pool his memories. “Never,” he said.
So I have a carafe, and I have a pool, and I’m fancy. I still don’t have a car, but I will, and it will be fancy. This is part of who I am, whether I like it or not. My cousin, the sociology major and future roommate, says I have class structure fantasies or something like that. I get it. I’m working on it. I am growing my appreciation of it. If you’re fancy, you’re fancy.
Las Vegas is not fancy. The Wynn casino is, and I’m sure others are too. But off the strip, it’s grit. People work hard and shop at discount grocers. They’re so nice to me. They’re often crap at getting stuff done on time, but they’re chill and kind, and everyone calls me “ma’am.”
Is that what I’ve been after? A place where people call me “ma’am”? I’m embarrassed to say, “yes.” But it’s true. Above all, home is where you feel seen. Appreciated. Loved.
I’ve heard about trans girls here who’ve run into violence. One got punched in the face in the grocery store by a stranger who said, “you’re the problem with this country.”
I have not felt that vibe — not one bit. If I do, you’ll find out. For now, I see in the eyes of the people I interact with a calm and kind appreciation for who I am.
And that’s home.
For now.
