FICTION: Love and Loss in a Bus Shelter

By Kay Ebeling (segueing from journalism to fiction, still being edited)

*

Dick Schmidt really came to Tahoe to relax, to treat his PTSD after decades of prolonged trauma. He was a Vietnam vet who'd lived through homelessness on Los Angeles streets.  When he finally got into shelter, for the first time in his life he met with psychologists and faced the truth, that his being molested by a Catholic priest as an altar boy in the 1950s had as much to do with his current dysfunction as three combat tours in Southeast Asia.

In 2003, the California legislature opened a one year window to file lawsuits about sex molestation in institutions even though the statute of limitations was long passed. That law resulted in about two thousand lawsuits re pedophile priests in Catholic archdioceses during that one year in Southern California alone.

At Dick's shelter a social worker knew about the opportunity to sue, so connected Dick with the lead law firm and he joined this stream of lawsuits, filing his against the Archdiocese of Rosarito, a group of tiny parishes along the Mexican border east of San Diego where he'd lived as a child.  

For the next six years, Dick went from shelters to transitional housing. An inability to stay sober would land him back on the streets. As he aged, the act of sleeping on sidewalks became more painful. His PTSD kept him isolated as he shouted and threw things when someone approached him.

However, now and then he'd join demonstrations with a group called CSRP, Catholic Survivors of Rape by Priests, where he'd meet other "survivors" many of whom had periods of addiction and homelessness themselves.  Once in a while he'd go home with a fellow survivor, but inevitably he'd end up back on the L.A. streets. 
*

However by attending those demonstrations, Dick learned that more than a thousand people in L.A. and San Diego had filed suit in that one year window and many were getting settlements in the six and even seven figure range.  Dick testified in a deposition about things Father Rodrigo did to him in the rectory. He had a black and white photograph of him standing uncomfortably close to the priest, in altar boy garb, his nine-old boy eyes almost pleading for help through tears. His lawyers assured him evidence like that is a big help.

The other survivors assured him, when you get that settlement, your whole attitude will change. "You'll be able to exhale," were words used by several pedophile priest victims.  So Dick thought it was just a matter of time until he experienced justice and had enough cash to, after legal fees, maybe buy a condo.

However, through some quirk of international law, one archdiocese in California was able to remove itself from the thousands of lawsuits that went through superior courts throughout the state, the archdiocese of Rosarito.

So instead of getting a six figure settlement as he anticipated for more than six years, he got zero, zip, Dick got a polite letter from the law firm explaining he owes them for expenses incurred.  His friends from SCRP stopped returning his calls.   

Dick Schmidt did get a nice package from the archdiocese of Rosarito: brochures about their parishes, inviting him to come join them to pray and heal.  He tore the papers apart and in a rage caused so much damage at the friend's house where he was staying that within hours he was back on the street.

Dick downslided again.  He was already raw because the last years of filing a lawsuit and answering corporate defense attorney questioning under oath about being anal raped by a priest at age nine had dug up physical pain he'd forgotten, he actually re-felt the pain as he sat in the law firm meeting rooms.  He'd smell the rectory and Father Rodrigo's body fluids when he heard church bells.

Plus the years of dealing with lawyers anticipating a large cash payout caused Dick to stuff down memories of Vietnam.  Once sleeping on top of a tarp with another tarp over him in a crevice under the bridge where the 101 crosses Sunset Boulevard, a car crash over head had him screaming at top of his lungs for a good 30 seconds. His fellow rough-sleepers squirmed under their lumps of cover, but no one wondered at Dick screaming there under the bridge.

Then a pretty girl walked up. The hair close to her roots was blond, the ends had been dyed red several months back, now all of it was pulled into braids at the side of her face like a Finnish teenager. She had milky blue eyes that probably looked stoned even when she was not high on drugs, which from her appearance had not been for a while. Her clothes were torn, she wore a tattered  bathrobe as a coat, but something about the way she stood straight, with the robe's sash tied around her waist, gave a hint of a time when she may have once lived in a middle class home with a heater and regular baths.
*

Her name was Lucy.  After they hung out in the parking lot of Hollywood Presbyterian Church for a few hours, Lucy asked Dick for help.  It was for him the first time he'd been treated as a human being with potential in months.

Lucy asked Dick to hitchhike with her to South Lake Tahoe where her mom was going to help her get into a drug rehab and he would really mellow out by that big lake where "you just absorb the blue and Chill," Lucy said.  

He wondered, "You've only known me a few hours."

"I'm a good judge of character," she snorted.  Her nose was slightly inflamed where a nose piercing had gone bad.  Someone a few years back paid thousands to get those teeth straightened but now they showed signs of decay and recent neglect. Her lips were thick as if shot with botox, if she were cleaned up and made over, she could work in a law office or a film production company.  But here she was instead, leaning on a fence, inhaling smoke from a makeshift fentanyl pipe.

"It's such a wonderful drug," she gushed and melted into his arms.

*
The plan was for them to travel to Tahoe without running out of fentanyl along the way. "I know a guy in Fresno just in case," she said, "but I'm scared once I fall off the freeway in Fresno, I'll never get back on.  It'd be better to go up the coast highway, Highway One, it'll take longer but it's better to hitchhike on surface roads."

Somehow this angelic little junkie in her late twenties, who looked as if she could be the Hollywood beauty guys fantasize about if she took a bath regularly, got Dick to agree to this hair brained trip.

They packed backpacks and used their monthly General Relief cash to buy as much opiate as possible. Dick fell in love at the bus shelter as Lucy "spanged" more cash from strangers  while they waited for an express bus to Pacific Coast Highway (aka Highway One) where they started north.

It took less time than they thought it would to get to Tahoe. Outside Sacramento one ride got them right to the entrance to the senior housing where Lucy's mom lived.

But Dick was not allowed to stay there. Lucy explained only family members could be overnight guests and closed the door leaving him in the hallway with his bundles, at least he'd had a shower there.  It was the last he'd have for a while.

Dick was now sixty two years old, homeless and painfully kicking the opiate that was in the pipe Lucy kept putting in his face on the trip north.  He was now in a strange town where it was about to start snowing and every hotel room was full at double the normal price even the slummy weeklies and there was no General Relief to supplement his Social Security check and the only place that feeds and helps homeless people is "one of those damn Catholic Churches" that he couldn't even walk near without having a PTSD reaction.

"I've been so cold at night," Dick commented to the guy next to him as they packed up from a night of sleep in the city run "warm room." "When I sleep outside, this tarp is supposed to be a windshield but man did my bones freeze-"

"That's what happens when you move to the mountains," the "mountain man" hollered over his shoulder as he walked away, and Dick realized, being homeless ain't no social club.

He spent a brutal winter spending most nights in an abandoned shack.  One night he even crawled into a hollow tree, but soon realized he was not itching, he was covered in bugs, and jumped out rolling in the snow to get what looked like termites off his clothes and skin. But Dick made it through a winter in Tahoe and began to feel like he'd accomplished something.
*

When summer came, he took to riding the bus.  Plus, when one is unsheltered, many hours of a day are spent just doing essentials. It took two weeks to find a replacement pair of shoes as he kept having to return to different agencies and fill out forms then sit in waiting rooms of different charities that "coordinated" getting shoes for the homeless. It was easy to find brand new socks though. Agencies handed them out like cookies, as when you never bathe, you have to at least change to clean socks or you get awful infections on your feet.

Dick spent a lot of time riding the bus from one end of town to the other just to pass the days, especially when the sun did not set until 9 PM in mid summer.  It's hard to find a place to hide in the daylight. 

One of the main stops on Route #50 was a redwood structure near the senior apartment building where he'd dropped off Lucy.  One day when he felt cleaner than most, he walked into the building and asked about Lucy and her mother, hearing, "that druggie nearly got her mother thrown out of subsidized housing." Several ladies in the lobby volunteered in excitement: "She went down to Carson or Reno, there's plenty of drug addicts living there," then they glared at Dick realizing he might be one himself.

Dick thought of going down the mountain to look for Lucy. 

But something about surviving that winter in the shack gave him a new strength.  Plus his PTSD symptoms had never been better. Lucy had been right. The serenity of Tahoe, compared to everywhere he'd ever lived, was helping him to heal. Just sitting on the lake and "absorbing the blue" as she had called it was bringing down his blood pressure.  Irritations that used to make him flare into a rage now barely affected him.

He felt he was finally, FINALLY, starting to heal from a lifetime of external attacks on his nervous system.  Now as he approached mid sixties, he deserved peace and quiet, even if he had to live in a tent in the woods to get it.

As summer drew to a close, Dick wondered if it was possible to sleep in that bus shelter outside the senior building.  It had a roof and four walls, a bench, and the buses stopped running at nine P-M.  Why not?

*

That's how Dick met Lola.  She was, like him, in her early sixties, a resident of the HUD building and a looker for her age, except for being a little plump.

She showed up in the little redwood bus shelter structure one morning just after the run of the number 55 and as Dick was waking up and was surprised to find Dick sleeping there. It was winter, still dark. 

At first she was scared, then realized she needed a smoke. She pulled out her pipe and said to him, "See that's a HUD building so technically weed is still illegal there," she smoked.  "Hope you don't mind." 
"Hell no," he said. 
And a kind of friendship developed there in the late night hours in the bus shelter, although it was always too dark to actually see each others' faces. 
"I have to come out here to smoke my medicine," she said, "I have PTSD from being a crime victim, and I've been using medical cannabis since it first became available in the nineties."

"Wow, I have PTSD too," he said. "Vietnam vet, 'nuff said." 

"Well," she said looking at his tattered condition, "My rent is subsidized, so I'm glad to share my medicine with you.  Here this pipe is packed with pure indica, it will help."  She reached in her bag then handed him a fresh packed little pipe and one inhalation changed his perspective for a long time to follow.

Lola came out to the bus shelter often and shared her indica with Dick as she knew it helped him sleep in what was not a real comfortable place.

*

Lola had woven a story from her life that Dick was not sure was true.  It came up one day when she casually mentioned dropping an envelope with 180 dollars cash in it, and did not seem very upset about losing that much money.

She said, "It's hard to care if someone steals five dollars from you when you've been robbed of one point five million dollars." She took a hit on her pipe and did not say another word until she had held in every millimeter of the smoke then seemed to contradict herself.  "At these prices who exhales," she joked. "I'm the opposite of Bill Clinton, I never exhale."
They laughed like people laugh when they've just smoked some weed. 

"One point five million dollars?" Dick then asked, and like her, inhaled and held in his hit of the sixty five dollar an eighth-ounce weed, as if he exhaled it, Lola would get angry at him for "Wasting it getting the birds high."

While cleaning gunk out of the pipe with a nail file, Lola told this story. 

"There ain't no FDIC protection from a red headed woman."

"Huh?"

"A red headed woman moved in on my father in 1995. Then she kept me and my sisters from being able to visit, classic separation tactic of an abusive spouse. When she finally left, there was nothing left."

"How did she get his money?"

"You know," she shook her head, "what is most pathetic is how easy it was, how she took advantage of a unique opportunity in time."

Lola refilled then inhaled from the pipe.

"It was when ATM's first came out.  She was sitting in his house keeping the rest of us away, when the bank sent a brand new first time ever ATM card in the mail.  My dad age ninety had no idea what it was. So she just went to the bank, over and over again over a period of time, and withdrew amounts of cash." Lola inhaled. "Well then she went to Vegas and withdrew a whole shitload."

"Wouldn't the bank raise red flags?"

"No, no one even noticed, because Red had moved in on my dad and was intercepting his phone calls and mail."

"Gosh, it was easy then."

"Well not for long. At one point they were closing in on her, this DA in Orange County named Dick was keeping me informed. Then Red disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"They found her a few weeks later, in Las Vegas, on the floor of a high rollers' hotel suite, in a coma. And there was no cash left, all the money was gone."

"Wow."

"Yeah so now after waiting five years on a waiting list, I live in this low income housing, and I grew up in Newport Beach and San Marino.  I'd do anything to get out of here. I don't even know how to be poor."

"Hah, I could show you."

She looked at him, offered him her pipe but he said he'd had enough. 

She said, "I really don’t like it.  I don't want to be poor anymore." Then seeing how much worse off Dick was she added, "Why don’t you apply to move in here?" she asked. "I think since you're a Vietnam vet you would go up to the top of the waiting list, or closer to the top, and get in within a year." 

He said, "How do I apply for this place?"
"Just inside," and she started to elaborate in her answer, then stopped, and seemed to make up her mind about something in that moment. 
*

Next day Dick cleaned up, went to the senior apartment building office, and filled out an application, and sure enough, his being a Vietnam vet put him at the top of the waiting list.

He took to sleeping in the bus shelter outside while he waited to be able to move in to the building, but Lola stopped joining him there.

Weeks later Dick was moving in when he saw Lola again. 

She looked different.  She had lost at least twenty pounds, and from her smile, even from a distance you could see she apparently got new teeth. Only then did he see she must be Lucy's mom. She was getting into a limousine that was picking her up from the back entrance of the low income senior apartment building.

The ladies in the lobby later told him that Lola is now dating a man she met in Reno, who picks her up often to spend the night at his mountain villa near the Mark Zuckerberg mansion.

Dick often looked for Lola around the building and even encountered her twice at the trash dumpster.  
She didn't seem to recognize him.

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