Locked Outdoors
Armed with only her pillow, blanket and teddy bear, and courting the shakiest self-confidence, Monica McDaniel can be found almost any night of the week just trying to get by, in what passes for her latest version of “home.”
She might be sleeping in her car, in some isolated parking lot, hoping the strangers of the night leave her alone and that her prayers keep her safe, for a few more hours at least. Or she might just curl into a ball on the beach, hoping the wet wind and sand don’t reduce her to tears before dawn.
When the sun appears, “that’s when you leave,” McDaniel said. “You learn to do that--quickly. No matter how tired you are, you’ve got to go. Your time is up. And mine has been up plenty of times. I cry myself to sleep. And many times, I cry myself awake.” After a sigh and another wiped-away tear, McDaniel finished the thought.
“Just because you’re homeless,” she said, “doesn’t mean you have a disease. It puts a label on you. Believe me, it does.”
McDaniel, 36, was rendered homeless last March, when she lost her Costa Mesa apartment because she could no longer pay the rent of $760 a month. She had stopped working on Feb. 13 and undergone rotator-cuff surgery two weeks later for what she contends is a job-related shoulder injury.
Although technically still employed by a large retail chain, where she had worked as a receptionist in good standing since 1991, McDaniel no longer receives her salary of $434 a week. Unable to handle her former job, which, according to company records, requires answering the phone 1,000 to 1,600 times a day, she’s now getting by on state disability payments.
The $192 a week is, for the moment, her sole source of income.
McDaniel says she believes any American could end up homeless “just like I did . . . in the wink of any eye. I’m living proof of the adage that ‘if you miss two or three paychecks, hey, buddy, you could end up homeless.’ I did. And now I’m stuck with it.”
These days, McDaniel is prone to what she calls harsh, biting laughter; she laughs at headlines that say the economy is getting better, the recession is over, unemployment is declining. . . .
Mary Ellen Hadley, executive director of Info Link Orange County, a countywide human services information line, says the economy is getting better, but that the Monica McDaniels of the world are hardly alone, even if they feel that way.
The details of how a person became homeless soon cease to matter, Hadley said. Whether they could have avoided their fate or could better their situation is, she said, largely irrelevant.
“When you’re talking unemployment, it is better out there,” she said. “But when you’re the person who is unemployed, it’s not better. The current [county] unemployment rate is 3%. Fine. Well, the population of Orange County is 2.6 million. Three percent of that is a fairly substantial number. When the average apartment in Orange County costs $800 a month, it’s a daunting proposition, believe me. A lot of people just fall through the cracks.”
Women like McDaniel are no strangers to Hadley, who recently interviewed a woman who had mailed out 167 job resumes, with nary a nibble. Just the other day, Hadley spoke with a legislator who told her that Toyota recently went to the Ontario area, advertising 350 jobs.
“They got 18,000 applications--in a single day,” she said. “So it doesn’t sound to me like joblessness is over.”
Orange County currently offers 1,200 beds in 52 registered homeless shelters, according to figures supplied by the county. But on any given day, Hadley said, Orange County has at least 12,000 homeless, a growing number of whom are children.
McDaniel is typical of many of those Hadley and Dunlap meet in their work. A native of Vancouver, she immigrated to the United States legally in 1990. Her mother committed suicide when she was a girl, and, she said, she never knew her father. A divorcee, she does not have even an aunt or uncle she can turn to for help.
McDaniel admits to having waged a lifelong battle with alcohol and says her web of emotional problems occasionally have required counseling. But in that respect, said the executives of two homeless-aid chapters, McDaniel is more the rule than the exception.
“It should be no secret that many homeless people have emotional problems or substance-abuse problems or do occasionally create problems of their own making,” said Linda Dunlap, a registered nurse and the co-founder of Project Dignity in Garden Grove.
“None of those factors erase the fact that millions of people are homeless,” Dunlap said. “As a society, we still have to deal with them anyway. If everyone were normal and well-adjusted and perfect in the execution of their daily lives, perhaps we wouldn’t have homeless people. But all homeless people deserve our compassion, our understanding and our love.”
Of the money McDaniel receives, she allocates $150 a month for storage of her clothing and furniture; $220 a month for three types of medication, including two anti-depressants; $70 a month for a cellular phone and pager, which she deems “essential” in looking for work, and $20 a month to be able to shower at a local fitness center. Her insurance premiums recently leaped from $42 to $228 a month. What little she has left over, she said, goes for gasoline and food.
“I don’t work out,” she said with a laugh. “I only shower. I may be homeless, but I refuse to look like a pig. You’ve got to keep what little pride you can.”
A spokeswoman for McDaniel’s former employer contends the company went out of its way to help her, even to the point of filling out her application for long-term disability insurance when she failed to do so.
McDaniel has two grown children, one living in Toronto, the other in Montreal, but doesn’t believe either could--or would--be willing to help. Since finding herself homeless, McDaniel has come to rely almost exclusively on her aging car and often degrading arrangements worked out with friends.
“I barter,” she said. “I’ve become very good at bartering. I’ll say, ‘I’ll help you organize your office or paint your bathroom, if I can just sleep on your couch for a week.’ It never lasts for long, and it’s often horrible.”
The added complication, which is nothing unusual to those who counsel the homeless, is that a woman who finds herself homeless and alone had best beware of the concept of bartering.
All too frequently, McDaniel said, “men try to take advantage in the cruelest ways possible. Staying alive and keeping your dignity is a constant battle.”
McDaniel jokes about “being a bag lady,” she said, wiping away a tear, “but I fear becoming that. You start to wonder, ‘How long will it be before I am that?’ I fear that I’ll never recover from this emotionally. I fear that I’m all messed up with nowhere to go, and at some point, if I’m not careful, if the bad breaks start to pile up, I fear I’ll reach the point of no return.”
One night recently, she experienced the feeling.
“I had only $2 to my name and no prospects for any more any time soon,” she said. “And I was hungry. I went into the store and found that I could buy a kaiser roll and a small pack of cheese and still have money left over. When I left the store, there was a bag lady by the door, asking people for money.
“These women, driving their fancy cars and dressed to the nines, were turning her down one by one. Hardly any of them even bothered to acknowledge the poor thing. By the time I got to my car, I decided I had to share my sandwich with her. I came back and I said, ‘Are you hungry?’ So we shared a meal together, while the rest of ‘em just stared at us, like we were scum.”
Another night, sleeping on a park bench in Newport Beach, McDaniel said, she was awakened by an elderly man rustling through the trash.
“I happened to have in my pocket this small pack of Trail Mix,” she said. “I asked him if he were hungry, and he said yes. Then he started crying . . . because I gave him the entire package. He felt so grateful. He said no one had been that nice to him in months. Then he said, ‘How did we get this way? Can you tell me how this happened?’ And I couldn’t. . . . But I knew exactly what he meant. For that moment, he was my soul mate. He was my friend. And we were both homeless.”
