MY LIFE AS A WASTREL, PART 1 - HOW I BECAME HOMELESS

The trope about being broke that you see most on film and television completely fails to understand the mindset of an actual poor person; it's a privileged person's idea of what it would be like to have no money. You've seen the scene; a man takes a woman on a date to a fancy restaurant but can't believe it when the bill comes, or a lady goes to pay for her groceries when, uh-oh, her card's been declined! How embarrassing! In reality you are acutely aware of exactly how much, or rather how little, money you have.

I used to be very poor, despite having a job and being on benefits. Part of it was misfortune that could of happened to anyone, but a large part of it was me being too scared, stupid and proud to ask for help until it was too late. I have pretty bad anxiety and depression, and when shit goes south I tend to slap on a brave face and pretend everything's fine. I recently read about a study that showed we see the future version of ourself as an entirely separate entity from our current self. That is absolutely my case; I'll maximise the pleasure I can eke out of each day and let future Tanks deal with the repercussions. Fuck that guy!

I've intended to write about how I got to be homeless ever since my first post, but I don't have a clear picture of how it happened in my head. I was in denial even as it was happening, and there's no clear narrative of what happened to me in my head. I don't know if I still owe money, or to whom. I don't know what happened to all my stuff. I know that I was rejected for benefits based on my health but was given £2600 retroactively, after I'd lost everything and was living in a hospital. I know one of my banks at the time tracked me down and sent me an £800 cheque over the past weekend, a refund on fees they just now decided I shouldn't have paid at the time. When cashing that cheque today I did think back to that time and wonder if I had all that cash then - roughly eight months rent - I wouldn't have lost my flat. It's easy to think that, but the truth is I was pretty miserable back then and I'm lucky to be alive now, the extra money would probably just have delayed the inevitable. My situation now is pretty bad, having no home and living bedridden in a pretty uncaring care home, but I'm genuinely happier day to day than I was when I was squatting in my flat. I tend not to think about that time in my life.

Gather round the fire for a tale of ill health and destitution!

I moved into my flat towards the end of August in 2016, and it was definitely a good move at the time. I didn't have much in the way of savings as I had been paying my parents £75 a week to live with them, and paying for and preparing all my own food. I had reached a point where I was sick of living with my brother, who at the time was getting black out drunk and probably also doing drugs every Saturday night. This had been happening for years, but as I mentioned before he got especially dangerous one night in June before I was about to go to Italy and I moved into the first flat I came across that wasn't a total dump. For an extra £80 a month plus utilities I would be independent; I could afford it and it was initially brilliant.

The flat was quirky, very long and poorly lit. The door was hidden from the road, you had to step behind a wall that shielded a little ally. My front door opened on to a staircase, at the top was a small landing and then a door that was split in half, like a barn door, that opened into the kitchen. You had to walk through the kitchen to get to a short hallway, with the bathroom to the left and my bedroom and a small closet to the right. The hallway opened out into the living room, which had a fantastic view of the road into town and the castle grounds, with large windows in the far and right walls. This made up for the one tiny window in the bedroom, where you could look out on the alleyway if you stood on my mattress, which was placed on a raised floor in lieu of a bed. The only natural light in the bathroom and kitchen came from two teensy skylights. I soon learnt that ventilation and heating were two major problems! The whole flat had big exposed beams in the ceiling that I felt gave it a vaguely nautical feel. There were definitely flaws I would know to avoid in future, but at the beginning I loved it!

The flat came unfurnished, and I bought some furniture on a credit card. I wasn't worried, my job paid well, I got on very well with my boss and her husband and as the only member of staff who ever used the dry cleaning machine or pressed any clothes I was invaluable! Things were fantastic for a few weeks until a fire in October all but destroyed the business.

The business was spread over three units on the edge of town, one with the dry cleaning equipment and the customer counter; this was my domain. The second shop had a wet cleaning machine -  essentially a glorified washing machine - an industrial tumble dryer and some rollers: this shop was primarily used to do laundry for hotels, restaurants and the like. The third unit was not connected to the other rwo, and was used as storage for wedding dresses and clean laundry. One night some dried towels were taken from the dryer in the second shop and left in a basket; they must have had some residual grease that retained hear until the towels smouldered and caught fire overnight. The fire spread to the first unit and the heat and smoke ruined the dry cleaning equipment and plenty of customer clothing. The roof was insulated so the fire or hear didn't affect the flats upstairs. Still, it was a major bummer.

I don't know when the fire started, the police called my boss at 3:30am and she called me the next morning to tell me I didn't need to open up, or worry about working that day. I turned up at about 10 to see the damage and offer moral support. I made my boss and her family laugh by asking if we were the victims of a terrorist attack, a joke I stole straight out of Clerks II. The damage was horrendous, we weren't supposed to go in the shop as it as cordoned off by police tape, besides which the smell was awful. The shops had massive glass windows though, so you could see how bad it was, and there were a few looky-loos and also customers who were stopping by to pick up their stuff and were suddenly confronted with the blackened remnants of a small tragedy. Some people were sympathetic, some were pretty much assholes about it.

For a month there was nothing to do, and my health got worse as I traded a routine and a hands on job for day drinking in my flat. My boss' husband had measured one of the awkward corners of my living room and his company was going to build me a custom desk as a present; I never asked him about it after the fire and never had a desk in that flat; I set my laptop up in the kitchen on a counter and would watch it sat on an office chair. I eventually took to sleeping that way when my legs swelled due to lymphoedema. There was a meeting in a cafe after about a month to discuss the future of the business; the other two full time employees and I were told we'd be paid in full for the first three months whilst they figured out what to do. There would obviously be no dry cleaning or laundry on site for a while, and they asked if I could do some driving for them. I said I would have to take some refresher driving lessons as I hadn't actually been behind the wheel since passing my test over a decade earlier. Those lessons ended up costing me about £100.

Basically the company stayed alive by outsourcing all our laundry to another business until there was a wet cleaner, dryer and roller installed in the small shop after a couple of months. The dry cleaning was done twice a month an hour away, in the windowless showroom of the company that provides us with our equipment. That showroom was an hour and a half away and we could only use it twice a week and even then during the other company's business hours, so twice a week I would have to come in early in the morning, load all the cleaning in the company van, go to the showroom, clean, press and wrap everything and take it back again. The rest of the week I would come in to cover breaks and help wrap up some of the clean laundry, but ultimately the staff rota was written by my colleague in charge of the laundry, who was long-time friends with the boss as their daughters were besties at school. She made sure she had her full work week and then me and the other previous full time employee made up whatever else needed doing between us. It was awful.

Initially I was being driven to the showroom by the laundry manager; the other full timer not having a license and myself not being confident enough yet. When she got scared to go because of the cold weather causing hazardous driving conditions the boss reached out to the part timer whose handling of the towels had caused the fire in the first place. This woman was especially joyless; I hadn't worked with her before but had heard complaints from my full time colleagues that she was a downer. Suddenly those long two days seemed a lot longer, as she had no interest in chatting and hadn't been taught to use the machinery, so would do no more than check pockets and look for stains for me to pre-treat. I wasn't even bringing good at this point as we were so pressed for time, I would just ask my companion to bring me a plastic cup of water once in a while.

After a few expensive lessons I felt confident enough to drive myself rather than dealing with these conditions. I don't recall for sure, but I think I had four or five stressful, flat-out days working in that black hole by myself until I wrote the company van off coming home in the dark one night. I'm not sure what happened, I remember following the roadworks that transformed the dual carriageway into a 40mph single road for about half an hour, then carrying on at 70 for a while before the van headed off to the right. The police said I clipped the curb, except there's no curb there to clip; whether it was fatigue or something mechanical or an outside force or what I don't know, I just remember being terrified for a few seconds as all I could see were branches and then coming round to find the van on it's side with me in the air, the airbag deployed and the windscreen cracked. The fire brigade cut away part of the van and pulled me up and out of a thick hedge, where the van was somehow facing the direction I had been coming from. I was easily twelve metres from the road, maybe more, I was on a stretcher by the time I could see it. A paramedic have me a once over and I rode in an ambulance back to my flat. They walked with me upstairs and asked if I was okay other than being shook up and sore from where the seatbelt had been holding me in the air, and from being manhandled. I said I felt basically okay, though walking seemed even harder than usual. The police had called my boss at the scene, I was terrified but she was just glad I wasn't hurt. She said I didn't need to come in until Monday, the accident taking place on a Thursday! I called my parents and told them I was roughed up but okay. I remember being well enough to walk the 400 yards to the town co-op for a bottle of vodka and some comfort food, not that that was out of the ordinary for me at this point!

I met the boss and her husband in a cafe on the Saturday to talk about it. I got on well with both of them, and their daughter when she had worked there; they almost felt like a second family. My boss asked if I had fallen asleep at the wheel, as I had been known to nod off as a passenger. I told her that I was anxious enough about driving that that was absolutely not an issue. She asked about drinking, I think (and hope!) out of obligation rather than real concern. I told her that I would never do that, and that the police had checked that anyway as a matter of routine. She also pointed out that I'd put on weight since the fire, and asked if the van would have been written off if I was skinny enough that they didn't have to cut into the van to lift me out! I said that the windscreen was wrecked and the van was on its side so I don't know if it could have been salvaged, or if there was a way they could have extracted a skinnier person in the same position safely without cutting into the frame of the vehicle or removing the door or the steering wheel. I'm sure in a movie Tom Cruise or Bruce Willis would just undo the seatbelt, fall upright onto the broken glass collected at the inside of the passenger door and then maybe kicked out the windscreen and climbed up the hedgerow and tree branches to safety, not worried about the dark or the potential of long term injury. I don't know how well any normal person could have done under the circumstances.

I told them I had started trying to lose a little weight, which was true, and agreed to have my boss weigh me once a week, which seems crazy now that I write it! My boss' husband made it clear that they weren't angry, but they could be in the circumstances! Looking back at my time there after the fire I can't believe how much responsibility I took on or how little I spoke up for myself. It also transpired that, contrary to what I'd been told, I wasn't insured to drive the van under the company's insurance as I was a little less than thirty years old. I don't know where that puts me or the company legally, I know their lawyer asked me for my birthday but I don't think anything ever came of it.

Eventually we stopped getting paid full time wages for part time work and were only paid for the hours we did. We also had the hours we were paid for but didn't work deducted. I was expecting the shop to be up and running after three or four months based on research I'd done on dry cleaners that had faced similar devastation, especially knowing that my employers were wealthy and that my boss' husband had excellent business contacts and was a first class schmoozer. I think that because they were wealthy and had other sources of income they weren't as eager to reopen as quickly as the other shops I read about, and it was about a year and a half before they fully reopened. During that time money got tighter and tighter, and my health got worse and worse. I had developed a spinster's claw due to repetitive strain, requiring surgery that left my arm looking "Frankensteiny, " according to one colleague. My left leg would always be soaking wet due to my lymphoedema causing lymph to drain out of my pores, and my back for so bad I couldn't make full strides without having a wall to hand for support.

Some time between my crash and the summer both my colleagues left, one due to stress and one because she was drinking on the job. This put a lot of responsibility on me but my health issues were stopping me from using the roller for long enough to help with the laundry. During that year my boss took on 14 other people, all of whom left because the job was too much for them. I used to sit in my flat wondering if I was crazy for staying on (with hindsight, it sure seems that way!). But they were nice to me, and had treated me very well up to the fire, and once you've won me over I'm pretty eager to keep you liking me.

At some point over the year following my accident I struggled to pay rent on time, and then to pay rent at all. I received a letter early in 2018 telling me I was expected to vacate the property. I'm loose on the dates, but let's say I got the letter sometime in February and was expected to leave in April. I'm pretty sure that's right, and if it's not then it almost is. But that's how it took a year and a half for me to go from being a healthy (though overweight) young man, renting a flat and working a respectable full time job to being a squatter with the beginnings of serious health issues. I think that's a good place to leave it for today.

In my next post I'll lay out how this affected my mental health (SPOILER ALERT: Negatively!), how I was living day-to-day, and how I kept off the street. It's probably going to be a lot more freeform. Please ask in the comments if there's anything you're curious about; I would love to think that someone was learning from my experience!

Peace!

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