I’ve had the strange experience a few times in recent years of mentioning my childhood poverty to another person and their response making me feel gaslit, like what am I remembering wrong?  For example, mentioning I have lived in a few housing projects and homeless shelters, and them asking which ones, and then…  I don’t remember the names, barely remember the locations.  I wasn’t living in them for long enough to identify with them, to see that as my “hood,” get to know the other kids there.  We’d be kicked out or otherwise shuffled along to our next flophouse before that could happen.  My father helped me fill in a few of these details, but he didn’t remember all of it either.

So to gird myself for this situation in the future, I’m trying to remember everything about my childhood that wouldn’t be too creepy to tell.  Maybe some of those things too, with appropriate content warnings?  Here we go…

Content Warnings:  Violence Against Animals, Animal Death, Description of Poverty, Mention of Parasites and Pests, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Child Injury, Children in the Context of Sexual Things (but no CSA mentioned in this one), Racial Tension, Drug and Alcohol Abuse, Marital Infidelity, Teen Pregnancy, Vomiting, Terminal Illness, A Man Dying Young, Mental Illness, Generational Abuse.

This will take more than one post and include details that don’t have to do with the poverty itself, just me trying to remember what I can before it slips any further into the void.  For this post, I’ll lay out what I can recall of the chain of places I’ve lived.

I was born more or less dead center in the middle of California, by fields of wheat and fast food places, wherein one could make purchase of a cheesed burger.  If I recall, my mom mentioned that I had visited Mexico in utero, which would be the only time I’ve left the country.  Before I could form lasting memories of experiences, my father re-enlisted in the army and bounced between Texas, Maryland, and Colorado, before settling back into the same place in California, in a housing project.  Section 8 and such programs can give vouchers that you use for rent anywhere it’s approved, while housing projects will let you pay a sliding scale of reduced (or free) rent, but only while you’re in these specific buildings.

This project is where my first durable memories were formed, like getting my nose broken by an older child (permanently deviated septum), barfing up my cheerios with dawn sunlight streaming in on my face, seeing my brother from outside his crib, getting chicken pox, watching Dukes of Hazzard, finding out in some whispered sense what sex is, starting to draw – back when -AI-like- I didn’t know where to stop drawing fingers.  The white walls were textured cottage cheese, the ceilings popcorn, the carpets beige – the first of a lifetime of such interiors.  It was a short drive past wheat fields into the suburban town with Carl’s Jr and PC Foster restaurants, and things I don’t recall.  I remember seeing lightning strike in one of those fields, on a sunny day.  I remember seeing a tumbleweed in the parking lot.

During that time we were babysat by or had other occasions to go to relatives’ houses, particularly my paternal grandparents.  They had a giant (for 1980) color TV inside a wood and wicker housing, on which I saw 49ers games, Flash Gordon (1980 film), Kung Fu, and The Man from Atlantis, featuring television’s Patrick Duffy with webbed fingers.  And Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as a cowboy, if I’m not mistaken.  Those grandparents had a garden with grape vines and peas and I dunno what else.  They smoked 24-7, some of the cigs in brown paper, some white and orange, both with a trace of gold foil.  Think they were Marlboros.  My brother nearly drowned at an aunt’s house.  Swimming pools are cool like that.  He learned to swim as an adult; I never did.

We had a rusty white 1965 chevy bel-air station wagon, which in my memory was the same as the car from Ghostbusters, but it wasn’t quite.  I saw inappropriate movies at the drive-in (Stroker Ace and 9 to 5, I think), and we went on trips to some nature spots in the mountains and forests.

From this point on we very rarely had television, so there’s a few years gap in the cultural experiences I share with other people my age.  We moved to some low income places in San Francisco, but I didn’t gather whether those were projects.  The first was near the waterfront, with lots of big rats.  I didn’t remember that, but did remember snails on the sidewalks out front, and my sister falling off a second or third story fire escape, splitting her arm to where we could see meat.  Yuck.

Next was a literally rotting Victorian apartment building with big bay windows facing out onto an alley.  Top floor of I’m not sure how many.  Watched the ceiling open up and dump rain on my mom once.  Saw a transgender person naked for the first time, when looking from our bay window at the next one over.  Hello there, and sorry.  I don’t blame her; it was on the alley side of the building and easy to feel like there was nobody else in the grey world.  My sister got us to play some weird game which involved destroying all of our toys, which had traumatic aftermath.  My original experience of voting for leopards to eat my face and wondering afterward what the hell I was thinking.  Classic six-year-old goof.

Walking in San Fran was awesome because punk rockers looking cool, and sourdough bread smelling good.  At some point us kids got left with other people for a day – a nice enough Filipino family who grossed us out by eating squid.  In those early days of the Clean Air Act, the sky was still piss yellow at times from smog, like living in the bottom of a beer.  I associate those two experiences; maybe that’s what the sky looked like when it was time to go home from squid house.  I had a teacher with a hook for a hand.  She wasn’t much older than my parents, far as I could tell.  Maybe she’s still alive somewhere.  Shout-out.

Next episode, Seattle!
We landed in this state in a homeless shelter repurposed from a brick schoolhouse, somewhere in the north end.  It doesn’t exist anymore.  We got our hands on a small box of donated mittens that didn’t have mates, and used them as toys – puppeting with the thumb inverted to use as the mouth.  Called them the blips, said they were aliens.  I got a book about wildlife and became very fond of all the animals presently going extinct.  The book cited poachers as an issue, time and again, but the real enemy was always crapitalism, wasn’t it?  My sister got up to dubious hijinks with twin native boys that had long, braided hair.  It was snowing and magazines about the eruption of St. Helens were still in every waiting room.

From there we quickly landed in the south end, a neighborhood called South Park, in a duplex converted from a house, with an extensive basement “rec room” area we kids spent most of our time.  In retrospect it felt like the residence of a drug dealer who was not home.  There was a massive stereo system left over from the ’70s, and a small selection of whatever records.  I remember a collection of TV theme songs that included CHIPs, SWAT, and Love Boat, plus a Kenny Rogers greatest hits album that had Ruby and What Condition my Condition is in.  Either we lucked out and Van Halen’s 1984 was in there, or I was just hearing those songs on the radio a lot, don’t recall which.  This is where the events of Len Ross began.

Homicidal dogs roamed the neighborhood unrestrained and I developed a profound hatred of barking at the time.  That’s still with me, tho my hatred and fear for dogs has dimmed.  That place also had rats, which led to getting our first Seattle cat, Snowball.  She killed with great efficiency and acumen, but was unsociable.  I remember the scene of us children trying to reward her excellent service with affection and little cans of tuna, while she growled at us low-key.

The places we lived were usually on some kind of sheisty arrangement.  I imagined some of them came from my dad’s drug dealer connections, like, it was some property they owned and would let somebody flop at in exchange for whatever.  The way he tells it, the frequency with which they were drug-adjacent was a coincidence or product of it being what poor people could hustle up.  Most of the places we lived at were not for us, rented with the understanding they’d be sold out from beneath us in short order.  Some work-for-rent gigs too, which led to being ripped off by shysters, homeless, and desperate.

I feel like we were frequently not enrolled in school when we were supposed to be, too busy moving between places, between school districts.  Memories of lots of different schools.  One expected me to already have multiplication tables memorized and know how to play an instrument, which was two things I’d never been taught.  This may have been that K-12 school, which leads to the weirdness of being a tiny child with a hall pass walking past smoking teenagers in the stairwell.  Team was the Summit Slugs.  That school doesn’t exist anymore.

At some point we stayed in a hotel on Highway 99 for six months.  I became interested in the free bibles.  It’s free stuff.  We’d sneak into the living room and watch cable TV with the volume super low while parents slept, which is how I saw some amount of naked ladies, Dune, and Black Moon Rising, which was a bizarre little movie.  Also a lot of commercials for Labyrinth, but I didn’t see that movie ’til some years later.

There was another place on the south end that was closer to busy traffic, more cheaply constructed, and where we were crammed into the upstairs with somebody’s leftover junk.  Big rats were devoured by Snowball, leaving only heads with spinal cords behind.  We picked up two more cats we named Cleopatra and Sonya, sisters, one black and one grey.  We ended up losing Sonya shortly, but held onto Cleo a while longer.  There were giant overgrown bushes around this place and I randomly found a porn magazine in one of them, prompting my dad to give me some version of The Talk, which was intolerable.  When we walked to school from that place, there was a lot of dog shit on the sidewalk.

There was some kind of big apartment building closer to downtown, in the Central District.  My dad says it was owned by a gay cop from the King County Sheriff’s Department, and basically a mall for prostitutes and drugs, which he did not know before moving his three kids in – tho he did know the building’s owner, so..?  Snowy feasted upon so very many mice in such a short time, just bodies everywhere.  I think their torsos must have a delightful candy crunch that kitties crave.  In my memory this was closer to the International District, and that’s because it wouldn’t have been a hard walk for our mom to take us someplace interesting to shop (Uwajimaya).  The ID has a historic landmark called the “Modern Fireproof Bush Hotel,” which has a similar look to this place.  I once worked with an Ethiopian immigrant who had lived in that building and was still angry at the landlord for the oceans of cockroaches.  I’d rather have mice than roaches, tho as often as not, you get both.

At some point, I think we did live outside of Seattle proper, in a janky suburb with misty trees and hills, possibly Renton?  SeaTac?  First place I became acquainted with craneflies (hate them), accidentally punched my brother in the face, and he picked up a dark piece of glass which is still in his foot, last I heard.  Based on the vibes tho, this could just as easily have been in north Seattle again.

We would occasionally spend time with my maternal grandparents, who were pretty fucking rude to us little goblins.  They lived for a time in Maple Valley and had us do some weeding.  Near a big busted stump on their lawn, for the only time in my life, I saw a salamander in the wild.  So cute, I love ’em.

I have some vague memories from this general time that involve a sunny suburb of thick, spiky, yellow grass and tall brown hills, but don’t remember if it was in Cali or Washington, and don’t know if I mashed up the two?  Feels like it could have been south Seattle in the summer.  At some point we went to Seafair and saw the hydroplanes race, got stickers from the KUBE DJ truck, and I remember the parks around Lake Washington had dead-ass yellow grass, so maybe them, in which case the hills in the memory were not accurate.  I had an experience of déjà vu in some extremely hot place near one of those chain motels with a bear on the sign?  Probably heat stroke.

There was this one janky little house in a field of six-foot tall grass, I feel like it was on MLK or Rainier?  By this time my dad was hung over every morning and would yell at us if we made noise, which had me intimidated enough that I decided to risk not going out into the hallway to use the bathroom, and just peed behind a wooden box.  I thought it would just be a little, but I had to go pretty bad, shoulda known better.  My siblings made disgusted noises, he woke up anyway, and I got in big trouble.

My dad said the owner told us we could rent the place, took a deposit, but then was immediately showing it to other people.  It was, once again, a dope house.  Plants hidden in the grass?  But I had a cool nature encounter there.  High up on a telephone pole, me and my siblings saw a black bird that impersonated our childish voices.  Had to have been a raven, only one I could be fairly sure of the ID for many years after.

At some point, we stayed in an emptied-out building that was made for business, not human occupation, behind a 7-11.  That’s where my mom gave her version of The Talk, which was shorter and more practical.  Also where I got a few cubic inches of 7-11 carrot cake instead of a birthday cake.  Worst birthday ever lol.  I almost forgot this one.

Regardless of where we were living at the time, we gravitated to the U District, for the big catholic church with the free meal and food bank.  While we were in that neighborhood, if we were lucky, our mom would take us by a cheap store on The Ave called Windfall, where we could buy plastic dinosaurs.  It doesn’t exist anymore.  In order to get enough food for three hungry kids, our mom would lie about our current address to visit more than one food bank.  We’d sometimes have to help haul the food mondo distances and bus rides with her.  Seattle Metro buses were white with brown and yellow stripes back then.  Blisters on our feet.

We briefly lived in the Yesler Terrace housing project, where I acquired a phobia of cockroaches.  My dad thought epsom salts would kill them and had lines of the stuff all over the floor like folk magic, but I think he was mistaken – it’s boric acid you’re supposed to use for that.  Anyway, this place?

It was like in 2001: A Space Odyssey when you touch the monolith and it’s full of stars, but instead it’s full of cockroaches.  Later in life I found myself looking at low income housing in South Lake Union, and it was more modern looking, but had minimum security prison vibes and roach, roach, roach.  It was darkly hilarious talking to the guy that showed me the unit, him saying “did some treatments, pretty sure we got ’em all” and there they were, right in front of our eyes.

At this point my memories get a lot more clear, tho still distant now.  We lived in a place near the U District, in a two story house nearly underneath the I-5 bridge on the north side of Lake Union.  I can remember the name of my elementary school.  That’s where my mom got arrested for shoplifting, which I didn’t remember, and that’s where my dad ate a ton of acid and hallucinated snipers across the street, so my mom took us out for a full day of fun, which I do remember.  We visited a video game arcade with the world’s filthiest bathrooms, Windfall, and probably Wallingford as well.  Just whatever you can get to on foot or with short bus trips.

While we lived there, I got a little pet lizard from a dude at school, which was named Nerd.  Nerd was an anole, so he could change from green to brown, and extend a little red frill from his chin and neck.  My parents were accommodating at first, and we would go to the PetCo on 45th to get crickets for him.  This did not last.  Late in our time there or early at the next place, we got a colorful tortoiseshell cat named Ginger, adding to Cleo and Snowball.

Finally, we came to the last place we lived in Seattle for any length of time, a very ramshackle little house on Beacon Hill.  I went to two different schools, the main one in West Seattle, which we commuted to during a racial integration program which no longer exists.  Black kids would sometimes harass me and my brother on the way to and from the bus, and on the bus itself, but while we were at school not as much.  One time this tall skinny guy who was half black and half Asian socked me in the face, and his smaller black friend jump-kicked me in the chest, bouncing me off a chain-link fence.  But they didn’t keep at it.  Don’t know why, but it wasn’t too injurious.  It certainly contributed to me and my brother becoming prolific truants for the first time.  My sister is half black and was under that radar, plus she had begun junior high when harassment was reaching a peak for us, not on the same commute.

During part of this time we had an olive green dodge dart, and I remember taking Ginger to the vet when she had a big abscess in her cheek, watching the road streak by through a rusted hole in the back seat floor.  The abscess broke before she got there, making a mess under on the front seat floor, and she just got a little clean and patch job.

At some point, my dad was in a drunken rage and threw Nerd’s cage in the gravel outside.  Doubtful he survived, tho I never saw the body.  It happened while I was asleep.  We finally had TV again, during a television horror renaissance, where there were revivals of The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, new shows Friday the 13th: The Series and Tales From the Dark Side.  Plus in my truancy I’d watched schlocky scifi horror daytime on the USA network.  Between these things, I developed fears that kept me up every night, imagining monsters in the clutter of our bedroom floor, or pressed against the window like the airplane gremlin in that Twilight Zone episode.  Also got to know Planet of the Apes and Star Trek, original series, and shortly thereafter the premiering Next Generation.

My dad had a moment of clarity while wondering if he’d die from a meth trip, and left our household to go into rehab far away.  Our mom did a shit job of managing us and the household, and we ended up with a few dozen kittens and abject squalor.  My brother still has trauma about the last of the kittens being taken away.  Really don’t like my mother, don’t know or care if she’s alive or dead, tho she probably did about as good a job raising us as an undiagnosed sociopath can.  Better than my sister did with hers.  When we left Seattle at last, we also left behind Cleo and Ginger, who went wherever their kittens had gone.  Back to just Snowball.

Epoch Three, a Hometown?
My parents moved us to Auburn, just south of Kent, where PZ grew up, and resolved to keep us in the same school district as much as possible, for the first time ever.  They kept getting evicted or otherwise having to move every X number of months, but I went to the same junior high and high school over the next several years.  Got friends outside of my brother for the first time ever – My Tech Support Guy, Try Anything Once Todd, Freemason Shawn, Slick, Brillo-pad Bob, and Bad Moustache Having Guy.  I should count Girlfriend Point Five a friend, but I was a fuckin’ terrible friend to her, and should not be counted.  After I failed to graduate, add Punk Rock Steve, Áine, my Arch Nemesis, Brandy, and Jeremy.

But all that’s getting ahead of ourselves.  First place in Auburn was at the foot of Lea Hill right on the Green River of Killer fame.  I used to wade in those waters all summer, inner tube a bit.  I still didn’t know how to swim.  Other than that, I’d go to My Tech Support Guy’s house and hang out in his attic landfill/bedroom watching him play video games while I drained his parents’ generic soda supply.  During this time I watched GLOW in the middle of the night and Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers in the day.  At some point also Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Freakazoid, etc.  Watched Star Trek original series and Next Gen back to back on the night new episodes of TNG aired, and those were joined by The Tracey Ullman Show, Werewolf, The Simpsons, and lastly The X-Files.  Good times.

My parents started screaming at each other a lot, every day.  I got the idea they should just get divorced, to which my mom would always have some bullshit to say.  Honestly I think she just wanted to stay married because it made having affairs more sexy for her.  My parents may have gotten me to stop skipping school, but I did go from straight A to nearly straight F student, and stayed that way until art school in my late 20s.  Life was just stress or escapism, what did it matter whether I passed classes or not?

My dad got a new cat, as a tiny kitten.  Kiki.  She was a long-haired black smoke cat, not an unusual color for stray cats in the area.  Barely survived infancy, closely bonded to my dad, a lil iffy about the rest of us.

Back to Seattle!  After the first place in Auburn fell through, during summer vacation, we briefly moved into a place in Seattle again.  It belonged to one of my mom’s coworkers at the hospital, and was up for sale or something, temporarily unoccupied.  Amusingly, we were living next door to Queensrÿche while they practiced the inane song Empire over and over and over again.  This was a year or two before the album came out.

Federal Way.  We weren’t there long, some house with a gravel driveway.  We filled the back yard with water from the hose and pretended our GI Joes were in a big swamp.  I was kinda old to still be playing with toys and stopped shortly after that, switching more fully to TTRPGs.  Parents got mad about the water bill.  More screaming at each other, now including my sister in the screaming matches.  I kept hammering the point – why not divorce?  Same bullshit.  One time when my dad was yelling at my sister, Kiki attacked her.  Cats love their favorite people, and killing their enemies is a way to show love, right?

At some point, we briefly moved into a homeless shelter in downtown Tacoma, similar to the one from far earlier in Seattle, brick with hardwood floor.  More of an abandoned 1910s hospital vibe.  More cockroaches, and far from our school district of choice, so this was protested loudly and didn’t last long.  I remembered there were small Afro-Caribbean children there with dreadlocks.  I mentioned this to an Afro-Caribbean guy years later and he thought that was outlandish, that dreads were a radical statement – more gaslighting for me.  My dad did confirm my memory tho.  Those kiddos were Rastafarian.  Parents ran a shop in the neighborhood.

Back to Auburn!  I forget where we were living at that point, but there were at least a few different places, roughly in order:

Fleabag Apartments.  We got a new cat and for a brief time two puppies, but our lives were out of control screaming horseshit, so the place filled up with so many fleas that the younger cat developed multiple permanent health issues and I developed an immunity to the irritant in flea bites.  They no longer itch for me.  While we were there Snowball ruined some delicate pencil shading on one of my drawings with her soft chamois-like belly.  I was upset, but u know, loved her.  My dad failed to make money selling ice cream.  My sister got pregnant by and then married to a terminally ill young dude.  He died before their baby was born.  Kiki also developed a horrible skin condition which remained after the fleas were gone, for the rest of her life.  Maybe Snowball had the same immunity I did; she came through alright.

Amusingly, there was a limousine that prowled this neighborhood in broad daylight, just a few blocks from the police precinct, picking up piles of “laundry” from the curbside.  I heard tell there were prostitutes in that thing too.  Bet the dealer / pimp is still alive out there somewhere.  Shout out.

29th Street.  Add my first niece to the household.  Listening to a lot of Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Metallica, Ministry, etc., mostly cassettes but starting to add CDs.  My brother put a skip in the end of Rusty Cage by dropping an orange on the record button.  My niece was a perfectly behaved and healthy little creature, my sister was neglectful to where any fool could have predicted the harm she’d do later, but for the moment we could pick up the slack.  Taking bus out of there would frequently be with people from a home for the mentally ill, who just smoked constantly, bummed smokes, and talked to themselves.  This is where the teenage part of Len Ross took place.  I remember me and my brother accidentally getting locked out of the apartment in the snow and a neighbor who knew we liked AiC assumed we were drug boys, to which we took offense.

37th Street.  I used to walk to a phone booth at night and feed it quarters to talk to my lady crush.  Dad finally left, squalor resumed.  Sister got a lot of food assistance due to growing number of babies, enough to where we had lots of ice cream.  Add her new husband Crappy Dipshit and their baby to the household, then two more cats?  And a million fleas.  Snowball finally died, poorly.  We listened to a lot of Nirvana and my oldest niece would dance to it by running in circles.  Our mom finally just moved out, leaving us with no way to pay rent, and my dad came back from wherever to pick up the pieces of the situation, along with his girlfriend and her kids and cat.  I turned eighteen, bringing this list of places I lived as a child to a close.

I’ll expand on some of these entries in separate posts.

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