Losing Myself

The title characters of Rachel Hoffman’s Packer and Jack, a novel told in chapters titled like and often functioning as independent short stories, are enigmas: to themselves, to each other, and often to the reader. Packer, originally christened Packer P. Packer due to an accident of naming, is a twice-orphaned one-eyed homeless man with a savant-like capacity for Biblical quotation. According to the narrative’s elliptically parsed out chronology, he must be nearly fifty, but I found myself picturing him a lanky teenage loner most of the time. His ability to suffer with almost beatific patience seems to be his primary coping strategy, rendering him paradoxically both vulnerable to and unperturbed by the near-constant physical and psychological assaults that constitute life on the Los Angeles streets.

Jack, a forty-five-year-old divorcee whose husband dumps her first into a sanatorium, and from there out onto the streets after years of subjecting her to both physical and psychological abuse, winds up with her name, and ambiguous gender identity, when the “Mission Lady” at a shelter she and Packer frequent misidentifies her as a man and calls her John. Jack, whose name was, once upon a time, Karen, never corrects the Mission Lady or anyone else and gains a modicum of physical security by concealing her gender. The costs of concealing, however, quickly become a thematic preoccupation in the novel, and what one gains through concealing must always be weighed against what might be lost. “If you hide something long enough, you forget you knew it in the first place. You forget who you are,” Jack cautions, continuing,

Their friendship turns the novel into a meditation on what love can be when it is freed up from romance.

Fact is, hiding something makes it secret, even from yourself sometimes. Fact is, everyone’s got secrets they don’t want someone else or even themselves knowing about. Fact is, hide, stay invisible, and you live. This has been true for me as long as I can remember. Hide what I know, stay invisible, and I live. Tell, and I get whooped.

The fact that one might get whooped is an ever-present reality in this novel. One might get whooped by a violent parent or a spouse or a thuggish fellow-homeless person on the street. One might get whooped by life itself. Gentle Packer is whooped by random and accidental eruptions of violence that deprive him of an eye, and then not one, but two sets of parents. Packer and Jack are whooped by hunger and the cold indifference of those who see the homeless as nothing more than a nuisance, if they see the homeless at all. “Shouldn’t have been, but I was always surprised at how normal civilized folks can step right over another person and not even notice,” Jack laments. “Actually,” she corrects, “I guess everybody steps over everyone else all the time and I’m the one didn’t notice.” The novel in no way romanticizes the life Packer and Jack scrabble together. While never shying away from the realities of brutality and indifference, the novel itself is not limited by, or, really, about brutality or indifference. Instead, it is about the network of small kindnesses, minor comforts, and moments of generosity that might be knit together to make a safety net for even those living the most precarious lives. “Psalms 68:6,” Packer informs Jack just after meeting her, and just after recognizing her as a woman, “God gives the friendless a home.” This, of course, is not technically true, as both Packer and Jack remain homeless throughout the novel. But they do have the Mission Lady, her Sunday breakfasts and free showers, and the haphazard protection of Swamp, a tattoo artist who has tattooed himself almost entirely green, and who lets them sleep in the security of his shop half the nights out of the week.

And they have each other. As Jack begins to recover from the devastating loss of her identity that began not with her husband...