New Life

I tell Americo that my friend Andrew could have survived on the street. He grew up in Kansas, worked on a farm and knew how to live outdoors. One time, when he and I were on assignment in Afghanistan, Andrew gathered scrap and built a grill and barbecued a slab of meat he bought on a street in Kabul called Butchery where water buffalo and chickens were slaughtered, necks cut, hanging from hooks tongues protruding, lolling to one side like dead fish. Blood on the pavement diluted pink from water dripping out of buckets where dead birds soaked before being plucked, eyes open, flies manic.

Andrew lives with his younger brother, Tim, in Alaska now. I’d just spoken to Tim before I met with Americo, a homeless man I’m interviewing for a feature news story about people living out of their cars in San Diego. I check in with Tim about once a week. Andrew drank himself into oblivion last year, has Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, better known as wet brain. He looks at his driver’s license and reads his name aloud, I am Andrew, I am Andrew, I am Andrew, like someone cramming for a test. Tim and his wife care for him. Andrew had despised Tim’s wife before his brain went all to mush but now dotes on her. Also hits on her. Better than them yelling at each other, Tim said. Andrew’s retired, I tell friends who ask about him.

Americo calls himself retired, too, as in not working, the bitterness in his voice hard to miss. He and his wife or girlfriend, he describes her either way depending on his mood and if they’ve had an argument, have been living in their van for six months. At night they park at New Life Church on 28th Street just off California State Route 94. The church allows what it calls vehicular homeless to sleep in their cars from six at night to six in the morning seven days a week. One Saturday a month they may remain all day to clean their vehicles and complete other chores.

About thirty people stay overnight at New Life. They turn into the same spot evening after evening like people coming home from work and crossing into their driveways. Americo occupies a spot the far end of the lot where a tree provides shade. Nearby, a woman named Sheryl parks her gray 1998 Chevrolet van. She keeps six brown and white teacup Chihuahuas in carriers in the back; she had ten but has sold four. Sixty-six-year-old Larry maneuvers his 2000 Ford Contour between Sheryl and Americo. He was kicked out of his son John’s house after they’d come to blows. Then there’s Christie, who positions her 2012 Honda Civic across from Americo in the middle of the lot and waves to Sheryl, with whom she’s formed a casual bond. She then greets Americo and Larry like neighbors, leaning on the open doors of her Honda as if it were a fence dividing her property from theirs before she arranges her car for the night, and Sheryl walks her dogs while Americo rummages in a box for a can of Hormel chili.

A microwave oven stands on a table close to Americo and an extension cord stretches from it to an outlet on the side of the church. Americo heats his chili on a Styrofoam plate, eats with a plastic spoon. A few teeth protrude from his mouth, ruined artifacts, scattered remnants from another life when he had a mouthful of teeth and a job before his body became afflicted with the aches and pains of rheumatoid arthritis and spondylolysis, a fracture of parts of the vertebrae. He uses a wheelchair, although he stands for limited amounts of time when he must. He offers me some chili but I decline.

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I remember the MREs I’d buy on the streets of Kabul when I got tired of chicken and water buffalo. Afghan translators stole them from the U.S. military and sold them for ten, twenty bucks, sometimes more. I was a reporter...