The Tent by the Lake

After Chelsea the streets and the temporary places became more permanent. I ended up living in a tent by a lake. Looking back I do not understand how any adult allowed a child that age to live that way. The question still has no satisfactory answer. I used to wish I had been taken into care. At least there would have been a structure, a record, something that might have made sense of the chaos to an innocent mind. Two of my brothers went to private Jewish schools and came out the other side intact. I have not seen them or my sister from that side of the family since I was an infant. My father was serving the long sentence. The contrast was absolute: private education and stability on one side, a tent and whatever food I could find on the other. That contrast is one of the facts that never softened with time.

I had sponsorship for a while. I self-published with Big Fish. I fished. I slept outside, sometimes in cars. The open air became the only home that could not be taken away because it had never been assigned to me in the first place. No parental controls. No fixed address. Just the knowledge that I was already operating with more practical competence than most of the adults who were supposed to be responsible for me, and none of their protection. The tent was not romantic. It was cold and damp and temporary in the way that everything had become temporary. But it was mine in a way that the houses had never been. No one could throw me out of the weather. The lake was there in the morning and still there at night. That continuity mattered more than I knew how to say at the time. Continuity had become the rarest thing in the life.