Best Lessons Learned While Living Out of a Car
It was a dark and stormy Sunday…
I sat hunched over the toilet at the beach, blowing my guts out. I wound the toilet paper (thinly disguised as tracing paper) around my hand like I was getting ready for a fight. By the end, sweaty and out of breath, I had burned though half the roll. I left the public bathroom barreled over with plenty of shame, soreness and disgust.
This wasn’t the first time I had had problems like this living out of my car and it wouldn’t be the last. It goes without saying, but “that car life” leaves you with only a sliver of options in every sense. It’s a chance to save money, but over time it becomes both a saving grace and hellish nightmare.
On more occasions than I’d like to count (or probably can) I would have to make a beeline to take care of business. Speeding down the road, too fast for the tight San Franciscan streets and too furious to give two shits. All because of some kind of comfort food I ate to cushion the chronic stress, some dirty restaurant I chose because of an open parking spot, or some drink I tossed back to forget the two former reasons.
A sense of scarcity for what you can and can’t do, can or can’t get leaves you open to poor choices and plenty of stress which in turn compounds those poor choices. Given enough time, it all feeds into each other and creates an Ouroboros — a never-ending story that leads you nowhere except to an unhappy ending.
The Second Lesson I learned while living out of a car was:
You’re only as good as your health.
When I made the leap and made the drive out West with a friend of mine I was by no means the healthiest person. At 5' 8" and over 200 lbs, I wasn’t crazy huge, but I was on my way to becoming a meatball — short and stocky. I exercised here and there, using my dad’s old Fuji road-bike from like 1865 and ate a salad usually with every meal, but I didn’t focus on my health like I should have.
Like a lot of people in their 20s I figured I could pound the hell out of my body just indefinitely without issue. And for a while I did just that. I had no concern for my late night meal choices, ate pretty much what I wanted and drank pretty much what I wanted to too — in excess.
So when I began living out of my car, it was a no brainer. My meals were limited, but I could get by. And by this time I was working for another food delivery service: UberEats. But this was no Caviar. No prepared meals, no hub, no wheeling and dealing to keep the food for myself. Instead I had to rely on the accidental charity of all the city’s drunks, stoners and narcoleptics who would order the food, but then never end up coming down to grab it (the delivery service had a 15 minute window for them to march out their door and get their order). This sounds fruitless, but believe it or not, more often than not I would end up with quite the treasure trove of food choices to pick through (usually on late night orders and usually on the weekends).
Plenty of times I was left bag-holding anything from salads, falafel, large pizzas, to fucking $70 of sushi. And each and every time I had to do what was right and dispose of it — down my gullet. I wasn’t going to let a free meal slip through my fingers. So I would wolf the food down in the car to not waste it.
This was all kosher for a while. All the free meals were great and I ate like a king in that car. BUT what to do with the food when I was done? Believe it or not I didn’t have a refrigerator in the car tucked away in the trunk (hard to believe I know). And I’m also not a black hole, so there was only so much I could take in before my gut was bursting. So any food I didn’t eat went to the trunk of the hatchback where it sat until the next morning. But it was always a roll of the dice when I did this.
You see, when you’re living out of your car, everything ends up being questioned. Can this fit in my living space? Can I eat this all in one go? If I leave this in the trunk will it stink up the car? If I eat this will it stink up the car? I did it anyway. Survival mode will do that to you.
So not only was I not eating the best and most healthy food in the world, but I was also not really storing it like you usually would…and should. I would roll over in the trunk and thank the heavens when I saw the bulging sides of the Caviar bag (I kept it from before as a kind of severance pay) in the morning. I would inhale that food in there like Kirby in Super Smash Bros. (the N64 version) without even taking a second to take a whiff of it.
Before I even had time to process what I’d done, my stomach would start speaking in the Devil’s Tongue to me — grumbling, grunting and groveling. If Son of Sam had been there to translate it would have no doubt been saying: “What have you done to us? Why would you do this to us? Please God in Heaven, help…us.”
Here’s the thing about food left in the car. If its Canada and the food will be naturally kept cold by the -200 degree weather outside, then its all gravy. But if you’re in California and have a hatchback with big windows inviting the sun’s rays into your car, then you’ll wake up in a hotbox the next morning…which is exactly what happened. Its almost embarrassing the amount of times I would wake up to my leftover food and I caked in sweat. Was I still going to let that food go to waste? No sir; I would still gingerly eat it that morning for my own gastronomical pleasure. Overtime this became a problem.
The next move would be to the public bathroom at the beach near where I had set up shop to sleep in my car. Wrapping my legs around the toilet bowl and the dust bowls from the sand that had blown in, I would plant myself firmly and wait for the blowback. I felt like a human anti-aircraft gun. The recoil was tremendous.
My volatile gut even impacted my sleep. More than a few times my stomach woke me up in the middle of the night, screaming for a bathroom. So I would have to sneak out of my car (so I didn’t give away I was sleeping out of my car) like I was in Call of Duty: Black Ops and slink off into the woods with only some leftover napkins from some food orders. You know, people poke fun at dogs when they’re taking dumps for having that scared, vulnerable look on their faces while doing it — but I’ll tell you firsthand, I get it. It’s no picnic out there, taking dumps in the woods is an entirely different animal. Valid or not, you feel like at any moment some Bengalese Tiger is going to ambush you out of the bush, grab you by the pants around your ankles and drag you off into the dark void.
The only recourse I had in this was to not give myself a chance to wake up until morning while ALSO taking out my stress at the knees. So after working, to decompress, and to get to pass out, I would “take” handfuls of beer like some sort of Ambien. I did this for almost every day for two years straight.
I would get done with my 10 hour shift driving and stressing out around the city and treat myself. I would go to the nearby liquor store and get my booze of choice — a sixer of Lagunitas Little Sumpin’ Ale. My God was it glorious.
Even now as I type this I still can taste the sweet cold lips of the bottle on my lips. Even though I was alone, even though I was living out of my car, even though an even more homeless person yelled outside my car window…I had a Little Sumpin’.
Lagunitas isn’t sponsoring this article or anything, but I would be spokesperson for them in a shotgun second. Anyway…
So almost every night I’d get this six pack and would burn through the whole thing. Now a six pack doesn’t seem like a lot, and it’s not. But the ABV on this sucker is about 7.5% and compounded over days, weeks, months and years — you could say it didn’t do me any favors. My movements started to slow, thick cobwebs formed in my head, brain fog set in, dark clouds of depression rolled in and anxiety built up in me brick by brick.
Now this isn’t to say it’s all the beers’ fault — and it’s not. Its the years of 10 hour shifts every day, the years of road rage, the years of eating cusp-of-spoiled leftover food, years of smoking and years of drinking.
It got to a breaking point when I got a call from my doctor. I had gotten bloodwork done recently and was waiting for him to call me with the results. I had access to them on my own, but I needed his interpretation of what exactly was going on. Over the phone he basically told me my body was all kinds of fucked up.
He said my white and blood cell counts were sub-par, my LDL was going stratospheric, my Vitamin D levels were down the drain and my Iron, Folate and Thyroid levels were all over the place. He said if I didn’t change course soon then I could develop some real problems down the road. For now I was ok, but the direction my body was heading spelled: T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
The problem I’m getting at is that my health was slowly declining. I’m not trying to be melodramatic and not declining in a way like “oh I have rectal cancer now”, but in a way that slowly chips away at your body like rain wearing away rock. There were other things I began doing as well that turned the rain from scattered showers to full blown monsoons.
My point in this has been that it’s easy to start bad habits especially in bad situations, but it’s even easier for these to snowball over time into bigger and bigger problems to contend with. And all of a sudden, even the very act of doing said things ironically becomes harder as your health takes a hit from the house-sized snowball effect. It became harder for me to smoke because my throat hurt, it became harder for me to eat all this leftover food because I needed a game plan for a beeline for a bathroom after every meal and it became harder for me to drink because my sides would start hurting.
You’re only as good as your health
