HUFFINGTON
11.11.12
NO WAY OUT
homeless shelter that had been
set up temporarily, just for the
winter months.
When spring came, she pitched
a tent in a makeshift encampment
carved into a slice of scraggly
brush set between railroad tracks
and an abandoned warehouse. She
bought a barbecue grill at a dollar store, using it to grill chicken
and pork chops she procured with
food stamps. Her restroom was
the bushes or the public facilities
at the Community Kitchen, the
social service agency nearby.
She contended with ticks, spider bites, and the men in tents
all around her, who were prone
to drunken fights and petty theft.
They stole clothing, bicycles, food
and even toothbrushes, she says.
One of them once sneaked into
her tent seeking sex, she says, and
she had to fight him off. Someone
swiped her cell phone, which had
all the phone numbers she valued
in the world, including those of
her four stepsisters.
Her cheeks burnt pink by the
sun and her blond hair pulled
back into a rough ponytail, Smith
conveys a sense that she is prepared to protect herself. “I can
take an ass-whooping as much as
I can give an ass-whooping,” she
says. But after two months in the
tent, she could bear it no longer.
She took refuge in a vacant house
that had been lost to foreclosure,
a place lacking both water and
power. She lights candles, cooks
on her grill, and cadges buckets of
water from unsuspecting neighbors, tapping their garden hoses
“EVERYTHING THAT
I REALLY HAVE TO
HAVE IN MY LIFE IS
IN THIS BOOK BAG.”
when they are away, in order to
flush the toilet.
“This is humiliating to me,”
Smith says. “It’s embarrassing to
be in this situation. How in the
hell did this happen?”
This is a purely rhetorical question. Smith has been homeless
before, and she has struggled with
drug addiction — crack cocaine
in particular — which devoured
her life in Atlanta, where she
worked as an installer for a local
telephone company, earning some
$60,000 a year. “I met this guy,”
she says, the preamble to a tangled story that involves losing her
four-bedroom home, her job and