Doorways I Have Known, part II: The U-District

Dear Diary,

For most purposes, I considered myself to have moved to the University District in autumn 2014, although during the first months of 2015, I worked, and so had to spend at least some nights on Capitol Hill.  I stayed in the U-District for roughly four years, then moved to Laurelhurst; either way, though, I actually spent my days at UW.  Come the lockdowns, I increasingly also spent nights at UW, until this year I got housed.  So in contrast to part I's concerning a single street, this part bounces around, and so will the next.

I'd forgotten, until I went back and looked at Broadway, the extent to which I was part of a community of homeless people there in 2012-2014.  But by the time I moved north, I figured I'd learnt enough.  I hadn't, really, but since that was what I thought, I avoided the main concentrations of homeless people in the area.  (I also knew by then that many of the homeless in the U-District were kids; although in 2014 I wasn't yet 50, I certainly wasn't a kid.)  Roughly speaking, having spent some hours today re-reading e-mails I sent in those years, I now think I spent 2014-2017 trying desperately to return to the housed world (but at the same time diving ever deeper into Korean TV and music), and 2018-2019 recovering from that effort's total failure.

People's reactions to me were different here.  Until the pandemic, I suffered only one serious theft, and not where I slept.  On the other hand, considerably fewer people gave me money.  I'm not sure whether that's because I was more confident, projecting less of a lost look, or because people in the U-District have less money to give than partiers on Broadway, but either way, it was true.  Finally, both actual acts of violence against me while I was homeless, though relatively minor, happened in the U-District, at the hands of young men who were probably college students.

The University District

4709 Roosevelt Way NE

Then:  Half Price Books

Now:  University Volkswagen extension

The main place I slept from 2014 to 2017 was Half Price Books' doorway.  I'd already started sleeping there when visiting the U-District overnight, pretty much from the beginning of my homelessness; this amused the people who worked at the Capitol Hill HPB, where I spent a lot of time both before and after becoming homeless, until it closed.

Roosevelt was, at that time, betwixt and between.  There were homeless people camped in University Playground, Roots was near University Way, and each was just three blocks from Roosevelt, but for some reason the two worlds didn't meet.  Roosevelt didn't have the crowds of rich students to try to beg from or interact with, it didn't have tent space, it didn't even have many doorways.

The doorway I used, I shared with the customers of the hookah lounge down the street.  Throughout the time I stayed there, visitors chafed at the idea that anyone would appropriate this perfectly good place to smoke a cigarette out of the rain, and because it took a long time for wet footprints to dry on rainy nights, I spent quite a few nights either staying up late, or in one of the alternate spots mentioned below.  But the regulars got used to me, and even tried to intercede with the visitors from time to time.  One regular gave me a job lead, though it didn't pan out.

This was where I first started using my copies of Seattle Weekly and The Stranger as sleeping bag pads.  That resulted from another suggestion from a regular, who pointed out that I wouldn't care about wet pavement if I had something between my sleeping bag and the wet spot.  I cared anyway, because I cared about those papers, but not as much; occasionally that gained me an extra half-hour of sleep.

I was sleeping here in January 2016 when my Milwaukee storage unit, into which I'd put most of the payment for "Stealing from the Homeless", was sold for non-payment of rent.  Before that time I'd already started accumulating books from HPB's "recycling" dumpster, but after that I was on a mission.  My books in Milwaukee had been taken to an HPB there; I wanted to see what I could replace in Seattle.  Not much, but it became an excuse for an extravaganza of book acquisition.  Because I didn't change clothes often, I was unwilling to climb into HPB's trash dumpster, but others happily did that, and I accumulated a fair number of CDs and DVDs from those they pulled out of the dumpster but left behind.  For a time I had two umbrellas, and was willing to use them to try to pull something I really wanted out of that dumpster, too.

Ironically, all this, which one would think would lead to serious annoyance on the part of the HPB staff, actually led, in the final months, to their seeing me much, much more favourably.  A local guy apparently lost a family member, and reacted to his grief by going around setting fires.  (Or at least this is the story he told that got him out of prosecution.)  One fire he set was in that recycling dumpster.  I was one of several homeless people in the vicinity who responded; my particular contribution happened to include the actual call to the fire department, and although the flames never threatened the building, once the employees found that out, I quite unfairly became their fair-haired boy.  I was happily able to sort of return the favour not much later.  Some man came and left a bag of housewares next to me, claiming I'd find them useful.  I'm guessing he'd fought with the intended recipient; they were small, fancy items, for most of which no homeless man would have any use at all.  After a couple of nights during which nobody reclaimed the bag, I handed it to the store's assistant manager, for the benefit of newcomers to Seattle on the staff, keeping only a small cutting board.

Sometime probably in 2016, I saw a man down by Trader Joe's, on the next block, weaving around waving a sleeping bag in the air.  Maybe a quarter hour later, he'd made his way to the HPB doorway, but his sleeping bag hadn't.  So he proposed to share mine.  He made it clear that this was a sexual overture, explaining that he'd used to be popular with ladies, but not so much any more - he was both visibly and audibly a formerly handsome ageing drunk - so he thought he'd try changing his luck.  Strangely, I wasn't interested, and this led to my avoiding this doorway for several months.  I'm actually unclear on the chronology of my stays in two other doorways in the U-District, but suspect I went to only one at that time, then returned to HPB for its final months in 2017.

What made the HPB doorway reliably dry was an awning, but that awning was deteriorating the whole time I slept there, and not long after they closed, had deteriorated so much that the doorway was no longer reliably dry, and when University VW came in, the awning came down.  So although I doubt UVW really cares what happens in that doorway, which they don't use, I've never seen anyone else try to sleep there.  I tried again occasionally later, but the hookah bar's clientele seemed completely to have turned over, and it just wasn't any fun, besides being wet when it rained.

The next two places were my alternate sites, for when I couldn't wait for HPB's doorway to dry out.  My main one:

4555 Roosevelt Way NE

Then:  Princeton Review

Now:  Academy for Precision Learning

This has a large dry, but not a reliable one; the pavement slopes down toward the building, and sometimes water leaps the gaps in it that, under other circumstances, create the dry.  Also, this is the first place I was physically attacked while homeless; a young man passing by one night kicked me in my back, though not hard.  So I really didn't like to sleep here, but still sometimes had to.

1105 NE 47th St

Then:  Vacant

Now:  7-Eleven, back door

This was the third place I found open last night, besides the two places already mentioned on Broadway.  What's more, I found a middle-aged white man hunkered down in this back doorway, which was blocked on the inside by a small display, so clearly not meant for regular use, but still, I was amazed he was allowed to be there.

He courteously got out of my way to take the photo.  We talked some, and agreed to meet again so I could put him in touch with cold weather gear; he gave me his number so that could happen.  However, he ghosted me today.  I ended up deciding I couldn't in good conscience keep my sleeping bags, though they're where I actually continue to sleep, not having bought a bed yet, given the impending weather; if I'd found him tonight, he'd have them now, but instead a plainly confused young white man, who reminded me a bit of myself in 2012, on Broadway, got them.

(By the way, dear Diary, I misinterpreted the evidence this morning.  Tonight I saw the face of the guy who was under a blanket on Broadway this morning, and he's definitely white.  I was going by his hands, so maybe he just had gloves on.)

I'm not sure I slept in this doorway more than once.  I'd gotten used to bigger spaces, and couldn't make this smaller one work.

Next, such neighbours as I had on or near Roosevelt.

4751 Roosevelt Way NE

Then and Now:  A private home

There was a group of men, probably American Indian, who used to sleep in one of this house's two doorways, with their legs sticking out into the wet.  Since I normally took 50th to get to HPB, I saw them quite often.  They spent a lot of time making fun of each other, and were happy to change pace by making fun of me instead; I took it poorly, but we had one or two civil interactions as well.  They flatly refused to believe that they were actually sleeping in a private doorway until the home's owner finally boarded it up.  I think they were already gone by the time of the fire.

911 NE 50th St

Then:  The Seven Gables Theatre

Now:  A vacant lot

Each night, someone set up a kind of fortress on the theatre's porch, and then took it down each morning.  (I'd rejected sleeping there long before, because of the wooden floor, I think a mat, and also the theatre's late hours.)

I met a man the night of the HPB dumpster fire.  This man later chased the pyro for blocks; although the pyro got away, the other man's description enabled a later arrest.  So this man was the real hero of that night.

I didn't know that at the time, though, and didn't recognise him when we met again in Laurelhurst, probably in 2018.  He told me that he was both of the people described in the above paragraphs, and thought he'd been looking out for me when I slept at HPB, too.  (When did he find the time to do that, what with all the fort-building?)  He was a black man, somewhat younger than me and somewhat taller.  The last I saw of him, he was upset over the disappearance of some pallets he'd stored in a Laurelhurst woods, and he left on a bicycle.

The theatre closed in 2017, like HPB and Ristorante Doria - basically all the shops on the block were put out of business at least partly by long-running construction across the street at UVW, except a massage shop that I think is still a Seattle Police Department sting, and the hookah lounge.  Apparently, in December 2020, when the building was occupied by squatters (a fact heavily emphasised by KING), it burned down.

A false alarm:

4746 11th Ave NE

Then:  Seattle Behavior Consulting and Therapy

Now:  Apparently vacant

I was firmly convinced, for years of my homelessness, that the only proper way to comb my hair was in front of glass, even though I rarely looked.  (Now I routinely comb my hair nowhere near a mirror.  Go figure.)  When HPB put in its windows treatments that are still there, I started combing my hair on the porch of this place, which I'd never have considered for sleeping on.  Every single time, this elicited a swift and emphatic security response, as if I'd slept there too.  Now, mental health places make efforts to protect their clients' privacy, which the layout of this corner store must have made difficult, so I can understand instructions to security to watch for people hanging out on the porch, but we're talking 7 A.M. here, so I still think it was strange.

My purpose in combing my hair there was that the glass was out of the way of pedestrians, which basically no glass further along on my way to Safeway, where I daily anticipated meeting people I knew, was.  I don't remember how I ultimately solved the problem, or maybe it was obviated by events (my moving, for example).

Now the other two places where I sustainedly slept in the U-District.

5030 Roosevelt Way NE

Then and Now:  Scarecrow Video

This was the second or third place, after Hardware and perhaps what's now Lifelong's side door on Broadway, where I slept despite a warning sign.  There's currently a "Conditions of Entry" sign in their window, as shown in the photo below; I don't remember whether that was the sign I worried about then.

I remember sleeping there for months, maybe even more than a year.  (If so, this is where I was sleeping in November 2017 when my fourth laptop was stolen - though at a UW library, not here - and I more or less gave up.)  Already on Broadway I'd learned that it was important to dry the soles of my shoes before going to bed (most of my homelessness, I didn't want to risk theft of my shoes, which actually happened one day to one of the Indians mentioned above).  At HPB (and One Hour Optical) I'd also started sweeping the doorway with those dried-out soles.  At Scarecrow I wore out a pair of shoes or two sweeping, because that's one huge doorway.  (Wet leaves were common, and several times, for some strange reason, someone spilled a large amount of popcorn across the doorway.)

I remember two endings to my stay at the other place, and only one ending to this one.  Also, I sent an e-mail in 2018 saying I was sleeping in a really big doorway (almost the only mention, in all those e-mails I re-read today, of my sleeping arrangements).  So I think I came here from HPB after HPB closed, and not during 2016, but I'm really not sure.

There are no ideal options for this doorway.  Scarecrow's night return slots are on one of its walls, the main doors on the other.  I chose to block the main doors.  Staffers mentioned to me that some customers were still afraid to use the night return slots while I was there.  Also, although I always waited until all the employees were gone, there was someone who liked to come in before I even woke up in the morning, something like 5 A.M., and apparently resented having to use the back door.

Also, there's an affordable housing building across the street, whose residents liked to hang out outside.  A rather more annoying foible I'd developed than the hair-combing one was that I didn't want any woman to see certain stages of my bed-building.  Some nights, at this location, that tic kept me up really late.

The end came one night when I got sick, and actually vomited into my sleeping bag.  I'm pretty sure to this day that I got it all, but I thought I really had to warn Scarecrow staff in case the smell lingered, and of course the only person I could reach was the one who resented me.  After I'd washed my sleeping bag, the next night, while I was still sweeping that doorway, a police car came by, and the officer told me the store had requested them to deter anyone from being there at night.

This is the only place where I slept while homeless that called the police on me, and with a story behind it that can only smirch their names, but my interest in older Korean TV dramas is probably going to drive me to apply for membership sometime in the next year.  Life is strange.

5034 University Way NE

Then and Now:  Christian Science Reading Room

I think this is where I retreated from the man with the insulting come-on to.  Appropriate, perhaps.  I also think this is where I went after Scarecrow kicked me out.  So two stays between 2016 and 2018, if I have the chronology right.  Another memory claims I came back in 2019; if so, that was rather bad behaviour on my part, but, I think, understandable.

My only sleep site on the Ave was far enough north that there weren't vast hordes of students walking past, but still quite a few.  Both preserving the dry area, and dealing with my worry about women seeing me build my bed, were very hard here. 

On the other hand, this was the only place that supplied me with things to read while drying my shoes, so I wouldn't have to unwrap the books I'd bagged for the trip from the UW.  To this day they always have two pages of the latest Christian Science Monitor displayed at one end of their front windows, and two pages each of the Christian Bible and of Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health at the other.  I don't know about now, but each time I stayed there the pages shown changed several times per week.  I liked reading the Monitor, and considered it my duty, each time I did so, also to read the others, which was fine with me as regards the Bible, but I came to dislike both Eddy's ideas and her style, which left me feeling rather awkward sleeping there.

I had one temporary and one lasting problem with the neighbours there.  I don't mean homeless people.  The lasting problem was the farmers' market setting up very early each Saturday, a day when I could normally have afforded to sleep somewhat later.

I think the first end of my stays at this doorway came when I was attacked much more seriously than the kick at the Princeton Review one.  One night my hands were full because I was eating, and a very drunk, very tall young East Asian-descended man demanded that I shake his hand.  I refused, gesturing with the food in my hand, and although at that point several of his friends caught up with him and did what they could to restrain him, he worked himself up into a rage over my refusal of his friendship, and punched me, knocking me out briefly, and breaking the glasses I'm wearing right now, which I'd only gotten the year before.  I couldn't even find all the pieces, so I originally reported the incident to the police as a theft, then had to amend that once I finally located the rest of them.  I tend to be slow to react to things, so am not sure I immediately returned to HPB, but I was probably happy to within days.

During my second stay, if not also my first, some of the neighbours hung out on the east porch of University Heights.  At first I thought they were homeless people, and I still think at first they were, but over the months people on bicycles showed up whom I interpreted as drug dealers.  Because of my hangup over women watching me build my bed, I kept an eye on that porch, and I'm pretty sure none of its denizens appreciated that.

One night in, probably, 2018, a woman came up to me around 2 or 3 A.M.  She whined that she was homeless, and had lost her "protector".  She wanted me to be her new one.  Thing is, I was pretty sure I recognised her as one of the putative dealers' customers.  So I refused.  She then asked for warmer clothing than she had on.  As it happened, I had a jacket to spare.  It had some sentimental value, once a gift and long of good use, but was worn out, probably even had holes in it.  But I could spare it, so I gave it to her.  At which point her pose of homelessness vanished; because the jacket had holes in it, it was unacceptable, and she drove the point home by physically tearing it into very small pieces, which she left for me to clean up.  I took this whole episode as an explicit warning from the drug dealers, and left for Laurelhurst the next night.

I'm tolerably confident in the reality of my 2019 stay.  What happened was that year's snow, closing the UW.  For three days I went downtown, and although I didn't actually stay at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall shelter, after being told that three separate places I tried to build my bed were unacceptable, I thought I'd picked up bedbugs there or at the Armory.  Now, people like to blame all vermin on homeless people's poor hygiene.  In the case of rats, say, there's some truth to that - ever since the sweep described in the first part of this series, I've been seeing a rat run across that rocky area every night.  But in reality, bedbugs like hiding places of kinds homeless people are usually ill-equipped to supply.  So I wasn't really worried that I'd keep the bedbugs, but that I'd carry them to wherever I next slept.  In this context, I think I must have cold-bloodedly decided that a reading room was more likely to have experience with the problem than the retail stores in whose doorways I slept in Laurelhurst, and so spent a few days there until confident I wasn't carrying them any more.  I then visited while the room was open to warn them of the potential problem.

What convinces me that this stay happened, despite the slur it is on my character, is that I'm pretty sure I remember a time when those drug dealers were no longer visiting U-Heights, and feeling very smug over that.

 

So I'm sorry, dear Diary, to disappoint your estimate of your author, but I hope you can forgive me.  There's at least one other bad thing to come, but it's no longer officially Christmas, I obviously can't meet even my revised schedule for this series, but it's time to try to sleep without my sleeping bags.  Good night, dear Diary.  I'll be telling you more tomorrow, obviously.