Books: Author Tells of Growing Up Homeless in ‘Criminal of Poverty’

from The Berkeley Daily Planet

By Osha Neumann, Special to the Planet

I first met Tiny when she came to my law office to talk about working off her parking tickets. She had pink hair spiking off in various directions and was dressed in a biker punk combination of clashing prints and colors. I remember thinking she looked awfully young, but then again, something about her contradicted that youthful impression. Now reading her extraordinary memoir I understand the reason for the double image.

When she was 11 years old, Tiny became her disabled mother’s sole support and caregiver. She was for all practical purposes her mother’s mother. Their joint struggle for survival is at the core of this book.

In the opening chapters of her book, Criminal Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America, Tiny sketches her mother-line of abused and poverty-stricken women stretching back generations to the Irish slums of Liverpool. Tiny’s grandmother, Helen Jo, sailed to New York alone and practically penniless when she was 15. Her hopes of becoming an actress expired in an abusive marriage which lasted long enough for her to give birth to three children. When her husband smacked her one too many times she knocked him unconscious with a frying pan and walked out, leaving the children behind. Boarding a bus to Philadelphia, she met the man who would become Tiny’s grandfather. He was “tall and thin, with kinky black-brown hair, dark skin, and eyes like smooth pieces of brown suede.” He told her she was pretty, said he was a singer, and promised to take care of her. They lived together in the dark corner room of a downtown hotel. She became pregnant. When Dee, Tiny’s mother, was born, the man with the brown suede eyes offered to marry Helen Jo. When she refused he left. Abandoned, unable to work and care for her baby, she made the fateful decision to give Dee away to a foster home, the first of a series in which Dee was repeatedly sexually, physically and emotionally abused.

Dee emerged from foster care emotionally scarred but with a fierce will to survive. She met Tiny’s father while she was still in high school. He was white, wealthy and privileged and found her exotic. They married and moved to Camarillo, where Tiny was born. After finishing medical school, he began to fall apart. He didn’t really want to be a doctor. The marriage unraveled. Violently. When he broke her arm, Dee took Tiny and left. Thrown back into poverty, she struggled to stay afloat. She managed to get a masters degree in social work from Fresno State and for two and a half years held a job as a case worker in a Catholic group home. She was laid off when the funding got cut. It was to be her last job. She had a complete psychological and physical breakdown.

From then on it was up to Tiny to keep herself and her mother alive. She learned to forage and scheme and pretend to be older than she was. She dressed up in her “rent-starter” outfit to beg landlords to rent them a place with no credit and the promise that a check was in the mail. Eviction followed eviction. They moved from Los Angeles, to Mexico, to Santa Monica, to Venice Beach.

In Venice Beach they screened Teddy bears on T-shirts and hawked them on the boardwalk. A month of rain killed their profits. Evicted one more time, they packed all their possessions in an old clunker and drove north to Berkeley. In Berkeley they sold their Teddy bear shirts on Telegraph Avenue and lived for a time in their car. It was cold. “Blankets on top of Goodwill-purchased blankets were piled on our already overdressed bodies, crunched behind protruding steering wheel, gear stick and dashboard and still, minute corners of inexplicably exposed skin would catch the icy drifts of air from the black California nights.” It’s illegal to “inhabit a house car” in Berkeley, and in no time Tiny and Dee had amassed a huge number of tickets for what Tiny calls “DWP”—driving while poor. Warrants were issued. Tiny was picked up, put in jail and got sentenced to do gazillion hours of community service. More evictions followed.

In adversity the bond between mother and daughter grew fierce and unbreakable. Love does not adequately describe their relationship. There was too much need and dependency. It was almost as if the umbilical cord that once united mother and daughter had never been cut. Tiny fiercely rejects the assumption that the child’s passage to adulthood must involve her differentiating herself from her mother and she would fiercely reject the suggestion that life flowed in only one direction through the cord that bound them together. She would not, could not abandon her mother, “without whom,” as she writes, “there would be no me.” She credits her indomitable will to her mother:

My mother . . .taught me that nothing was ever too hard to do when it came to people, community and advocacy; as a matter of fact nothing was ever too hard to do in life. Period. If it had to be done then it must be done, unless you are deathly ill and even then it was somehow accomplished. This unrelenting work ethic and refusal to accept defeat or failure was one of the crazy wonderful things that my mother infused into me. Survival was just something you always did, no matter what.

I have a homeless friend, Jimbow the Hobow, who’s lived out on the Albany landfill. He’ll relate to me a litany of his latest woes, but invariably conclude “I'm not trying to sell you a snivel sheet.” Tiny’s memoir is not a snivel sheet. At times she imagined suicide. At other times, the childish demanding, complaining, indomitable mother and her adultish, resourceful daughter would collapse in laughter, reimagining their lives as a living theater of the absurd, finding common ground in fantasy.

On the Venice Boardwalk they sat on folding chairs next to a cardboard “Depressed Box.” “Give us a dollar,” they announced to passersby, “and we’ll tell you how depressed we are.” In Berkeley they transformed the windows of a squatted storefront into a series of art installations. “The Phobia Support Group” was a collection of cut-out cartoon characters who all suffered from severe phobias and met on a 24-7 basis around a table in the window. “Fear of the Marketplace” was a collection of haphazard items for sale with a sign “Throw in your money and we will throw out the product.”

Dee was born Mary Jo and Tiny had been Lisa, but on their drive north from Venice Beach they abandoned their given names “and the myth of Dee and Tiny was born in what seemed to be a journey of life-imitating-art-imitating-life, tragedy-be-coming-reality-becoming some kind of strange performance art piece. . . . or maybe it was just a really long and miserable drive.” The myth of their lives, punctured and battered by reality, sustained them. Art had far more to do with their survival than charity and social services.

Tiny did more than survive. She proudly and rightly proclaims: “Mine is not only a story of survival, but of triumph.” Having taken up residence in the Bay Area, Dee and Tiny began auditing classes at San Francisco State. They had the good fortune to meet extraordinary teachers. In Mina Caulfield’s anthropology class they learned about the resistance of colonized people to their oppression. Tiny came to see the impossible life she and her mother were living in the context of the issues facing poor people around the world. Theirs was not just a struggle for survival. It was a battle for justice.

Newly energized, Tiny turned all the skills she learned keeping herself and her mother alive to founding a series of extraordinary community enterprises. A powerful organizer was born. She began with Poor, a glossy full color magazine, intended to be the voice of the poor as Fortune is the voice of the rich. With Dee at her side, she started Poor News Network, and the Po’ Poets Project, and a job training program for media activists, and a radio program, all devoted to the proposition that poor people are the experts on their own lives. Tiny believes they should be respected as “poverty scholars” and she aims to let their voices be heard.

Criminal of Poverty is by turns funny and heart-rending. It should be required reading for anyone even thinking about passing new laws criminalizing the homeless. Ross MacDonald famously described Raymond Chandler as writing about the “sun-blinded streets” of Los Angeles “like a slumming angel.” Tiny, whose formal education ended with the sixth grade, writes like an angel. But she’s not slumming.

Full disclosure: Tiny mentions Osha Neumann in her acknowledgements, and devotes a chapter to their meeting. Neumann is on the Board of Poor Magazine.

CRIMINAL OF POVERTY: GROWING UP HOMELESS IN AMERICA

By Tiny, aka Lisa Gray-Garcia. City Lights Foundation.