Adventures in the Everett shelter, part 1

Ann was crazy. I mean, she was certifiably crazy. I shared a room with her at the Snohomish County Domestic Violence women's shelter in Everett, Washington. This was way back in the fogs of 1990, after I left my abusive girlfriend, A.P.

The big old house in a residential neighborhood of Everett had room enough for about eight women and a raft of children. We had to share rooms, of course. This wasn't the Holiday Inn. The place was comfy, for a domestic violence shelter but it was way out in the boondocks, far from Seattle. Since I didn't drive back then (or now, for that matter), I had to take two very long bus rides from downtown Seattle to the house in Everett. I was fairly new to Seattle, having moved there from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. just nine months previously. Back then, Everett was very rural and "rednecky" and I hated being there because I was constantly worried about being gay-bashed by the local yokels and this fear was well-founded... but that's a story for another time.

Anyway, I initially shared a room with this really cute straight woman named Kris. She was startled to find out I was a lesbian and was a little leery of sharing a room with me until I made it very plain that I didn't mess around with straight women. Why do some heterosexual women assume that a lesbian wants to "do her"? Arrogance! Kris was cute and sweet, though, and eventually we became friends. We were having a great old time and then she got a place of her own, away from her abusive husband and left the shelter. I was very sad to see her go and wondered who I'd have to share the room with next. I didn't have to wait long. About two days later I met Ann. She was an older black woman with a two year old daughter whom she hadn't seen in about a year. She was eccentric as hell and constantly muttered under her breath. We hit it off badly from the get-go and things between us went from worse to horrible in no time flat. The first thing she did when I met her: She threw my clothes off my bed and claimed it for herself.
"I can't be sleeping without my back to the wall! This here bed is mine now!" she snarled at me as she rummaged through her four large garbage bags. I was too intimidated to protest but inwardly I seethed. I liked sleeping next to the wall. It had a great little space heater that made the attic room nice and cosy in the cold of the Pacific Northwest.
I didn't have many clothes of my own, having fled my abusive situation with hardly any possessions, so I had gone to a thrift store and bought some cheap t-shirts. One particular shirt, my favorite at the time had Mikhail Gorbachev's picture on it and some Russian words about peace and freedom. I liked it because of the bold graphics and text. I didn't care that it had Gorbachev's picture on it. Well, Ann certainly had words to say about it. I was taking my turn cooking dinner for the house and she stomped downstairs and slammed into the kitchen with my t-shirt in her hands. She waved it in front of me and yelled,
"What's this Commie rag doing in your clothes! I ain't sharing no room with no Commie! I'm gonna throw it in the trash!" and she headed across the room to toss it in the garbage can. I grabbed her wrist and shouted at her to give me my shirt back. Well, I got in all kinds of trouble for grabbing her and also, during our scuffle, calling her a bitch. I lost my temper, to be sure. We both got sent to the administrator's office and I got a verbal warning for putting my hands on her and calling her a name. She was written up for taking someone's property and attempting to destroy it. That certainly had the house buzzing with excitement. I made my dinner and everyone ate it except for Ann who was sulking in our room.
Life continued in the house. DeeDee called her husband and went back to him for a few days until she came to her senses and returned, sporting a new black eye. Graciella and her four boys hung around the house, not speaking a jot of English and constantly commandeering the television for "MacGuyver". But she sure could cook! The women who ran the house were all too familiar with Graciella and her sons. She had been in and out of this particular D.V. shelter several times over the years. This time around, Jorgé, her oldest son had his leg in a cast. His father had tried to push Graciella down the stairs and Jorgé had intervened. He went down the stairs instead. The boys didn't do much at the house and they never had to do any of the chores as did the rest of us. They were very macho and would order Graciella around, making her get them snacks and do all their washing. I despised the way Graciella let herself be treated by her sons but was told that that was part of their culture and that Graciella had always kowtowed to the men in her life. I had other problems so I just tried to ignore the creepy feelings I got around her children.
I spent most of my time drawing or writing in my journal. I made the weekly trip to Seattle to see my psychotherapist at her office in Fremont, a trendy neighborhood in Seattle. It was a long-ass bus ride, though. Two buses each direction. My eyes were getting bad and A.P. had destroyed my only pair of glasses. When I traveled at night I could barely see where I was going and so I was always terrified that I would miss my stop in Everett and wind up God-knows-where. So the bus ride back from Seattle was never very soothing. All that calming psychotherapy wasted on the perilous trip home!

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if I should accept my sisters' goodwill and get a bus ticket back to Maryland. Somehow, this always felt like giving up and I resisted it. Seattle was an adventure! Unfortunately, it was not the greatest time I'd ever had in my life, thus far. I had barely a hundred dollars to my name, I was homeless and staying at a domestic violence shelter, I had no friends here, I had no job skills, etc. etc. Perhaps I should've taken my sisters' advice and moved back to the East Coast. But I decided to tough it out, for a little longer, anyway. I was probably in love with my therapist and didn't want to leave Seattle because of that! I certainly wasn't having a very good life, all told. When I first arrived in Seattle on February 14, 1990 I was with A.P., a crazy woman if ever there was one. I got an upper respiratory infection that winter and I had it for nearly eleven years! The entire time I lived in Seattle, I was sick, sometimes very ill indeed. Was it worth it? Anyway, I digress...
Ann's increasingly weird behavior coincided with my popularity at the shelter. Some of the women were just fascinated with me, goggling at me in wonder ever time we had to have group sessions with the shelter therapists. They could not wrap their minds around the fact that I was a lesbian and that I had been in an abusive relationship with another lesbian. One myth they kept trotting out: Women never could hurt other women, we are all too nurturing! Yeah, right. A.P. was a lot of things. Manipulative, mentally ill, obsessive, paranoid, controlling... she also could be, at times, sweet, caring, concerned but only if she thought she could get something from someone by being these things. She was very narcissistic which I only found out by degrees. At the shelter, I was the resident wit, always ready to zap someone with a well-timed pun. I had everyone in tears of laughter. Humor has always been my strong point. And I used it as a mask, my therapist was always telling me. Well, yeah, of course! Better the laughter than the endless crying jags!
So, anyway, Ann was required to go along to these therapy sessions with the rest of us. No one wanted her there because her behavior was always weird, if not downright hostile. She would mutter things under her breath whenever I spoke and the counselor would have to stop me for a minute and say something to her. Everybody else would roll their eyes and sigh. Ann was oblivious to us. Whenever it was her turn to speak, she would mutter even more furiously and blurt out strange things that made even the counselors scratch their heads. She never said anything that could be recognized as coherent speech. Eventually, she just sat in her chair and the counselor would skip right over her. This went on for a few weeks. Around the last week of November I was getting some good news nearly every day and was fairly skipping around the house. I found out that I had been accepted to live at a "transitional housing" program in Seattle. It was run by The Sisters of Providence, a great bunch of Catholic nuns and I had met the program director, Sr. Mary Wilson the week before. We got along like a house on fire and I was so happy to finally have a place to call home for a year or so. I had also gotten some money from Washington state. "G.A.U."-Government Assistance for the Unemployed. It wasn't a whole hell of a lot of money but it was better than nothing. I would get $350/month and my rent at the transitional house would be a measly $120/month. I had also applied for Social Security Disability Benefits and was going through that long, long process. Everything was looking up and I was going to be moving out a few days before Christmas. The only thing that put a damper on my joy was the continuing and escalating problems with Ann. She nearly set our room on fire one day when she put one of her garbage bags in front of the heater and turned it on to the highest setting. I smelled something funny and went in and found the garbage bag melting onto the floor! She would come in late from wherever the hell she went all day, nearly getting locked out by missing the eleven o'clock p.m. curfew. She would stomp upstairs and turn the overhead light on, waking me up. She didn't care. She would then pull out her garbage bags from the closet and rummage through them, muttering under her breath. I would try to sleep through this but one time I did open an eye briefly and found her going through my dresser drawers! After that, I asked for permission to sleep during the day so I could draw and keep an eye on her during the night. The counselors poo-pooed my concerns about Ann but then things started to go very badly wrong in her life and the whole house got in an uproar.



End of Part 1