David K.

On burning

Image from NYT

There’s been an explosion of houselessness in my hometown, which is just down the road from Paradise, the hamlet that burned to the ground in the devastating Camp Fire. Last night, my mom and I went on a walk along the kudzu-lined channel that wends past her house, noting where new tents and encampments are appearing.

As long as I can remember, people have lived in that channel, which is rocky and dry most of the year. It’s cool in the summer and protected during our mild winters, unless it’s surging with water from the foothills, though it doesn’t do much of that anymore; global warming has changed things. It rains much less here than it did when I was a child, which means it’s possible to live down under bridges and among the undergrowth full time, or almost.

I’ve noticed a shift in my mom’s politics over the years, and flatter myself to think that some of it is due to conversations she’s had with me and my younger sister, K—although we can’t take more credit than the radicalizing effects of disaster capitalism’s impact on our hometown, or her 35 years of navigating a bureaucracy designed to punish poor people, first as a single parent on welfare, and then as the parent of a child with disabilities.

My mom talked about programs that she admires in other places that she wishes could come to our town—like not requiring sobriety to offer services or work programs—describing harm reduction without using the term, which I don’t think she knows. For now, the city has put out portapotties where groups of houseless people live, and a moratorium on cops stealing or destroying their property. It’s better here than in a lot of places, and even this has been mightily fought for.

There aren’t many hotels here, and fewer empty buildings because when the fire displaced 35,000 people, many of them came down the road to our town.

But surely, I said, there was still empty housing, developers sitting on houses waiting for someone to pay their inflated prices? Why couldn’t the houseless be given rooms or homes otherwise empty? This was more of a rhetorical question on my part. Despite the courageous people seizing empty housing in the middle of a pandemic, I know what’s happening in places like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“Well, they’ll never do it,” said my mom. “They don’t want to get sued.” If someone moves in and gets hurt or dies, the city will be on the hook. In her opinion, the issue is one of potential liability. The city simply won’t risk the cost.

What can one do about a system that generates a litigiousness that doesn’t even protect the most vulnerable? I asked, curious to know how she thought one might attempt to fix the system from within. My mom has been working in non-profits since I was 10. She knows a lot about local politics. There was a time when her tireless energy and blonde faith in liberalism reminded me a little of Leslie Knope.

She told me a story. 25 years ago, she was sitting in a cafe when a passing waitress tripped and spilled a teapot of boiling water on her exposed left thigh. I remember the burn. As it healed, it bubbled like charred naan, black then red then pink.

Medi-Cal would only cover half of the $200 burn cream my mom needed. She asked the cafe owner to cover the other half. He told her to fuck off. Someone told her about a local lawyer named David K. She went in for a consultation. All she wanted was to not have to pay for her medical treatment, she said. “I saw it happen. It was honestly an accident.”

With her body, David K. told her, my mom could easily get $50k out of the cafe owner. “You’re a single mom with great legs,” he told her. “It’s a shoe-in. You’ll go in there in a short skirt and collect. And couldn’t you use the money?”

My mom was repulsed by him, by the whole thing. “It was an accident,” she kept telling him. As much as she hated the cafe owner, she didn’t want to destroy his business. So she didn’t take David K.’s advice, seeking instead the money for the burn cream and a reimbursement for the $1,200 treatment paid for by Medi-Cal. She won.

“I got the money for my cream and not a penny more,” she said. The cream worked. All these years later, you can still see the outlines of the scar, but just barely. When we drove up to Paradise this week, wildflowers covered the ground; new leaves curled in the wind. If it wasn’t for the missing town and a few black trees, you wouldn’t even know there’d been a fire—the deadliest and most destructive in the state’s history.

A decade after she won her case, I would go to David K.’s house to hang out with his son, Brandon. The K.s lived in a ranch-style development on the other side of the channel, a big, beige micromansion on an umber treelined street. I don’t remember how I ended up there, in his clean but boy-smelling bedroom. There’s a vague impression of stale styrofoam or soft popcorn, maybe an electric guitar in the corner.

I didn’t think Brandon was all that cute, but he was built like I like straight boys to be built—muscled, more linebacker than boxer. I’ve always liked husky boys with big thighs, polo and rugby player types, the kind who can pick you up but often as not want you to fuck their ass and spoon them, even though I tended to date skinny guys when I was still dating straight men; I was less attracted to them physically, but wanted to have a goal body around. Even before I knew that trans people existed, I knew what I wanted to look like.

Brandon was nice, too, and smart, though he looked appealingly stupid. He had yellow hair and a gallic nose, a velvety radio voice. Sick of waiting for him to get up the nerve, I kissed him. I wanted to get it out of the way and see what happened next.

“You punk,” he said, laughing softly. I don’t know why he said that. I think it was meant to be cute or something, but I was embarrassed for him. (Now I’m thinking about the homosexual connotations of the word punk). Shortly after that, I went home.

“It’s funny,” said my mom. Our walk had taken us to the railroad tracks between Cussick and Rio Lindo, where yellow and orange cactus flowers encircled a few sodden tents, an overturned shopping cart. An old woman gazed out over the almond orchards toward Hamilton City, propping her chin on top of a shovel. We all waved.

“I just saw David K. at the grocery store last week,” my mom went on. “Over the avocados. We said hi.” She laughed. “We were both wearing masks.”

David tweets at @k8bushofficial.