Close Your Eyes

None of my new friends at Penn knew I lived in a car each summer.

By Caren Lissner

Three weeks after my freshman year of college ended in 1990 and I said goodbye to my new friends at Kings Court—after we’d hugged and packed up turntables, newfangled CD players, personal computers, and a few typewriters—I was sitting in the back of my mom’s Plymouth Duster in a strip mall parking lot in Woodstock, New York, watching heat lightning silently flash green and blue across the sky.

The radio said a tornado watch had been issued for Sullivan and Ulster counties. I waited for the sky to open up. A few wet spots appeared on our windshield.

“Try to get some sleep,” my mom said, up front.

My brother, dog, and I were crowded into the back seat amid boxes of our belongings. Just like the past three summers, we were sleeping in her car.

Ever since she’d gotten divorced when I was in junior high, my mom had rented a slew of cheap places for us to live, sometimes month to month while searching for a more permanent arrangement. The last one had been in a Jersey Shore town, but the rent was about to spike for summer. My mom thought she might find a cheap bungalow in the Catskills, where the resorts were dying.

But she hadn’t started looking for a new place until days before the last lease ended—a constant source of frustration for me. During high school I kept a calendar and repeatedly reminded her of deadlines, but we still often ended up in our car or cheap motels. I started school assignments well in advance and handed them in days before the due date in case emergencies arose, and I was a stickler for deadlines as a student newspaper editor. I’d been in enough desperate situations to avoid them any way I could.

Most of our furniture was in storage in New Jersey, but many of my dorm belongings were beneath my feet: notebooks, clothes, the stereo that had kept me sane. As heat lightning flickered, I wore my Walkman headphones, listening to tapes I’d made from friends’ records freshman year. I hoped to distract myself from the possibility that I could be sleeping in the car for three months.

Music was one of the main things my floormates and I had bonded over freshman year. The defining dynamic of 1980s radio was that Top 40 stations would play a hit song over and over until everyone got sick of it, then never play it again. If you didn’t buy the record when it was out, you might go years without catching an old favorite on the radio.

By the time my peers arrived at the University in the last months of 1989, we furiously passed around tapes of tunes we hadn’t heard since our adolescence and admired the guy on our floor who had a multiple-bay CD player.

Freshman year was in fact a year of constant sharing, but there were some things we held back. On the third floor of Kings Court English College House, we talked about relationships or the lack thereof (some of us had never been on a date, be it because we were shy or sheltered), our class ranks and SAT scores (nerdy but true), and our parents’ divorces. Yet there was much about classmates’ families I only found out years later. I certainly didn’t tell them, as the year wound down and they talked about summer jobs in their hometowns, that I had no idea where I was going.

And I didn’t have the language yet to explain what was happening. For years, my mom had told me the FBI was out to get her—but sometimes they wanted to hire her. She would land a new job and be excited about it, then quit because someone was talking about her. She bought things we couldn’t afford and often ran out of money before the end of the month. I didn’t understand the reasons behind her decisions. I’d try to argue, but a funny smile would cross her face and she’d say I knew what was going on.

It pained me that I wanted to be a writer but never could find the words to dislodge her ideas.

If there was an upside, it was my realization during high school that studying could lead to college and four years of stability. While teens can’t control much, studying was something I could control. If I could find a quiet corner of a motel room to memorize English vocabulary words, I took it. I applied to Penn, got an acceptance letter along with financial aid, and said yes.

For all the rhetoric about college being “elitist,” I met many people who similarly saw it as a way out of a confusing or unstable situation, who used it as a goal to keep them going through high school. I met kids freshman year whose parents worked in minimum wage jobs or hadn’t finished high school. But at some point they’d connected with that one teacher or adult who told them that if they focused on their strengths, college might expose them to new opportunities.

I loved my little room in Kings Court. I loved the clink of my own key in the lock and loved my phone number: 573-TUKI. I called myself “Tuki Typing” based on the number and stuck flyers on campus offering to type people’s papers for a buck a page. Many people took me up on that (amid the obligatory prank calls). And I loved my work-study job doing dorm publicity. In fact, I applied to be dorm publicity manager for sophomore year and got the job. That meant I would stay in Kings Court for another year, but first I had to get through the summer of 1990.

On that June night in the parking lot, I wrote letters on lined paper to floormates in Maryland, Milwaukee, and Chicago.

“Stop moving around,” my mom told us. “Close your eyes.”

I didn’t mention my situation in my letters, since homelessness carried a huge stigma in the 1980s. Once, while returning to school on a train after a break, I heard a man sitting behind me tell his adult children, “There’s no reason for anyone to be homeless. They have all these programs for them.” I wanted to turn around and suggest that the situation was more complicated, but I didn’t.

And my year at Penn had also opened my eyes to how lucky I was. Two of my floormates and I had volunteered each week at the “Friday Night Meal,” a soup kitchen inside a church on 43rd Street. The crack epidemic was in full swing, and I saw poverty and illness all around. One time I watched a man freeze in place as he brought his fork to his mouth. At least my situation was temporary, I thought—although I wasn’t sure about my mom. (Years later, she’d end up sleeping on the streets and subways of Manhattan, but that’s for another day.)

In the back of the car I yearned for stability, and I yearned for a shower, but what I wanted most desperately was to go back to being the helper—the soup kitchen volunteer—instead of the person needing help.

My dad lived with his new wife and kids a few hours away, and I could stay there briefly, but there wasn’t much room for me, and it carried other complications. It wasn’t a long-term solution.

The radio announcer told us in her quiet voice that the tornado watch had been extended until 8 p.m. I didn’t see much happening. But we were in a strip mall and I noticed a glowing light from the used record store. I asked my mom If I could go.

Her decisions could be unpredictable.

“Fine,” she said.

I weaved through the store, relishing my freedom. The albums had three price tiers: 29 cents (usually scratched), 59, and 99. I bought albums I remembered from elementary school: Michael Jackson, the Clash, even Devo.

Three months, I told myself as I paid with change. In three months I’ll be back in Kings Court, playing the records in my room. Maybe next spring I’d apply for one of those Residential Living jobs that allowed you to stay in the dorm a few weeks longer. Maybe I’d earn extra money to help my mom, I thought.

A week later, Mom found a crumbling bungalow colony near the town of Liberty, New York. I slept on a mattress on the floor and the felt cool mountain air shoot through a broken screen. A new song topped the charts that month, “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips, and I tried to memorize the lyrics: Hold on for one more day…

September came and I returned to Kings Court. I put my stereo on the desk and finally played the records I’d picked up that summer. I was ready to learn about Shakespeare and economics and politics. But mostly, I wanted to learn while knowing I had a stable place to come home to.

Caren Lissner C’93 is working on a memoir, How We Became Homeless: A Cringy Chronicle Of Downward Mobility. Find more of her writing at carenlissner.com.