I’m wearing a luxurious champagne-colored silk wrap dress as a bathrobe on a weekday morning in Spring 2018.
The air in Los Angeles is crisp and the breeze gently teases my drapes. It’s the first quiet day after a particularly draining week and I’m finally enjoying some needed peace and self-care.
I start my day by washing my face and painting my toenails in front of my large, framed Pottery Barn mirror. I spray conditioner in my tangled hair and put it up in a scrunchie.
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I pull a bottle of argan oil from Trader Joe’s from my medicine cabinet and collect a few drops on the palm of my left hand when I hear a commotion coming from next door.
I pull back my black-and-white zigzagged MISSIONI for IKEA curtains (which perfectly match the duvet cover on my floating bed and MISSONI for Target cruiser bicycle parked out front) to see what looks almost exactly like a full LAPD SWAT team gathering in front of my home. I blink as their walkee-talkees beep and buzz.
I cooly ask them how I can help them and they say they are looking for me.
ME?
One of the cops (a SMART Mental Evaluation Unit officer, which is not a SWAT officer, mainly because he wears khaki pants and his vest says SMART. SMART is apparently not a typo for SWAT) is holding a loaded syringe in a nitrile-blue gloved hand.
I search for eyes that might reveal a soul behind shiny wraparound sunglasses but I only meet the twin reflections of my own terrified face. I haven’t penciled in my eyebrows yet, so maybe I don’t look petrified. I try not to seem scared, but my voice trembles and I feel like peeing all of the sudden. I hold it.
I keep my eyes on the mystery injection and tell them as seriously as I can: please don’t drug me.
They are here to hospitalize me, they say. But I’m not sick, and since when would it be police business if I were? I ask if I can go to a hospital myself and if I am being accused of a crime right now.
Not an option, they say, and no.
I say I could ride my bike to the nearest ER. They can follow me. I won’t run. I have no reason to. I’m not “wanted”. They would know.
Nope. You’re coming with us.
The weight of what is happening hits me like a brick wall when the social worker introduces herself. She says she’s worried about me because of some things that people said to her over the phone. I ask if any of those people are here right now. They are not. I ask her if they are in another State. They are. I ask if she’s hearing herself right now. She blinks.
I tell her I don’t like what is happening, and I don’t like her, and that I am fairly certain that what is happening to me is not constitutional.
The social worker says family is worried and I tell her to stop talking about me behind my back. LAPD SMART shackles my hands…behind my back. I tell her it’s the first time I’ve been handcuffed and ask her what sick kind of “worry” is assuaged by terrorizing a family member with ambush and arrest?
I ask her when worrying people became a real crime in California, or if this is a federal issue and I ask the cops if this is what they have resorted to doing with their time now that weed is legal here. I ask if they investigated the matter because if they did they would know that I texted my brother that I was sorry for being ghost, and I that I had seen him just last month. Right here. We had dinner.
They say I absconded from my housing and I tell them I was threatened with eviction. I tell them all that they are unnecessarily giving me trauma right now. I ask anyone how in the world I can make this stop. No one responds.
I ask if this is America because I’m not doing crime or even bothering anyone. I’m not hurting myself or others. I’m trying to do self-care right now, or I was, before they barged in uninvited. Rude.
My rose gold wrap dress opens, exposing my naked chest, covered in goosebumps in the spring breeze as metal cuffs squeeze my tiny trembling wrists tightly together behind me, unable to cover myself. Tears stream down my face and my damp hair sticks to my snotty nose. I try to illustrate the point that my forced nudity is probably a crime like indecent exposure. No one ever asks who let the bulls in china shop in the first place or if they were authorized to deliver delicate mental healthcare on unsuspecting targets. I realize now why they need big guns, because springing bad-faith, short-sighted interventions on fragile humans is dangerous business.
In a matter of minutes, I’ve gone from Lady Liberty to Lady Godiva, from a whole elder millennial human into E.T. when the people from the government come.
The cops think it’s funny that they can see my breasts and I’m squirming and everyone’s struggling to remain composed, but I am the one failing fastest, as intended.
In this exact moment, I am actually wishing I could instantly stop existing, but I am not suicidal. I desperately want to rapture out of their gaze, leaving an empty silk robe and handcuffs behind in a heap on the dirt. Then, as soon as possible, I’d like to go back to finishing my bath alone in my home. The water has probably gone cold already.
I come to the unfortunate realization that I am the only one who is not “just doing my job” here. I am not getting paid to hurt anyone. I figure they must get paid a lot if the manage to sleep at night after a day of depriving people of their civil rights.
After accepting that Ihave no rights or authority over anyone in this scenario, I know that must submit completely, or I’ll make it harder on myself. I could get sedated or injure myself against the restraints or worse. It’s a serious struggle because total submission is a betrayal of my finely-tuned survival instincts. I wonder what these people know about survival. They probably think you can order it in a catalog.
This unexpected, forced physical domination and the mental trauma of having my birthrights revoked indefinitely under unclear terms by County workers and LAPD, on top of my already precarious (but until now, stable and relatively healthy) living situation — broke me, purposefully.
I beg them for the “privilege” of being “allowed” to wear my own blue jeans to walk out of my “home”, where I am strapped onto a waiting gurney and driven somewhere I’ve never been before.
Why me? Why now? What for? How long? How?
I should clarify that I am a homeless “unhoused”person, but I was not quite roofless at the time this happened in 2018.
My home was in an upscale suburb of the City of Los Angeles. It was under a freeway, next to a river, and nestled behind a private school, a temple, and a sports bar.
I lived there for almost a year before Caltrans eventually removed me, including immediately after this violent extraction/brief interruption by LAPD SMART and DMH. It ultimately resulted in my being discharged right back to my “bridge home” (which I believe was technically a viaduct) several hours later, but carrying all-new heavy traumas that I am obviously still unpacking.
Under the “bridge”, I had a 3-walled “room” in the very back, in which a large bed had been installed cleverly so that it was “floating” over a dirt floor. On the floor, repurposed rolls of discarded carpets had been laid down with channels dug underneath so that occasional rainwater could find the way down to the hillside after running off the highway and down the back wall of my room like a waterfall. Everyone used to come over from the other spots to escape from the rain. I still miss that spot whenever it rains.
Perched up on a DIY platform on the steel catwalk of the bridge was my private room, which had a copper-colored sequined curtain, candle holders, a small mattress and pillows, and a faux-furry rug. I had a bookshelf with my favorite sci-fi titles, which I had obtained for free from the trash after LACC’s weekly swap meet at Vermont and Santa Monica.
I enjoyed a Batman comic book, Circus McGurkus by Dr. Seuss and a summarized American history book my neighbor liked to read aloud when he would come over to visit from his spot nearby and smoke weed. I kept several art books which I inherited from a couple who was being chased around on the other side of the highway by CHP.
I had several diaries, a sketchbook where I drew portraits of people in ballpoint (not my preferred media, but available, and I was getting quite good at it) and colored pencils which I constantly sharpened on both ends. I had a jewelry box with my birth records in it and IKEA storage units where I kept my clothing.
I used to read Girl, Interrupted and Prozac Nation when I was living a more outwardly “normal” life. As in, I could sometimes pass or “blend in”, but inside, I often felt liked I could never afford to live in this world, and like what little I had could be lost at any instant.
I was really good at math, so I didn’t just think these things. I knew them, very matter-of-factly. I was a vibrating ball of anxiety hiding existential depression behind a nervous smile. But I had maintained hope that I would find a solution to these problems. I believed I could carve out a place where I belonged, and I never let go of that hope fully.
I struggled a lot and I made a lot of changes. I left a marriage that turned abusive and quit a hardcore drug addiction. I moved across the country and worked my ass off doing dangerous labor while homeless. I walked away from a sex trafficking scenario. And now, now that I finally could afford my life, and no one should be able to take it away from me, I was in a pretty good place.
I had a community of friends who helped me get what I needed. I was clothed, well-fed (getting Whole Foods’ hot bar leftovers regularly) and sheltered. I could finally sustainably afford to exist without doing crime.
I wasn’t tiptoeing around volatile providers or getting ripped off by abusive employers. I wasn’t being a burden. And somehow it was being taken away from me. Or I was being taken away from it, in an ambulance and restraints, without my diary, birth certificate, cash, or jewelry. I was lucky to have been permitted to wear my jeans and shoes with laces. And when I was released and the busses had stopped, I had to find my way back home all alone in the dark without my knife, mace or even a map or damn compass, I felt like I was really truly in danger…
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