Everything Is Bullshit: The Greatest Scams on Earth Revealed (18 page)

The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They
call it “The Gap.” It’s the time period between when your years as a working
writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for
when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an
excellent pension plan for writers who have more than seven consecutive years
of service. When I finally hit 65, my WGA pension combined with Social Security
means I should have a comfortable retirement.

I was 46 when I had my last writing job in television. That
meant I faced a
19 year
Gap. As with other writers
facing The Gap, my resume was a problem. I worked as a publishing executive
before becoming a writer. I had a nice, solid resume that showed constant
forward progress in my publishing career from financial analyst to business
manager to circulation director. Which is great… except that progress ended in
1991 and I was applying in 2004.

I sent off resumes and scored occasional interviews. But the
interviewers mainly wanted to hear Hollywood stories and then said, “Thanks
we’ll be in touch.” I don’t blame them. I’d hire the person currently working
in the magazine business instead of the guy who had a lot of amusing stories
about comedy writing but hadn’t worked in a publishing environment for more
than a decade.

By 2008, with the older children off at college or working and
my job prospects bleak, Marina and I decided to separate. She moved to San
Francisco with our two youngest daughters and settled in temporarily with two
of our oldest daughters who worked there. I could no longer even afford to
house myself. I found friends to take in my two remaining high
schoolers
.

And then I became homeless.

Yes, I, David
Raether
, the smart and
funny guy who graduated with honors from college and read thousands of books
and played the piano and went to church and won television awards, was
homeless.

What happens when you hit bottom? I can tell you one thing: you
don’t bounce back. You crawl back, fighting every step of the way. It isn’t a
straight arc back up either; there are dozens of setbacks every step of the
way. And the place you land isn’t anywhere near where you were when you slipped
off the cliff.

In the first days and weeks after I became homeless, I was in a
daze, utterly and completely disoriented. I felt like a boxer staggering around
the ring after a rapid series of blows I didn’t see coming. It took me several
months to figure it all out.

When you become homeless, you face a number of practical issues.
In fact, when you are homeless, all you face are practical issues.

Where am I going to sleep tonight? What supermarket has the best
samples today with the most protein in them? How am I going to deal with
rainstorms dumping water into my usual sleeping spot? I have a job interview; I
have clean clothes, but how can I make sure I don’t smell? These are the issues
you deal with on a daily basis.
Dreary, boring, painful
issues that relate directly to your body.
And that’s because
homelessness is a dreary, boring, and often painful condition.

Your days are very long. The rhythm of work followed by home is
gone. It’s replaced by long stretches of empty time. No company, no
conversation, no deadlines, nothing.

Several years earlier, one of my sons played on a mainly
Hispanic soccer team in Bell Gardens, a working class Hispanic suburb of Los
Angeles. I got to know one of the fathers quite well. He was from Guatemala
City.

“What’s Guatemala City like?” I asked him one day.

“The days are very long in Guatemala City,”
he said.

That was all he said about his life there. And that would
probably be the best description of life as a homeless person. The days are
very long.

In my past life, I spent a typical autumn Saturday reading the
paper and drinking several pots of coffee while working two or three crossword
puzzles. Around 11 a.m., Marina and I would drive one or two or six of the kids
to the farmers' market in the parking lot at Pasadena High School. Then we
would return home and I would come up with an interesting set of reasons for
not working in the yard while settling down on the couch to watch college
football. Several hours later, I’d pour a glass or two of wine as the day
turned into night, watch a movie, and settle into bed. Not much of a day,
really. But when I think of those days now, they seem like some kind of lost
paradise.

***

A
Saturday during my homelessness went like this.

I would wake up around 4 a.m., brush myself off, and wander
around the streets for
awhile
until Starbucks opened.
I'd spend what little money I had on coffee and hope someone left a copy of the
Los Angeles Times
so I could work the crossword puzzle. I'd wait. And
wait. At 10 a.m., the Pasadena Central Library opens. I would walk up there and
surf job websites and send off some resumes and read articles online during my
allotted time until noon, or, if I was lucky, early afternoon.

That was the hard part of the day. I’d be hungry.
Really hungry.
A week since I had a real meal hungry. I'd
walk over to Whole Foods on the Arroyo Parkway, which has good food samples on Saturdays,
grab a cart, and pretend to shop. (It always helps to put some items in the
cart to look the part.) The fruits are by the door – I'd grab a bunch of
orange slices and watermelon chunks. Next I go upstairs to where the muffin
bits and cheese chunks are and gorge as subtly as possible. I'd return the
unpurchased
items to their places in the store and exit.

By then it would be mid-afternoon. I'd dream of lying on a couch
in a warm living room, watching college football. Instead I would walk to another
public library to access the Internet. As the sun sets, I'd head to a
coffeehouse in South Pasadena called
Kaldi
where I
could find someone to talk with. It wasn't the company of loved ones, but they
were decent people who didn't ask too many questions about my circumstances

Night. At 8 p.m. I'd return to the Starbucks. I would find
discarded copies of the
New York Times
and start working the crossword
puzzle. And that was Saturday.

Sundays were the same, and so were Monday and Tuesday and
Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. On public holidays, the libraries closed and
I needed to find someplace else to spend my days. Only the rare job interview
broke the monotony.

Gradually, however, I adjusted. I accepted that I was not going
to have a career anytime soon, but I did need a job. I was not going to own a
house, but I did need to find a place to live. I couldn’t cook or afford
restaurants, but I did need to eat.

After the first few disorienting weeks of homelessness, I got
myself up off the canvas and begin to bob and weave and shake my head. I
sniffed the ammonia capsule of reality and realized that I was in the biggest
battle of my life.

During the nearly 18 months I spent homeless off and on, and
during the ensuing years, I learned that I am more resourceful than I ever
imagined, less respectable than I ever figured, and, ultimately, braver and
more resilient than I ever dreamed. An important tool in my return to life has
been Craigslist. It was through Craigslist that I found odd jobs — gigs,
they often are called — doing everything from ghost-writing a memoir for
a retired Caltech professor who had aphasia to web content writing jobs to
actual real jobs with actual real startups.

Real companies advertise career jobs on Craigslist, but gigs
were a godsend because they didn’t require five years of similar professional
work, recent recommendations, or even a permanent residence. Pay generally ran
between $10 to $15 per hour
.

The
ghost-writing
work was the perfect
example of a Craigslist gig. I
ghost-wrote
for a
professor in his eighties. He had lived a remarkable life: traveling all over
the world, writing dozens of books, and becoming a respected figure in
academia. In his late eighties, however, he suffered a stroke as he began to
write his memoirs. The stroke afflicted him with aphasia, which basically is an
inability to communicate. He couldn’t put together more than a few words at a
time, couldn’t type, and couldn’t write. But his mind was still sharp and he
could read and edit.

So I sat in his office and took notes as he haltingly described
an incident or person he wanted to write about. I would guess at what he was
trying to tell me and if I
was
right, he’d say yes.
And then I’d try to re-narrate the story back to him to verify it. It was
painstaking work, but after two years of occasional afternoons in his office,
we produced a book. He died not long after that, and the book was never
published.

I worked a number of other gigs: I provided editorial content
for a commercial real estate agent’s website, helped high school seniors write
college essays, worked as an office equipment mover, and helped re-organize a
small warehouse.

I got my first Craigslist gig in early 2009. When I managed to
string together a couple of these at the same time, I could save enough money
to rent a room for around $500 a month. Craigslist advertises a nearly endless
supply of rooms available for rent. The situation is always the same: Hey, we
have a roommate who is traveling/away for the semester/in rehab or jail and we
need to rent out a room in our apartment to help pay the rent. You don’t need a
credit report, three references, and a deposit. All you need, usually, is to
show up, look clean, and be willing to move out when the regular tenant returns
from Europe/rehab/jail. I was able to rent a room by late winter of 2009 after
seven months of homelessness. But I was homeless again by summer until I
managed to save enough to rent a room once again in the fall.

These situations can be quite nice, and not too many questions
are asked. I once lived in a house owned by a young Pasadena attorney who was
on a two-month assignment in New York and needed someone to house sit. Some,
however, can be dicey. I came home one day to a ramshackle house in northeast
Pasadena and there was a gun on the kitchen counter. I moved out a couple days
later. I don’t have an intrinsic objection to handguns; I just didn’t want to
live in a place where the other residents were better armed than I was.

Losing my career and home changed my economic circumstances and
day to day
life. But it also upended my priorities. At the
peak of my career, I ferociously pursued my goal of creating a hit TV show. It
was my greatest ambition — and a lucrative one. But after years of
homelessness and isolation, my single greatest desire became company. I wanted
to spend more and more time with family and the people I loved. The goal of
having a hit television show in syndication seemed so uninteresting compared to
sitting across the table from my two daughters in a small apartment that we
shared. Family and love became my top priorities. Everything else seemed
insignificant. I had lost everything else, but these were still my children and
I missed them and they missed me.

This desire led me to one of the most remarkable services on
Craigslist: Rideshare. Rideshare is a refined form of hitchhiking. Let’s say
you want to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco to visit your daughters. On
the Rideshare listings you can find someone making that drive
who
is looking for a rider to pitch in for gas and help with
the driving. Or you can post your own ad: “I’m in Pasadena and want to go to
Berkeley on Saturday. Flexible on time.”

I traveled between Los Angeles and San Francisco a hundred times
and never had a problem. The car could be a bit crowded and the company a bit
irritating, but most of the time I met interesting people: engineers,
scientists, medical students, writers, artists, gallery owners, and guys like
me — traveling to see their families on a budget. Most Rideshares I took
cost about $35, which allowed me to see my now separated family far more than I
would have otherwise.

In the years since I became homeless, Marina and I split up
permanently. As a child, her parents had emigrated from Serbia to Germany, so
she holds German citizenship. All of our children do as well. Germany has a
stronger social safety net, so she decided to return with our two youngest
daughters. They spent their high school years there and received a great
education.

They are now fluent in German, but will return to the U.S. for
college. I managed to find friends to host my children already in high school,
so they could continue attending the same San Marino school. One of my
daughters stayed mostly with one family, but one of my sons lived in fourteen
different homes. Still, they graduated from one of the most elite public high
schools in California, which prepared them for college. I remained active in
their lives by visiting them after school each day, volunteering for school
activities, and disguising my homelessness with my “San Marino disguise.” It is
a community of professionals: doctors, lawyers, and bankers. So whenever I met
my children in a public place, I wore dress slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie.
Friends and parents didn’t need to know I was sleeping in parking garages.