How Clouds Are Made
“Once you’ve lived it, you kind of develop a sixth sense about it,” explains Jim. He is six foot, maybe taller, balding, and is less concerned with specific dates or minute details. “There’s people like this all around you, but you don’t even know it.” He speaks at an easy pace, and doesn’t seem to realize he believes his own words until they’re hanging in the air.
“There are certain things,” adds Ellen, “but it’s usually the dirty shoes that give them away.” She emits a high-pitched, surprisingly young-girlish cackle, only cackle isn’t the right word. That’s for witches.
We’re sitting outside of a small sandwich café in a chilling breeze. Over the course of a few sliders, two cups of decaf with cream, and a hot cider, Jim and Ellen, in their matching forest-green jackets, candidly recount difficult circumstances and minor triumphs.
What you have to do, they go on to explain, is never pop your head up. If someone sees your head suddenly pop up, you’re dead. What has to happen is, you wake up at dawn before anyone else. And just in case someone does happen to see you getting up, make it look like you were bending over to the passenger’s side to pick something up—and you should actually grab something, just in case—and not make it look like you had been sleeping. And before you even get up, never have your windows rolled down all the way, because when cops do their rounds at night flashing their lights, it looks suspicious. Ellen also says how keeping a jar with a lid is useful in case you have to—you know—in the middle of the night.
And most importantly, Ellen says, with her head cocked liked Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange, make sure you never become institutionalized. Jim nods his head.
These are the things you learn after years of being homeless.
Blend in
“You pull into any neighborhood and somebody’s watching. A strange car pulls into the neighborhood and ‘What’s it doing here? How come the guy hasn’t got out?’ That kinda thing. You don’t wanna bother with that.”
After parking near a mountain-biking trail, Jim explains, “You take a helmet, you take a bike, and some other associated riding paraphernalia. Get out of your car and lean the bike up against it and set your helmet there and everything, and as far as anybody knows, you’re off taking a leak in the bushes or something and the cops drive right by without paying attention to it. Meanwhile, you’re out hidden somewhere, taking a shower, taking a bath.”
With a grin, Jim says, “Rubbermaid had made a little wheelbarrow, but they made it out of—it’s not a plastic—but it’s very similar to plastic.” So he bought one, took off the wheels and placed it in the bed of his truck. “I didn’t have to plug the holes because they were blind holes. The screws only went up so far, they didn’t actually go through the thing. It holds water and everything, you know. Well, I used my ingenuity enough to know that warm water’s better than cold water.”
So Jim, with a bunch of quarter-inch copper pipe, which they use for refrigeration he says, he wraps it around the exhaust pipe on his truck. He rests his forearms on the sandwich wrapper to stop the wind from blowing it up and away. Miming the coiled pipe, he twiddles his pointer fingers and slows his speech. “And it took a long time to do that. I think I laid underneath my truck for a couple of hours, and I would just twist it and keep twisting it ‘til I had this coil of copper pipe all down my exhaust.”
Smiling, his mustache obscuring a few missing teeth, he says, “I took an aquarium pump—they run on 12 volts, okay. Get yourself one of those—not one of the ones that you plug into the wall—and you hook that to the battery and that pumps the water.”
Via the copper piping, the 12-volt pump would suck water out of the wheelbarrow and spit it back in. “Turn on the switch,” Jim says, “and it would run the water around the exhaust pipe (you had to drive somewhere) but while you were driving somewhere it would just keep circulating, heating the water. It would go into the little wheelbarrow bathtub and into the little copper pipe and back in until it would be steaming.”
All mustache and smile, “I got that thing so hot that you couldn’t touch it,” Jim says. “You couldn’t touch it at all.”
Bluff
Shoulders slumped, Ellen says how one night, when she was sleeping in her van at an apartment parking lot, some kid comes along blaring his car stereo. “And of course, the cops come over, flashing their lights and they’re talking to him. The thing is, if I look right out my back window, a cop was standing right there and I thought ‘Oh frick, if he just doesn’t turn around and look.’ ”
She smacks the table with her palm and says, “And sure enough he did. I hear the tap, tap, tap on my window and so I acted like he woke me up.” Ellen rubs her face like she’s in a Neutrogena commercial and says, “I roll my window down and say ‘Yes, officer?’ ”
The officer asks what she’s doing and Ellen says—lying—she says, “Well, here’s the thing. I told my boyfriend who’s in the apartment here, that if he’s going to drink I’m sleeping in the car. Because I’m not sleeping with him. He’s pissed me off!”
Smiling, Ellen continues, “And the cop said, he says, ‘God, what is it lately? This seems to be happening a lot!’ ” And Ellen continues smiling, a beautiful smile, the way they do in the commercials.
“That’s the underbelly of the Silicon Valley, you go with some of these startups and some of them make it—they do quite well, they pre-IPO, ya know, that whole thing. And then there’s many (and most of which I was with) that go under.”
In the 80s and 90s, Ellen did sourcing, recruiting, and administration work for many high-tech startups. Wiley Labs, Disabled Programmers Inc., Coastline Technical Sales, Applied Materials and more. At one company, Ellen made it through three layoffs—and she was the last one hired.
Taming the wind, she wrangles her hair with her pointer finger. She sweeps her hair behind her ears revealing etched wrinkles—which she has enough of by the way, thank you very much—Ellen says, “Another company I was with ended up transferring—relocating—to Larksburg.” She frowns and says, “Well I couldn’t relocate to Larksburg because I was living in Morgan Hill and that was when my dad started showing signs of Alzheimer’s.”
Ellen left the job market to care for her father; Silicon Valley went on without her. Younger people went to school, did internships, got degrees, masters, and worked in her place. Tech startups rose and fell without her. Others were established and continued to grow.
Nine years later, Ellen’s father dies. She returns to the job market, with no degree, and no family left. “My resume kept showing just one year here, two years here, a year and a half there. And none of them were my fault. I didn’t do anything wrong here.”
Later, Ellen chanced into a job managing an apartment complex for some time, and during the summer of 2008, when California hit record temperatures, she got into an argument with her boss—in which she defended tenants’ rights to install air conditioners—and he ended up forcing her out of her apartment. Ellen has been living in a van ever since.
Avoid institutionalization
“In the movie Shawshank Redemption,” Ellen says, “One of the greatest lines—or kinda monologue—that Morgan Freeman has is talking about Brooks, and that is the guy who had been there for 50 years, and when he had got out he ended up hanging himself. And none of the guys could understand. ‘Why would he kill himself?’ ”
Ellen adopts a slower, authoritative voice. She raises her right hand slightly, and says, “ ‘You know, when you first get here, you’re sitting here and you hate these walls. You’re here long enough and’ ” —Ellen, hand still in the air, she sweeps air molecules slightly to the left, suggesting time passing, then continues, “ ‘you get used to them. You’re here long enough’ ” and Ellen, sweeping more molecules, says, “ ‘you depend on them. You become institutionalized.’ ”
“When I was young, the average person could get a job and you could support yourself on it. And you could do it without any extra skills or anything else” Jim says. “I did jobs that more or less don’t exist in the quantities that they used to around here.” He zips up his forest-green jacket. It was $3.60—half-off because it was from the Salvation Army and bought on a Wednesday. It used to be Ellen’s, but Jim really liked it.
“I worked in a machine shop and now you can hardly find a machine shop. We were doing the industrial tail end of the development process and all those things that have now gone overseas. So I worked in those positions and you didn’t need an education. Some guy would show you how to work the machine, tell you what the product should come out like, and you’d find a way to do it. That’s all you’d need. As time went on, I kinda just kept following that philosophy.”
Around the mid 80s, Jim ended up working at a high-end spa retailer in Cupertino. After a few years, he became the backbone of the operations. He was running the delivery crew, directing people in the warehouse and single-handedly coordinating the deliveries. During his employment, the business bloomed. They opened locations in Fremont and Santa Cruz, and bought out a place in San Mateo.
At the end of thirteen years, and working at the same wage he started with, Jim explains, “I was doing the same thing, but for four stores and with miles and miles between them, and it wasn’t working anymore because we still had one truck and one me and they were killing me. They were killing me.”
At this point, upper management demoted Jim and hired an outside guy to take over. Things went downhill fairly quickly. Paperwork was being stuffed in corners of the office and the new hire adopted practices that were burying the company.
Eyes trained at a far distance, Jim says, “I realized they were trying to get out of debt, and they were doing it through bankruptcy.” At no fault of his own, Jim lost his job.
“I went down of course and filed for unemployment. Drove off from the place sitting there wondering ‘What happened? Like what happened?’ I had just been separated from something I believed in. It just left this empty, weird sense of detachment.” De. Tach. Ment. He says it like it’s three words.
Then, Jim moved to Washington for a couple of years and worked at another place that ended up going out of business. He drove back to California in the truck that now doubled as his home and took up the first opportunity he came across: it was a job washing dishes for a new restaurant—located on McClellan Road and Foothill Boulevard, not too far away from where the high-end spa retailer used to be. Jim worked there for a few years and fell into his old ways; he became the backbone of the restaurant—Bruschetta—running the crew, training the staff, coordinating schedules.
“I’ll be darned if I don’t come into work one day and there’s a note on the door that says: JIM—Do Not Go Inside. Call this number,” he says. “And I’m thinkin’ I’m fired. And I’m thinkin’ ‘Why?’ ” Jim shifts in his chair. With his hands around his warm coffee, eyes somewhere else, he says, “I walk over to a phone, pick it up and make the call and it’s the owner’s brother—barely able to speak—and he goes, ‘Wes is inside and he’s dead.’ I looked over at Wes’ car and just went into shock. Total shock.”
Wes, the owner, had been inside at his desk, arguing on the phone with a vendor over a discrepancy of 30 cents. The debate got heated and he died of a heart attack. He was only 34 years old. Jim, heart still working, lost a job for the third time in his life. And at no fault of his own.
Jim, with a bend at his elbow, he points his finger to the sky and starts drawing circles. Stirring the air, he says, “There’s little pockets all over this valley where I drive by and I go ‘Hey, I used to have this existence here and I had this existence there. Four years of my life here, thirteen over there.’ ” The air still swirling, he says “and the whole time, you’re getting older…I end up working in a gas station kiosk, five in the morning, going ‘How did I end up here?’ ”
Utilize your resources—properly
“You can keep a cooler,” Jim explains, “but then you have to figure out a way to get your ice for free. A place where you can get refills. A place like AM/PM who allows refills might let you have some of the ice. But whatever you do, don’t keep the cooler in your trunk because it’s hotter in the trunk.”
“I had been at Robert’s Deli,” Ellen says, “up in Woodside, and had picked up a turkey sandwich on a croissant and it was really cold weather so I finished half and put the other half in the trunk thinking, ‘Oh gosh it’s so frickin’ cold, it’ll hold there right?’ ”
Ellen shrugs and says that she then went into the little sandwich place where she worked at a few hours a week, and the manager showed her, Ellen, ex-high-tech administrator, how to work the register. “I got all the customers to laugh, goin’ ”—and she mimics poking at a keyboard one finger at a time—“I’m new at this! Just bear with me!” She emits the first note of her signature non-cackle, then droops her head and her voice and says, “Oh god it was so pathetic. I hated it.”
“So the place starts to slow down and we close and I go out and get the other half of my sandwich. So I’m sittin’ in my car and I take a couple of bites and I thought, ‘This tastes kinda funny.’ And then I got busy and I wasn’t eating and all of a sudden—” Ellen clutches her middle and balls up and says, “my stomach starts not feeling well. I thought ‘Maybe it’s the onions or something like that.’ ”
Ellen unclenches and rolls her eyes and goes, “So anyway, my stomach is just gurgling—and gurgling— and all of a sudden…” Ellen pauses and leans in. “It wants to go out the other end. And I’m thinkin’ ‘What the frick am I gonna do?’ ”
She leans back and says, “Well number one, Los Altos Library has a bathroom that’s open 24 hours a day. Lotta homeless people walk around there, but everyone’s pretty respectful. You know, the homeless in Los Altos—they are just characters, you know. In fact one of them just passed away and I went to his memorial.”
“Anyway, so I thought ‘Oh my gosh, can I make it there?’ because I’m really starting to feel it and this is not just a little upset stomach. So I got there, fell apart there and I’m starting to feel it come out this way,” and Ellen drops her jaw and mimics her fist exploding, palm up.
“It’s around 11 o’clock now and I get down to the AM/PM. I went in and bought Gatorade… It wasn’t helping. And I thought—” and Ellen looks genuinely worried now, “ ‘What the flip am I gonna do?’ because now I’m starting to vomit.”
Lowering her tone and slowing her speech, she says, “I get to a Motel 6, I spend the last of my money. Get up to the room and vomited and diarrhea,” and even slower, she says, “for nine hours I was sicker than sick. I thought, ‘Let me die.’ I’m lying there on the floor of the bathroom thinking ‘I have no money. I have no family. How am I gonna make it through the next couple of weeks?’ ”
Let it rain
“You have to understand, there’s nothing worse than that feeling of being alone. The feeling that you have when you realize, you know, you’re in trouble and you have no connection… The words ‘I have no family—’ it’s just…” and Jim inhales. Then he exhales. “It is the most intensely strange place to be in.”
“Basically, water molecules—that we all need to survive—are in existence all around us. The fresh water that we drink is created through filtering. Part of the filtering system is the fact that when molecules are heated up—and the sunlight does that—they begin to get excited. The electrons begin to circle the atoms faster and faster and they begin to become literally lighter than air. You don’t see it, but—” and Jim points his finger again, stirring the air, he explains, “there’s moisture here. A possible cloud all around us. The fact that it’s lighter, makes it rise, and it rises and rises until it reaches a point where it starts to cool off. That cooling causes condensation. And when it does it enough, you start to see it, and a cloud is formed.”
“If it gets even colder, molecules will grab together even more and form a droplet, and if it happens even more they become heavy enough to a point where the air can’t support ‘em and they come down in the form of rain. It returns to the earth, filters through the rocks and the soil and so forth and returns to the ocean… It just continually happens.”
Find a quiet place
About the cemetery, Ellen says, “I’d clean out the water holders of residents. If the flowers were real, I’d make sure to clip the ends and replace the water. If they were fake flowers, I’d wipe them off to give the bouquet a bit more luster. I’d throw the ball for my dog Jessie, or nap on my blanket next to my mother’s grave. I’d tell her about my day, I’d confess my fears, I’d cry my regrets, and I’d tell her I wished we’d met.”
“Not that this thing weighs a ton, but—” he says, and seals his sandwich in his backpack with a zip. He crumples his coffee cup as he rises to full height, and Jim says, with the wind blowing in his face, “Take this—throw it away” and carefully places the cup in the trashcan.
He explains how he was recently enrolled in aviation courses at a community college about an hour away from his mother’s house, where he’s currently living. About his classmates and professors, “Everybody loved him,” says Ellen, proud and glowing, like in the commercials. “He was getting A’s.”
But then he had to drop out. “We established that I was gonna be pourin’ $2,700 worth of gas in my van a semester… I was gonna graduate, but be totally broke. And be what? 59 years old…I decided I’m gonna cut my losses. I know what being broke meant.” It meant coiling more quarter-inch copper piping.
“What I’m dying for, to be honest with you, is I’d love to have something that just won’t go away.”
Jim and Ellen, they’re walking along searching for a place away from the wind. The two of them, wearing matching green jackets, he walks in front of her, preventing her long brown hair from whipping her face.
They’ve been engaged since September of last year.
matthewbaltar
The Sampler 
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