Dead

The Loss of Invisible People

She hated this photo. 

She hated that her nails weren’t clean. They were always black and greasy from working on bikes. She hated that her face was unshaven. 

Come to think of it, this was the first time I had ever seen her with razor stubble. Her body was usually immaculately hairless. 

How did she always stay on top of that while living on the street?

This photo was taken the day her boyfriend torched her tent, with her in it. He burned all her clothes and that really special eye shadow palette, name-brand and barely used. 

Still, she was alive, shaken. A small miracle. 

It is dangerous and hard to be homeless. It is harder still to be an unhoused Mexican trans woman. She was mostly on Sahara Avenue. The guy who owns the lamp and lighting store let her stay there. In fact, she kept an eye on things. She kept other unhoused folks from breaking in.

She got her food from City Impact,  a non-profit  that gives out shelf stable, packaged foods to unhoused and desperately poor folks. She drank from a pancake syrup bottle jammed in the bike’s bottle cage. Pure sugar is a dopamine rush. 

Meth addicts love sugar and bikes. 

Becca was a meth addict but also college-educated. Smart. Out of  wood and metal, she made a cart that she could pull on her bike with her tools and bike parts. The sign on the back said: Becca’s Bike Repairs. She worked on it in our yard, borrowing tools and parts from my husband, David. 

David is an avid mountain biker with parts to spare. He also picked up tools and parts she needed when he went to the bike shop for himself. In many ways, he was a small life line for her. 

Because she couldn't buy many of her own things, she bartered for them, with bikes and bike repairs and parts and stolen bikes. Once, Raffi, my son, was at a nearby park and left his bike unattended. It was Becca who warned off a couple dudes eyeing it. But she reveled in stealing bikes herself. Anyone who lived in a house was fair game. But she never stole from inside her community. 

It was important to her to make that distinction. 

She was a connector for people on the street. Everyone knew her. When I ran a street pantry - the place we met - and needed to get the word out to the unhoused community, about a new delivery of food or if  I was looking for someone I hadn’t seen in a while and worried for them, all I had to do was tell Becca. People listened to her. 

She had pull. 

Charisma. 

Gravitas. 

+++++

I was driving along Sahara.

I spotted the pink and yellow plastic flowers first. Then the candles with the Virgin on the sides. Crosses made from palm branches. The pink stuffed animals. 

I knew what it meant. 

A cyclist or a pedestrian was killed on that median. Recently. 

I drove by. 

I didn’t think of the plastic flowers again. 

Until I heard that she had died.

Then, I knew. 

+++++

I had another essay planned for this week. One that was a little lighter. David suggested that maybe I lighten it up a bit around here. :)

The minute you think you can lighten up…? Well, you can’t always. 

Life is harsh often enough. 

Two things happened simultaneously last week, the public death of Tyre Nichols and the very invisible death of my friend, Becca.  The news of both came within seconds. 

 I saw the video first. The vile, unnecessary beating. And then a random Facebook post from a local charity informed me of the second. 

But I wasn’t sure. The photos the charity posted weren’t of Becca, but someone who looked a lot like her. They were blurry and the person was far away. The woman who runs the charity had to have known that the photos weren’t Becca. She posted them anyway. 

And this feels apt. A certain hands-off,  this-will-do, neglect that is the way we treat the unhoused. We don’t want people hosing them off but we’d rather not see them or have to deal with them. 

I am hurt on Becca’s behalf that the photos are wrong. 

What would she say about that? 

How does she want us to remember her? 

This is a stupid question, because she told me. Not how she wanted to be remembered, but being remembered. 

After her boyfriend tried to burn her alive, and torched all of her possessions,  she showed up at our door. On her knees. Howling.

“Do you have any idea what it feels like to be in this city, and to have absolutely nothing, no one?” She gulped desperate mouthfuls of air. “If I die out here, they will just cremate me and no one will ever know I existed.”

She rubbed the front of her wig back and forth against her forehead.  

“That’s not what I want for my life.”

+++++

The photos of the wrong person threw me off. 

My brain rationalized it. Those aren’t photos of Becca. She didn’t die. 

I kept telling myself that Becca was fine. I would see her again, just like I did the past week. She would be at the door and asking to stash more valuables in our  old Jeep, already full of her stuff. I’d offer her a bowl of whatever was on the stove, chilli or a fish curry with rice, and she’d stay to eat. But she liked hand-food the most, lamb sambusas and potato and pea samosas. Traveling food. Moving food. Can’t sit still food. Potato knish, sausage rolls. Food wrapped in paper and foil.

When she stopped by just last week, I brushed her off. Book edits, no time to talk. We didn't sit and eat on the stone path, under the tipu tree, talking about life and all its fuckery. 

Not that our times together were idyllic and slow. Becca always came to us in crisis. When her bikes were stolen, when a security guard destroyed her cart, when a boyfriend broke up with her on Valentine’s Day, the time she was nearly raped and left for dead in an alley.

Her childhood was constant crisis. And her adult life was the same. Lots of homes, shipped to relatives’ houses, a father who broke her arm, a pill-popping mom with a string of boyfriends to whom she fed her child. They chewed her up for money and sex and partying. She let them grind up her kid.  Everything Becca did, every minute she existed was about how much she hated her mother.

She fantasized out loud about murdering her. 

It kept a hate-fire burning inside her. At the same time, and this is how complicated human relationships are, she wanted her mother to hold her, love her. To say she was proud. 

Becca’s existence became a mirror of her childhood. She didn’t know anything else. 

But through that childhood, Becca got good grades. She went to college for business. She went to Hollywood to body double for Johnny Depp. When Hollywood ate her up, she came to Vegas to nurse her addiction, steal cars, and do her drugs, and let the hate she felt for her mother immolate her insides.

“I came to kill myself,” she told me. “The long and hard way.”

+++++

I read this online: 

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Traffic Bureau

Date of accident: 1/17/23

Time: 4:04am

Event Number: LLV230100066024

On January 17, 2023, at approximately 4:04 a.m., a fatal-injury automobile versus bicyclist collision occurred on East Sahara Avenue at the intersection with Commercial Center Drive. Evidence at the scene and witness statements indicated that a 2019 Nissan Versa was traveling east on East Sahara Avenue, approaching the intersection with Commercial Center Drive. A bicyclist was riding north on Commercial Center Drive, entering the intersection. A collision occurred when the Nissan entered the intersection against a solid red traffic signal striking the bicyclist. The Nissan lost control and traveled onto the landscaped raised center median, overturning onto its side. The bicyclist was transported to the Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center, where, despite all life-saving measures, the bicyclist succumbed to his injuries and was pronounced deceased. The driver of the Nissan displayed indicators of impairment and was transported to the Clark County Detention Center and booked for all applicable charges.

The bicyclist's death marked the 6th traffic-related fatality in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department's jurisdiction. 

+++++

The relationship of the writer to her subjects is a unique one. 

Becca and I weren’t friends, exactly. I didn’t tell her about problems and issues in my life. We weren’t family, our beginnings weren’t the same. But the relationship between a writer and the people she writes about can be intense and profound. Beautiful and complicated. 

We might be the one person who knows many of the truths. The things people would normally keep to themselves. Hide. We listen and commiserate. We’ve heard all the ugly stuff and still see their worthiness. We see their humanity, even when others judge. We put hands on a knee. We hug through tears as we take our notes and set the story details in our heads. 

We see the complexities. 

We fall for people. People fall for us. 

Or that is how I think of it.

And I suspect this is also true for Roxanna Asgarian, author of the soon to be released book, We Were Once A Family: A Story of Love, Death and Child Removal in America.  The book is an indictment of the system of child removal in our country. It focuses on the Hart family, a white lesbian couple who drove their entire family of Black adopted children off a cliff  – to their deaths. But the crux of the story is why, in the first place, these children were removed from their loving but struggling biological families. 

Nathaniel, the father figure who also wanted to parent these children and wasn’t allowed to do that by CPS, figures predominantly in the book.  

“When he died, it was devastating for me,” said Roxanna. I called her when Becca died. I knew she would understand. 

“I re-read my book and my notes, after he died,  he had talked about death alot,” she says on the phone. “He knew he was going to die, but I kept pushing it off. I didn’t want to believe it.”

Still, when the time came, she was grateful that she found out in time to come to the memorial service. 

“There is no guarantee that the family is going to think about calling the writer,” she says. “They probably don’t understand our relationship. They can’t see the connection.”

“I would've been devastated,” she says about possibly missing the service. “He checked in on me, long after the book was written.”

I was surprised I was so undone and sad when Becca died. I hadn’t realized how much I cared for her or how easily she had slipped into our lives. How much I enjoyed her dropping by the house. I often joked with her that she was my adult child. 

And this might’ve been more true than I thought. 

When she told me once she wished her mother would’ve told her she was proud of her, how desperately she needed that, I made sure to praise her triumphs. I mothered her the way I mother my own children. I felt she needed it. 

When she got a little place to sell bikes she was buying off Craigslist, I told her how proud I was. When she started laying off the meth and gaining weight, I told her how strong she was and how much I believed in her. 

But with the exception of David and the kids, who had their own unique relationships with her, Becca was set apart from my other personal relationships. 

“My friends and family didn’t know Nathaniel,” Roxanna told me. “He wasn’t a part of my life in the same way, so when he died, it was like who will understand my grief? It’s isolating.”

What’s missing in our relationships with our subjects is the more recognized forms of equity, I think. We aren’t bringing our troubles to them. We aren’t asking for them to talk us through work problems we are having. We haven’t told them our darkest secrets. We haven’t invited them to our dinner parties. 

And yet, maybe the currency is simply different. Our subjects help writers do their job of telling stories. They help us shed light on our humanness and this can drive progress and change.

During the conversation, Roxanna and I talk about trust, how Becca and Nathaniel trusted we would do right by their stories. 

“Writers have to feel the pressure of getting it right. You have to accurately convey the story.  I was with these people for a long time and it was outside the bounds of my actual life. My friends and family don't have a reference.”

And this is why I went to Roxanna when Becca died. 

I mean, David got it. He was as struck and numbed by it as I was. But other than David, the death happened in a vacuum outside of our public life. No-one was going to send us casseroles or gentle texts. I called Roxanna because I knew she would understand our intense relationship and she would understand that Becca and I loved each other in a way that couldn’t be reducible to our circumstances in life or by our culture’s rigid definitions of family. 

“My relationship with Nathaniel was very special to us both,” she tells me. “He had love for me. And I for him. We had the ability to say the kind things we needed to hear from each other.”

As for Becca, I unconsciously expect her to show up tomorrow. I expect her to show up with another story, another trauma, a new stolen bike to show off, another injustice, another achievement that seems improbable in an unhoused world that has very few success stories.  

Instead, I am left with her memory in my heart and on my skin. I am left with how she changed me. How I have a more deeply empathic regard for the unhoused in our Vegas community. How I am more apt to extend a hand, initiate a conversation, approach instead of look away, listen without judgment. 

That was her, all her. 

“There are so many people out here, it's like talking to ghosts,” she told me about her community. “They forget how to live a life. They are absorbed into this street life. They don’t even see how hard their existence sucks, and they can't even see a light to guide them out…They are already dead.”

And then, she added:

“You know why people don’t see the light?...Because there is no light, Kim.

It’s pitch pitch black.”