I accidentally dated a homeless person: Part 1 •

A month ago, I flashed a smile and exchanged Instagram follows with a ruggedly handsome PCT thru hiker with questionable taste in sunglasses. We were in Sequoia National Park. One thing led to another and a month later, after dropping him off at a rest stop near Boreal, I finally realized that I accidentally housed, fed, cleaned, dressed (and undressed) a homeless former junkie with a criminal record. Oops.

I feel like I need to defend myself. Also, I feel like I need to defend myself for wanting to defend myself.

Me defending myself: I met ‘Anarchy’ (aka Chris) while hiking solo. Hikers (especially thru hikers) look like homeless people (or vice versa?). And technically, if you sleep outside for more than a couple nights and you don’t own or rent property, you’re considered homeless. So, as you can see, the wide spectrum of homelessness, when compounded with the whimsical shine of being a ‘nomad’ means that it’s super easy to miss such a (possibly important) detail. Also, for the record, there’s nothing wrong with being homeless. Especially if it’s by choice. I’m really lucky with the opportunities I’ve had (blah blah blah) and who am I to judge what someone else has had to go through?

Me defending myself defending myself: Like I said: there’s nothing wrong with being homeless, but when someone gets close enough and there is a huge (and I mean huge) discrepancy in lifestyle/income, empathy or some kind of communistic instinct kicks in and you redistribute some of your ‘wealth’ or in this case: dinner, wine, bed, shower.

You need some more background because this story is starting to have a non-flattering lens and Chris deserves better. Also, I feel like writing this down will help me be like, “that’s a red flag…oh and that’s a red flag. Yep, there’s another.”

The beginning:
I stumbled into camp at Crabtree Meadow around dusk totally exhausted and cold from hiking 17 miles and getting pelted with hail for the last 2 miles. I meet Chris and other thru hiker and say hello. I lay down in my tent and fall into a deeply physically exhausted sleep. I am pretty sure I dreamt about him. In fact, as I drifted off listening to him and his buddy setting up for the night, I fantasized about him having read my non-verbal cues and deciding to unzip my tent, grab my thighs with his calloused, dirty hands and fucking me. I think that was the first time I felt sexual during my trip. Of course, I’m so glad nothing happened then — I smelled a little bit like piss, a little bit like shit, and a lot like body odor. Plus I was dirty and oozing from the blisters on my hips.

Actually if I remember correctly, that night I was so paralyzed with exhaustion and dehydration, I barely had it in me to grab 3 jolly ranchers from the belt of my backpack by my feet and it took all my strength to pull whatever water was remaining in the platypus. I drifted awake in the morning unable to move still. I read a little bit from my kindle in hopes to awake my brain and eventually my body. I didn’t have far to go.

Chris had clearly made friends with an expedition that was camped there the night before (he is social..check!), and he was mere feet away from me, sitting on a rock and watching them do their morning…tango. I opened my tent flap and looked over at him and said, “Are you planning on joining in?”

He looked over at me almost startled and said in a thick NY accent, “I don’t want to embarrass these amateurs while they’re learning.” Ha. He’s witty. Yes please!

I ended up asking him about his trip — being on the trail for so long is extremely interesting — and moseying over to the rock to look at his pictures. As I scrolled through, our dirty fingers touched. My body clenched up and I’ll be honest, I added yet another body fluid to the equation (hint: not urine). I wanted the conversation to last forever. He was so fascinating — he regaled me with stories about friends in cults, bushwhacking in the adirondacks, he gave me advice about how to survive, how to filter my water better, what to fuel up with. It was so sufficient. He could clearly do so much with so little. As I side glanced and threw coy smiles in his direction while he told his stories, the sun caught his teeth and I saw that one of them, about 2 from the front, had this dark line through it and the rest were slightly discolored. Whatever. That can be fixed. Plus he’s on the trail so I can’t expect that he would be Crest whitening that shit.

10 min became an hour and then an hour became 2. One of the more important details that I picked up was that he became friends with a girl from San Francisco who was also thru hiking, and he was planning on visiting her and her fiance when he was done. I told him that he must let me know when he came to town. Of course, all I’m thinking is ‘omg what a great story that would be…’ because I do everything for my invisible audience. We both slowly packed up our tents and bear canisters, fill our water bottles, say our goodbyes and of course, exchange instagram usernames (handles?). As we walked in opposite directions, I thought about different scenarios to give him my phone number and tell him that he should come visit. Then I fantasized about that visit and our future together.

Ok, flash forward, like… a week. I’m done hiking. I’ve summited Mt. Whitney. I’m thinner. I’m full of emotion and super proud of myself. I’m also in a room at the Holiday Inn in Madera (It’s an oasis in a food desert.) on my way to Yosemite for my friend/society reunion Lying in bed, I finally check my instagram and see that Anarchy (aka Chris) has liked a bunch of pics and commented something Star Wars related and flirtatious on one of them. I’m like hell yes! I fucking knew it! He wants it. I direct message him my summit pic with my number and a message. I ‘like’ a bunch of his pics because that’s what you do when you want attention.

We flirt on IG for a week. He never saw the DM. He goes off the grid, I go to tahoe with friends. A few days later I messaged him my # in a publicly available comment. He texts. Then, he calls. Now this is where the story actually starts…

14 things I learned about Chris on the phone:

• He ran away from home at 15* and went to Houston with his buddy and ended up homeless. In fact, he was so homeless, one time in the dead of winter in Houston, Chris and his friend were so cold that they scoured the area under a bridge for pallets, set them on fire, and wrapped themselves in a strip of old carpet. (First of all, doesn’t this story make your heart break?) *his dad was abusive and his mother was crazy and also she was 16 when she had him.
• He has an 8th grade education. But as he put it in his upstate accent, “I’m an autodidact so I know shit. I learned.” Impressive.
• When he was still a minor, Chris and his buddies did a bunch of burglaries and they were caught but the records were sealed. Fun fact: Breaking and entering is not the same as burglary because you didn’t take anything. Learn something new every day.
• He has had a bunch of jobs in his life, including but not limited to bartender in a seedy club in charge of switching out Greygoose for well vodka, construction worker, video production, website development, manager of an escort service/brothel, business internet installer, waiter, dishwasher, taxi driver, drug dealer (he was still a minor allegedly), and…that’s all I remember (partly due to wine consumption, partly due to not caring enough).
• He is from Albany NY, but he has lived in Miami, Palm Beach, Philly, Houston, and somewhere maybe in the midwest? (See my commentary from point 4).
• He’s 37.
• He thinks that we have a lot in common and that the discovery and sum of all of these things are an indication of karmic, significant universe sign of the possible success of our budding ‘relationship.’ For instance, his favorite color is sage green and while I do thoroughly enjoy that color, I might have let it slip that it was also my favorite color. I don’t know…maybe it is?
• He hurt his knee last year (fractured his knee cap in November) and he’s currently staying in Lone Pine, CA with friends and doing odd jobs.
• On the morning he met me, Chris apparently told his buddy on the trail that he should have gone hiking with me instead of with him that day. Note: he mentioned this to me EVERY DAY a couple times.
• He prefers brunettes (and of course, I colored my hair back to brown the next day).
• He thought that telling me about why he was doing the PCT while on the phone would be tacky.
• In 2006, Chris hit Rachel Ray in the face with a baseball while they were playing catch (writing this, I’m thinking, why they fuck were they playing catch?). Fun fact: Chris’s dad is now married to a Peruvian woman.
• He lost his virginity at 16 to a girl in Boston who was 18. He prematurely ejaculated and she wasn’t very nice about it.
• He thinks he is a generous lover (I would soon come to find out that’s pretty true)
• He had an Okcupid profile in which he states that he’s looking for a ‘nymphomaniac with a sense of humor and the ability to cook’

One evening during the week of 4 hour phone calls I ended up consuming a full bottle of wine and inviting Chris to come visit immediately. He offered to hike to me as a romantic gesture. I was like, ‘oh my god. this is literally the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.’ It did NOT occur to me, that it would take like a full week and that he didn’t suggest taking a bus or train because he was destitute. (Yes, red flag)

That same evening or perhaps the next one (it’s all a blur), I got impatient and horny and decided that he shouldn’t hike to me. I’d pick him up with my dog in Mammoth on Friday and then take him home with me. I even booked a dog-friendly hotel. Waking up the next morning, 10 seconds into consciousness, all my memories came tumbling into the forefront and I began FREAKING OUT.

Let me summarize this for you: A stranger offered to hike to my door and then I offered him my address. This stranger had no money, no job, no home or mode of transport and weird methy teeth. I got impatient and offered to pick him up 7 hours away in Mammoth AND I paid/reserved a hotel room in for $230 (and I bought him and his friend a drink). I absconded with this person to San Francisco and suggest that he stay for an open-ended period of time.

Read: Part 2…the ‘meeting’ in Mammoth, the drive to SF.

Originally published at www.reddit.com.