A Look Inside Life On the Streets

Q. The flood happened 3 years ago. You haven't had enough money to buy food since the flood. Where do you get food to eat?

EelKat: The Salvation Army. Funny, because it's probably the only church in the state that I didn't attend at one time or another. Pretty much basically, if there's a church in Southern Maine, I've attended services at least once. Except for the Salvation Army. I don't know why, I just never got around to going to one of their services yet. All the church we had attended though, we went to them for help. None of them would help us. Not one. There was like 20 different denominations most of them had programs for helping the homeless, but we were turned away from every single one of them.

After the fire, one of the fire men asked us if we knew about the Salvation Army. (The young guy who had rescued Buddy.) He said they will help any one, no questions asked. He said, just go in, tell them we needed help, and they'd help. So we went in, and it was really weird, because at all the other churches, they asked for stuff like proof of income, proof of residence, phone bills, light bills, basically everything you could think of. At the Salvation Army, the woman asked our names, address, asked why we were there, and asked how we needed help. Turns out if we had asked them for it, they do everything from paying light bills to rent to buying you cloths to getting toys for children to buying you food. She starts listing off the things they do, and than wanted to know what we wanted them to do. We told her, all we wanted was food. We were hungry; we were going 3 or 4 days a week without eating. We were starving to death.

So for the last 3 years, The Salvation Army has paid for our food. If it hadn't been for them, I don't think I would be alive right now, because my income is only $1,200 a year, and the average person spends that much each month on food. Thing is what they can do is limited to how many donations they get in their little red buckets in front of stores, so some months you get enough food to last the month, and some months you only get 2 or 3 days worth of food.

It was the Salvation Army who also told us about the Food Pantry. What they do, is each week they go around to all the local super markets and they take all the old food: expired milk, week old deli stuff, wilted vegetables, badly dented cans, opened and half empty boxes, cakes that fell on the floor, and other such stuff that no one will pay money for, and would cost the store money to return, so it's cheaper for them to donate it to shelters, even though technically the stuff it rotted and not fit for human consumption.

The Food Pantry takes all of it, and they hand it out to homeless people on a first come first served basis. They ask no questions at all. You just get in line out front of the building (you have to take a number, to avoid rioting and fighting over who got there first.) and they hand out as much food as they can to each person in line, until there is nothing left to give out. You get there early you get more food, you get there late, you may get nothing.

So we go the Food Pantry each week and we get food there too. You have to learn to eat around the mold and watch the really bad stuff for maggots, but most times the food is good enough to eat. They don't bother asking who you are or why you are there, because they go on the theory that, this food is so bad that only the really most desperate of people will bother to stand in line for 3 or 5 hours to get a handful of food which has a good chance of being molded and rotten. I hate having to go there, but, it keeps you alive.

That is the worst part of being homeless: being hungry. Never knowing when your next meal will be. Never know what your next meal will be. Never knowing if you'll even find a next meal. Always hurting. I hate it. Being homeless, changes what you eat because you no longer get to decide what you want to eat, you have to eat whatever cast off other people don't want to eat. Being homeless changes the way you eat too, because you no longer eat meals at set times of day, instead you eat whenever there is food in front of you. You no longer eat full meals either, instead you may eat a single roll and call that your meal for the day. If you are homeless long enough, you no longer think in terms of skipped meals, such as, I skipped breakfast, but rather, skipped days such as: I ate a roll yesterday, this is my last roll, I'll skip eating today so that I'll have it to eat tomorrow and hope I'll have found food for the next day by than. That is the way I've eaten my meals for the past three years now.

Q. Why didn't you go to a shelter?

EelKat: There were a few reasons. One being that the closest shelter was a drug rehab shelter, and they only provided beds for people who took a drug screening and failed it, and were than willing to join their drug rehab program. They provided you with a cot to sleep on while you were taking their rehab program. Well, me, never having used drugs before, I was not eligible for that shelter, which although it was the closest one, was 5 towns away.

The next closest shelter was a two hour drive by car, but me not having a car that ran, meant no way to get there, But as it turned out, they would not have been able to help me either, seeing as I later found out they only took single mothers with small children. Me with my high moral standards, means that no marriage = no sex = no children = no shelter where I was eligible to stay in.

Of course than there was the problem of the animals. At the beginning of all of this, there were 2 dogs, 9 cats, 3 birds, and 75+ (pet) roosters, and well, I wasn't going to any shelter that wouldn't take them in too. But, even without the animals, the only way I was eligible to stay in a shelter would be if I was a drug addict or a single mother.

It was a case of when you don't need help; you just assume that there is help out there for people that need it. But than you become one of those people that need help, and it's a real eye opener, about just how little help there really is out there for them. It really amazed me, just how little help their really is for homeless people.

Q. So, you are having a hard time finding a job, because you never had a job before, and at your age, people (employers) expect you to have already had a few jobs. Why did you never seek a job before the year of the tent?

EelKat: I wasn't allowed to. It goes against God's will. The LDS church teaches that women who work outside of the home will be condemned, along with women who commit the sin of cutting their hair, or send their children to public school.

Okay, since Orthodox LDS/Mormons are a minority even within the Church, I guess, I should explain what it is I mean, by the fact that "I was not allowed to work".

I should note here that members are unofficially divided into 3 groups:

Orthodox LDS: long standing families, usually 4th and 5th generation members whose families followed either J Smith or B Young since the 1800's). These are the uber strict strictest of the strict LDS. Often referred to by gentiles (non LDS) as zealots and fanatics. Orthodox LDs abstain from coffee, soda, hot chocolate, tea, cigarettes, meat, sex, make up, jewelry, TV, rock music, movies rated PG13+, short sleeve shirts, pants on women, short hair on women, bathing suits, shorts, anything that shows the knee, the list of things orthodox LDS avoid as sinful goes on and on. I know this list because I grew up in an orthodox LDS family. Orthodox LDS also believe in total self sufficiency or else: in other words, you farm the land, grow you own food, home school you kids, and stock pile a 3 year supply of everything (food, cloths, water, etc) just in case of the third world war which will follow Jesus' second coming. (100 years of war followed by 1000 years of peace, than Judgment Day after that.)

"I Grew Up In The Church" Mormons: These are members who are usually 2nd and 3rd generation members. Rarely have their families been in the church longer than the 1960's; These members tend to be strict, but not nearly as strict as the Orthodox LDs members. For example, they may allow female members of the family to get jobs, wear makeup, or cut their hair. These are generally accepted by Orthodox members, though they are likely to be thought of as *weak in the teachings*.

The Converts: Members who joined the church or whose parents joined the church within the last 20 or 30 years These are the most common, as well as the least strict. They often allow such activities as swimming, and are not offend by drinking soda or hot chocolate. They are very likely to own a tv, go to movies, and allow their children to go to public schools. Rarely are these members looked on with a good eye, by the Orthodox members, who are likely to call the new converts *gentiles*. (Calling an LDS member a gentile is as bad as calling a black man a nigar... it's about the worst thing you could call an LDS member).

Q. I think most people have a hard time understanding what it is like to have religious convictions so strong that you are not allowed to cut your hair or get a job. In the end you went to work just to have a place to stay warm. While living in the tent, how did you deal with the weather? Snow, rain, cold and the like.

EelKat: Not well, but, when you have no options, you can't choose to do better can you? I used cloths pins (a whole big bag of about 200 of them) to hold the edges of the tarp shut to keep out the wind and rain. Inside of the "tent" I had taken several blankets and layered them, to build up walls of insulation. On the ground I had built up a foundation out of several bucket loads of sand, and than used my futon (a Japanese mattress) to sleep on. I had three sleeping bags, one inside of the other, and slept at night with all of my cloths on and three coats, and slept inside the tripled sleeping bags. What cloths I wasn't wearing, were stuffed into every crack and corner to keep out the cold.

In the summer and fall, we had to deal with the thick seaweed scented fogs that rolled in off the ocean every night. You don't really notice fog, until you have to live outdoors in it night after night. It's like having this big wet sponge wrapped all around you for hours. It soaks everything just like it had been a rain cloud. Fog is really weird. Over the months, however, I grew to love the smell of fog and it's rich seaweed and crab scent. I think that is the one thing I miss about being in the tent. I really love the smell of the ocean air. Of course being outside all night, all year, I found out that love the sounds of hearing the ocean waves all day and all night. Indoors you don't really notice the sound of the waves or the sound of the gulls, but out in the tent, you hear them steady all the time. I miss that.

At the beginning of this, I had me, my dog, and 9 cats. A few months in, the pet food poisoning happened and I lost 5 of my cats in the space of 2 weeks. After that it was me, my dog, and 14 cats. Weird, how 9 minus 5 equaled 14, but it did, and I am at a loss as to how to explain it, but one morning shortly after the deaths of my other cats, I woke up to find several stray cats tucked into the sleeping bag with me. They moved into the tent and I have had them ever since.

There was one wild night of a lightening storm. That night, required me to take the cinder blocks and tie them down all along the edges of the tarp in order to keep it from flying away.

It was hard once the snows came, though, and I had to use shipping pallets to support the center of the "tent" in order to keep the heavy snowfalls from collapsing the tent on us during the night. During the storms I had to keep a shovel inside the tent, and shovel my way out, and take the snow off the roof of the tent about every 15 minutes or so, to keep in from getting too heavy on the roof.

Once the snows came I found I had new problems, when I awoke one night to find a baby skunk tucked into the blankets along with me and the cats. He had apparently been separated from his family in the storm, came in the tent for shelter, and got snowed in. He couldn't have been more than 3 or 4 months old. Once the storm was over a few hours later, he left.

One night, my blind albino Siamese cat, Utopia, was asleep on my feet when something big reached through the tent, grabbed him, and ran off with him. My dog Buddy fought it off, and it dropped Tope and ran into the woods. It was suspected to be a Marten or Fisher, but later events would tell us that a wolverine was in the area, killing everything in it's path, including more than 70 of our chickens, a few deer, and a moose, and it is now believed that it was the very same animal which attacked Tope that night. Today, as a result of the attack, Tope has no fur growing on his side, his ear is a mangled up scarred mess which in no way resembles an ear, he is missing all of his teeth on one side, and there is a huge scar running under his eye and down his face. Tope, never again, slept on my feet, and to this day, Tope refuses to sleep anywhere except wrapped around my face like a fur scarf.

I'm in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, and I live on the beach. I am homeless. At night the temperature drops to -15*F BEFORE wind chill factor. Including wind chill factor the temps are often as low as -42*F (and the ocean freezes over when the temps are like that!) This year it's pretty warm and stays around 0F. This year (2008/2009) winter is not that bad, it's staying around 30*F. We got a tone of snow this year, but it's not as cold. Last year (2007/2008) was colder. My first winter homeless (2006/2007) was the worst. In 2006, Maine had it's coldest winter on record since 1927 and I got frost-bite that year, and that's when I started looking for a job. Not to make money, but to have a place to stay warm.

No one cares that you are cold, so long as they are not.

It got very cold that year. Our first snow fall came in October of 2006. By December, the temperature plummeted to 0F. February of 2007, saw -15F temperatures, before wind chill factor. Living on the beach meant that wind chill factors brought the temperature down to a blistering -40F at night. Once the temperature dropped, my hands started to crack and turn to blisters. It became very hard to use them for anything. Today, three years later, my hands are still scarred from this, and now resemble the wrinkled hands of an 80 year old woman. I have tried every thing under the sun, but nothing has yet to heal the damage done to my hands from the extreme cold of the winter that year. Today my hands are extremely sensitive to touch and I go through a family sized bottle of GoldBond hand cream each week, just to stop the skin on my hands from cracking. Fact of the matter is my hands (and my feet) suffered from frost bite and I don't know if that will ever heal.

Q. While you were homeless and living in the tent, you lost 5 cats to poisoned cat food. What happened?

EelKat: I lost 3 cats to food poisoning, Skezics, Little Moose, and Bear; the other 2, Girl and Blackie, got hit by a car.

The first thought is for people to ask me: "Did the Mormons take their vengeance so far that they poisoned your cats?" The answer is no, the Mormon members who went crazy and drove us out, actually were not the ones behind the poisoned cat food: some guy in China was.

In November of 2006, my Skezics died a horrible death from massive seizures. He was fine one morning. The next day he was dead. The vet did a blood test, and told us the tests couldn't be right, so redid them all a second time, and than just to be certain redid them a third time. She said afterwards that he had more poison in his system than it would take to kill a Great Dane and he was only a 7 month old kitten. It was so alarming that she asked for a list of everything I had been feeding him.

In the next few months, more cats followed Skezics in the same manner. Baby, Snowball, Moose, Fragile, Little Moose, Bear, and Trouble, eight cats in all, dead for no reason. (The extra five cats belonged to relatives.) There was only one answer: the cat food had been poisoned.

My vet, however, was not the only vet seeing these sorts of alarming deaths, and my cats and my relatives' were not the only ones she saw. Hundreds of vets, all across the Nation were sending in thousands of reports to the FDA, and all the reports were saying the same thing: death by food poisoning. In that 4 month period it was estimated that some 6,000 cats and 2,000 dogs died across the United States due to poisoned food.

The FDA started an investigation, and by March of 2007 it was announced that the biggest recall in history was underway, as nearly every brand of cat food and dog food got pulled off the shelves, not just in the United States, but in Canada, Europe, and Asia as well. The recall would eventually include not just cat and dog food, but also bird food, horse feed, pig feed, powdered milk, baby formula and some chocolate candy as well. The whole thing was traced back to one man in China, who had poisoned the wheat gluten that was being used to make these products. By April of 2007, only Meow Mix, 9 Lives, and Fancy Feast cat foods remained on the shelves, and those selling for skyrocket prices as there were not enough of them to meet the demands.

Q. Being homeless affected your library habits didn't it? Can you explain this?

EelKat: I got my first library card when I was 3 years old. Since that day a week hasn't gone by that hasn't seen me in a library. Books are the center of every thing I do, and always have been. As I got older, I branched out going to more and more libraries. In the past 30 years I've been to nearly every library in Maine south of Augusta, plus a few New Hampshire libraries as well. How has becoming homeless changed that? Well, I used to visit libraries weekly, but only took books out from my local library in Old Orchard. Becoming homeless changed that. For one thing, when I left the library, I used to have a place to go home to, so my visits were short, an hour, two at the most, but not any more.

Since being homeless there have been a few changes: one, not having a place to go home to meant, I needed to stay some where out of the cold as long as possible, meaning I was now at the library every single day, and staying there 4 or 5 hours or more. Since homeless people are not welcomed inside of most public buildings, I ended up getting library cards for every local library in the area, and went to a different one each day.

Fact of being homeless is that if you go to the same place every day all day long and you don't work there; people get all paranoid on you and ask you not to come back. Well, I couldn't have that happening with the libraries, because going to the library is the one thing in my life that I still have, that I had before I was homeless. You can't even begin to imagine how important it is for me to be able to go to the library. I can't risk losing that. I would be devastated if I couldn't be around books all day. And that's why I don't go to the same library each day. Other homeless people, they haven't figured that out.

Of course, I have this aversion to being dirty too, so I'm not always dirty like most other homeless people are and that helps too, because almost no one is even aware that I am homeless. I don't look homeless. I don't dress homeless. I don't act homeless. And I don't tell people I'm homeless, so no one, not even other homeless people are aware that I'm homeless.

During the summer, there is not much need for me to stay indoors, so during the summer months me and Buddy walk to the beach and spend the day at the beach. After October though, it gets below zero on the beach, so I head to the libraries more and more frequently. Once snow comes I'm there a lot more often.

Q. Being homeless means not only not having a roof over your head and having no electricity, it also means no running water. For a very long time you had no indoor plumbing, no running water, no sinks, no tubs, no showers, and no toilets. What did you do? How did you cope with this?

EelKat: I grew up in a beach cabin; our bath room was about 4 feet by 4 feet. There was no tub. There was a 2 inch space between the rim of the toilet and the edge of the shower, the shower itself being less than 2 feet square, and was just wide enough to squeeze into. The sink was right beside the toilet on the other side. You had a space big enough for your feet to stand on the floor between the three, and if you did it slowly, you could turn around without falling into the toilet. I hated that bathroom. Being homeless was like being released from prison, when you compare it to that bathroom. Thing was, I really hated that bathroom a lot. I didn't use it unless I had too. There is a reason I write about the Twighlight Manor as being in the middle of a dense forest. I write what I know. I lived in the woods, so I grew up using trees and bushes instead of toilets. It wasn't a big change for me, really. The only change was that I did use the tiny bathroom at night and when it was cold outside, and being homeless, meant facing a huge fear: being outside after dark, every single night. It was one of my worst phobias, and after being homeless, it's gone. The other thing was, without the tiny bathroom during the winter, meant two words: cold bum.

You become very well versed in the lay out of every store and restaurant when you are homeless, because you have to know where every restroom is. You also learn to carry a toothbrush in your pocket every where you go, so that you can brush your teeth should you end up in a public restroom, because that is the only time you get to use a sink at all.

As for sinks, showers, tubs and other places to wash, a brook runs through our farm, it is feed by the swamp behind our land and drains into the ocean in front of our land. Like I said, I hated that tiny bath room, so growing up; I was always in the water, just not in the water in the shower. I really did hate that bath room an awful lot. I think I may be claustrophobic or something because I do have big problems with small spaces.

People often ask me the secret to my looks. You see, the thing of it is, I am daily asked for proof of age, by people, adults who demand to know why I am not in school on a school day. Damn! High school was 20 years ago, and these people think I'm too young for that even!

Bathing in the ocean is the answer. It's all that mineral water and a complete lack of any type of soap or shampoo. I've been doing that since I was about 6 years old. I still do it. Jump right in the water with all my cloths on, drag my dog in with me, and me and him get clean and I still look like a kid and he still looks like a puppy and both of us is ancient. Being homeless didn't change that. We are always at the beach. Buddy loves it. It's how we are both able to be homeless and yet stay so clean. Beach sand is amazing for scrubbing your skin with and it does wonders for my hair and Buddy's fur; makes it so soft and touchable. But that is what makes the biggest difference between me and other homeless people you meet. I brush my hair (granted with Buddy's dog brush, but hey, if it's good enough for Buddy it's good enough for me.) and I keep myself washed and clean. The first thing you always hear people saying when they see some one homeless is: "Stay away from them, they are dirty!" I hate it when people say things like that, and I don't want them saying it about me, plus being dirty is the number one reason why businesses throw homeless people out.

I adapted to being homeless quite well actually, because I was already partially living off the land as it was. I was raised Mormon after all and not only that, I was raised Mormon in the 1970s when self sufficiency reigned supreme, and any non-farming Mormon was considered a disgrace to the Church. These new converts who tried to drive me off my land, haven't been Mormons long enough to know how to live off the land like any long standing Orthodox LDS does. If they had been stronger in the faith and knew more about the Church, they would have known that forcing me out on to the streets was not going to do them a bit of good, because I was raised to be prepared for such things. They as Mormons should have known that.

Q. I have to ask: Being homeless you must have to use a lot of public restrooms, which have very small stalls. The way you dress, with huge skirts, long trains, and giant capes, your daily wear cloths are wider than the average bridal gown. How do you get in and out of those little bathroom stalls dressed the way you dress?

EelKat: I can't use the smaller stalls actually; most of my skirts don't even fit through the doors. I have to use the handicap stalls, the baby changing stalls, or the family room stalls. Once in the stalls, getting the skirts up, takes a good 5 minutes. It's not unusual for me to be in the restroom for well over 15 minutes, just on the account of the difficulty I have in maneuvering my huge skirts in such small places. If you are with me, and I get up and head for the bathroom, plan on waiting a while.

Q. You are homeless, and this shocks people because you don't look homeless. You are always clean, well dressed, and well, dressed like you were ready to go on stage with Liberace`. People are constantly asking you for hand outs assuming that you are a millionaire, while people every where you go stop you and ask for your autograph, assuming that you are some famous actress or rock star. How do you deal with this?

EelKat: Let's see: I have a black fur coat, a full length one of a kind custom made just for me ISAAC MIZRAHI coat, an antique 3/4 length mink, a red frockcoat, a Mongolian Sherpa, a blue velvet cape, and a purple velvet cape. I have 4 trained batiste regency empire gowns, a black fully beaded flapper gown, a velvet gown with huge trained hoop skirt, several Japanese kimono and Hawaiian Muumuus, and other assorted long dresses. Underneath my dresses are worn multiple layers of skirts and petticoats, most of which are made of velvet. I have 3 black business suits which I wear to work. Top hats, feather hats, 13 foot scarves, velvet runas, and long strings of pearls are worn on top. That is my wardrobe. All of which I had BEFORE I became homeless. Some of which I have had for more than 20 years now.

People look at me and the way I dress and their first thought is always: "OMG! Look at her! I'll bet she's an actress." I think those are the two questions I get asked the most often: "Why are you wearing that?" or "Who are you? Are you filming a movie around here?"

There is always a rumor going around that I am some one famous, hiding from the paparazzi. For a while there was a rumor going around that I was really Cher in disguise. I guess cause of my long black hair. After that another rumor got started that I was Madonna. OMG! You couldn't believe how many times people have stopped me and asked for my autograph. I had to keep saying: "I'm not Madonna" every day and they wouldn't believe me. There was this one guy, kept coming up to me; he'd hug me and than ask: "Are you sure you aren't Madonna". It was driving me crazy for a while. Thankfully that only lasted a couple of months. I don't look like Madonna or Cher, so I don't know how those rumors got started.

When people ask me where I live I usually just say: "Old Orchard", some times I say "Biddeford", because I live in Biddeford as much as I do Old Orchard, but Old Orchard is were the tent is, so Old Orchard is what I usually say. I don't tell people I'm homeless, so no one knows about it. The only time any one ever finds out I'm homeless is when they ask if they can stop by my house some time and I have to say: "No, I don't live in a house. I'm homeless, I live in a tent, well, it's not a tent, I just call it a tent because tent sounds better than saying I threw a rope over a tree branch and hung a tarp from it and held the corners down with cinder blocks. I mean, what is that exactly anyways? It's not a shack. It's not a lean to. It's close to being a tent, so I call it a tent, but anyways it's only 8 feet long and 4 feet tall and 3 feet wide, and there's only enough room for me and Buddy and the cats, so you'd just be standing outside in the cold anyways, it's better if we just get together at the library."

After I've said that, though, the average reaction is to stare at me like I had just hit them in the face with a brick. I never hear from them again once they find out I'm homeless. Weird. When they thought I was a famous millionaire they couldn't wait to be my friend, once they found I was homeless they couldn't get far enough away from me fast enough. That's the advantage of being a homeless person: you find out who your REAL friends are.

Of course, dressing the way I do, attracts a lot of attention, esp. from people seeking hand outs, and odd as this may sound, it's not the homeless people who are always asking me for money, either. Rich people, wealthy people, people with 2 or 3 cars and a vacation home; in other words: greedy middle class people who are looking for a millionaire to fan their vanity and pamper their fat ass life style of fast cars and big houses. Too many people look at me and see only my cloths. They don't see me. They just see the velvet and sparkle. They really have a hard time looking past what I am wearing. They assume that only some one with a lot of money can afford to dress like I do, but when they find out how little money I actually have, they are flabbergasted as to how I can afford my wardrobe. Once they find out I'm homeless than they want to know, how come I'm not dirty and dressed in rags.

Fact is, I can't afford to buy "normal cloths" It would take me 2 or 3 months to save up enough money to buy plain T-shirt, and I'd have to go with out stuff like deodorant, tooth paste, and feminine pads in order to do that.

My wearing dresses full time like this started way back before I was homeless, when I was about 12 years old, and I didn't have a dress to wear to church, mine had gotten worn out, and the bishop was ragging on my family about girls wearing pants to church. It came down to the point where my parents could either buy me a new pair of jeans to wear around the farm or a dress to wear to church. They were going to get the jeans, I said, no, get the dress, I'll learn to do the farm chores without getting it dirty. I wore the dress every day around the farm, and ever Sunday to church. I learned how to do farm work and keep my cloths clean at the same time. This came in handy after being homeless, because I can live on the streets and stay clean at the same time. It's an odd skill to have, but one that turned out to be very good to have.

Back when I was a kid though, people from church (home teachers, visiting teachers, and missionaries mostly) would come to the house and see me in the barn with the animals wearing my Sunday dress and they'd get mad at me, for wearing a dress on any day other than Sunday. That was one of those eye opener moments for me. After that, I realized something. Women only wore dresses to church, to show off, because they did not wear dresses the rest of the week. They had put so much emphasis on wearing dresses in church, but than ridiculed you for wearing dresses the rest of the week. This so totally confused me, because it was not good logic to own something which you could only wear on certain days, for the lone purpose of showing off to other people. It was not only illogical, but it was wasteful. Why have two sets of cloths when it was more resourceful to own one? This bothered me.

I determined after that, that I was going to wear what ever the hell I wanted, and I was going to wearing it every single day of my life, I didn't care if only the hens ever saw it or not. That's when I started I made a floor length dress out of gold sequined fabric I'd bought for a $1 at Goodwill. I looked like a black haired Marylyn Monroe out there shoveling horse stalls, and I shocked the hell out of every one the first time I wore that glittering gown to church. After that, I just wore whatever I pleased, when ever I pleased, where ever I pleased. That included wearing Halloween costumes year round, because I decided why, wear them only one day a year?

Over the years, it is my cloths that are always the first thing people notice about me. My cloths have been the cause of people saying I was crazy or that I was a witch. My cloths have been a far cry from what the average person wears, for most all of my life. And becoming homeless didn't change that.

Never judge a book by its cover. Just because I am homeless, doesn't mean I have to be dirty and wear rags. I've only been homeless since 2006, I have been dressing like this since 1978 and I never did have money. I made my cloths out of $1 per yard fabrics from Wal-Mart and Rich's. The prom dresses I wear, I bought for $2 each at the Salvation Army Store more than 20 years ago. All three of my fur coats were given to me, though before the flood I also had a black mink, a lynx, and a raccoon too (lost those and most of my formally very large previously much more elaborate wardrobe in the flood; but again, I never paid a penny for any of those either). My entire wardrobe was built on less than $200, and most of it was made in the late 1980's. I take good care of my cloths and I go ten or twenty years between adding new items to my wardrobe.

I actually have more money now than I did before I was homeless (my current income is $60 - $200 per month, before being homeless it was $20 - $50 per month). I've never in my entire life ever made more than $1,800 in a single year, but I never let that stop me from dressing the way I do. You don't have to have a lot of money to dress like you belong on stage with Liberace`, you just need to be creative and know how to buy expensive looking things for bargain prices.

Q. You mention Liberace` in your conversations often. He was, you have said, more or less your hero while growing up, and ultimately was the inspiration for much of the outfits you wear today. You started dressing like him when you were just 5 years old. It has been said of you that if Liberace~ wouldn't wear it on stage, that you wouldn't wear it at all. And you admit that statement to be true. Liberace was one of your earliest and longest running obsessions, and as a result you had a huge collection of memorabilia about him, which you no longer have. You at one point had a huge collection of Liberace` records, which had taken you years to amass. You don't have them anymore, and you mentioned something about it on one of your blogs, that it had something to do with your being homeless. It's a pretty alarming story; one which shows just how far the vandalism got against your family. Could you tell our readers, what it was that happened to your record collection and why you don't have it anymore?

EelKat: My record collection. Many of my comic books. My stamp collection, stamp books from the 1850s - 1920s, that had belonged to my grandmother. My first edition Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. My autographed first edition Alfred Lord Tennyson. My other grandmother's antique glass and gold clock from Germany. They are all gone. Taken away by acts of pure hatred.

It happened a few months after the fire. It was April of 2007. I had taken Buddy on his daily walk to the beach. This took about 3 hours, and every one around here locally knows when I leave down town with Buddy, I'll be gone for several hours, and that I left about the same time every day, due to the dog beach laws that say you can only have dogs on the beach during certain hours.

Though we lived in the tent, my belongings were still stored in the dilapidated remains of the house. That night, when me and Buddy returned home to the tent, we found windows smashed out of the house, which had not been previously smashed. My dad's garden tiller was out of the tool shed and laying on its side not far from the house. Plants in the garden were smashed and broken. The tent itself was torn apart and had to be rebuilt.

Obviously some one had been here so me and Buddy went into the house to see what had happened inside. What we saw, was the worst thing they had done of all. The first thing I saw upon walking into the house, were the covers of my records, torn to shreds, nothing left of them. We are not talking one or two records here. I had about 700 records. The discs themselves where shattered. Some one had taken a sledge hammer to them. Do you have any idea how hard it is to break a record? They don't break very easily. You really got to throw everything you got into it, just to break one, and here, were some 700 of them, smashed. Not broken, but smashed. Shattered into lots of tiny pieces. After the records had been broken each of the pieces had been broken. It take such an alarming degree of hatred to do something like this.

My books, my antique books, books from the 1700's - 1800's, many first editions, a few autographed, about 200 books in the collection, they had been shredded. Leather and cloth covers torn off, the pages ripped up into teeny tiny, microscopic sized pieces. Some one had taken the time and effort to rip out the pages and than sit there ripping them up as small as they could. It takes an awful lot of hate, for some one to go through that sort of trouble to destroy a book so thourally. That was the day, my eyes were opened to the fact that the people doing these things to me, really, truly, hated me with every fiber of their souls. This wasn't normal angry hatred. This was pure vile hatred with a vengeance hatred. It scared me to my very soul. I realized that day, just how truly psychotic these people were.
My stamp collection was gone. They stole that. It had been my dad's moms. She had made it in the early 1930's. It was a huge collection, thousands of stamps, nearly every stamp ever made, dating as far back as the 1830's. It was priceless. It was worth a fortune, but I never sold it because it had been in our family for nearly a hundred years, and now it was gone, and I have no idea how to get it back. I contacted several stamp societies and they said that if it wasn't a registered collection, that most likely who ever stole it was going to cut it down and sell the stamps individually over the course of 20 or 30 years, and it'd be impossible to trace once they had done that. They told me the only hope of finding it would be if they tried to sell it to a dealer as an entire collection. It has been listed on all of the national and international alerts, by several different stamp societies though, so if anything like it shows up for sale, they'll let me know.
My comic books. I love my comic books. Every one who knows me, knows how much I love my comic books. They took, my comic books, and they dumped them out. The floors of the house were still soaked from the flood a year earlier, we live in swampland, so the air never dries out, and thus the house never dried out either. They took my comic books, dumped them into the water on the floors and than stomped them into the mud until there was nothing left but a mashed up soggy pulp. You couldn't even tell that they had once been comic books; it looked like wet paper mache` smeared all over the house.

My grandmother had grown up with and been best friends with the women who became the wife of America's first ambassador to Japan, back before the World Wars. It wasn't just her stamp collection they took. The emperor of Japan had given the ambassador and his wife a whole bunch of ceramics, about half of which she sent back to America to my grandmother. Imari dishes, China rabbits, vases, nick-knacks. I inherited them when she died. They now looked like some one had used them as baseballs. They were shattered into dust and powder, scattered from one end of the house to the other. There were no pieces big enough to try to put anything back together.

My bed, my bureau, the furniture, had been chopped up like fire wood. Some one took and axe to them.

These are the type of people, whom I was going to church with. This is what superstition and religious dogma does to people. This is what fearing god makes people do. I can't believe these people actually thought they were justified in doing this. I stopped going to church after that. That was what it took, to finally show me, that I was not the type of person who goes to church, because I would never feel justified in destroying some one else's property, no many how many men of god told me it was okay to do it.

When I told people what had happened, the response I got was: "Well it's just things. You can replace things. Buy new ones."

These are not replaceable. Sure, I can go out and buy another one like the ones destroyed, but I had not bought them to begin with. I didn't have these things because they were something I went out to buy just to have, these things had been in my family for years. They help a psychic connection to the people who had owned them. I kept them because my grandmother had owned them, touched them, held them. They were my connection to her. She died when I was 8 years old, I barely remember her. I had her things to remember her by. You can't replace that. Buying things that looked like the ones she had is pointless, because they would not be the ones she had owned.

Another answer I got was this: "Well that's what you get for leaving things where people can destroy them."

What the hell? They were inside my house! How is that leaving them where people can destroy them? What right does any one have to come on private property, go into my house, trespassing on my land, and than destroy my property?
I will add here, that both of those statements were said by a Mormon, who also told me that: "Well maybe you deserved the way they treated you." You know what, no one deserves that. I don't care who they are. Violence is ALWAYS uncalled for.
You asked earlier, if being homeless changed my writing, and it did, but it changed a lot of other things in me too. I am one person in a family with more than 600 members in it, a member of a church with over a 1,000 members, a resident in a town with 12,000 people, when those people needed help, I never turned them away. Not one. When those people were in trouble and needed some one to take their animals, they always turned to me, in the last 30 years I have taken care of more than 5,000 animals and barely a handful of them were actually my own.
These people, who I devoted my life to helping, they are the ones who took every thing from me. They are the ones who threw rocks at me and shot paint ball guns at me. Some one set fire to my home. Some one after the fire broke into the house and took a sledge hammer to my records, tore pages out of my books, smashed my grandmothers' antiques, and took an ax to my furniture. Somebody throw a rock at my horse and took her eye out. Somebody dumped oil in our brook and killed my ducks. Than, after I had no place to go, and no money to buy a real tent to built one out of a tarp, every week someone came and tore it down. I had to keep rebuilding it. These people, they were people who I had once called friend. These wonderful loving Mormons showed me their real colors that year. When these things happened, I asked for help, I begged for help, when I got no where locally, I wrote 300 letters all identical and I sent them out the every governor, senator, and state representative all over the USA, begging some one, any one to help me. I even sent letters to Bush and Hillary Clinton. No one helped me. No one. Not family. Not friend. Not church. Not town. Not state. Not country. No one. I gave up on the Human race. I know now, what it means to be Human, and I want no part of it.

Q. Has being homeless changed your outlook on life?

EelKat: I haven't had contact with humans outside of my church. I never go out in public; in fact the only time I go outside at all is to do something in my own yard with the animals. The way I was treated growing up, by the Humans in my church, I just have this deep mistrust of all Humans now. I have a hard time seeing them as anything other than vile beings whom I don't want to associate with. Being homeless did that to me. I don't like Humans. I know now that they've never liked me. I used to over look things they did and said, I had hope, and that's why I continued to attend church in spite of the fact that they've never had a kind word for me, never shown me love, and the only thing I've ever gotten from the Humans is criticism, condemnation, threats, and hate.

Being homeless opened my eyes to the truth. I mean, come on, why would I want to be around a race of creatures that acted like that? I don't, only I didn't know that before being homeless. Before being homeless, I thought I did want to be around Humans. Being homeless opened my eyes to the fact that these people, really, really, really hated me. And it's because of that very reason that I not only no longer go to church, but now I no longer leave the house at all. I'm tired of the hate. I don't want it any more. I've had 30 years of nothing but hate and being told I was an evil apostate who was going to spend eternity in the darkest pits of hell. I don't want to hear that any more. If Humans can't say anything nice to me, than I don't want them to say anything at all to me anymore.

I just want some peace and quiet for once in my life. I mean, yeah it would be nice if there was someone out there who loved me, but there isn't, I know that now, and I gave up hope of ever finding that. There were 750 people in the Cape Elizabeth/Portland Ward hating me, 350 more in the Sanford Ward hating me, 250 more in the Saco Ward hating me. That's over a 1,000 people. A 1,000 Mormons. That's a lot of people. There are 52 Sundays in a year, that's 52,000 times a year I was being told I was evil, the child of Satan, I was going to Hell because of what I wrote. That went on for 30 years, that's 1,560,000 times I've been told I was worthless, 1,560,000 times I was told I was hated. And that's only counting Sundays. I don't know why I put up with it all those years, why I kept going to church.

Looking back now, it all seemed so pointless for me to keep going to church all those years. I went to every single meeting, 3 hours on Sunday at each Ward, Tuesday Night meetings, Friday night meetings, volunteer work to do landscaping and decorating the church for the dances and holidays. I never missed a single one of them. That's another 4 days each week times 52 times 30 plus 1,560,000, which comes up to a grand total of I have been told by Humans that I was a hated worthless child of Satan 7,800,000 times.

In my life I have been told 7,800,000 times that no one loved me because I was evil and going to hell. I just can't take that kind of abuse any more. That's why I don't promote my books. It was my books that caused the hate to begin with. If I promote my books more than I did already, that would bring them before millions more people. I'm having a hard time holding up against the hatred I'm receiving just from a 1,000 people as it is. If millions of people were to start hating me, I couldn't take that. I just wish some one would find something good to say about me for a change. Maybe, it would get my hopes up, but, I don't know, it's just been so long since the last time I heard a kind word spoken to me, I don't know if it would even have any effect.

Has being homeless changed my outlook on life? It did.

Q. Would you say you learned anything from your time being homeless?

EelKat: Oh yes. I learned more, than a million dollars worth of college would ever have taught me. I learned how truly cruel and cold hearted the Human race truly is. I learned to put my trust in no man, especially men claiming to be men of God. I learned that while every one tells you that the government has programs to help the poor and homeless, but in reality, there are no such programs. I learned that charities that say they give back to the community by helping the poor, actually never have any funding left over after they get done paying their CEOs income via the donations. I learned that people only give to the poor things that are rotted, molded, or broken, things that they themselves would never dream of eating or using. I learned that when you have no roof over you head, and you just assume that there will be shelters you can turn to, but than you find that most homeless don't qualify to stay in shelters because only those that live immoral lives are eligible for help. I learned that when people think you are wealthy they can't wait to be your best friend, but than after you take them to see where you live, and they see that you live under a tarp, than you never hear from them again and they pretend they never knew you. Yes, I learned a lot these past three years.
Most importantly, I learned that people see the world through big bowls of glistening fruit and are blind to the mold at the bottom, and if any of that mold gets on you, than you had better watch out, because they well stomp you down and hide you under the fresh fruit and than bury you is heavy cream, so that they won't have to see you or your pain. They want the world to be a big bowl of peaches and cream all fine and dandy and if you do any thing to disrupt that view of their world, they will stop at nothing, to restore their precious candy coated mask on the world, even if it means destroying you to do so.

Q. I have noticed something about your words, your train of thought even. You see it once in a while in your words online too, but it's just scattered in random bits and pieces there. Here in this interview, and through out most all of your answers, I see you referring to people, not as people, but as humans, and not just humans, but Humans, with a capital "H". I've never seen any one do this before, and I've never heard any one who speaks of people as Humans the way you do. It's as though you are speaking of them like they were a different species than yourself. Like one would speak of a cat or a dog. Why do you talk like this?

EelKat: If you've listened to anything else I've said in this interview, than you will already know the answer to this: I was 27 years old, before I had contact with a single Human outside of my church. Church members did not think I was fit for society, so I was strictly forbidden to go out in public. I was never allow to go out in public, with out being accompanied by a male religious person. I was not allowed to speak to strangers. I was not allowed to look up and acknowledge that strangers had been seen by me. The only time I was allowed to speak was to church members, and they were so dead set on shutting up my ravings that I was rarely asked by any of them to speak. I became the prolific writer I am today, because if I wanted to communicate, my only option was to write down my thoughts and than pray that they would not be burned. I was never welcomed by these people as though I was one of them, rather I was treated as though I was an evil creature, not part of their race. I was never made to feel Human, in fact, I was treated as though I were not a Human at all. Thus I do not feel a connection with the rest of the Human kind.

I know I refer to people as Humans. I've done it most of my life. The way Humans treated me, made me question, wither or not I actually was a Human. Maybe it comes from talking to Etiole most of my life. (Etiole, the alien/creature/being/thing that I saw when I was 4 years old, whom no one would believe existed. For most of my life he has been the only person to whom I speak. And the reason the church members said I had schizophrenia, and the reason they wanted me to leave town.) He refers to them as Humans, and yet, he never refers to me as Human. It is because I talked to Etiole, that Humans originally started treating me the way they did. While other children also claimed to have seen him, no adults ever saw Etiole, so no adults ever believed he was real. They were punishing me, for refusing to agree with them and say that Etiole was not real.

I guess, some where along the line, I stopped feeling like I was one of these things, these monstrous creatures that called themselves Humans, because there were no Humans willing to accept me as an equal. The less equal they treated me, the less equal I felt, thus the less I felt Human.

I never learned to trust adults. I never learned to trust Humans. The only Human I ever did trust was a boyfriend, 27 years my senior, I had for 15 years, who, just weeks before our wedding, I went to a doctor and was told I could not have children, so he called off the wedding two days later and broke up with me, him being a "good Mormon" and all, because I wouldn't not be a good wife, since I was useless as a breeder. That happened in 2003, just after the vandalism and harassment was getting started. I was losing my faith in the Human Race back than, but he was the one person that I could turn too. The only one I had to talk too, and suddenly, he was gone. He was the only Human I had ever opened my trust too. Suddenly I couldn't even trust him any more. Maybe that's why I have such a hard time staying in a relationship with men, and why I am at my age, still a virgin. After I found out I couldn't have babies, I got a lot more animals. They took the place of the babies I could never have. My animals, became my children.

The summer of 2003, saw an evil form of harassment come in the form of some vile anonymous person signed me up for a year subscription to American Baby, Parenting, Baby, and several other such magazines for new mothers. Not many people knew what the doctor had told me, I told, I think 4 people, all Mormons, as I don't know any non-Mormons. Rather limit's the options, there was one odd thing about it however: they got my mailing address wrong. It stood out, because for the past 20 years, I had gotten quite a few letters in the mail, addressed to this very same misspelling of my address: letters from my grandfather and my uncles. This unique misspelling of the mailing address on these magazines, that were now coming, was a glaring indication, that either my grandfather or my uncle had paid for the subscriptions, because no one else ever misspelled my mailing address in that manner. I wonder, though, how they could have gotten the information, seeing how I never told any relatives, what the doctor had said. It means that one of the people I did tell, had to have contacted one of my relatives and told them. Either that, or somehow my uncle found out who my doctor was, the same way he'd found every church I was going to, and thus contacted the doctor. In either case it was a breech of my privacy. I called the magazines to tell them to cancel the subscriptions, but being gift subscriptions, meant I couldn't cancel them, and I ended up getting each of them for the next two years. I chalk it up to being just one more act of cruelty at the hands of religious men, and one more reason why I dislike Humans.

I have never been treated like I was a Human. It's been so many years now, that, I don't feel a connection to Humans any more, I do think of them as very different from myself, and can't breed with some thing not of my own kind. I don't know when exactly the connection broke, it's been wearing thin for many years now. The year of the tent was hard. I needed some one to talk to, and I had no one. Just Etiole.

The year of the tent, 2006, left me alone, with a lot of violence being done to me, and no one willing to talk to me about it. I think that is when my connection to the Human Race, finally broke. I was alone, for a year. Shunned by relations, shunned by friends, told that what they had done to me, was really the work of God. There was no one there for me. No one cared.

I needed Human contact. I was desperate for Human contact. That's why I looked for government help, not the get help, so much as just to find some one out there who cared about me, even if it was just strangers. I tried signing up for welfare programs, food stamps, some thing, anything to keep me in some sort of contact with at least one Human, some where, any where, any one would have done at that point. I was desperate. I was turned away from all of them. Friends, family, strangers, government.

The year of the tent, 2006 - 2007, that was also, the year of the world wide pet food poisoning. The poisoned wheat gluten from China. The recall would not come about until months after thousands of pets across America had already died, mine included. All I had left was my animals, and more than half of my animals died that year. My animals were my children, and without them, I was devastated. The day the house burned, I had more than 300 animals in my care. By the end of that year, there were only 40 left. I begged every one I knew, if they wouldn't help me, please, at least help the animals.

I had to deal with all the things that had happened that year, alone: the flood, the multi-million dollar medical bills, the fire, the town council's constant harassments, living in the tent, the pet food poisoning, the destruction of everything I owned at the hands of vandals, and than on top of that 260 deaths. All of this happened in the space of 8 short months, and there was not one single person whom I could turn to for help. I just shut down completely after that. Whatever thread there was keeping me connected to the Human Race, broke. So much violence. So much death. So much hatred. My eyes opened that year, and I saw the Human race for the vile beasts they truly were. After that there was no doubt in my mind, whatever these evil creatures were, these despicable monsters who called themselves Humans, I was not one of them.

With everything that happened that year, ultimately it was the deaths of so many of my babies that year, that showed me, just exactly what it means to be Human. Humans are cruel. Humans are cold. Humans are heartless. Humans are evil. Humans are monsters. And religious church going Humans were the worst beasts of them all. What they did to me, I could tolerate. I've had to put up with it for 30 years. What they did to my animals was unforgivable. I can replace books. I can rewrite words burned. But a life once taken, can not be restored.

I didn't just lose my home, my possessions, my so-called Human friends: I lost the one thing that mattered most in my life: I lost my animals, and you can't bring them back. I want no part of the Human Race now. I saw very clearly than, that they were right, all those years ago when they said I was different. They were right, I was not like them. I am nothing like them. I have feelings, I have compassion, I have love for those around me; they had none of that. You have no idea, what the Old Orchard Beach town manager and his Mormon town council put me through that year.

There were 4 people during that year, 4 Humans, who maintained contact with me: my 3 teenage brothers, who checked in on me a couple of times a week. They wanted to help. They tried to help. And my one friend, the strange UFO chasing Sunday School teacher-ex-boyfriend from so many years ago. For some unknown reason, he showed up in my life once again, the year of the tent. He is the reason, I still have my books and my comic books and my huge antique church organ. He loaded them up and took them to his house. My stuff was in the process of being packed in boxes, to move to his house, the day the vandals came and destroyed everything. Everything they destroyed was packed in boxes, ready to go up to his house. The vandals, before smashing everything, had unpacked the boxes. It tells you just what kind of effort these guys put into destroying my property.

I don't know what to think about my ex. He was there for 15 years, than in a blink he was gone, off with some other woman, and then three years later he's back in my life acting like nothing had ever happened. I have a hard time dealing with that, because I've been told by someone from Church that he's still with one of the other woman, (don't know who to believe on this since both my ex and the other member have lied to me in the past, and I don't really have a reason to trust either of them anymore) and yet he's here at my place every Sunday on his way home from church. I don't get it. However, if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't still have my massive book collection, because when the town came in after the fire, they took everything that wasn't named down and auctioned it all off, well, everything that the vandals hadn't destroyed before the town got there, that is.

In the end, after 30 years of being called an apostate and being told I was going to hell, and being harassed, they finally broke me, and yet, I still write. Weird. The one thing they wanted to stop me from doing, the reason behind everything they did: they couldn't stop me from writing. They can't make me say Etiole wasn't real, and they can't stop me from writing that he was real. They wanted to silence me about the crimes of the bishop, and ended up committing more crimes to protect him, and now, here I am writing that down too. It almost seems funny in a way, when you think about it. After everything they did in an attempt to stop me from writing, all they did was give me more things to write about. They took every thing from me, but they forgot that I still had my free will. They can't take that away.

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