*****

This past weekend we had my girlfriend’s family over and I cooked for everyone. I’d never cooked for a group of people and hosted a social gathering like this before but it was a goal I’d had for a while now. I’ve gotten very into cooking this year and I’ve been fortunate to be able to cook regularly. I have an impressively large callus on my right index finger from chopping vegetables. It’s fun to have this callus: It is a sign that I have been doing something for long enough that it has become part of my body. 

I started early and I enjoyed the work. I seasoned some chicken with cumin and coriander for a Southwestern feel; I made rice and beans; and I made guacamole, which I have gotten very good at. I love Mexican food. I grew up in North Jersey but I was born in Tucson, Arizona, and I actually spent the most homeless years of my homelessness there. The southwestern deserts and borderlands are part of who I am. As long as there is a liminal element, I am of it. 

*****

Tucson is full of restaurants, and when you’re homeless and wandering the streets, you smell the food cooking as you walk by, wishing you could be part of that world behind the walls that keep you out.

I still remember my homelessness very vividly. Even then, in the thick of it, I understood that I had taken willful part in my own exile and was expressing my simultaneous feelings of unbelonging and deep desire to feel loved and cared about by acting out a theater of my own degradation on the streets where other people could gaze upon the pity and the terror of my suffering and despair. Pretty dramatic! Unresolved childhood sexual trauma, you know. Addiction. Criminality. Dirtiness, desperation, self-loathing, shame, defiance. That’s that spiritual homelessness. 

I took perverse pleasure, for instance, in eating discarded food out of the trash or off the ground in front of people sitting and eating at a restaurant, outdoors on the sidewalk, or safely behind a window or a fence. Rubbing their faces in it as it were while also hoping one of them would adopt me and take me home like a stray animal. I understand why people commonly use the term “unhoused.” But anyone who has grown up in a bad household can understand that a house is not always a home and sometimes you find your home elsewhere, like out on the road.

I always had this underlying fantasy that some infinitely tender cosmic Mother would come scoop me up and make everything okay. In the Southwest, we call her Guadalupe. I suppose that in the absence of that mother, I made a mother of fentanyl. That turned out to be a bad choice. I suffered a lot, as did anyone who stumbled into my gravitational field. 

Eventually though, in the fullness of time, I somehow caught a brief glimpse of the truth about myself. After that there were occasional lights that stood out like stars by which I could navigate the shoreless void of chaos and ancient night that my life had become. And one of those lights, one of those beacons, one of those stars, was the smell of home cookin’. More so than any roof over my head, those smells made me feel like home was a thing that involved true love and the human soul, and that even though I felt like I’d been exiled into the outer dark and consigned to nothing but weeping and gnashing for the rest of my life, I might actually find a place for myself by way of specific, identifiable, intentional activities that had that quality to them. 

I came to understand slowly and violently but inexorably that I could in fact get free of the hell of my own self-centeredness by learning to see heaven in my relationships with other people. And I could nurture and strengthen those relationships through very simple acts of service like cooking and cleaning. 

*****

In the course of my cooking, I did not worry once that I’d fuck it up and upset everyone. What a relief that is! I used to do that all the time. I worried a great deal when I started my coffee commitment at my first AA home group. Since then I’ve come to see the fear that everyone will hate me as one of the more challenging forms of self-centeredness of the many that I’m still working on getting rid of. This is common among alcoholics and addicts. But a lot can change in a little time; that is one of the defining characteristics of spiritual experience as I know it; and so I was graced to be able to enjoy myself unencumbered by intense self-doubt. I timed it all out pretty well and I was laying out the spread just as our guests arrived. By the grace of the good lady Guadalupe, I had found my way to the other side of the wall.

I had a chance to explain this to Sally’s family as we sat and chatted during and after lunch. I had avoided going into my history with her family and friends for a while. Treating normal social interactions like group therapy or a 12-step meeting puts me at risk of becoming an emotional black hole and warping the social fabric around me by way of the gravity of my unmanaged intensities. This is not only unhealthy but unethical and can cause harm both individually and socially. 

I’ve struggled with intense narcissism from a young age. I had to raise myself in a violent and chaotic environment. For years in young adulthood, I’d taken pleasure in nuking conversations by saying the unspeakable. I was passionately filthy. Naked Lunch-type stuff. I got myself into all kinds of trouble! Sometimes I would even hit someone mid-conversation just to spice things up. Throw a dart at a stranger’s foot! Get punched in the face. Good! I was always acting out my radical unfitness for civilized society. This kind of recreational violence generally involved heavy drinking. If I did strong-arm robbery, it involved cocaine. If I dealt cocaine, it involved Machiavellian manipulation. That’s that life for you. I’d been fucked up from a young age, and I exacerbated my problems by making bad choices repeatedly throughout my adult life until I finally hit a breaking point that cracked open the shell of my own insane defense mechanisms so that I could get reborn good and proper on June 28, 2024 at the age of 49. 

That morning when I cracked open and crawled out crying I’d woken up on a gurney in an emergency room unaware of where I was. I had envelopes with notices from different municipal police departments resting on my body. I was hearing voices and experiencing paranoid delusions during psychosis caused by alcohol withdrawal. I was crying and afraid. A man asked me if I wanted to check in and stay at the hospital. That was it. I knew I could surrender. I could let go. A woman gave me an intramuscular injection of Ativan to alleviate the symptoms of my alcohol withdrawal. Then I filled out forms, but someone had to write them for me. According to my intake paperwork, I was physically unable to sign my name. As someone who has spent a lot of time writing under the influence of every substance imaginable, this still impresses me. 

I got into service early on. First I was in the dual diagnosis unit at New Bridge Hospital in Paramus. I did the readings during morning group. Soon I moved on to short-term inpatient rehab, also at New Bridge. I served food at mealtimes and cleaned up afterward. I had to deal with sugar thieves, who run rampant in rehab units. People also compulsively hoard milk. 

I also served as sergeant at arms on the unit, so I had to make people get out of bed and be on time for group. I helped illiterate people do their workbook assignments. I tutored a young man who was hoping to get his GED. He was 20 years old, Honduran, and had raised his younger siblings. He was a good kid, handsome and fun, very athletic, a great skater and a boxer, but he had no education. He needed to learn math most of all so I taught him arithmetic, geometry and algebra. During that time I got to experience seeing someone else light up and come to life as I worked with them and I realized that I could find guidance by using light like that as a beacon. That beautiful light in other people was what I could give my life to when I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. 

After my short term at New Bridge I went to Turning Point in Paterson, where I ended up cleaning up after meals, cleaning bathrooms and hallways, tutoring people and serving as president of the unit, leading the morning meetings and serving as liaison between the residents and the head of operations. That was rewarding. I still talk to people from that time regularly. During that time I also wrote a great deal. I filled notebooks. Thousands of pages. Then I threw them away. The writing was its own reward, same as the service. Each in its own way gave me access to the world beyond my own individuality, which is big, and beautiful, and terrifying, and worth it.

After the first long-term rehab I did a second long-term rehab, then moved into a halfway house, where I did other people’s dishes, washed house linens, took out garbage, cleaned rooms to prepare for new arrivals, showed new arrivals around, and led the daily reflections house meetings in the morning. The Latino guys usually cooked so we ate a lot of rice and beans and I loved it. I took on a coffee commitment at my first AA home meeting. After the halfway house, I got a single room at a homeless shelter at the YMCA down the street. I finally left the homeless shelter on March 1, 2026, 611 days after I was first admitted to the hospital.

*****

When I finally rotated back out into the wild among regular people, I had to adjust. I couldn’t talk about surviving sexual abuse or robbing drug dealers or shitting my pants on the bus with just anyone. You talk about that stuff constantly while institutionalized or in the rooms. And I enjoy that shit. The real shit. I love it. But there’s something about getting back into life on its own terms that is very satisfying. You can talk to regular people about regular things. You can fit in. Fitting in was an exotic new feeling for me at 51 (I turned 51 one week after leaving the shelter). I have socialized with regular people many times by now. I go out to restaurants where people are drinking. People smoke weed around me. It’s not tempting anymore. I’m past the struggle of resisting certain temptations and find genuine satisfaction in other things. Home cookin’ is one of those things. Serving others helps me achieve some measure of liberation and communion: There’s a mysterious sense of compassionate power in it. But I’ve come a long way since my old life and my institutionalization and now I can finally speak openly about my past as I did with my girlfriend’s family—during and after lunch—and that meant everything to me. 

There’s a kind of trick to telling people lighthearted stories of terrible suffering and misbehavior. I know that for me there is a lot of humor involved. So it’s like, if I go into something about, say, drinking a pint of hand sanitizer and waking up to being sexually assaulted and fighting the guy off only to deal with realizing I’d been robbed and suffering the intense miseries of severe acute alcohol withdrawal, including hearing voices and paranoid delusions. I could speak easily of the darkness of my own life without warping the sociogravitational field around myself and sucking everything into my orbit. I could talk about the psychology of food in institutions, the weird habits of people who come in rail-thin after starving on the streets, but still complain obnoxiously about being served chicken twice in one day. 

But sometimes the most deeply damaged people can’t appreciate anything because they’ve had a kind of infinite defiance beaten into them by the cruelties of this world. This was another issue I had to work on in terms of my own problems and propensities, and it is the kind of thing that you try to get rid of so you can be free from the manifold forms of spiritual isolation that afflict the traumatized, the addicted, the homeless and the criminal. 

I have to relay that information so that my manner of expression actually conveys the fact that I have healed from the terrible damage. Pity can be a noble emotion and is an important part of our shared human experience, but self-pity is very poisonous to me. Telling stories from my life about my time on the streets and in the wilderness. The times when I was homeless and strung out, and smelled bad, and robbed people, and walked around muttering to myself incoherently and getting arrested without even knowing what I’d done—I want to tell that to everyone: I want people to believe in the better side of humanity and that it can exist even in people like who I used to be, who I am now.

****

Some people say cumin smells like body odor, but I think it smells like Walt Whitman, the bard of the eternal. Yes. It’s similar. 

I was glad to cater to my girlfriend’s vegetarian sister-in-law, who apologized for being messy but couldn't help it, because she was missing a thumb on her good hand. After the brain, the thumb might be the most human body part. She was very cheerful though, and we’ve always gotten along.

I’d long had trouble feeling ashamed in front of my partner’s families and it was good to feel as though I’d grown out of that. So when Sally’s dad had some kind words for me about his burrito, that was really satisfying. He is an interesting cat. He’s around 85, an Air Force vet and former aerospace engineer, and he has paid my bill at nice restaurants in Philly, so it was good to be able to feed him.  He brought a pound cake from a Philly bakery for dessert. We talked about how good bakeries smell and how even if you don’t buy anything, it can be fun to go in and just look at the cakes. I could tell that my girlfriend was really happy and she bragged about how I cook for her every day. She knows how crucial it is for me to cook for others. She gets it. 

I started cleaning up. We have a dishwasher but I do dishes by hand every day. I like how it feels. And there is a kind of vibe you create by taking care of things as everyone sits around conversing amiably. Everything was very warm and wholesome,  and that made me feel like life is good and that the world is worth living in. This is still new and exciting, almost exotic, for me. This feels like home.

****************************************

Mike Brown is a middle-aged public library enthusiast living in Lansdale, PA. He’s written for Hell World. He also has a Patreon.

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