"Do you need anything?" This is a common refrain writer Patrick Fealey says he gets from police officers when they knock on the window of the car he parks along beaches or in Walmart lots. Fealey has been unhoused since 2023 and lives out of his 2013 Corolla with his rescue dog, Lily. Finding a place to park through the night is a problem. He recounts his experiences with blunt force in an Esquire essay, from the very specific reality of how he rations the $32 he has per day from disability checks, to the "toughest parts" of being homeless for Fealey: how people treat him. "It's usually subtle, this hostility," he writes. "People pull in to visit the lighthouse or the beach or wherever I am, see me, and immediately park somewhere else. All day long."
Fealey's career as a journalist was derailed when he first became manic depressive in 1997. A complex cocktail of medications has his mind functioning while his kidney health and teeth deteriorate. Along with challenges navigating health care, finding bathrooms, and eating through tooth pain, a throughline that Fealey revisits involves parking his car to work, eat, or sleep. Sometimes at night he's awakened by flashlights pointing into his car, or it might be during the day while he tries to write. Fealey exhibits the pain of having nowhere to turn, and despite doing no harm, all the ways that being homeless is treated as a crime during a time when record numbers of people are on the streets. His narrative is so moving, people in the comments of the piece have created a GoFundMe for him that's amassed thousands of dollars. Read the full essay on Esquire. (More unhoused stories.)
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