Cat (Etta)

Cat’s real name is Etta, for Etta James.
With bright purple hair and an outgoing personality, Cat, 29, has been through enough tough times she’s not afraid to live out loud. She’s tired of the homeless being criminalized.
On a quiet Sunday morning, she and her friends were waking up slowly, until a pair of downtown Clean and Safe Officers told them they needed to move on. “They arrest us if we sit too far out into the sidewalk,” she said. “They call it encroachment, make it illegal, so they can get rid of us. They throw away all our belongings while we’re locked up, then release us in the middle of the night with no money, no blankets, no place to go except right where we were before.”

She and a friend on the street, Cookie, lamented the lack of sanitary places to change clothes, take a shower, even brush your teeth. “How you supposed to get ready for a job interview if you cant get clean? They want us working right? Maybe they can help make that happen.”

Born in Yuba City, Cat was one of 13 siblings that all went into foster care. Cat says she’s half Irish and half Cherokee. Over the first 15 years of her life, she lived in 15 different homes. The families she lived with between ages three and eight were the worst, she said. At one point she was living with one of her birth siblings, but eventually they were split up. She bounced between living situations and make-shift families through her early 20s, eventually catching a bus out of Yuba City, ending up on the streets in San Diego. Her own two daughters, age five and seven, live with their fathers.

She prides herself for being discreet, especially when she’s doing something she knows will get her in trouble. The one time she admits to being a little careless was using her skateboard as a getaway vehicle when she’d just burglarized a home. Someone recognized her skateboard. She served one and a half years of a four year sentence and has two more years of parole to do. The scar across her cheek is from another indiscretion. “I was messing around with someone’s baby daddy,” she admits, “and she cut me. I get it,” she added.

“I’m usually smart about what I do,” she said proudly. “I don’t sh-t in my own backyard.”

She said she’s not ready to go indoors yet. She has a lot of pride, and even though she’s willing to accept help when she needs it, she feels in order to truly appreciate something she has to earn it on her own. She has gone through recovery programs, and wants to cut her own path to self-sufficiency though she’s not quite sure what the end goal might look like, and therefore not sure of the path.

She freely admits to self medicating with meth and listening to Drake’s music, which “hits home for me,” she said. Cat knows she has a lot of self-confidence that translated to personality, which makes it easy for her to establish friendships on the streets where most people keep to themselves. And she’s aware sometimes that personality makes police officers nervous. “This world can’t handle any more character,” she said with a laugh as she bicycled away balancing two coffee cups on a soggy cardboard tray in one hand.