Street roots., March 10, 2017, Page 9, Image 9

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Page 10
Street Roots • March
A life back on track
Chrysanne O ’Dell knows life’s highs and lows, and what it means to have a place to come home to a t the end o f the day
BY REBECCA KOFFMAN
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
“I always have a hustle,” Chrysanne O’Dell
tells me. We are in a Starbucks, talking about
her journey out of homelessness, and she is
frank about her obstacles. “My credit sucked,
bad financial history, criminal record.”
But her eye for
opportunity eventually
helped her get out of
homelessness.
She comes to our
meetings directly from
her daily appointment
at an Old Town mental
illness and addiction
treatment clinic. She
seems both frail and
steely.
She is 61 now, barely
five feet, slight and rail
thin; her long, auburn
hair held strictly in
A series o f stories about
check with bands or
barrettes. Her clothes
people who have
are carefully matched,
experienced homelessness,
her jewelry prominent
Bom in Athens,
and fou n d their way home
Greece, she was
adopted by a Greek-
American family in
Boston who picked her out from photographs.
“Growing up I was a nonconformist, always a
square peg in a round hole.”
When Chrysanne was 19, she left her home
and family in Boston and moved to California. It
was 1973. “I wanted to be a hippie on the comer
of Hollywood and Vine,” she says.
In San Diego, she rented a room and
registered at ITT Tech for a medical
assistantship course. Before she could make it to
•Hollywood and Vine sh e m arried a man who
drank. Sometimes he hit her. They lived in a
trailer with no electricity and no water, three
miles from the Mexican border. This didn’t
matter until she gave birth to a daughter at 21.
“Then I was homebound. After three months I
said, ‘Screw this.’”
They moved to a ranch where her husband
trimmed trees in exchange for rent. There
followed some good years. They built a tree­
trimming business.
“I’d walk up and down streets with handbills.
We did ornamental trimming and grafting. Then
we got a half-page ad in the phonebook. We had
three crews, a mulcher and a stumpgrinder.
“We bought a condo in La Mesa. We had a
Broyhill dining room set. One day he came
home with the chainsaw, drunk. Goodbye dining
room s e t”
After he threw her down the stairs, she
started squirreling away some of the grocery
money. She got away.
Back at her mother’s in Boston, she enrolled
at Northeastern University to study abnormal
psychology and got a work-study job at a halfway
house for men who had done serious time. That
led to 10 years as a corrections officer in a
women’s state prison at Framingham.
She started doing cocaine with her
co-workers.
“I don’t know if I was crazy,” she says. “I’ve
always had eating disorders. My brain is strange.
Most people will say they do drugs because they
want not to feel. I did drugs, in the beginning, to
be able to feel.”
A boss sent her to a treatment program. She
was clean for a spell and then one day, after a
prison macramé class, one of the inmates threw
her newly-knotted creation over the fence;
instant escape ladder. “I went up after her and
dropped down on top of her,” she said. “She
broke her back. I fractured a vertebra in mine.”
•—Chrysanne was prescribed Demerol for the
pain. “After two years the doctor decided it was
way addictive and took me off.” She started
buying Vicodin and then heroin.
After 21 days in detox she moved back to
California, “still in wicked pain.” On a mission to
score some heroin, she crashed a borrowed car,
and was arrested for speeding and leaving the
scene of an accident. “The first time I got in
legal trouble.”
This time 30 days in rehab was followed by
intensive maintenance. A sponsor “drug my sick
ass to three (AA and NA) meetings a day.”
She was clean from 1989 to 1994, when her
mother’s sudden death and a bad breakup, sent
her veering off course: more drugs, a couple of
bad boyfriends. She met her second husband,
and they had a son in 1997. But their
involvement with a check fraud and identity theft
scheme landed them both in prison.
“The picker-of-men I have installed in me is
broken. If they’re good, they’re boring.”
She moved to Oregon after leaving prison and
in 2000 got a job with the Better Business
Bureau.
For years she made good money, she said,
paid rent on her own apartment Then she lost
the job and soon after it, the apartment.
She and her son moved in with her daughter’s
boyfriend’s father, Bob. The relationship, she is
at pains to point out, was platonic. Bob paid the
rent, was kind and took care of her.
On July 2, 2015 he died of cancer. “I was
completely lost He was my everything.”
Chrysanne didn’t have enough money to cover
the re n t She and her son had to leave by Aug.
16. They stayed. On Aug. 19 while she was out
and her son was at work, there was a fire in the
apartment
On Aug. 21 she collapsed on the street and
See FINDING HOME, page 11