frank kensaku saragosa
nobody is born to this
trigger warning: drug use, sex, violence, child neglect/endangerment
Nobody is born to this,
but there are kids here, more than you’d think. People raise kids in this, in and out of the system, in and out of juvie, foster homes, group homes and living with grandma or an auntie who’s really a cousin or comadre, or running around shelters, maybe running the streets, and those kids start young – slinging dope, doing dope, not all of ‘em, but some, and sometimes it’s not just smokes and weed, sometimes it’s not just hitting the pipe or smoking off foil, sometimes it’s shooting up, even if their mom says if I catch you with a needle, I'll… even if she shoots up herself, or turns tricks, or is such a sloppy drunk she stays passed out on the sidewalk and yells at her kid cuz she needs 3 bucks to buy a cheap pint and if he doesn’t have it she calls him a lazy piece of shit, or
maybe dad’s got the kid and stays at the family shelter at Vinnie’s with his 10 year old daughter but gets kicked out cuz he missed curfew or cuz he argued with a guard so he sets up a tent on C Street over by City College under an overpass and he’s getting high but he’s still trying to get her to bed and wake her up and get her to school and do some laundry so she has clean clothes and he’s trying but it’s hard to feed a kid and get her ready for school and get your hustle on and do whatever it is you gotta do and he gets arrested for something dumb and she gets taken by CPS and he’s bummed as fuck cuz his wife is in jail and his daughter’s been taken away and I can relate, I know what it feels like to feel like the biggest piece of shit in the world, and we’re sitting in his tent and he’s pissed and he’s crying and he’s hurting like hell and when you hurt like that you gotta get high, but I also know that he likes getting high and he was getting high before he lost his wife and his little girl, and I don’t know but I figure that all he’s gotta do to get his kid back is not get high, and not piss dirty for the PO or CPS or whoever he needs to piss clean for, but instead he’s chopping it up with me and getting high like a motherfucker, and I feel for him, but I also kinda wonder how important to you is it? But who am I to say shit cuz I ain’t got shit, not even a little girl I lost or a wife who’s in jail, and we’re in the same exact place doing the exact same thing, and I’m low-key hoping that now that we’re finally in his tent alone maybe now I can get into his pants, so who am I to judge which one of us is a bigger piece of shit, but
my point is no one is native to the streets, not even if they’re Native, even though when you think about it, they would be the only people who actually belong here, if that makes sense, like that girl Andi, she’s Native and she’s smart and hella cute with her straight black hair cut short in a bob and she takes care of herself and doesn’t look homeless, but she is, right here with the rest of us, and I thought she was Asian like me until one time she says I’m Native, and she doesn’t mean to San Diego cuz she’s from like Montana or Oklahoma, I don’t fucking remember, she means Native American, but even she’s not native to this place, not her or her people, just cuz you’re on the streets, you’re not native to the streets, if you know what I mean, and it’s not really about where you were born or where your people are from or how many generations your people have been on this land, it’s about the fact nobody is born to live on the streets, and
what I’m really trying to say is no one is native to the streets even though some people say they are, they say Fool, I been on these streets my whole life! These are MY streets! But they’re not, not really. Nobody on the streets is from the streets, even if they grew up on this street, if you know what I mean, cuz
everyone on the streets is from somewhere else, even if they’re from right here, if you know what I mean. I mean, I lived in a condo in City Heights and there’s a grip of homeless cats on the streets and in the canyons and when I got kicked outta my condo I coulda stayed there, but I didn’t want to, and I didn’t go to North Park or Hillcrest, my old stomping grounds where I used to hang back when I had a place to live, back when I had a job and money and went out with friends, until I went out for good, if that makes any sense, and I coulda stayed on those familiar streets but I didn’t, cuz
it’s humiliating waking up in an alley in North Park right at Park and El Cajon and taking a piss behind a dumpster and looking over and seeing some guy in an apron standing there watching you, and you recognize him cuz you went out on a couple of dates. You’ve been to his house for dinner and you went to a Thai place down the street, and now he’s standing at the back door of his barber shop opening up for the day and looking annoyed at the homeless dude pissing on his wall, and you see him realize it’s you, and he says Hey, what’s going on? You doing OK? And I’m pissing on a wall behind a dumpster in the alley I just woke up in. How the fuck does he think I am? But I get it, I know, what else can you say? But I don’t want that to happen again, don’t wanna be where some friend or former friend or whatever the fuck he is to me now can watch me piss first thing in the morning, and I don’t wanna see that look in their eyes, I don’t need to deal with that crap, so that’s why I stay downtown, away from the places I used to call home, but
some people stay in the places they lived cuz they wanna be close to home even though they don’t got a home, if you know what I mean, and whether or not you got a home to go to you gotta be somewhere, and even if you live on a street your whole life you don’t live on it, if you catch the difference, and it’s a big difference, it’s all the difference in the world, and
even if someone sleeps on the same block where they used to live, and even if their mom has a house there, or their girl, or their baby’s mom, they can’t just open the door and walk in, they gotta call first, and sometimes somebody lets ‘em inside, and for a minute it feels real, like they really came home, and it feels good to be inside a place that feels like where you belong, but it’s not like that for long, and before long they’re yelling and you’re yelling or you’re sneaking out in the middle of the night cuz you got a text and your homie came up, or maybe you came up and you know it’s shitty but you’ll replace it and they don’t need it, they got money and a job and a house and you don’t, so what’s this ring or this purse or this 60 bucks, and you know they’ll be pissed but shit they’re already pissed, and
the point is you might have lived here your whole life but you’re not from here, not from the streets, no one is. Everyone’s gotta learn how to be here, and whether you came from right here or from some other place, once you land on the streets you gotta start new.
It’s hard setting foot on new soil as a stranger in places that are familiar, or being in a place where you used to have a home, but you don’t, but you’re still there, and you don’t know what’s worse, if you never feel at home living on the streets, or if someday you do. It’s hard having people looking scared cuz you’re walking toward them, like you’re a criminal or a monster and not just some guy. It’s hard having no one to claim you. It’s hard not belonging. But who the fuck really belongs? Why do the people who live in a building belong there more than the people who just live on that street?
We live here too, just like you, maybe more than you. We breathe the exhaust from your cars and kick the piles of dogshit you leave on the streets and dig through your trash looking for something we need; our blood and our piss soak into the ground; parts of the street have become part of our bodies and parts of our bodies are part of the street.
No one is born here, or maybe they are, but that doesn’t make 'em native, and it doesn’t matter where you came from or who your people are, if you’re Native or Mexican or White or Black or a refugee from Vietnam or you’re Chaldean or if the Marines brought you here or if you snuck in across the border, cuz none of us ceded anything we lost, not our houses or our families or our right to be. You can’t tell us we don’t belong here, cuz we do. We do.
frank kensaku saragosa is a San Diego based writer whose work is rooted in his experiences of homelessness, addiction, criminality and incarceration. Work he wrote in prison won the PEN America Prison Writing Award, and since his release, he was named a LAMBDA Emerging Voices Fellow, an Anaphora Arts Fellow and a Columbia University Assembling Voices Fellow (with Jason Ritchie, as the San Diego Unhoused Collective). In 2025, he won the Ragdale Foundation’s Wauld Fellowship for Formerly Incarcerated Artists and was selected as a Write it Out! Playwriting Fellow.