Falling dominoes: the path to homelessness for one couple

She is a mid-1980s Los Gatos High alumna, now 48. Married once, mother of three. Former business woman. Optimist.

He is a 1980s Prospect High alumnus, 46, formerly the proud owner of two houses and the kind of guy who fills the room with laughter. Likely a “class clown.” Realist.

Kellean Fransham and her boyfriend Monte Bippus were typical middle-class Americans. They were just like you. They were just like us.  Until they lost everything. All it took is one domino to fall.  

In the early hours of a Saturday morning, we sat in the Home First clinic waiting room, just the four of us. Fransham had on a black graphic-tee, a plaid button-down and gray slippers — her shoes had “broken” a while ago. Her wispy henna-red hair brushed against her forehead and past her shoulders. Every so often her upper lip would lift to reveal missing teeth.

Bippus sat a few seats down from her, scruffy hair pushed back under a baseball cap. He shot us an encouraging gap-toothed grin and we began our conversation.

Fransham married at age 18, but didn’t go to college to help her husband manage a sheet metal and machine shop in Los Angeles. She had two kids and was pregnant with a third when her husband was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer.

In a few months, he was gone, and Fransham never recovered. Instead, she grew steadily worse: She sank into a deep depression; she gave birth to her daughter, but was in no state to look after any of her children; she relinquished their care to her father. Fransham was left alone. That was 16 years ago.

“I had a life,” Fransham said. “I had kids and the whole thing. And when [my husband] died, everything just kind of fell apart for me.”

In her depression, Fransham began using drugs, which led to her addiction and eventually to homelessness four years ago.  

Fransham said: “I was hospitalized [after my husband’s death] for a little bit and then when I got out, I looked for any way I could to get out of that depression, and it was drugs … It was just one after another. Drugs was my double-edged sword: It was my savior, and here it’s killing me.”

While Fransham was in the throes of addiction to methamphetamine, she met her current boyfriend of six years, Bippus, another meth user.  For two years, the couple lived in a house under construction that belonged to one of his friends. They could stay as long as they “did some work” on it. But when the house was completed in 2010, Fransham and Bippus had to move out. They no longer had a home.

“I do remember the day,” Fransham said. “It was November, right before Thanksgiving, and [we] got set out of the house that we were living in, and [we] stayed in the back of a U-Haul truck [we] had rented. And it was raining. It was pouring down rain and I had to go take the truck back. I kept it for two more days and paid the rental for it and slept in the back of it instead of taking it back. That was one of my first days of homelessness.”

Since that day, Bippus and Fransham have resorted to various means to survive without a steady income to provide a roof over their heads. They first slept in his pick-up truck, and when it was impounded, they slept in carports, and on school rooftops in the summer. For food, they relied on Bippus’ food stamps until those, too, stopped. Then, they started recycling cans and going through dumpsters and pawning items of value they found.  

“To be honest with you, we’d go and — I mean, this is about honesty; I might as well give it to you,” Fransham said. “We went to the hospital and said we were in pain and got pain pills and sold them.”

At this Bippus added, “Hey, not me! I was [actually] in pain.”

“OK, whatever,” Fransham responded teasingly. “That’s the honest truth.”

Meth eventually took a toll on Fransham’s health, limiting her agility. On a particularly bad day, Fransham called the hospital, thinking she was having an asthma attack.

“The ambulance picked me up and said, ‘Your lungs are fine and everything,’ and they put the ECG (Electrocardiographic) things on me and said, ‘Uh oh,’” Fransham recalled. “My heart was not pumping the way it was supposed to.”  

Even after she was hospitalized, Fransham did not immediately forsake the highly addictive meth. When Bippus came to visit her in the hospital, he was high on drugs, triggering Fransham’s craving.

“I made him give me some in the hospital and then I was like ‘What in the hell am I doing; this is killing me’ and that was my last time,” Fransham said. “It took me to go and hit that pipe and think about what I was and where I was, sitting on a toilet, in a bathroom, in a hospital, in scrubs, in a gown with things hooked up to me everywhere, to say, ‘That’s it, I’m done.’”

Fransham said she is now finished with using drugs.

“It was a life or death thing,” Bippus said.

“Yeah, I don’t think I would have done it otherwise,” Fransham said. “I think I’d still be out there, high.”

This all happened about a month ago. In late October of this year, Fransham and Bippus left the hospital and, on the advice of the hospital staff, headed for the Home First respite center in San Jose.

The center provides the homeless with a place to stay for up to six weeks if they have a medical condition, as does Fransham.

Bippus, on the other hand, had to join the New Start  program to be able to stay for up to six months. This program aims to help the homeless find employment by providing them volunteer-work experience and employment workshops.

“Otherwise, they give you one night. I never knew that,” Bippus said. “When I came here and said, ‘Can I get … a bed?’, they are like, ‘Well, for one night.’ And I go, ‘Really? For one night?’ It was unbelievable.”

Both Fransham and Bippus find their time in the shelter a welcome relief from the bitter nights they spent on the streets.

Fransham is optimistic that their stay at the center will break their spell of homelessness.

“I’m an optimist too,” Bippus said. “[Some people think] you know, is the glass half full or half empty? I’m just happy I have a glass.”

But Bippus admits it’s hard to find the silver lining when recovering from chronic homelessness.

“If you don’t have housing, it’s tough to get a job because you can’t groom yourself,” Bippus said. “You can’t keep your things so that you can go to the interview with nice clothes because, when you are homeless, you lose stuff every day. People are [always] stealing your stuff.”

Fransham spends her days resting, planning, going to church and attending the housing meetings the shelter holds; she keeps her eyes open for any opportunity to be granted subsidized housing.

“I just, I can’t lose the hope, I mean I can’t be [a] pessimist … and say, ‘Nothing’s going to happen, nothing’s going to happen; we’re not going to get housing,’” Fransham said, “because I see people leaving; I’ve seen three people leave since I got here to their own housing.”

For Fransham, the hardest part about being homeless, other than the physical discomfort, is her separation from her family.

“When I got sick, I got in the hospital and got scared and called my family for the first time in a long time,” Fransham said. “So, just recently, I got to hold my baby [who was given away for adoption] for the first time in … oh God, years?”

Bippus interrupted. “Tell them how old your ‘baby’ is.”

“She’s 16,” Fransham laughed. “She’s 16 and she’s still my baby … all the time when I was gone, she was with [my father]. And she’s rebellious and she’s mad at me [for the drugs], but she has an open door for me.”

Despite Fransham’s recent contact with her daughter, her main bond now is with Bippus. Her father passed away this year, and she is not in close contact with her mother or her only sibling, a sister.

“[My mother] has her own issues, but she’s [still] worried,” Fransham said. “She doesn’t want to lose a child.”

Both Fransham and Bippus find it difficult to contact old friends and family, or even to talk to strangers because of the stigma of homelessness.  

In addition to their loss of friends and family, homelessness has robbed Fransham of her dreams and aspirations.

“I wanted to do a lot of other things; I wanted to go [to] a lot of places. My dad wanted to live in Australia, and he and I had this argument [because] I wanted to live in Paris and he wanted to live in Australia, so we [agreed] to meet halfway,” she laughed. “We didn’t want to be here, but yeah, I had a lot of aspirations back in the day.”

As for Bippus, his goals came crumbling down when he began to gamble his savings away.

“Addictions are addictions, you know?” Fransham explained. “It’s not the upbringing, it’s the [addictions].”

Bippus hasn’t gambled for four years: He has nothing left to gamble.

“[The homeless] are normal people,” Fransham said. “There’s people here that would give you the shirt off their back and then there’s people that will just turn their nose at you like they have lived in the highest class place; I think that we are trying to accumulate all the homeless people into one place … I don’t even know where that is…”

“Concentration camp,” Bippus muttered.

Staying homeless is not an option, they say. All of their energies are being spent on finding housing, and for good reason:

“Being homeless, staying homeless, staying on the street, I don’t know how many nights I’ve just cried tears just being out there, telling my mind I’m so tired of it,” Fransham said.