Cali Carlisle admits she is a heroin addict — ‘but in a healthy way,’ she insists, even if the visual evidence belies that claim.
Her nose is the brightest shade of red imaginable. She constantly picks at scabs all over her body. Her home is a makeshift bed beneath Interstate 80 in Sacramento.
And Monday was her 26th birthday. Not that you would ever guess. Anyone looking at her would think she is at least 15 years older.
Carlisle is part of California‘s growing homeless emergency. The state has around 130,000 people without a roof over their heads. But she is not in downtown Los Angeles where Skid Row is a symbol of the national crisis or San Francisco where nearly one person in every hundred lives on the streets.
Instead, Carlisle and her fiancé Brian Workman are in Sacramento, the state capital, where homelessness has shot up by a shocking 19 per cent in the past two years, putting the problem squarely on the doorstep of Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor.
Last week, salon owner Liz Novak brought the nation’s attention to the problem when she announced to great fanfare that she was shutting up shop because she could not deal with the needles, the human waste, and the general aggravation that comes with having a business in the city.
‘I just want to tell you what happens when I get to work. I have to clean up the poop and the pee off of my doorstep. I have to clean-up the syringes. I have to politely ask the people who I care for, I care for these people that are homeless, to move their tents out of the way of the door to my business,’ she said in a video posted on Twitter, which gained the attention of Fox News and other national media outlets.
‘I am angry about it. I wouldn’t be relocating if it wasn’t for this issue,’ Novak added.
Carlisle and Workman insist they are not part of the problem that forced Novak out.
‘All we do is lie around, eat ice-cream, have sex, and take drugs,’ said Cali. ‘Man, I love ice-cream.
Carlisle says she needs heroin just to exist. ‘I need it for everything — just to walk and to breathe.
‘I did go to rehab once, she added. ‘In Orangeville I think… or maybe it was somewhere else.’
Then she started a long rambling monologue that included ramekins and pico de gallo among other subjects and went off into her own world.
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