On a recent Friday, Matthew Pallamary was 151 pages into his newest novel.
He planned to continue writing through the weekend. Each workday begins around six in the morning, or earlier if he’s recording an audiobook and wants to avoid departing planes.
For the past several decades, the 68-year-old has been a fixture of the San Diego writing scene. Framed awards hang on his walls. He’s a recurring guest on the AM radio show Coast to Coast and his work has been featured in The San Diego Union-Tribune.
He’s also been homeless.
Pallamary’s life — which intersects with a world-famous writer and one of the planet’s best-known treasure hunts — simultaneously illustrates the difficulties of knowing just how many people are on the streets and a new county effort to keep the crisis from growing.
Matthew Pallamary, 68, shows two notes he received from the legendary writer Ray Bradbury. Pallamary recently began receiving rental assistance from the county for his two-room Point Loma apartment.
(Alejandro Tamayo/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Pallamary grew up in Dorchester, Boston’s largest neighborhood. His “r’s” still occasionally slip into “ah’s.”
He joined the Air Force in the 1970s and became, in the words of his discharge paperwork, an “electronic warfare systems specialist.” In other words: IT.
“Once I got a trade, and knew I could feed myself, then I figured I’d decide what I really wanted to do,” Pallamary told a reporter years ago.
His first book was the horror collection “The Small Dark Room of the Soul.” Ray Bradbury, of “Fahrenheit 451” fame, sent a supportive blurb, and Pallamary still has that handwritten note (“Bravo! More!”) framed by his bed.
More books followed. The historical novel “Land Without Evil” was recommended by a Lonely Planet travel guide, adapted for the stage and profiled by a TV station in Austin. He wrote about the supernatural and the spiritual and made headway as a teacher and editor.
Then Pallamary was pulled into a plot rivaling one of his own.
Two hundred years ago, a galleon reportedly pulled out of western Mexico loaded with treasure. One centuries-old account in The New York Herald estimated its value at $15 million, meaning the current worth would require a few more zeroes.
The goods belonged to Spanish and church leaders nervous about the region’s “revolutionary insurgents” — Mexico was on its way to independence — but the ship made it only partway into the Pacific.
According to PBS, the crew mutinied, cut the guards’ throats, tossed their bodies overboard and buried what they had on an island.
The “Loot of Lima” has since become so famous that a board game is named after it. Franklin Roosevelt once tried to track it down, The Telegraph reported. So did Errol Flynn.
Several years ago, Pallamary joined a group with similar hopes.
The plan was to both look for the treasure and make a documentary about the hunt, he said. Pallamary estimated that he invested at least $150,000 into the effort.
Although his throat remained intact, one partner nonetheless proved unreliable and the plans collapsed, he said.
Combined with the breakup of his marriage, an earlier layoff from an IT gig and the 2008 financial crisis, which made new work hard to get, Pallamary found himself living out of his car.
He developed a system to keep typing.
Pallamary would park his blue Prius by a 24 Hour Fitness in Carlsbad, timing naps for when security guards were least likely to notice. He could shower at the gym and charge his toothbrush at a library. A nearby hotel offered ice for keeping food fresh.
While he said police occasionally told him to move, online Superior Court records don’t show any tickets or arrests from that period and Pallamary said addiction wasn’t a factor. He just owed a lot to the IRS.
Eventually, Pallamary drove north. Friends he’d made through the Santa Barbara Writers Conference, among other places, offered guest rooms. Some let him house sit.
This lasted more than a decade.
“I’m a writer, so I know how to struggle,” Pallamary said.
It’s likely he never appeared in any homelessness statistics. Pallamary said he was never approached by outreach workers while in his car and it can be nearly impossible for censuses to capture couch surfing.
He only got a place of his own last year after moving into a complex for older adults in Point Loma, not far from Pechanga Arena.
Rent for the two-room apartment began around $970, he said. It’s since climbed to more than $1,100.
He can swing it. Yet when no editing jobs appear, or his car needs a new battery, things get tight.
Earlier this year, he applied for San Diego County’s new rental subsidy program for seniors. So did 2,196 others, all vying for fewer than 250 spots.
Participants were chosen at random, officials said. Over the summer, Pallamary got an email: He was in.
The county began sending $500 to his landlord last month. The pilot program is set to end after a year-and-a-half, and researchers from MIT are currently studying whether the money is making a measurable difference.
“I hope this works,” said San Diego County Supervisor Terra Lawson-Remer. “It costs less to keep people housed than to pay for a shelter bed.”
Pallamary also hopes it can continue.
“It gives me some breathing room so that I’m not living hand to mouth,” he said.
Pressures remain. He’s found it hard to land steady IT work and wonders if employers are wary of hiring someone approaching 70. Living near the coast no longer feels completely safe from fire, and he uses a laptop in case a fast evacuation is ever necessary.
Rent may keep rising. The county’s assistance could end.
In the meantime, he hopes to finish his newest novel next year.
The story follows two people who want to engineer the “perfect baby,” and they hire a company, called Fetal Fantasies, which lets them choose everything from eye color to IQ. A boy is successfully born, but he soon orders the parents to bow down and worship him.
Considering recent advances in gene editing and artificial intelligence, the narrative sounds less like science fiction by the day. (Parents of toddlers may also find the plot twist relatable.)
As long as Pallamary stays in the current apartment, his workspace will have room for a second note he once received from Bradbury.
This one is a typed postcard from late 1999, sent after Pallamary shared another of his books.
“I hope it sells well out in that terrible often uncaring world,” Bradbury wrote. “Good luck!”
