A Street Life--Wasted Days, Wasted Nights

Hawthorne Boulevard cuts through the city, a river of restless humanity on the way to somewhere--a job, a home, a friend, a lover, a meal, a date; a blurred embodiment of purpose, always on the move, never quiet.

But for Bert Gonzalez, Hawthorne Boulevard is the Street. And it is home.

He has lived on it off and on for two years--sleeping in nearby cars, under bushes, in cardboard boxes, whatever will offer shelter for a night; watching the cars, buses, trucks, bikes rush past his bus bench at 147th Street.

Rules of the Street

He knows the rules of the Street along with its dangers, comforts, where to find a meal, how to turn a dollar, where to give blood plasma twice a week for $15 a pint.

“I do not consider myself a bum,” said Gonzalez, 56. “Just temporarily down.”

Although no statistics are available, officials estimate that there are several thousand other homeless men and women like Bert, roaming the streets of the South Bay, living life on a catch-as-catch-can basis.

A typical day with Bert provides a glimpse into life on the streets.

It was a day of small victories--beautiful weather, one meal, a cup of coffee, a few drinks, a drunk friend’s escape from police scrutiny with just a warning, and talk, much talk with friends, to pass the long, idle hours.

Bert wants out. He vows to get off the streets, to get a steady job again, to stop drinking as much as he does. “Instinctively, a man does not want to be down,” he said.

But the Street sings a siren song of defeat. He has seen others disintegrate and he hears that evil song.

“It would be easier to give up,” he confessed. It is fearsome to venture away from the comfortable anonymity and sidewalk friendship that street life, however rough, offers him.

Indeed, Bert’s dimunitive figure at the bus stop blends in with the other riders waiting for the bus. But off the streets--in restaurants and stores geared to the cash-carrying public--a single glance can ignite a scalding shame.

“They serve you, but they look at you and you think, ‘Oh, God, I shouldn’t have come in here,’ ” he said. “The realization comes to you, and you say, ‘God, what have I become?’

“I have thought, ‘God, I’m glad Mom and Dad are dead.’ ”

Bert’s story and his street lore comes out in bits and pieces.

“It is sort of an unwritten rule that you don’t ask a person their background or why,” he explains.

Years of Drinking

He is 5-feet-4 and weighs 123 pounds. The whites of his eyes have a yellowish tint, testimony to years of drinking. Bert dresses neatly in inexpensive clothes. He tries to wash his hands and face every day. He shaves less often and figures he showers about once a week.

Six months ago, a doctor told him that his teeth needed repair, that he has the beginnings of an ulcer and that his heart beats too fast.

“Put it this way: I sleep in the bushes overnight, in the car the next day, in a shed the next day. Naturally, it is going to run your health down,” he said.

The morning began well, mainly because the night before had not been a problem.

Bert had been fortunate enough to bunk down on the back seat of a friend’s stalled blue 1970 Cadillac El Dorado, bypassing his preferred spot on the grounds of a nearby church because it was a cold night. “Do you think I like sleeping in the back of a car? I despise it,” he said.

The Caddy, which needs a new battery, has been sitting for weeks in Hawthorne Boulevard’s median parking strip near 148th Street, stranded like some sort of lifeboat cast up against a river island.

Up at 6:30 a.m., Bert smoked the first of many cigarettes and walked down the street to a Best Western Motel to use the lobby toilet. No chance to wash up or shave because an unsympathetic desk clerk was on duty, he said.

Bert said he was born in East Los Angeles, attended the University of Redlands for awhile and later worked for McDonnell Douglas Corp. A succession of jobs followed, including a stint in the mid-1950s as sports and feature reporter for the Los Angeles Examiner, he said. He married and divorced and married again. He has a son who is a high school senior living with Bert’s second wife in Aurora, Colo.

For almost 10 years, Bert worked for Gulton Industries Inc. of Hawthorne, spray-painting silk screens used in the manufacture of printed circuit boards, a company spokesman said. Bert said he was making $14.50 an hour in 1982 when he was laid off, conceding that a drinking problem “might” have been a factor in his layoff.

He got another job with a screen-printing firm, but that company went bankrupt, he said.

His situation disintegrated.

“I gave up on myself. I said, ‘What is the sense of killing myself for a job that pays $3.50 an hour?’ I didn’t try. I know it,” he said.

He and his wife moved out of their $350-a-month, two-bedroom apartment near Chadron Avenue and 149th Street and into the garage of a drinking buddy. The man sent Bert out mornings with money to buy a fifth of Scotch and a six-pack of beer. Bert drank beer for breakfast.

“I would have two and then go out job hunting and take one with me,” he said.

“My wife and I were on the street a while,” he said, but eventually--he isn’t clear about dates--he sent her to stay with relatives in Colorado. “I couldn’t do things on my own because I would try to take care of her,” he said. He has not spoken to her for some time.

“Four or five months ago (was) the last time I called over there. She wasn’t home. (A relative) was rather curt and cold. It rather ticked me off, so I didn’t call back,” he said.

He has supported himself by working odd jobs and, during one stretch, donating blood plasma twice a week. He said he last worked about three weeks ago, earning $75 for four days of sign painting. Now the money is gone.

Permanent jobs are hard to get for a man his age, he says. “I have had companies tell me, ‘Off the record, Bert, it’s your age.’ ” he said.

It is 9 a.m., an hour before the House of Yahweh would open to serve coffee and doughnuts.

Bert passed the time by pointing out the shed where several itinerants were sleeping and the used-car lot where razor-edged concertina barbed wire kept them from breaking into cars for a night’s rest.

There was the once-vacant house where he and others used to sleep and, across the street, a Der Wienerschnitzel restaurant, where the bathroom is open late and the A-frame architecture provides partial protection for those sleeping against its walls. And nearby, a Burger King that puts out a sack of unsold food at the end of the day.

“There are the same sort of hideaways all the way to the (San Diego) Freeway and up on the freeway, you will find many a bedroll,” he said.

But bathrooms can be a problem, said Bert, who admitted that he has been caught short more than once. “Yes, I myself am guilty of that, not by choice. Where are you supposed to go?” he said.

Bert drank his coffee quickly at the House of Yahweh and went back to his bus bench where he held forth on the Rules of the Street, the informal code of conduct to which he and his friends subscribe.

“Never steal,” he declared, adding after a pause, “from one another.

“It happens, but woe to the (homeless) person (when others) find out who it was. For one thing, he’ll be ostracized. Most likely, he’ll take a pretty good beating. Even if he is too big to handle, he better not go to sleep.”

But stealing from non-street people is a different matter, he said.

Most street people generally avoid armed robbery, he said, “but (if) someone needs a coat on the bench, that coat will disappear.”

Over the course of the morning, several of Bert’s friends stopped by the bus stop. But at lunch time, it was back to the House of Yahweh for a fish-noodle casserole, salad, coffee, bread and butter.

In the afternoon, a friend, a man in his late 20s who identified himself as Barry Zornak, returned to the bus bench, obviously drunk. Bert took a few swigs from Barry’s pint bottle of bourbon.

“What are you going to do all day?” Bert asked. “Our soup kitchen is going to be closed in half an hour. From there it is a long stretch until tomorrow. So you get together and chip in and buy a bottle.”

Barry tried to strike up a conversation with two girls waiting for a bus. They ignored him, getting on the next bus.

But two sheriff’s deputies who took notice circled the block, pulled over, tested Barry’s reflexes and told him to move along.

At the end of the day, it was back to the Caddy on Hawthorne Boulevard to smoke and philosophize.

“It is your own fault if you stay on the Street, but it is not necessarily your own fault that you wind up on the Street,” Bert said. “Circumstances can put you on the Street.

“To find yourself sleeping in the bushes, to wake up and know you got to be out of there by 7 a.m. and no particular direction, that is a difficult world. That is when they give up. You don’t give up at once. It is gradual.”

Bert said he feels healthier than he has for a while and believes his life will take a turn for the better.

“I’m on top of a realization that I have got to get out,” he said.