‘I’m no crusader. I’m just a little guy fighting for what I believe in.’ : Voices in the Night

There was a kind of glory to the man sitting alone in the darkness chained to a doorway, against the immensity of the night and the office building.

No marchers chanted his cause, no police cars lent the color of authority to his vigil and no television lights froze the scene in garish still life.

It was just Stephen Elias by himself, and he seemed terribly alone.

I watched him from a distance for several moments, the glow of his cigarette flaring and dying, a burly man of 43 with tattoos, a mustache and a three-day growth of beard.

He was an unlikely hero, and maybe not a hero at all, a bartender who slipped on a beer-slick floor, now confined to a wheelchair, now fighting an insurance company.

I wondered as I studied him if I were witnessing the beginning of a crusade or simply another quiet sideshow in the carnival of a big city.

Was he a champion aborning, or just one of us, tired, sick and fed up, with no place else to go?

It was hard to tell, watching Stephen Elias in the darkness. His demeanor gave no hint of his inner motives.

He seemed, at best, an ordinary man, yawning, scratching and resettling himself in his wheelchair, staring into the summer night, waiting.

But the glory may rest in his very insignificance.

Elias’ fight is with California Compensation and Fire Co., a member of the Hanover Insurance Co.

He claims that they have refused to pay legitimate medical bills and won’t authorize surgery recommended by his physician; surgery, he says, that would get him out of the wheelchair.

Hanover won’t say anything.

The ordeal began almost two years ago. Elias’ fall left him paralyzed in one leg and partly paralyzed in the other.

Workers compensation, handled by Hanover, paid his bills for a while, Elias says, then arbitrarily stopped, simultaneously denying that they had authorized treatment which he had previously undergone.

When they turned a deaf ear to his protest, Elias appealed. A workers compensation board will hear his case later this month.

Meanwhile, he felt that alone wasn’t enough. He wanted to be heard and he wanted others to hear how a giant company could manipulate the life of a man in trouble.

So last Tuesday morning, on a quiet street in Woodland Hills, Elias chained himself to the front of the starkly modern building occupied by Hanover.

Police were called at the beginning of his protest, looked over the situation and decided that, since he wasn’t blocking the entrance or disturbing the peace, he was violating no law. They left.

A newspaper reporter came out, took a few notes and was gone. A television cameraman shot some footage and went on to other assignments.

And Elias was quite alone.

For 60 hours, day and night, he remained in the doorway. Relatives brought him food, others offered a kind word or moral support.

He unchained himself only to use the building’s bathroom. He slept on a mattress, still manacled to the door.

“Look,” he said to me when I finally approached, “I’m no crusader. I’m just a little guy fighting for what I believe in.

“I’ve worked all my life and I’ve got this treatment coming to me. And I’m not leaving here until I get it.”

It didn’t work out that way, at least not at this writing.

A chest congestion drove Elias from his vigil Thursday night after 60 hours of protest. He vowed he would return.

“I don’t give up this easy,” he said.

He might be there now.

What’s important about Elias isn’t the size of his anger or even the legitimacy of his cause. Silent protests rarely win vast media attention.

He will never, for instance, get the press accorded those peace marchers who tramped off into oblivion or the anti-abortionists who called God’s thunder down on the heads of their enemies.

What distinguishes his vigil is that he is doing it at all, and that he is doing it quite alone.

True heroes are more often born in silence than in clamor.

Elias shrugs off the notion that he is anything more than he is.

“What have I got to lose?” he asked. “A mortgage company is about to take our home and, in another week, they’re going to turn off our power, our water and our telephone. I’ve got to do something. “

Maybe so. Desperation often drives us to acts larger than our capacity to perceive them.

But one senses more at stake here.

Insurance companies have assumed a status in society vastly disproportionate to their moral importance. We have all felt the sting of their arbitrary refusal to insure and the frustration of being able to do little about it.

Stephen Elias is doing something.

For whatever set of motives, he chained himself to a doorway and for 60 hours became a lonely symbol of protest against the size and power of big business. And perhaps, by the nature of his whisper in the night, said something for all of us.