Skid Row Dodger Fan Refuses to Sing the Blues

To some of his many friends who knew him when he was a regular at St. Vincent’s Center on Skid Row, he is “Eugene the puzzle man.” For years he was a daily fixture, seated before his current jigsaw, working it rapidly with his good arm, his paralyzed left arm crossing his chest, tucked inside his shirt. Those were the years when he was sleeping in Elysian Park and walking downtown to panhandle and eat.

Those who know Eugene Fejnas (he’s Eugene to everyone) even slightly, however, know the puzzles are just a hobby. His passion is the Dodgers.

The Dodgers are such a passion for him that even now that he has cancer, an inoperable tumor in his abdomen that has caused him to drop 100 pounds in the past few months, leaving the tall, stooped man at 130 pounds, he will still put his Dodger cap on and make it to a game if someone comes up with a ride and a ticket.

For the past nine years, he has been a guest of the Catholic Worker community, living at Zedakah House over their soup kitchen on Gladys Street. The puzzles moved with him. Until recently, however, he remained a regular at St. Vincent’s, helping serve coffee and doughnuts to the men every morning.

Recently, when he got out of the hospital and decided to forgo any chemotherapy, the Catholic Workers persuaded him to move into their main house in Boyle Heights where he would have better care and more company. He sent dozens of his jigsaws to the Downtown Women’s Center, retaining just a few, which sit untouched in a closed cabinet in his room. He is weak and can’t eat. He can’t even eat that many Eskimo pies, he complained to his friend, Catherine Morris of the community. She had brought him his own private carton of them.

But the Dodgers remain another story. For that reason, not only did some of his friends arrange to take him to a game last week, they arranged a surprise: He would meet Tommy Lasorda.

The Dodgers would beat the Cardinals that night, 8 to 2, but things had not been too good of late, the Dodgers being “in the cellar” as Eugene put it. Lasorda’s name came up in the car as he voiced the frustrations of a knowledgeable fan.

Once at the stadium, however, seated near the edge of the field, it was “Eugene” and “Tommy” from the start, just two Dodger fans pulling for the team, one of them a little in awe, saying, “Tommy, I just can’t believe this.”

Tommy and Eugene spent a good 15 minutes together, seated side by side, chatting casually while they looked out at the warm-ups, remembering a few games and plays.

Eugene told him about the cancer, and the years in Elysian Park, more as an introduction than any exercise in self-pity, and Lasorda took it in that spirit, saying, “Eugene, you’ve got that good hat (the Dodger cap). Wear it in good health and pride.”

“It’s none of my business, Tommy, but do you mind my asking how old you are?”

“I’m 58.”

“I’m just a little bit older. I’m 64.”

The two men, it turned out, share something of the same philosophy. They agreed on the importance of laughter and friendship in life, on the necessity of looking on the bright side.

It was time for Lasorda to go to the dugout, and when they shook hands, Lasorda said, referring to Eugene’s friends who had brought him, “Eugene, you and I both know no matter what, people do care. There are people out there who really do care.”

Eugene couldn’t have agreed more.

While they had been chatting, Lasorda had written on a baseball for him: “To Eugene. You and the Dodgers are both great. Your friend, Tom Lasorda.”

‘I Just Can’t Believe It’

“They’re gonna have to kill me to get that ball away from me,” Eugene told Lasorda when they parted.

Later, as he headed out of the stadium, he tossed the ball slowly in his hand, looking down at it, repeating his disbelief: “I just can’t believe it. A man who slept in a park for 15 years gets to meet Tommy Lasorda.”

The man who slept in a park for 15 years was born in Milwaukee in 1921, the only son of Polish immigrants.

He told his story the day after the game, fully clothed but stretched out on his bed in the cheerful room the Catholic Workers has fixed for him. The autographed baseball was on the nightstand.

He took a circuitous route with his story, separating the anecdotes with “I’ll tell you something else,” relating mostly tales of kindness or cruelty done to him.

Both his parents had heart trouble, he said, so most of the time they lived “on what they now call welfare.” From time to time his father worked for a federal agency, the WPA, supervising road crews. His memory is vague about his schooling. He can write his name and that’s all, he said.

Good Manners

They were a close family, the three of them. Eugene later attributed his good manners and geniality--despite a lifetime of living in an often hostile and dangerous environment--to his parents.

“My mom and dad always said ‘good morning’ to anybody no matter what color their skin was.”

When he was 17, life changed forever. They were in a car accident. His parents were killed. And Eugene, whose paralysis dates from the accident, spent two years in a hospital. He thinks now the staff kept him there out of sympathy, knowing he had no place to go.

“When I got out, I just started bumming around.”

He slept in parks and under bridges, knocked on doors asking to mow the lawn or rake leaves, “anything for a meal,” begged.

He would not know a home again until the Catholic Workers invited him to live with them “on Easter Monday, 1977.”

To be that young and alone. To start to live outside. To beg. It must be so frightening.

“Oh, yes, it is. But you sort of get used to it. I cried at first a lot of the time,” he said, his voice catching and tears coming to his eyes. “At first I dreamed potato pancakes. My mom always made them on Friday. We were Catholic and we couldn’t eat meat.”

Whenever his feet itched, he headed for the highway, hitchhiking back and forth over all 48 continental states, he said, spending no more than three to five months in a place.

Vagrancy Sentences

He got locked up for vagrancy once in a while, drew a few 30-day sentences for begging in California. When he could find a job, he worked--on a dairy farm in Orlando, Fla., “picking up manure with my one good hand”; working in a plastics factory in New York; folding linens for the Salvation Army in San Francisco; getting up at 3 or 4 a.m. to sell newspapers on street corners all over the country--something he can’t imagine in today’s violent times.

“No one molested you in those days. Gangsters weren’t interested in kids. They were interested in robbing banks.”

If it rained or was cold, he sat all night “in the shows, but you don’t dare go to sleep.” If he had money, he slept in a hotel.

“I’ll tell you something else. I did something wrong once. I went into a Catholic church in Texas and stole $50. I served 14 months of a two-year sentence in Huntsville, Tex. I didn’t even get to spend the money. They were waiting for me when I came out of the church.”

Prison terrified him. He never stole again, preferring, he said, to be jailed for begging than stealing.

“I’m ashamed of it,” he said of the $50, “but I’m going to tell it. I paid my debt to society.”

He came to Los Angeles for the weather and gradually gave up the wandering. He spent two years under the 6th Street bridge, then moved to Elysian Park. He walked five miles to Skid Row to eat at the missions, often getting sick on sour beans, he said.

“I ate better out of the trash cans.”

He will say, “I’ve met a lot of wonderful people on the road,” but, as gentle and vulnerable as he is, he came to fear the streets. He remembers the days of the Skid Row Slasher vividly. And the guy who held him up, taking the one thing he had in his pocket, his handkerchief.

He couldn’t believe it when the Catholic Workers invited him to live with them. “ ‘You’ve gotta be kidding,’ I told them. ‘I’ve got no money.’ ” To his surprise, they didn’t care.

He Was Too Dirty

One of their former members, Kent Hoffman, took him to his first Dodger game. He had never gone during his days at Elysian Park, when the noise and lights would keep him awake, he said, because he was too dirty. People don’t like to sit next to someone who is dirty and smells, he said.

It’s been a good life with them. He has gone to their parties, held placards in their demonstrations against apartheid, intervention in Nicaragua, military spending. And whenever they take kids on an excursion, he is the first one in the car, ready to go anywhere, knowing unerringly, his friends say, how to make the best of things and have a good time.

They are family now, and he said, “I love the Catholic Workers very much.” It is clear they love him dearly in return.

Not Ready to Go Yet

After saying he was waiting for the Lord to take him to heaven, he hastened to add he is not ready to go yet . He wants to keep going to ballgames, keep going for rides in cars, “meet Tommy again, and Vin Scully--I’d like to meet him sometime, too.” He would like, he said, another eight to 10 years.

All in all, how would he say life has treated him so far?

“The only worst thing in my life was losing my mom and dad. The second was being in prison, and the third is this,” he said, pointing to his abdomen where the cancer is. Then he cast his good arm out over all the memories he had summoned, concluding, “Otherwise, perfect.”