Homeless in San Diego : Life on the Streets; As Hours Pass, an Ongoing Struggle for Existence

They used to sleep where Horton Plaza now stands, but in the last year most of San Diego’s street people have moved about seven blocks east--out of sight, out of mind to many.

“I think the impetus to concentrate on the problem has diminished,” said Pat Morse, director of the Transient Center, which tries to find jobs for the homeless. “The crisis is over as far as the business population is concerned, and that’s really unfortunate. I think the problem could get continually worse if it’s not addressed.”

Municipal Judge Robert Coates is tired of having his reasoned discourses on helping the homeless fall upon deaf ears and glazed eyes at speeches before churches and clubs. The judge, who sentences dozens of transients a day for minor offenses, now resorts to emotional appeals to make people pay attention.

Meanwhile, the streets buzz with a fluid population--often skilled, sometimes confused--that has grown in the county from 3,500 three years ago to an estimated 5,000, most of them downtown. As one people-watcher who cruises downtown every day on his motorcycle noted: “It’s getting crowded down here.”

Here are the events and people of one night this week downtown:

5:30 p.m. The 28-year-old son of a Chula Vista woman walks past a gutted dairy distribution center on K Street. He has shiny red sneakers hanging from his duffel bag. Sunburned in the face from fishing San Diego Bay with his Budweiser-can reel and line, he’s been on the streets a few months after a string of driving jobs and working as a bouncer at the Sports Arena.

“I do better on the streets than paying $240 a month rent,” he says, perched on his belongings and combing a golden beard. He bares speckled forearms to show how he pays for food: Twice-weekly pints of blood plasma donations to the San Diego Plasma Center on F Street bring $22 cash.

Like most street people, he has an explanation for his situation. Refusing to pay an El Cajon jaywalking ticket and evading subsequent parking tickets and moving violations has kept him on the move. “There’s this one cop who’s really cool down by the Mission: he blows reveille through his speaker,” he said. “But the police have something to do with you losing your job.

“It’s almost socialistic. The State of California must be making a fortune off the judicial system. I’ll never go to court for those fools. They’re going to have to put me in jail and feed me.”

He says he’s comfortable on the streets but “winos are giving the street people a bad name” and things can get violent. Last night, he said, he heard gunshots while sleeping in a produce truck, and he refuses to go to liquor stores on popular corners for fear of being assaulted near the doorway.

“I know a guy down the street who got his SSI (Supplemental Security Income) check for $470 and he was going home to Denver, and he got rolled that same day.”

He sleeps in Balboa Park but complains he often gets drenched by sprinklers that burst on at 4 a.m.

6:30 p.m. A man from Arkansas in waist-level dreadlocks leans on a rail outside the San Diego Life Ministries center at J Street and 11th Avenue, known by its old name the “Mission.” Like the 50 or 60 others lounging in the lot, he is waiting for the doors to open for the church service and dinner. “I’ve done nothing today, just keeping to myself mostly,” he says. “I just want a bag of popcorn, man I sure could use one.”

7:30 p.m. A nondenominational service is winding up inside Life Ministries before 300 people, seated in fold-up chairs. Some listen attentively, nodding and echoing “Amen” and “Hallelujah” as a guest choir sings and a sermon churns the air.

“I know that many of you have come to the Mission day after day, week after week, some of you month after month,” the preacher bellows into a microphone, “but we pray that God will do something, especially for you.”

Others in the congregation plug their ears, read, sleep or grumble at the lofty rhetoric: “Shut up.” “Humbug.” “Tax deductions is what it all is.”

An array of shoes greets those with bowed heads: cowboy boots held together with duct tape, scruffy black dress shoes, sandals, running shoes. A standard service, it includes a collection in wicker baskets that brings no bills, many pennies. The setting sun streams through hexagonal stained glass, setting the 1,568 brass names of contributors to the Mission aglow on the side wall.

Here sits a demographic salad. According to the experts’ best guesses the homeless person averages about age 30, mostly male. Three-quarters are single, about half have a high school education or more, about half have been on the streets for six months or less, slightly less than half are mentally job-ready, about a third suffer from mental illness.

8 p.m. From the front row back, 320 street people file out of the chapel into the Mission dining room.

8:30 p.m. Mopping up a free dinner of chicken and cold peas, Tom Ueck, 42, describes how he dropped out of high school in seventh grade to care for a pet dog and how Jehovah’s Witnesses in Chicago turned him on to smoking PCP. He’s been in San Diego since 1981, and he has combed the sidewalks and parks, collecting rare clover leaves and pressing them between napkins with plastic non-dairy creamer containers from fast food restaurants “to keep from going batty.” He used to have a 20-leaf clover and others comprising a formidable assortment, meticulously labeled and catalogued.

He’s also writing a novel about how gangsters have robbed him of thousands of plants and knock his life backward every time he is on the brink of stability. “What I got robbed of is unbearable,” he says, hand-rolling a menthol cigarette. “I don’t even want to try to put a price on it.”

He wants to go back to his home state, Michigan, where “the four seasons are healthier for you and give you a better conception of time,” to breed show pigeons or work as an artist. He’s been robbed several times and says “you can’t afford to be boisterous.”

But a few times he’s gotten himself in trouble, blacking out after a liquor binge and regaining consciousness with the police in “detox,” the Volunteers of America Alcoholism Services Center on Island Avenue. “Every time I drink I get a ticket one way or another,” he says.

He distinguishes between different types of street people. “You find a lot of people with a lot of potential out here who look like they’re straight out of the Marine Corps. Then you have the riffraff. All types.”

9:30 p.m. Tom Recker, 33, ex-Marine, is among the estimated one-third of the homeless with military experience. His last job was with the Salvation Army in Anaheim, and he is ill at ease on the streets, bitter, remorseful. “I’m so embarrassed,” he says, dragging his cardboard bed out of a dumpster on Island Avenue. “I’m not a street person.” His mustache is well trimmed and his green corduroy jacket looks new.

First he blames illegal aliens for his plight. “That’s why I’m not working and that’s why I’m sleeping on cardboard tonight. There’s a secret about cardboard, by the way. It holds heat, I don’t know why.”

Then he calms down and finds another explanation, rooted in a tumultuous and violent childhood in Massachusetts and manifested in the pungent breath from the four-fifths of cheap wine he drank that day. “It took me two (fifths) just to get my head together,” he says. “It’s horrible that I’m here, but I’m here because of alcoholism.” He complains the detoxification centers aren’t as advanced here as they are in Boston.

He’s been jumped four times in as many months and wants to regain his job as a psychiatric technician.

10:15 p.m. Chris, 36, finds San Diego a bit more caring. “This is the only city that does anything,” he says, preparing for sidewalk sleep. “In San Diego, if you starve to death you deserve to die.” He bobs while he talks about the residents of what he calls “Peckerwood Flats,” the stretch of sidewalk on 11th Avenue near the Mission where dozens sleep nightly in a row.

“It’s a family,” he said, pointing out Red, Betho and Pineapple, a Hawaiian who has a bad habit of pinning people up against walls on short notice. “If I was asleep and someone started something with me, Red would come over and kill him.”

This informal brotherhood is fiercely independent, only occasionally taking meals at the Mission or other assistance centers. “You know what bugs me about this place,” Chris says, pointing at the Mission and Volunteers buildings. “Those people that run it ain’t much different from us. They get a little bit of authority and go bananas.”

The son of a Victorville lawyer, he said he’s getting out of the drug business that has cost him his marriage and Florida house. He’s hacking weeds for minimum wage in a county work program, but he spent his last $73 on cocaine. And he still could cook up a batch of highly-addictive “crack” and could sell you a batch for $25. All he needs is cocaine, Epsom salts, baking soda and 20 minutes with a microwave oven.

11:30 p.m. Vickie, 30, looks like a tourist, except she’s wearing a ski parka in mid-summer. She’s an attractive blond with earrings and a quick smile. She used to work at a Texas doughnut shop and a Palm Springs deli, and she lies under her blanket on a C Street bench as trolleys roll by.

She loves the zoo, the beaches, everything about San Diego but the Social Services delivery system. “Every night I’m scared,” she says, pointing to the street lights and open windows that make the bench the safest place downtown, “but I can’t stand to go to a shelter because I can’t stand being told: ‘Do this, do that.’ I’m too old for that.” She says Social Services come with too many strings attached: probing personal questions, condescending stares and paper work to sign away legal rights.

“You can’t get a job here without a home, and you can’t get a home without a job,” she said, glancing at the luggage cart that holds her three plates, teapot, radio and clothes. “I’m between jobs. I’m not what you would call homeless.”

3 a.m. Strains from Carl Jarrett’s homemade bamboo flute echo off downtown buildings on Seventh Avenue. A self-declared Rastafarian, Jarrett is at peace with the streets. He mixes cement and digs ditches part time during the day and checks out discount movies once a week. He left Jamaica when he was 13 to travel.

“There’s always something in the garbage to quench your hunger, even if it’s just for a minute,” he says. “It’s easy living. The problem is love. Sometimes I have the telepathic riches of the mind.”

But he still is searching for a niche. “I leave no trace upon yesterday,” he says in a lilting voice. “A nonviolent approach seems to be the way to be . . . but my karma is so elusive. It hurts when the degrees, the magnetic forces, are not positive and it sucks the marrow from your bones.”

He laughs when asked about the two decorative pins on his checkered coat, which he’s saving for a girl, and he smiles when he envisions a city that welcomes him as a flutist, cash-poor and spirit-rich.

6:30 a.m. Most street people are up and around. Many have slept intermittently about four hours. James and Joe are taking their night’s work to Allan Co. recycling center on 14th Street in shopping carts.

It has been a slow night for James, who has 41 pounds of aluminum cans in the cart and overflowing into white plastic bags hanging from the sides. At 20 cents a pound, he walks off with $8.20, although he’s netted triple that amount before.

Joe is a cardboard man, “it’s quicker than cans,” he says. But board pays $40 per ton--or two cents a pound--and requires loading the cart until it nearly tips. “Some people make their living panhandling,” he says. “I can’t. I ain’t got the heart.”

8:30 a.m. Michael, 36, is one of the 150 people who have just been through the St. Vincent de Paul Center’s breakfast line on Market Street for coffee, an orange and a ham sandwich. He clutches a thick volume of Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonriders of Pern” and explains about the number of jobs he’s had since he left the Navy as a boilerman. He attributes his struggle to “mental stress,” damaged hearing from clanking boilers and a depressed job market that renders his two welding licenses temporarily useless.

“Don’t get me wrong, I love camping,” he says. “But this ain’t camping, it’s survival.” He works part time at a nearby tavern and hopes the Veteran’s Center can hook him up with a permanent job.

“You keep your mouth shut and your eyes and ears open and you’ll be OK,” he says. “I don’t carry weapons, I know better.” To blow off a little steam he’s become a card-carrying member of a rebellious club with an unprintable name that offers the flip side to the Mission routine. It specializes in “drunken brawls, Christian deprogramming and better living through chemistry,” according to his card. Initiation costs $4 and meetings are $1 each.

9:30 a.m. Ray, 37, is a scientist with a fifth-grade education. He reads the newspapers through the pay box windows and collects “meteorites” in a cardboard box marked “Fragile Instruments: Handle with Care.”

Originally from Boston, he says he senses “when the meteorites will come whistling in” and asserts the downtown railroad tracks are a strewn field.

“It’s tough on the street, but it just takes a little courage and strength,” he says, bumming a cigarette on Market Street and greeting a picture of JFK on a matchbook cover. “I’m a scientist. I don’t mind hard work, but it’s a little tough. I’m quite fortunate to have trigger movements in my brain to keep me busy.”

He keeps to himself, but he says he still can’t figure out who turned his chest and stomach into a swirling burn scar with a flame thrower.

10 a.m. The management of Burger King on B Street and 10th Avenue is about to break up the morning meeting of what Beverly Hoppes calls “the literary corner.”

Hoppes has spent another night at the YWCA women’s shelter and she works on a crossword while talking about the 30 poems she’s composed on the street. She shows off a caricature a friend has drawn of her on a napkin. Nearby Tom Ueck is carefully pressing leaves into napkins.

Hoppes has worked as an office assistant and dreams of working in the white Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishing building on Fifth Avenue. “I fell in love with its colors and architecture,” she says, peering at its blue turrets through the window. “This place gives you a view.”

10:30 a.m. Robert Brown, 51, pushes everything he owns in a shopping cart with one arm and props himself on a crutch with the other. He was laid off as a janitor at a hospital in Pomona and says he gets robbed of his SSI check regularly.

Originally from El Paso, he’s hoping to get an apartment in Logan Heights soon. “The only kind of work I could do is clerical, but that’s hard to find,” he says. “They tried to get all the transients out of the Plaza,” he said, nodding westward. “Here, everyone’s still doing the best they can.”