One to One Aid for the Lost and Lonely : Help, Hope Given to Mentally Ill Street People

Mark and Tina live in a tent in Balboa Park’s Florida Canyon, well-concealed from their No. 1 nemesis, the police. He has been on the street for the last 18 months. She has been there before, but this time it has been about two weeks.

Tina receives about $600 a month from a government program for the disabled. Mark sells his plasma for $8 or $12 a donation. Both get food stamps. As they eat lunch--instant soup and milk--Mark pulls at the bandage on his right arm.

Both were molested as children. Tina said she was raped by her father and her uncle. Mark was attacked by his father.

About three months ago, Mark made two attempts to throw himself off the Coronado Bridge. The police talked him down the first time. “The second time I almost succeeded,” Mark said. “If it wasn’t for this one cop. He got close enough to me that when I let go, he grabbed me.”

Mentally ill and homeless, Mark and Tina are part of a group of people that occupy the very bottom rungs of society. It is a group that has been in and out of mental hospitals, in and out of prison and in and out of work--mostly menial work. They live in boxes, abandoned buildings, parks and tents, They are not the screaming, muttering crazies who wander downtown. But they are not that far from it.

New Club

Since July, they have gathered in a newly formed social club called the One to One Program, where, it is hoped, a little bit of normalcy can be injected in lives that are anything but normal. On this day, Mark and Tina sit in the cluttered clubhouse and discuss their lives.

They are feeling a particular urgency to get off the street now. Tina is pregnant, and the street is no place for an infant, she said. “I’ve been hurt. And I don’t like being hurt. I don’t want this baby being hurt when it’s born,” she said.

Mark says he is warming to the provider’s role, although the baby is not his. He used to live in an abandoned coin laundry with 15 or 20 other street people, friends he considered his street family.

“Everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve built up a family. Brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. And I like to take care of the family’s problems,” he said.

He fashions himself a fierce fighter, though he is frighteningly scrawny. With attacks an everday part of life for people living on the streets, Mark believes it helps to have a reputation for being a little bit crazy.

People “tend to be more cautious,” he said. “They tend not to rouse us too much. The guys at the mission know. On the street, they know. Word gets around.”

Glenn Allison, executive director of Episcopal Community Services, was sitting in a meeting at the University Club three years ago when a thought struck him.

“I said, ‘It seems to me what (the homeless mentally ill) need is the equivalent of this kind of place,’ ” Allison said last week. “It’s a place like the University Club is. It’s a place where you go to meet your friends, to talk with your friends, and you’re not identified as sick.”

In July, Allison opened that place in an old tannery at 10th Avenue and G Street in downtown San Diego. It is called the One to One Program, named for the Big Brother- and Big Sister-type matches arranged between outside volunteers and club members.

Once a visitor gets acclimated, the One to One clubhouse appears to run a lot more like the University Club than might be expected. Elected officers hold regular meetings where gripes are aired and plans laid. Programs are held each afternoon. Friendships are formed among people who break bread together each day, who support one another’s efforts, who listen to one another’s dreams.

‘Like a Real Club’

“This is like a real club,” said one man who hears voices and calls an abandoned warehouse home. “We see each other in the streets. We communicate. We share cigarettes.” Loyalties develop, he said. When a club member is in trouble on the street, other club members help. That is not something they do for other people.

“There’s a lot of people who would be able to function normally if they were given the support,” said Pat Morse, the clubhouse facilitator. “But life on the street doesn’t do that. Life on the street challenges whatever little support they have.”

The Regional Task Force on the Homeless estimates that on any given day, 5,000 homeless people live in San Diego County, perhaps 25% to 50% of them with some kind of mental illness.

About 20 of the 45 members of the One to One Program have volunteer matches who provide support, encouragement and help in getting off the streets. They go out to dinner or ballgames together, or just sit and talk. Whatever they do, they provide One to One members with badly needed exposure to a different world, and the self-respect that comes from having a friend who is not on the street.

William Stolpe is Mark’s match. When Stolpe first met Mark in the county mental hospital after the suicide attempt, Mark was completely out of touch with reality and jabbering about being from another planet. Just a few months later, Stolpe says, “He’s cleaned himself up.”

“Once you’re down, it’s hard to get back up,” Stolpe said. “And it’s hard to get someone to believe in you.” Stolpe should know. A Vietnam War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism, he wandered America’s streets for eight years before cleaning himself up at the Landing Zone, a San Diego recovery house for vets. He hasn’t had a drink in 17 months and is attending school to learn computer skills.

Stolpe believes that Mark truly wants to get off the street but is hamstrung by his fear. “He’s afraid to break away,” Stolpe said. The street “is all he knows. He doesn’t know anybody on the other side of the fence. There’s that sense of loneliness.

“He wants to come over to the other side of the fence, but he doesn’t know anybody there. He’s scared people won’t accept him.”

The big news at One to One last week concerned the shower. After months of trying, program director Jane Pechman had found the money and labor to install a donated shower that stands unused in the clubhouse bathroom, waiting for the services of a plumber.

This is a big deal. There are many places downtown that serve the homeless hot food, give out canned goods and offer clothing. What the homeless really need, one man explained, is regular access to a shower.

For men, the only available shower is at the rescue mission run by San Diego Life Ministries, and only people with IDs are allowed in. Many transients have no ID or purposely carry none to deter police from writing them tickets for illegal lodging or other minor offenses.

Currently, members without plumbing at home sponge off at the sink in the One to One bathroom, waiting patiently for one another to finish.

One to One is a modest clubhouse. It is a collection of couches and chairs, seven old schoolhouse lockers, bookshelves with games, books and magazines, a meeting table, a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and three small offices for the staff. Much of the room is dominated by heaps of plastic garbage bags and other satchels where members who do not have lockers store their clothing.

But none of that matters. One to One has a washer and a dryer, a free washer and dryer, for use by the members. It has an available toilet. It has a microwave oven for warming food. It has a television and a VCR, on which the members play MTV tapes and movies such as “Rambo” for whomever isn’t snoozing on the couches. It has an iron, an ironing board and a sewing kit. It almost has a shower.

Things That Matter

These are the things that matter. “This is a place where they can come do the things that most of us take for granted,” said Dean Shaffer. “Like go to the bathroom. Like watch TV.

“Being on the streets is a full-time job,” Shaffer adds. “When you wake up in the morning, you know where your clothes and breakfast are coming from. When these people wake up, they either don’t know, or if they know, they travel to four, five, six places to do that, to get the basic necessities.”

Said Allison: “My feeling is that what many folks need is a place away from the system, a place where the focus is not what’s wrong with them, but what’s OK for them.” One to One is San Diego’s only self-help model day center of that kind.

Under this peer-support model, there are no psychologists among the four paid staff members at One to One. Members receive psychotherapy, medication and health care elsewhere. But structured programs are part of the club day.

For her weekly health lecture Tuesday, Chanel Kotewa, nurse practitioner for Episcopal Community Services, chose the topic of safe sex. Seven members listened to instruction about preventing sexually transmitted diseases--which are rampant on the street--and guarding against AIDS.

Kotewa realizes that she is fighting an uphill battle. “Some of their other needs would probably take priority,” she said. If “they’re very lonely and they just need some comfort and they’re sleeping under a bridge, they’re not going to say ‘just wait a minute, I have to go to the drug store, I have to get a prophylactic.’ ”

Last week, Kotewa gave out condoms. “I got the feeling that some of them would use them, and the feeling that some of them would give them to someone who would use them, a friend who they think needs them,” she said.

Problem Solving

The staff also holds problem-solving sessions, where members and a facilitator help each other negotiate the bureaucracy to find clothes, food, assistance payments, transportation and other essentials. Art therapy has proven very helpful to many club members; some of them have produced works that were exhibited this month at the County Administration Center along with pieces by other mentally ill people. In weekly group rap sessions, the members try to help each other with the problems of life on the street.

In a weekly drama session, members act out real life situations that illustrate life on the street: hassles in the welfare office, a wino panhandling for money, a mass protest of the homeless at City Hall.

Members also get up and deliver monologues about themselves. Karen Murphy, club president, described how she and her 4-year-old daughter spent every day of an entire year sitting on a bench at Horton Plaza with other street people.

As time went by, friendships developed among the regulars. They whiled away the hours watching the schizophrenic woman who danced for them, another transient who zapped dogs with an imagined ray gun, and the pimps and prostitutes who tried to recruit Murphy.

As the months passed, Murphy decided she had had enough of life on the bench and moved on. “Because I was healing,” she said. “And it was because of those people and the support I received from the bench. Yet my heart is still at the bench.

“The other day I went back to the bench, and guess what? They want me back. Because they still need me.”

Gerald Shaffer suffers from paranoia. He is bothered by the fact that his disease hurts his relationship with other club members. Twice, he has provoked fights when his suspicions about other club members have gotten out of hand.

But when Shaffer traveled to Texas to visit his sister, the members wrote him a letter telling him how much they missed him. The letter did not arrive in time, so Shaffer’s sister sent it back to the club, where he received it Wednesday. He was obviously moved.

“I know somebody cares,” he said to some of them. “I know you all cared.”

The club members know that Shaffer’s paranoia makes him nervous about cashing his disability check alone, so someone goes with him. “There’s a tremendous tolerance here for differences,” said Dean Shaffer (no relation to Gerald), who serves as office manager, altercation-stopper and counselor. “Gerald’s paranoid, so we’ll give him a hand.”

The way Daryl Tilton sees it, he has just lost too many people to be completely sane. He has buried Army buddies and countless friends from the street. But the person he can’t forget is his older brother, who was killed by a car when Daryl was 7.

Last week, death visited again. Tilton, who had been on the wagon for nearly 11 years, got drunk with a friend when two job applications didn’t pan out. They argued.

“I told him, ‘Why don’t you just ------ off and jump off the goddamn bridge?’ ” he said. “And he did.”

The club members are Tilton’s main source of support. “I’ve been able to open up to these people more than anyone else. Maybe because I know they’ve got problems and I’ve got problems and they’re willing to help me when I’m down. I feel closer to them than I do to my own sisters.”