Royalty doesn’t pass whimpering into obscurity without a good fight. : A Dream of Things to Come

Her walk was painfully slow, but her will was as strong as steel.

“I’ll get there,” she said, coming toward me through the bright sunlight of a new spring. “You just stand right there, you hear?”

She was wearing a dress of electric blue, and her glasses were framed in Hollywood glitter. A white, furry tam sat cocked at a rakish angle on her head.

She was like a movie star from a twilight time, wearing the faded memories of a glory that passed long ago.

“There,” she finally said, reaching my side. “I told you I’d make it. Now let’s get started.”

The Queen of the Streets is back.

She’s parked at an intersection in Canoga Park, her old Plymouth jammed with the collection of a lifetime in boxes, bags and jars.

They contain things she’s gathered from God knows where, because the old lady’s dream isn’t one of previews and spotlights, but of owning a secondhand store someplace, like in the old days.

“All I need,” she says, “is someone to set me up with a shop where I can sell things. I’d pay them off every penny. By God, I’d make it if I had a store.”

You remember the Queen.

Her real name is Princess Red Fawn. Her mother was Cherokee, her father Delaware.

She began living in her car maybe half-a-dozen years ago, but she can’t remember why. “I had $20,000 once and a home in Las Vegas,” she says. “I woke up one morning and they were gone.”

She had a store too, and still carries the remaining merchandise around from place to place, clinging to the faded ribbon of the dream like a child clutching the string of a balloon.

The Queen is barely 5 feet tall and weighs maybe 100 pounds. Two years ago, she told me she was 84. The other day, she said she’d be 83 in September, or maybe October.

Time is different for the street people. They figure it by the gap between meals or between bouts of trouble. Years don’t matter a lot.

I wrote about Red Fawn a couple of times before when her dog was stolen and her car smashed. I kept telling myself I had better things to worry about than an old lady who lived in a car, but there was something compelling about the Queen.

Royalty doesn’t pass whimpering into obscurity without a good fight. She was never willing to just lie down and die. She kept saying she’d make it OK under the toughest circumstances, and then talked about the store, if only she had a store. . . .

She disappeared one day without telling anyone.

Months passed. Every once in a while, someone thought they’d seen her, but I couldn’t find her. Like summer rain, all traces had vanished in the heat.

Then, a few days ago, Ralph Merlino, who owned a magazine place called the Book Rack, telephoned to say she was back.

Her car was in the same old place. It wasn’t the Pontiac Bonneville she used to drive, but there was no mistaking the stuff jammed inside and piled on top. The kingdoms of the street have special identities.

The Queen had a story to tell.

A son in his late 50s who lives in Loma Linda had read about her and tracked her down. There was a reunion of sorts.

“I hadn’t seen him in 30 years,” she said. “When he said I was his mother, I made him show me identification. You never know.”

I asked why she hadn’t seen him in so long.

“He said some nasty things to me and I said to hell with him and left.” She paused. “You know, it’s been so long I don’t even remember what he said, but he never did apologize.”

She lived with her son for maybe five months, and they weren’t bad months, all things considered. He wanted her to stay, but then it happened again.

“Damned if he didn’t say something nasty to me again,” she said. “I can’t remember that either.”

When she insisted on leaving, he bought her the Plymouth and she came back to the Valley a few months ago. At first, she stayed with a woman she’d met at a restaurant, but that didn’t work out either.

“I liked her,” Red Fawn said, “but her kids were stinking rats. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do now.”

The reason she’d been staying with them in the first place was that a pickup truck had knocked her down at a crosswalk. She spent several days in a hospital.

“They kept giving me medicine,” she said, “but it wasn’t doing me any good, so I left.”

Her right arm and leg still hurt occasionally, but she’ll get by. She always does.

The Queen gets $650 in Social Security, but spends most of it to store the things she’s been saving for the secondhand place. The rest she spends on canned soup and sweet rolls.

It’s the dream of owning a store again that keeps her going, and I’m not the one to say it’s a dream without purpose.

Robert Browning taught us a century ago that the reach must exceed the grasp “or what’s a heaven for?”

Heavens exist where spirit prevails. That old lady is never going to stop reaching.