Nattily Dressed Homeless Man Has a Mission

Homeless activist Ted Hayes was holding court in the lobby of Los Angeles City Hall recently when a man in a blue suit and trench coat stopped to listen.

Hayes declared that rich people are dying to give their money away for the cause. “I’ll bet you could write me a check right now for $1,000,” Hayes said to the man in the blue suit.

“Are you sure?”

“Well, if not $1,000, I know you can write a check for $500,” Hayes said.

“As a matter of fact,” said the man in the blue suit, “I sleep on the streets of this city every night. I am homeless.”

And so he is.

Jerry Neuman--husband, father, registered Republican and former middle-class breadwinner--lives out of a black attache case, not a shopping cart. He wears a tie, shaves everyday and somehow keeps a shine on his black loafers.

But he sleeps in the downtown Greyhound Bus station or occasionally under a highway overpass and, more often than not, goes to bed hungry. He doesn’t drink or take drugs.

Neuman has one vice, however. He is obsessed with his plan to build group homes for those homeless who are willing and able to work and want to get back into society. That’s what brought him to City Hall.

“Everyone is being asked for solutions and input except the people that are most concerned with the problem and that’s the people living on the street,” said Neuman, who developed his plan after he became homeless about 18 months ago.

The realistic answers, he said, must come from the homeless themselves. “It has to be someone who in fact is homeless that can see the problem with some degree of empathy and insight,” he said.

They understand that the small things often mean the difference between being hungry or satisfied, being warm or sleeping on the sidewalk, finding a job or just waiting for the next soup line to form, he said.

“Little things, like telephone calls, become insurmountable,” he said.

Most of us can make a local phone call for a few pennies, as part of our monthly rate.

“I make a phone call from a Greyhound bus terminal to someone who lives in Beverly Hills and it costs me 50 cents for the first three minutes and a nickel a minute after that,” Neuman said.

Then you have to get to the job interview.

“A homeless person cannot (afford to) buy a monthly bus pass with unlimited transportation. . . . He drops 85 or 95 cents or a buck fifty if it’s out of the third zone each and every time he gets on that bus,” he said.

“You can spend $10 and accomplish nothing,” Neuman said. “And then it gets down to a matter of am I going to spend $10 to talk to this person (about a job) or am I going to go get something to eat and make damn sure I’m clean and make sure I’ve got enough money to sit in the bus terminal and drink coffee all night.”

And, Neuman said, there is a growing community of formerly middle-class workers like him who spend nights on the hard chairs of the Greyhound station, afraid of the Skid Row streets.

“With me, it happened to be a bout with thyroid cancer and not being able to work for a period of time and getting divorced in the interim” that wiped out his savings and left him destitute, Neuman said.

“If you have not been (homeless) before, you’re going to be optimistic. You’re going to have this can-do attitude. It’s only then that you begin to realize things like the phone calls,” he said.

“You don’t realize till you throw your luggage into the locker at the depot that they charge you $2.50 or $3 a day, because you’ve never done that before. Suddenly, when you go in to get your things you find out that you owe $20. . . . “

And for every one of the homeless--regardless of their background or education or former social standing--there is the first night on the streets.

“The one thing I remember feeling is the fear of it getting dark at night. That’s a very, very, very frightening feeling” because it means you have to find a place to sleep. “Late in the afternoon you get this anxiety and you still get it even after a couple of months.”

But beyond the night, there’s even a greater fear for some homeless, Neuman said.

Many fear the dawn and another day on the streets.