Counselors for the Homeless Have Walked in Their Shoes

For most of last year, Chris Cummings and his wife, Chrissa, slept in San Fernando Valley parks, alleys and run-down motels. Charles Sladky lived in a tent on Venice Beach.

It was not an easy time for them, but it did give them a perspective on the homeless problem that they say they could not have gotten any other way.

“You feel more lost than if someone had picked you up and dropped you off in a helicopter,” Chris Cummings, 20, said of the experience. “There’s no other way to comprehend what it feels like to look around and see nothing that’s yours.”

Now instead of burying their memories of homelessness, they are using the insights they gained to help others.

Sladky, 46, is a private homeless consultant associated with several public agencies. Chrissa Cummings, 48, heads up the shelter program for Better Valley Services, a nonprofit housing agency, and her husband, Chris, is a volunteer.

Mobile Services

All three are working with the Mobile Ombudsman Program--a city-funded trailer bringing services to the homeless. It will be parked in Van Nuys until mid-September, then move on to other parts of Los Angeles. In its first week of operation, more than 400 homeless people were served there, according to Bob Vilmur, project coordinator.

Vilmur said formerly homeless people bring to their work “an incredible ability to empathize and sympathize” that might not be so natural in people who have always had a real address.

When homeless people show up at the trailer, Sladky addresses them as “sir” or “ma’am.”

“These are people that need to be treated with respect,” he said, “because in a lot of cases they’ve lost their self-respect.”

Sladky serves as the intake worker on the trailer project, checking in the homeless who are either bused in from parks and shelters on city vans or who arrive on their own. He assigns them to a volunteer who guides them through the assortment of on-site services.

Handling Belligerence

Chris Cummings is one of the volunteer guides and he doubles as security backup when a client becomes belligerent or violent.

“See the guy who’s over there who might cause some problems,” he said, indicating a client who was angry about the wait. “Well, I can understand him. I was waiting at the welfare office one day and I got so mad, I wanted to kill someone.”

Chrissa Cummings tries to find creature comforts for the clients--food, transportation and shelter--by consulting a dogeared telephone file filled with social service contacts. She knows the inner workings of the social service system from a clients’ point of view, she said, and she knows the flaws in that system. She tells clients what to expect at their destinations.

“Be patient, because they’re under a lot of stress over there. Try to understand if they’re a little short with you,” she advised two women headed for a county Department of Public Social Services office to apply for welfare.

Sladky and the Cummings couple have two things in common: they all recently moved to Los Angeles from out of state and none of them wanted to ask their families to pull them out of their hard times.

In other ways, their stories are vastly different. Sladky became destitute overnight when he was robbed, while the Cummingses found themselves without a home after a more gradual financial decline.

‘Pretty Good Stake’

Chris and Chrissa Cummings moved to California from Dallas in the summer of 1986, shortly after they were married. They had substantial savings and two cars--what Chris calls “a pretty good stake.” They rented a house in Encino and both found jobs, she as a driving instructor and he as an electronics technician.

Then life began to splinter. A chronic back injury began to bother Chrissa and she quit working to try to recover, she said. Chris broke his wrist on one job, then was fired from another.

With an $850-a-month rent drain, “our savings went real fast,” Chris Cummings said.

They were evicted from the Encino house in February, 1987, then sold both cars to pay first and last months’ rent on another house in Van Nuys. Chris had trouble finding work because he had no recent references, he said. Chrissa’s back still bothered her.

In mid-1987, they were evicted again for not paying rent and this time ended up on the street with their possessions in storage.

“When my clients tell me I don’t understand what it’s like, I tell them, ‘I have slept in empty cars, I have slept in bushes, I have slept in abandoned houses. Now tell me about not knowing,’ ” Chrissa said. “This grabs them.”

The lowest point for both was when the despair of homelessness caused them to break up. But that also was when Chrissa began volunteering regularly as a receptionist at Better Valley Services, which is supported in part by grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. She learned about the agency from other homeless people who took her and Chris there to get a voucher for a free one-night motel stay.

The Cummingses were reunited, Chrissa was hired as a full-time shelter coordinator and makes $1,300 a month, and Chris began to get some day-labor work. They saved enough money to buy a van, then five months ago the Cummingses finally moved out of motels and into a Van Nuys apartment.

“It’s so good to know that I can take a shower when I want, to lie down on my own bed,” Chris Cummings said.

Better Memories

Sladky is more likely to reminisce about being homeless than are the Cummings.

“I’m not going to kid you,” Sladky said. “I had some fun on the beach. I was with a good bunch of people.”

But it was not a planned vacation. Sladky had worked as a makeup artist in New Orleans for several years before deciding to break into motion picture makeup, he said.

Late one afternoon in April, 1987, he arrived in downtown Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus with all his money and possessions in two suitcases. He was mugged while walking toward a bus stop, he said, and ended up walking to Venice to try to find old friends who, he discovered, had long since moved away.

He ran into five guys who were living on the beach and set up camp with them, earning enough to buy himself a tent and food by working at the Marina del Rey swap meet. The group, which later grew to 13 men, called itself “1 West Dudley,” to reflect its spot on the beach west of the Venice Boardwalk near Dudley Avenue.

Spokesman for Homeless

Sladky soon became an unofficial spokesman for the plight of the beach dwellers, appearing at community meetings to protest their treatment. His contributions to a local task force on homelessness led him to a job with the Los Angeles Business and Labor Council’s homeless project, which in turn brought him to the attention of Vilmur at the city Community Development Department.

In October he rented an apartment in Venice.

From his time among the ranks of the homeless, Sladky said he learned two things: how to get help for others and how to size up someone trying to get help.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said about his new powers of perception. “I just have the ability now to tell who the players are, how to tell the people are who are really trying, the people who don’t have the ability to try, but want help and those who are just using.”