Anywhere She Pays Her Fare Is Home

When the city rests, Sadie Cohen rides.

Eighty years old and without a place to live, Cohen seeks her shelter aboard the RTD. Night after night, all night, she takes the buses up and down Wilshire Boulevard. Using her discount senior pass, she rides a route between MacArthur Park near downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica near the coast.

“Every night. Every night. Back and forth,” a Southern California Rapid Transit District driver confirmed, shaking his head as Cohen negotiates her way down the front steps of a bus stopped at Wilshire and Alvarado.

“I couldn’t just stand on a street corner all night,” Cohen explains in a faint New York accent as she pulls up her two brightly flowered plastic satchels and heads across the boulevard for her first return run of the night.

Cohen’s predicament is partly self-made. But to follow her through the night is to see another side of bus service and homelessness and of the conflicts that arise between a rare breed of RTD customer and those around her.

She’s a puzzle. Cohen, small with swept-back silver hair, thick glasses and a neat, fur-collared winter coat, looks every bit the typical grandmother. But she says she was once a patient--against her will--at New Jersey State Hospital, where she received electric shock treatments.

She seems more coherent, tidy and organized than many people living on the streets. She receives government assistance, maintains a bank account, sees private doctors and has her clothes laundered. Some who know her do not realize that she is homeless.

“That is a surprise to me,” said Dr. John Brasch, one of Cohen’s Wilshire Boulevard physicians. “She’s dressing fairly well and seems to be taking care of her own business.”

Combination of Factors

Cohen appears to be driven to the streets and buses by a combination of factors: limited finances, a haunting fear that people are out to kill her and a feisty, independent streak as wide as the bus benches she presides over.

“Help?” she asks back in disbelief when the question is raised. “I’ve got to help myself.”

Asked about possible assistance from her relatives--an older sister near-by and a son in the East--she is insistent. “I am not disabled. I can talk and go to interviews and make out applications better than they can. . . . I always did things for myself.”

Life destabilized for Cohen about two years ago, she says, when she lost a Hauser Boulevard apartment she had had for 20 years. Her resources and choices are limited: She figures that about $350 per month is as much as she can pay for a room. She’s tried a few places but abandoned them because they were “unsafe.” People would slip in and, without stealing anything, move her things, she says.

Hotels are out. “I’m afraid of going into those rooms with everything that’s happened to me.” She avoids the missions because the people there are “all ex-convicts.”

She hopes to get into a low-income senior citizen housing complex, one with security guards. The places she has tried, including one in Santa Monica and the huge Angelus Plaza in Bunker Hill downtown, have long waiting lists, she says.

In the meantime, Cohen’s routine begins at 6:30 a.m. each day at a Wilshire Boulevard Burger King. She orders a fish sandwich. She dawdles, has three or four cups of coffee and chats with employees.

“She’s got a good head on her shoulders,” said Greg Walkiewicz, the manager. “She’s clean; she cleans up. . . . She has her moments . . . (but) she’s one of the nicer ones. We appreciate her business.”

Later, Cohen freshens up in an Wilshire office building restroom, tends to errands or goes to the library. “I’m an avid reader,” she says. She winds up the day in Westwood, where she buys a senior discount ticket for a movie.

She sleeps through most of the shows because she’s tired and doesn’t care for what she sees. Jamie Lee Curtis in “A Fish Called Wanda” was “much too promiscuous for me,” she whispers.

Cohen fills the time between the movies and the Burger King riding or waiting for RTD buses. “I hate the night,” she says.

It’s after 1 a.m. and a piercing chill is settling over the eerily lit, lifeless streets of downtown Santa Monica.

Cohen is waiting at the bus bench, becoming melancholy. “I was a type of girl who never went out at night except with your husband,” she says. “I never had a lot of friends. . . . No one that matters do I have. It has to be someone that matters, otherwise I’d rather be alone.”

She reflects on her life, judges it “terrible” and recalls how during one bitter cold snap last year she “really contemplated ending it all.”

Chris Dawson, a Santa Monica police officer, cruises slowly to a stop at the corner. He has kept an eye out for Cohen for two years. “I stop and talk to her once in a while, ask if I can help her, but she says she’s not in danger,” he said. “She’s not doing anything illegal. She’s an adult and she’s not a danger to herself or anyone else.”

Cohen professes not to be frightened about safety. She has never been mugged. “Maybe I’m immune,” she quips. Last week, however, she did have to rap one young man on the head because he was getting too close. “My umbrella’s a good solid one,” she says.

The Rolling Homeless

Cohen is not the only one who uses the bus system for housing.

For years, drivers on the Owl service--between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.--have hauled around snoring drunks, drifters and bag ladies.

Leilia Bailey, the RTD’s transportation director, was a nighttime bus driver in the early 1970s and recalls having to roust one or two people at the end of the line.

No one keeps statistics, but Bailey believes that there are more of these rolling homeless now. “Because the (homeless) situation has increased in the community, I would expect public transit would get its share,” she says.

Owl service drivers along Wilshire say they typically have four to six riders who sleep the whole run, have to be awakened and then board another bus for the trip back. It has not become a significant problem, Bailey said, and the district has no policy to discourage such riders as long as they have the fare.

It’s about 3 a.m. Cohen’s anger is rising as she focuses on a complaint--really her only serious complaint--about her situation. It’s the reason she contacted a reporter.

More and more, the buses that pass for home have been passing her by.

This is a serious problem in the wee hours of a chilly night, she notes, because the buses run only once an hour. The 2:05 a.m. bus had passed Cohen. The driver appeared to deliberately keep the doors shut as Cohen approached, then to open them for another passenger as she turned away.

The 3:05 bus is approaching and Cohen is up, at the curb, waving her satchel. The driver pauses at the red light. But the doors remain closed and the bus pulls away. Cohen’s body sags and she turns back to bench.

When a reporter catches up to the bus and boards to ask why Cohen was left behind, the driver said, “She’s trouble.”

He refused to give his name but ticked off a list of problems he said Cohen has caused on the buses: arguing with drivers, using racial slurs, stretching out on the seats when there is standing room only. She even “hit one driver upside the head” with her umbrella, the driver said.

“It’s not every time, but it’s enough to make you want to avoid it,” he said.

(This is not how it is supposed to work. “She should be picked up,” Bailey said the next day. Drivers can be disciplined for arbitrarily banning riders. Disturbances caused by riders must be dealt with on an incident-by-incident basis. Bailey said she will investigate.)

Back at the bus bench in Santa Monica, the temperature is dipping and the 4:05 bus comes and goes, with the driver ignoring Cohen.

Cohen is on her feet, denying everything the 3:05 driver has said. “What did you expect these bums to say?” she asks loudly, her voice bouncing through the vacant streets. Yes, she argued with a driver last week, but he started it. She hit him with her umbrella, but “only on the finger.”

No one will believe it, she goes on, but the drivers are in on a plan to kill her.

After a while, she settles down and begins her watch for the next bus.

She urges her visitor to go home.

Don’t worry, she says. “I’ll be fine.”