Out on the Edge

“Where will I go? What will I do?”

The questions, asked in anguish, hang in the sultry air of Liz McVey’s tiny upstairs apartment on a Hollywood side street.

Outside, the owner of a produce truck blasts a horn to announce his presence in the predominantly Latino neighborhood. Voices rise through an open window, like snatches of sound from a distant world.

McVey is motionless, trapped inside her own thoughts, a tremulous half-smile frozen on her face.

For a moment, she seems unreal, as though transformed suddenly into glazed pottery.

Then, abruptly, without preamble, she speaks again. “I owe three months’ rent, I’m almost out of medicine, and I will be evicted next week. I have no money and no income.”

She sits on the edge of a daybed, prongs from an oxygen tube inserted into each nostril. There is a wheelchair and aluminum walker nearby.

“How could this happen?”

McVey is 49 but, in this moment of despair, appears older. Her skin is pale and her reddish-gray hair disheveled. It’s hard to imagine her as successful.

“I used to wonder why homeless people couldn’t just pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” she says. “I guess I’ll find out.”

She hesitates, fidgeting with the oxygen tube that winds like a silver snake across the floor to a tank in another room. Then the realization comes to her, stark and mean, the truth she has not wanted to face.

Liz McVey--private investigator, restaurateur, once the privileged daughter of a wealthy landowner--is about to become homeless, and she’s terrified.

How, indeed, could it happen? Is it possible that any one of us, burdened by successive calamities, could end up suddenly on the edge, about to drop from a world of the familiar into an existence as alien as life on another planet?

It’s happening to Liz McVey.

Within less than a year, her health has deteriorated and her income has gone from $10,000 a month to zero.

A born-again Christian, she clings to her faith like a climber to a rope, but the rope unravels as hope thins. Her friends have given all they can, and she has one week before eviction.

There are no miracles on Hollywood side streets.

McVey was raised in a gray stone mansion in a wealthy section of Chester, Pa., and numbered the DuPonts among her schoolmates.

A graduate of Bryn Mawr, she came to California in the mid-1950s as an Air Force comptroller, then, intrigued by detective work, earned a private investigator’s license. By 1970, she owned two agencies.

Such was the success of her agencies that within 10 years she had opened a pair of restaurants. One, a soul food cafe, became a hangout for black celebrities and was grossing almost a million dollars a year.

Then the roof fell in. Cheated by her own employees, cleaned out by thieves, both restaurants went under. McVey ended up losing an elaborate Westside home and owing $100,000. She declared bankruptcy.

But through it all, she kept the detective agencies and worked hard to reestablish her life. Two years ago, she won a large contract for undercover work, but what seemed like a way back was only a prelude to disaster.

If it is true we are all fate’s children, Liz McVey was selected for a punishment beyond reason.

Moved into her current apartment as she rebuilt her life, she fell through a back porch, injuring her knees, her hip and her back. Unwilling to sue, she suffered the pain and went on with her career, but fell again, this time off a curb.

What followed was seven months in a hospital, an attack of asthma she says was caused by medication, pneumonia and a diagnosis of diabetes.

She has been bedridden since October. Doctors feel it will be at least three months before she is able to work again.

Meanwhile, her savings have disappeared, she is three months behind in her rent, and grief is at the door.

She is seeking other government assistance but has been told it will take at least four months, if it is forthcoming at all.

Friends have been bringing her food and some have paid her telephone bill, but generosity is tempered by priority. Liz McVey is not first on their list.

“I can’t believe I’m where I am,” she says, the fingertips of one hand touching her cheek in a gesture of incredulity. “It doesn’t seem that long since October.”

She shakes her head and asks the questions again, another of fate’s children on the precipitous brink of despair.

“What will I do?” she says. “Where will I go?”