Writers’ Row Homeless, but Never Far From the Muse, a Coalition of Scribes Is Striving to Bridge a Yawning Social Chasm

Under the fierce fluorescence of a winter morning’s sun, a ragged knot of homeless people rest against a Skid Row wall. Around them are bundles and grocery carts, and, in their midst, a figure sits in a wheelchair.

From down the street a police car swings up, leveling a microphone blast at the motley bunch.

“You’re gonna get in front of the mission or get off the streets!” a woman’s voice shrills.

A group on the opposite curb merely shrug. They are homeless writers and this is part of their daily existence--the stuff they use to stir their muses.

From a wellspring of bitterness and love, they write of drugs and crime, of God and their mothers, of standing in a line waiting for food, living in cardboard, keeping on the move with no place to rest.

In recent months, Skid Row poets and writers have formed the Homeless Writers Coalition. Their goal is to rent a neighborhood storefront office where they can write and keep their manuscripts.

More transcendently, they want to bridge the gap between homeless people and the society to which some aspire to belong. Their message, told over and over in their work, is that they are no different from anybody else.

For those who would listen, they voice possible solutions to their plight. For one who wants to look behind their verses, they offer an informal odyssey through their lives on “The Row.”

In a booth at nearby Gorky’s Cafe, a slender man of 42 spreads the counter with papers. He reads from some of them in the mellifluous voice that recalls his Louisiana upbringing. Born Willy Lewis, he goes by the name Dino. He is a sometimes-homeless writer and driving force behind the Homeless Writers Coalition.

Once there was a good job, fine clothes and diamond rings

Houses in the hills, new cars and everything

. . . Now my good job is gone, my wife and kids I’ll never find

And my life is spent looking for food, every day from line to line

My house is made of cardboard, now sitting on the curb

Where loneliness, destruction, and dope is the only word

. . . Now this story could go on, there is so much you need to know

But I’m not the one to tell you, how quickly the good things can go

In the quiet after the poem, Dino nods at a compliment and allows, “The only bad thing about it is you tell too much about yourself when you talk from the heart.”

Nonetheless, poetry from the heart by the homeless is beginning to make its way from The Row into the mainstream in a rush of events.

Under the auspices of municipally and privately sponsored programs, homeless writers are reading for audiences ranging from the hungry in Skid Row soup lines to bookstore patrons in towns like Claremont and Santa Monica. The week of Feb. 11, homeless writers will read with established authors at Los Angeles-area bookshops to benefit the national homeless-advocacy group, Share Our Strength. Part of the revenues collected from those readings will go to the coalition.

Dino is mobilizing the grass-roots Los Angeles group Artists against Homelessness to sponsor another fund-raising event for his organization. He has also written a skit for a homeless event at the Afro-American Museum, and, along with another homeless writer who calls himself Southern Comfort, has his work printed in a booklet at USC.

Dino pulls all of this material out of a brown vinyl briefcase that he carries wherever he goes. His companion, Jackie, totes an address book filled with the names of the people and agencies they hope will work with the coalition.

“We don’t want handouts,” Dino says. “Good jobs and affordable housing are what we need.

“They say the only people on the streets are the ones who want to be there,” he says, waving toward the wall of skyscrapers north of Broadway. “How can they say that when they live in their big $250,000 homes? They send you a food line and some used clothes.”

Dino is picking politely at the lettuce leaves of a salad he has finally consented to eat.

“I only need two meals a day,” he says, patting his flat belly. He and Jackie were up at 5:30 a.m. to line up for 8 a.m. breakfast at the Midnight Mission on Los Angeles Street.

It is after noon now, and, after lunch, Dino and Jackie have places to go and people to organize.

“It’s hard to catch up with homeless people,” Dino says with the kind of soft irony that defines the fragility of his position.

Two days later, Dino and Jackie are waiting in front of what is grandly called the San Julian Hotel, a flophouse of about 20 rooms, one of which they have lived in for several months.

The rent is $312, the equivalent of a month’s general relief check. For this they are usually allowed no visitors, no cooking in the room, no telephone, no private bathroom. A sink gushes with a leak, a piece of sheet covers a small window that will not shut and a naked light bulb glimmers from the ceiling shadows. In preparation for a visitor, Jackie has dressed the bed in a bright flowered spread that speaks of a former suburban existence.

Dino writes on a donated typewriter, set on a wood crate pulled up to the bed. A love poem to Jackie hangs on the wall:

. . . Now there is two of us, sharing a life meant for one

Loving, caring, and sharing . . .

Now my life is made easy . . .

For most of the year that they have been together, Jackie and Dino have lived “in cardboard.”

“I refused to believe I was on the streets,” says Jackie. “I pretended I was on a camping trip.”

Between 5 and 6 a.m., the police would rout them and the thousands of other homeless people off the sidewalks of Skid Row.

“When Jackie and I got serious we knew we had to do something better.”

For a while Dino took a job loading and unloading trucks in central downtown, earning black-market wages of $20 for six hours of work.

He has also worked as a janitor (“I can mop and sweep with the best of them”), a doorman and a bartender in Las Vegas. He has been in and out of jail and has lost track of a wife and four children. When he took up with Jackie, he had just gotten out of prison, where he’d served two years for burglary.

“When you see your children hungry and crying for food, a man will do a lot of strange things,” he says.

At the mention of her past, Jackie stiffens. She says her last name is Townsen, she is 50, from Sacramento, has seven children and is divorced. On The Row, she hands out blankets and clothes she collects from the missions and is known as “Mamma.”

Leaving their room, Jackie and Dino set to spread word of that evening’s meeting of Artists against Homelessness, which will focus on fund raising for the Coalition.

The streets are filled with the background music of sirens and bordered by walls topped with barbed wire coils, but they are also filled with their friends.

Dino raises his palm and crooks his fingers in a masculine handshake; Jackie dispenses hugs and kisses.

Among the regulars: a “very special” police officer, who used to come beat on their box until the morning that Dino woke up and found Jackie reading him poetry written on the walls of their cardboard house; and “Tony I Am,” the minister who’s run a soup line on Skid Row for the past three years without missing a week.

There are also the babblers and beggars.

“Hey, man, I’m a curb creature,” Dino protests at an outstretched hand. And there are the truly downtrodden. By the doorway of her hotel, a woman suns herself on a newspaper mat. She clutches a handful of cigarettes, her wrist ringed with a bracelet tattoo, and stares into nowhere. Jackie bends down and pats her.

“Her hotel makes ours look like the Bonaventure,” she later says. “It’s the roughest on The Row.”

But it is Southern Comfort (whose real name is Charles Walker) the pair is after. Dino has been “bounty hunting” for his peripatetic pal who lives in cardboard.

They meet the 34-year-old poet by a wall where he has painted his poetry. A barren slab on 5th Street 10 months ago, the wall now blazes with his brightly colored verses, written in paint salvaged from trash heaps.

“The plot of my rhymes is in the agonies and discomforts of my life and my friends’ lives,” he says over lunch at a local fast-food spot.

I hang in all the dope spots, not trying to cope,

just wishing in my heart that everyone would stop.

refilling their pipes with those little tiny beams

and ailing for real and busting at the seams . . .

Comfort says he spent seven years in Germany and Holland, first as a cryptographer for the Army, then riding an old bike selling roses to shopkeepers and passers-by.

“I’m an able-bodied person. I can go out and get a job,” he says with traces of a Texas drawl. “But I don’t feel comfortable. It’s like I got to be on quiet. I can’t express how I really feel. Society that’s here now is a real fabrication to me. It’s not real at all.”

Dino says if people “would put the faith and the time into a person, they could probably find anybody they wanted on The Row to handle almost any job.”

Says Comfort: “Right, but see it’s not the skills the people are lacking. ‘You know, you don’t look like the guy I want to sit behind my desk.’ Like there’s always been the outcasts of society.”

So Comfort remains in the rag camps. “We’re like family,” he says.

Comfort finishes his beef teriyaki and promises to be at an afternoon rehearsal of a Maxim Gorky play, directed by Michael McGee, an actor from Artists against Homelessness. The play will be read and later, the organization hopes, produced at a series of Skid Row venues. As he leaves, Comfort says he will also be at the evening meeting.

Later, at the Midnight Mission, Russ Gardner, who mans the reception desk, also makes note of the evening meeting of Artists against Homelessness. Gardner, 61, a former occupational nurse, is a genial white-haired man who likes to joke, but his poetry is something quite different:

The streets are angry!

Listen!

To the roar of muted voices, the silent stamping of leaden

feet, speaking out in many languages of the same tongue, the frustrations of themselves, of others, the need to be free . . .

Dino and Jackie continue their rounds. At the small park on San Julian Street, Dino finds Fred Burton, who tends the green oasis--”a place for reflection,” he says--where men gather to play chess and dominoes and where Fred dreams up the verses he writes in a vintage Day-at-a-Glance journal.

They also find Luanne Poindexter, a songwriter, and hear Alexander Anderson is back in town. A social worker they meet announces that a storefront for the coalition may be in the offing. She conjures images of sunshine and plants: “I want it to be pretty .” Dino grins, thinking of cardboard.

“Oh, you women. . . .”

Waiting for McGee in front of the San Julian Hotel, Dino explains his ambitions for the coalition.

“What I’m trying to do is establish the coalition as an organization of its own. I don’t want anyone to control it but the writers themselves. No one has the last word. We sit down and we talk about things and we vote.”

When McGee arrives, Dino and Jackie move to the rear of an adjacent parking lot. There they settle on a Victorian-red velveteen sofa, abandoned under the barbed wire coils on a battered brick wall.

In his play “The Lower Depths,” the Russian writer deals with people at the bottom of society. The actor has added a prologue from Gorky’s political novel “The Mother.” He hands Dino his part to read.

“We are revolutionaries and we’ll go on being revolutionaries as long as some people do nothing but give orders and others do nothing but work. . . .”

Comfort has not shown up, so the actor reads his lines.

“I know the time will come when all people will wonder at their own beauty, when each will be like a star to all the others. The Earth will be peopled with free men, great in their freedom. . . .”

But Dino is thinking of Comfort; his buddy had better turn up for the evening’s meeting. He reckons he’ll have to go back out bounty hunting for him again.