Women Face Special Hardship: No Place to Spend the Night

It was winter in Wilmington, and the waterfront was sour with the smell of brine and crude oil. A woman leaned against the chipped blue wall of a $13-a-night hotel, three dollars short of the price for a room.

Two years ago, she mused, puffing on a Camel, she was a tariff clerk at Los Angeles International Airport with an apartment and steady pay.

“Then I got evicted and laid off in the same week,” she said, and her luck has been downhill ever since.

Now she is a regular among those who sleep in junkyards and under derricks on this rusty edge of the South Bay.

She is also among the most neglected of the hundreds of homeless men and women who wander the region’s streets.

According to local advocates for the homeless, there is only one shelter in the South Bay for women who are living alone on the streets, and that is a drop-in center in Wilmington that is open only during the day. Unless they are eligible for a specific program--unless they are mentally ill, for example, or are battered wives or have children living with them on the streets or are actively trying to kick an addiction--homeless women in the South Bay have no place to go at night.

For the woman leaning against the hotel wall, who fits none of those categories, the only bed was a broken-down car parked near a convalescent home. It wasn’t much, she conceded, but it was better than the castoff couch in the vacant lot where she had slept the month before.

No one can say exactly how many people are homeless in the South Bay. Even countywide estimates have varied enormously, ranging from as low as 3,000 for all of Los Angeles County to as high as 50,000 or more. The first intensive effort to make a local head count of the homeless is being done this year as part of the 1990 U.S. Census.

There are, however, educated guesses. United Way, for example, estimated in 1986 that 35,000 people were living on the streets of Los Angeles County, and 2,450 of them--7%-- were in the South Bay and Long Beach areas. The study also concluded that in the Los Angeles suburbs overall, the biggest gaps in service were for homeless women and homeless families, most of which are headed by women.

Craig Fenner of Crossroads, a Redondo Beach program for the homeless mentally ill that operates outreach programs throughout the South Bay, estimated that a third of the area’s homeless are women.

And in Wilmington, Jim Morrow, who launched the drop-in center on North Marine Avenue 16 months ago, said 65 to 70 single street women have come in since the center opened.

“There are virtually no services for single (homeless) women in the South Bay area,” said Morrow. He came up with the idea for the drop-in center in the course of his work as a drug and alcohol abuse counselor in Wilmington for Behavioral Health Services, a county-funded substance abuse program.

“We didn’t start out as a women’s center,” Morrow said one recent afternoon in his small, spare headquarters in the heart of the waterfront. Initially, he said, his mission was to counsel the drug addicts and alcoholics, most of them men, who wandered among the dockside bars.

“But during the day, I’d walk, and around the (dockworkers’) union halls, I’d always see eight or nine women standing around,” Morrow said. “Then I started driving, and at night, around Anaheim and the Pacific Coast Highway, there were more of them, working the street.

“They were in really bad shape--some seemed almost to be hallucinating,” he said. Through his work with the Harbor Coalition of Food and Shelter Providers, a local advocacy group for the homeless, Morrow got donations of clean shoes, clothes and underwear and boxes of food, and eventually expanded his counseling program to include the drop-in center.

Three days a week, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Morrow and his team of counselors and local volunteers offer the women of the waterfront a place to shower, change clothes, get a free meal and, if they’re ready, seek help and a permanent home.

What the women tend not to get--from society, at least--is compassion, Morrow said. Nearly all of the women who live in the streets near the center are addicted to some sort of drug, typically crack, he said. Most support their habits by either dealing or by selling themselves to dockworkers and passers-by for $10 or $20 a time. Few have managed to retain the mainstream social skills that would make it easy for them to return to the working world.

“They’re not the usual, sympathetic picture of the poor homeless person,” Morrow said. “The world doesn’t have much empathy for a chronically homeless prostitute.”

And yet, said Betsy Barnhart of the Harbor Coalition, “regardless of their problems, they’re human beings who need love and attention. If you’re all by yourself out there, it’s pretty scary. Of course, drugs have aggravated the problem. But for some of these women, drugs are part of their survival mechanism. I don’t know what I’d do, if it were me out there.”

The experiences of the women who filter in and out of Morrow’s center are testimony to the danger and despair inherent in homelessness. In January, for instance, counselor Barbara Mayer said, she arrived at the center to find one of the regulars already standing at the door. The woman was agitated. Her friend, with whom she had been living in a graffiti-covered garage nearby, had miscarried during the night.

Mayer rushed to the garage and found a woman huddled in a dark corner of the concrete room. Weak and filthy, she was hemorrhaging on a bed of oily rags. Mayer bundled the woman into her car and off to the emergency room at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where she was treated and released.

Last autumn, Mayer said, she witnessed another unforgettable scene. Each morning, a woman had been bringing her children, ages 5, 3 and 2, to the center to shower and eat. “But apparently, it got to be too much for her, and she couldn’t take care of them anymore,” she said.

One evening, as dusk bathed the waterfront in shades of gray, the woman brought her children to a vacant lot across the street from the drop-in center. Knowing Mayer was watching from the window, she abandoned them.

And there have been other memorable women and children: a 17-year-old who was living in a van with her father and brother, who were selling her for drug money. A 14-year-old prostitute who walked the streets in a school uniform, passing her earnings to her homeless drug-addicted mother. A pair of women who lived for a time in an abandoned taco wagon parked in an alley. An elderly woman suffering from cancer and rheumatoid arthritis whose home is a bright orange car. A cheerful alcoholic with a thick, ropy scar that runs from ear to ear, a souvenir of an attack on the street.

For some, there is only survival, and sometimes not even that. In November, a 28-year-old homeless woman was found murdered, burned to death in the van where she had been living in a storage yard a few blocks from the center.

But for others, there is hope.

Take, for example, Rose, a 35-year-old crack addict who until recently eked out a life on the street as a “strawberry”--a prostitute who trades sex for cocaine money.

“I used to live in San Pedro, with my husband and kids. Then my brother-in-law turned me on to cocaine,” she said. “I smoked for a week. I couldn’t put the pipe down. And that was how it started. My life slowly just went down, down, down.”

She lost her car and her job behind a supermarket deli counter, she said. She stole rent money from her husband’s wallet and pants pockets. Eventually, she said, her family was evicted and had to move to a hotel. Even then, she was unable to stop.

“A friend told me how I could get money,” she said, and so she began prostituting herself around the docks, $20 a trick. On a good night, she said, she could make $150--enough money to keep her wired for up to three days.

When she was high, she said, she stayed on the streets because she didn’t want her three children to see her under the influence of drugs.

It was dangerous.

“When I was doing coke, I didn’t care what happened to me,” Rose said. One night, for example, she went to Terminal Island to buy a $20 rock of cocaine. The dealer, a dockworker, took her money and instead of giving her the drugs, raped her, beat her and stole her car keys, she said.

After the attack, Morrow said, Rose showed up at the center, refusing to tell the counselors who had battered her and why she was so upset. As she sat quaking in the center’s modest sitting room--a comfy area with clothes racks and a sofa on one side and a microwave oven and coffee pot on the other--the dealer came to the door looking for her, brandishing a golf club, Morrow said.

Morrow and Mayer managed to push him out onto the street while the women inside called the police, Morrow said. They were eager to turn the man in, Morrow said, because, as it turned out, Rose was not the only street woman he had assaulted.

“He had raped probably seven or eight girls,” Morrow said. “One had even come in before Rose’s encounter with bloody bruises across her belly and breasts where he had whipped her with a chain.”

That woman, Morrow added, had been five months pregnant.

A rail-thin gamine, Rose has dark cropped hair and soft brown eyes that shifted nervously as she spoke. She bit her lip and fidgeted constantly, crossing and uncrossing her legs, compulsively munching fistfuls of caramel popcorn. She herself ended up under arrest after soliciting sex from an undercover vice officer four months ago. The offense landed her in a drug diversion program, and now, although she is back together with her family, she comes to the drop-in center when she feels the urge to use drugs, she said.

It has only been a few weeks since her last binge, she said, and though she is back with her husband, the financial toll of her habit has been enormous. Her family, she said, is living at a single-room-occupancy hotel down the street from the drop-in center until they are back on their feet.

Rose is as close as the center gets to a happy ending, and she admits her new-found stability is precarious.

“I want cocaine all the time. All the time,” she said. “Like when I get upset, I think, I’ll just buy a rock, calm my nerves down. If I get a job and keep busy, it’ll keep my mind off it, but I don’t know if I’m ready to handle a paycheck yet.”

And there are problems, she added, beyond drugs, for which addiction is only a mask.

“These girls,” she said, gesturing around the room, “these girls are big girls, but they need love. They need family, someone to tell them, ‘C’mon, you don’t need to be out there on the street.’

“They look in the mirror and say, ‘I’m nothing.’ I was lucky. I looked in the mirror and saw myself changing. You get proud of yourself when you change. So that’s what’s keeping me going. The mirror.”

She shivered and glanced out at the street. She needed to get busy, she muttered, needed to put the craving aside. Cocaine could be like that--one false move, and you’re back in its grip.

“Where’s the vacuum, Jim?” she asked briskly. “Got to vacuum this place.”

* Who are the homeless? Profiles: B6