Concern, Reality Split on Broadway

The doorman, a beefy guy dressed in a fancy jacket and gray derby, is smiling and nodding as he holds open the door for the people going into the hotel lobby full of chandeliers, marble, antiques and splendor.

A woman with a briefcase comes up.

“Where’s the homeless workshop?” she asks.

The doorman looks into the park across the street. A bare-chested man with a dog collar around his neck is growling like an angry Rottweiler, a drunk with rubber legs is nearly falling into traffic, and a Charles Manson look-alike is frantically scratching and digging at his skin, screaming, “One shot to the body, baby, one shot to the heart. . . . “

The doorman pulls open the big glass door, and the cool, clean, old-money fragrance of luxury sweeps onto the sidewalk.

“The homeless conference? You’ve got the right place,” the doorman says. “It’s right inside, ma’am.”

The sun is pounding off the white face and windows of the U.S. Grant Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 4th Avenue in downtown San Diego, making the place look like a palace.

Across the street--and at the other end of the world for all practical purposes--the same sunlight is hitting Horton Plaza Park, warming it up nicely, taking off the morning chill and making it ripe with the smell of urine and sweat.

“The Lawyer,” who has just sat down on a bench, is a little disbelieving.

He had just been asked if his colleagues--the park’s drugged-out, hung-over, unconscious or otherwise out of it denizens--are aware that the glittering hotel looming in front of them is host to a major, two-day workshop Thursday and Friday of the federal Interagency Council on the Homeless, a regional conference that hopes someday to spawn the answers for getting them off the mean streets and back into mainstream society.

“Oh, hell, no, son,” says The Lawyer. “I’m afraid a lot of these folks aren’t aware of too much that happens around them, let alone in a hotel like that.”

At age 63, Robert Dupre is living proof that homelessness can happen to anyone and--this is the part that makes homeless advocates cringe and the anti-homeless gloat--that being a hobo just ain’t always that bad.

Dupre tells one of those stories you would never believe. As a young man in the 1950s and ‘60s, he was an FBI agent, a senator’s aide and an assistant U.S. attorney, a real up-and-comer in the powerful legal and political circles in Washington and the South.

You think: Yeah, sure you were, old man. And I’m the Wizard of Oz.

Only problem is The Lawyer’s story checks out. The FBI, Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), and the U.S. attorney’s office in South Carolina all confirm it.

“Well, I declare, I declare. That’s shocking. . . . As a young man, I thought he had a bright future,” Thurmond said softly, upon learning Dupre has been on the streets since the early 1970s, when his life crumbled under alcohol, a divorce and other personal troubles. He was a public defender until being disbarred a few years later.

Dupre says some homeless people call him The Lawyer because he does occasional paralegal work and once in a while will help a street person find the right legal and social services.

Thursday morning, sitting on a park bench, Dupre looked over an agenda for the conference on homelessness.

After a moment, he launches into a knowledgeable discourse about financial waste and the inner workings of the bureaucracy administering funds from the federal McKinney Homeless Assistance Act.

He favors eliminating much of the bureaucracy, which he considers a self-sustaining black hole for taxpayers’ money, and instead giving vouchers for food, clothing and other necessities directly to the homeless.

“There’s so much money wasted,” The Lawyer says. “It’s such a complex system, and it really shouldn’t be.”

During the conference, the Interagency Council on the Homeless, a coalition of federal, state and local agencies, discussed everything from housing to job training for the homeless in the council’s Western region of California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii.

The language of the workers discussing the homeless is much different from the language of the homeless.

San Diego was chosen to host the conference because of its record for “interagency cooperation” and establishing one of the nation’s highest numbers of “single-room occupancy boarding houses” for people surviving on government benefit checks, conference officials said.

In one workshop, the topic was mental illness and substance abuse, considered two of the most pernicious disorders gripping many homeless people, putting some on the street, keeping others there, reinforcing many people’s perception of the homeless as lazy winos and addicts who wouldn’t take honest manual labor if you gave it to them.

Inside the ornate meeting rooms, the social workers used their clinical terms--”dual diagnoses” and “integrated assistance programs” and “relapse prevention”--to discuss the troubles of the mentally ill and alcohol and drug abusers.

Someone mentioned the homeless who refuse help--the ones whose brains and bodies are too far gone, the ones who have, for whatever reason, abandoned mainstream society.

One item mentioned was a proposal for more conservatorships, where social workers get control over a person’s monthly Social Security disability and veteran’s benefits checks so the money, theoretically, is used “properly,” rather than lost, stolen or “wasted.”

The homeless “wasting” government benefits is at the crux of the issue of “true” homelessness. Some get no money from anyone. For others, monthly benefit checks are more than $1,000, enough for a vagabond lifestyle, with shelters, churches and other social service programs meeting emergency needs.

In Santa Monica, the merchants would stop complaining about the homeless if they realized how much the street people were spending on clothes, motels, liquor and Walkmans, said Susan Dempsey, head of a Santa Monica social service program.

“They blow the checks. They just spend it as they wish. . . . It’s an abuse of the system because these people have no desire to get off the streets,” said Dempsey.

A tough-talking woman in her 40s, Dempsey emphasizes the need for compassion and hope for the mentally ill homeless, but she doesn’t appear to tolerate any mollycoddling. She opposes shelters that provide food and clothing without offering recovery services and permanent housing programs.

Most homeless people want off the street, Dempsey said, but helping those who don’t is nearly impossible.

Fear is what keeps many people on the streets, she said--a fear of failure mixed with no self-esteem and a denial of what life really is on the streets.

“If you trust in the system for help and you fail--for whatever reason--then the next time will be twice as bad. . . . You get into a vicious cycle and, after a while, you figure what’s the use, life isn’t so bad on the streets as long as you get your (benefits) checks.”

A young man Dempsey knows lived on the street for years until his family helped him get psychiatric care. He got medication, clean clothes, hot meals again. And he hated it.

“On the streets, he was out of it (mentally),” Dempsey said. “But he said the medication made him too aware of who he was, what his problems were. He said, ‘I have no life. I see that now.’

“It’s very sad. The only thing we can do with people like that is just keep trying to improve their quality of life.”

Back in Horton Plaza Park, The Lawyer is talking in a raspy Southern accent about how he can quit the streets any time and go live with relatives--he hasn’t told them he is a hobo--in San Francisco, Salt Lake City or even return to his native Oconee County, on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains in northern South Carolina.

Dupre is clean, polite, soft-spoken, avuncular. He is not a braggart about his past; he is more interested in discussing homelessness from both a first-person perspective and as a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Neatly dressed in tennis shorts, an Izod sweater and South Carolina Gamecocks baseball cap, his worldly belongings in a gym bag, he sounds, looks and smells like a grandfather from the rural South: strong hands and a potbelly, smelling vaguely of pipe tobacco, cologne and old sweaters.

He has no intention, however--at least right away--of leaving the street. He says he’s “not ready” yet.

He has been lucid until now, but he starts wandering a little, talking of “searching for something . . . a way to change homelessness. . . . I’m still learning about life.”

He says it as if he were a young student gathering material for a doctoral dissertation on homelessness or the human condition, and not a 63-year-old recovering alcoholic who has nowhere to go and doesn’t particularly care, an old man who spends his nights on concrete and days soaking up the sun among the Horton Park regulars--some harmless, some dangerously unstable and none clearly all there.

The $845 a month Dupre gets in Social Security and veteran’s benefits--for being a Navy Air Corps tail gunner in the South Pacific during World War II--goes for food, an occasional motel room, odds and ends and, since he gave up booze, enough marijuana to get “relaxed” a few times a month.

Sen. Thurmond, irritation edging out his pity, cannot understand it.

“Just between you and me,” the old senator whispers. “Is he all there in the head? . . . He’s got an education, and he comes from a very respectable family. I wonder why he hasn’t gone home to his people. He could get a job in real estate or insurance. I just don’t understand.”

Dupre wants none of it.

“Nobody’s smart on the streets, but you choose to be in society or out of it,” he says. “Those are the two choices--there is no middle ground. I’ve chosen to be out of it. To fit in, you need that good ol’ American work ethic. . . . and I don’t have it.

“I didn’t mind losing my status--I never had any great calling to be a lawyer anyway--but I don’t want to lose my mind and sink into the homeless mentality.”

He looks around. Dozing or chatting in the sunshine are dozens of young men, able-bodied and looking well rested, a little drunk or high, bumming change off people passing by, relaxing on the grass and benches.

This, apparently, is what Dupre thinks of as the “homeless mentality.” Nobody is poring desperately over the want ads in search of gainful employment or otherwise “pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps.”

Jack Kemp and Frank Keating would be disappointed.

Inside the Grant Hotel, in a vast ballroom after lunch, Keating, general counsel for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, was speaking about HUD Secretary Kemp’s “Operation Bootstrap” and homelessness being a “national tragedy” afflicting “lost souls.”

Nothing was too memorable among the cliches and rhetoric until Keating recalled a winter day in Washington a few years ago when he was returning from lunch. He came upon a man sitting on a sidewalk grate. It was raining and 20 degrees. Icicles covered the man’s beard and bare head. He was trying to peel a frozen orange.

And Ted Bundy popped into Keating’s mind.

It was a tragedy, Keating said, that a society’s priorities could be so screwed up that a serial killer like Bundy could live in a Florida prison before getting the electric chair--and yet no one was taking care of that freezing man with his rock-hard navel orange on the Washington grate.

Down in Horton Plaza Park, with a few of the social workers from the conference passing by, a woman with no teeth asks for the time.

She has not bathed in weeks--her hair looks like a mechanic’s grease rag. The crotch of her farmer’s overalls--big enough for a 250-pound man--hangs to her knees. She is in her 40s and looks 70--a very ill 70.

She clearly is in a hurry. Impatiently, she shuffles away--to a corner, back, around the park, to another corner, fenced in a by a one-square-block mental barrier.

She is going nowhere.

After a while, she gets tired and sits on a bench. Ten minutes later, she starts bouncing off the invisible walls again--corner to corner to corner to corner. It goes on all day.

“Poor woman,” says The Lawyer. “See, I’m not like that because I have the choice of being out here. . . . Do you think she has that choice?”