Homeless Man, Helper Remain Strangers

I know a man who has done something to change the way I look at homeless people.

Early this year, my friend, whom I’ll call Louis, was driving home from a technology conference in San Francisco when he picked up a hitchhiker, a man in his mid-30s who was waiting by a stand of bushes at an off-ramp on the Interstate 5.

After talking with him for several hours, Louis learned that his only possessions were contained in the small tan suitcase he had set onto the back seat of the Volvo and that his destination was no more precise than “anywhere in L.A.”

Alan (also a pseudonym) had $10 in his pocket. He had no friends in Los Angeles. For the past week and a half, he had been living in the bushes next to the freeway where Louis picked him up. Alan was homeless.

By the end of the drive, Louis felt he had an accurate sense of his passenger. Alan had spoken about wanting to study architecture. He seemed politically informed. He was neatly dressed. Concerned about how he would survive on the streets of this bigger and rougher city, Louis offered Alan a hot shower and a bed for a night and he accepted. The night turned into a week, then two. In the end, Alan lived with Louis in his Venice bungalow for almost three months.

This is not a moral tale, a story of a man redeemed by a munificent gesture: Alan wandered out of Louis’ world very much as he wandered into it, with a single suitcase, a few dollars, and a new destination, this time to points north.

It isn’t particularly Alan’s story at all. A Vietnam veteran who was out of contact with his family, Alan appeared to want to retrieve the thread of his life. But although he talked about returning to school and enrolled in classes, he never attended them, since he spent most of his time looking for a job. And although he eventually found work as a cook, he quit after a week.

For me, this is Louis’ story, the story of a man who happened onto one of the most desperate issues of our time and chose not to regard it as an issue. Confronted with a human predicament, Louis ignored all the usual assumptions and engaged his humanity.

Many of us share certain ideas about the homeless, even if we don’t always articulate them. They are mentally ill or alcoholic or on drugs; they are somehow responsible for their own disenfranchisement; they must have always conducted marginal, careless, unplanned lives.

To help, we may send off checks or attend fund-raisers. We may reach into our wallets when approached by a plaintive figure on a sidewalk. But, essentially, we view the homeless from behind the safety of our windshields. Unkempt, forlorn figures who sprawl on park benches or curl up in doorways, they remain anonymous, shadowy. The very word “homeless” puts them at a distance. By forcing them to become a statistic, it tends to dehumanize them.

My friend Louis, who programs computers, is a reflective man, and when he invited Alan to stay with him, he wasn’t acting out of pure impulse. As he began his trip, he told me that he recalled something Katharine Hepburn once said: When she was a child, if a man got stuck on the side of the road, people would stop to help him, and if they got bopped on the head, they got bopped on the head.

This attitude appeals to Louis: “You can’t always be so suspicious--or so fearful,” he says. “Not everybody is going to murder you.”

Once he had picked up Alan, Louis found himself thinking about his paternal grandfather, who had died before Louis was born but is depicted in family lore as a man, who, during the Depression, distributed cards to hungry men that they could redeem at a restaurant. “When I was a child,” Louis says, “I thought, this is how I should be.”

To Louis, offering Alan a place to live seemed logical, both in the moment and since. He refuses to think of it as an act of unusual charity.

The experience was not an unmitigated success. There were times, during the three months, when Louis, who had given up his bedroom, felt claustrophobic and would have liked to have his privacy back. There were times when he was frustrated with Alan for not trying hard enough to find work. There were times when Louis felt he could have done more: He tried to find Alan a job and encouraged him to make use of Veterans’ services. But he felt the limitations of his investment--he recognized he could not set Alan’s life back on course for him. Curiously, the two men remained strangers to the end.

What was illogical to Louis was the way his family and friends reacted: “People disapproved, and often very emotionally, which I never understood.”

Louis’ sister, a social worker, “totally freaked out.” With some distance, she now says, “There are other ways to help people that don’t necessarily endanger your safety. Louis put his life on the line without using a screening mechanism, some way of knowing this man.”

Most of Louis’ Westside friends refused to socialize with “a man off the street,” “a stranger.” At one point, Louis wondered whether he shouldn’t have handled the situation differently. “If I’d said, ‘a friend of a friend is staying with me for a few weeks,’ it would have changed everything. They’d have invited Alan to the movies, to our softball game. They’d have given him a chance.”

Alan has been gone several months now. I asked Louis to think back to that drive down from Monterey. If he’d known at the time that Alan was homeless, would he have stopped the car? “That’s a tough question.” He reflected for a moment. “It probably would have made a difference, yes. If I’d seen Alan on the street, I wouldn’t have let him live here. If I’d talked to him for five minutes, still no. But after six hours, it was different.”

Talking, it seems, can restore a man’s humanity. Before an even more insuperable gulf opens up between those of us who have homes and those of us who don’t, maybe we need to talk--and, as importantly, to listen.