Wilshire Has No Miracle Miles for the State’s Mentally Ill

A decade ago, who would have imagined that the one thing all American cities one day would have in common would be the mentally ill people begging in their streets?

Who would have believed that Americans, the people who claim compassion as a national characteristic, simply would go about their routine business or pleasures, even though it meant stepping over or around sick people without food or shelter?

Yet today, Wilshire Boulevard, conceived 70 years ago as the first great processional avenue of the Automobile Age, is an artery of both technological progress and human disintegration. To follow it from downtown to the sea is to chart not only the geography of a city but also the contour of a national disgrace.

A stooped black man with a gray beard and a stained tan overcoat stands in the late-afternoon shadow of the One Wilshire building, begging for change. For a quarter he’ll leave you alone; for a dollar, he’ll tell you a secret:

“The white lady lies on TV.”

Does he watch much TV?

“No, man. On TV they make lies. The lies get in your mind and make you do things.”

In the more than 20 years since a great “reform” movement emptied our state mental hospitals of most of those held there against their wills, the myth of Americans as an unusually compassionate people has fallen by the wayside. But the reformers miscalculated on two counts: In their belief that large hospitals would be replaced by smaller, kinder neighborhood treatment centers, they underestimated the willingness of the American majority to ignore the needs of those who can do nothing on their own behalf. They also underestimated the unlovely, if involuntary, truculence of the mentally ill themselves.

The cities won’t build those centers and the sick people won’t take their medication.

He’s called Travis; she’s called Marie. I happened upon them and their two children, a boy of 5 or 6 and a girl about 3, just after dusk on a corner east of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Travis wears a Dallas Cowboys cap and holds a hand-lettered cardboard sign that reads: “I Work for Food.” Marie and the children squat in a line on the sidewalk behind him, each shrouded in a dirty pastel-colored blanket. Beside them are two plastic milk crates. One is blue, the other bright red. They contain a jumble of children’s clothes, a naked doll with one arm and a copy of the National Geographic magazine.

Marie says she worries about her “babies,” who have the glassy eyes and fragile pallor of refugees. When they get “settled,” she’d like them to have toys and a TV; she wants to get them “started at school.”

For that to happen, though, Travis will have to find work. He is a thin man in denim and a plaid shirt with a twitch that periodically snaps his head from side to side like an unseen hand. His eyes, at once frantic and frightened, seem to dart in all directions.

He’s been like this, he explains, since they put wires inside his head at the hospital. He thinks it was in Texas, but Marie says it was in Arkansas.

“So, were you forced to undergo electroshock?” I ask. Oh, no, Travis says. They came while he was asleep and put wires inside his head. Now, every night they turn on their magnet and try to pull him back into the hospital. That’s why his head moves: He’s “fighting with the magnet.”

I gently suggest that with the kids and the damp and all, maybe his family would be better off in a shelter.

Oh, no. You go to sleep in those places, and they steal your shoes. “Hell,” Travis says, “they’d slit my throat wide open to get these.” He points proudly to the scuffed black cowboy boots jutting from beneath the cuffs of his jeans.

“Real Tony Lamas,” sighs Marie, who has no shoes at all.

Another of the illusions to fall in our encounter with the mentally ill is the myth that their state is anything but an affliction. To look into the eyes of the mentally ill as they really are makes nonsense of all that. Even passing contact with the pain, desperate confusion and fear that is the daily life of many now roaming our streets is enough to prove that here is illness and the need for care.

It is harder--indeed, wrong--to dismiss the parallel argument that the mentally ill have basic rights that cannot be ignored. They are human rights surely, but whether they are civil rights of the kind and scope asserted during the great deinstitutionalization of the late 1960s deserves further discussion in the light of experience.

Should a man or woman whose psyche is the scene of a biochemical riot, whose free will has been shredded by illness, bear the burden of self-determination? And yet, if they are relieved of that burden, can anyone else really be trusted to bear it for them? That question, too, deserves to be answered in the light of experience.

In Santa Monica, where Wilshire Boulevard and the continent end, the homeless and the mentally ill are a presence and an issue. Here, after and the sun has set and the ocean damp has risen, I find four men in an alcove beside an office tower. Three already are fast asleep, two in sleeping bags, one wrapped in blankets and a plastic sheet.

The fourth is a short, slender man of perhaps 30 with shoulder-length blonde hair and a patchy beard. He is squatting on his haunches in his stocking feet. Beside him, aligned with mathematical precision, are his shoes.

He does not speak. But his hands clench and, never meeting mine, his pale blue eyes twitch like frightened animals.

Across the street, I stare over the rail toward the sea. Turning, I see a woman in a knit cap, a letterman’s jacket and a floor-length skirt, dragging a shopping bag. As she passes, she turns her head toward the vanished sun and says:

“I hate the nights in this cold town.”

They are people lost in shadow, these strangers in our streets, and through the dark curtain of our indifference the rustle of their ghostly presence whispers like an unquiet spirit: Choose--choose between tolerance and self-protection, between convenience and compassion.

Their demons have become our own.