Down and Out in La Jolla : Sociology: Affluent community can be a paradise for the homeless, too, but the gap between the haves and the have-nots is magnified.

Victor Carvin is a stranger in paradise.

He feels it each time he looks up at the grandiose houses on the hills of La Jolla. Or when he sees the Jaguars and Mercedeses tooling around his palm-studded neighborhood, eager valets running to open their doors outside one fine restaurant after another.

Many of his neighbors are cushioned by fabulous wealth. And the sight and the smell of their money make him feel like the ultimate outsider, especially when he grows hungry.

The 28-year-old Philadelphia native, his rugged looks eroded by years of alcoholism, has done time in gritty inner-cities from Florida to Arizona. Now, three years in La Jolla have taught him the lay of the rich man’s land.

He sleeps at the parks and beaches where he can crash for the night without fear of being roused by a policeman’s billy club. He’s learned which residents will loan him their back-yard garden hose for a quick, cold shower and which waiters secretly offer free handouts from their back-alley restaurant doors.

And he has found the best Dumpsters.

Come mealtime, he stakes out the industrial-green garbage bins behind the two downtown supermarkets for some Dumpster-diving.

He seizes the vegetables whose bruises can be hastily cut away, the good part used for an evening stir-fry. He gratefully grabs the packaged cheese with yesterday’s expiration date, the almost-rotten eggs and the bad apples.

But some local residents believe that Carvin himself is the bad apple--that he and others like him are damaged goods whose very presence is spoiling an otherwise polished community.

On the gleaming streets of La Jolla, a daily drama unfolds between some of the county’s richest and poorest residents--a collision of disparate lives, a claim laid to a place both groups consider their own cozy refuge.

Local residents and businesses complain about increased crime--burglaries, robberies and car break-ins--which they attribute to the 3 dozen or so homeless people living among the elite stores and ocean-view houses. They tell horror stories of men badgering elderly residents on their immaculate streets, or sleeping in the outdoor sculptures behind the local art museum and on the basement floor of the local recreation center.

They talk of the day one deranged man taunted a sick elderly resident, circling her like a vulture, threatening to yank the breathing device from her throat as she stood frozen in fright on the sidewalk.

And they still remember the evening late last year when two homeless men ransacked a downtown boutique until the pistol-packing proprietor shot one of them in the buttocks in self-defense.

Church leaders and community volunteers understand both sides and wish they could get their neighbors to do the same.

“This community is a homeless person’s paradise, just as it is a rich man’s paradise,” said the Rev. Charles Foss, pastor at St. James by the Sea Episcopal Church. “It’s clean and safe, there’s lots of food in the Dumpsters, and the restaurants are willing to share their leftovers.

“But there is also an undercurrent of tension here. It comes from some of the have-nots who are tired of seeing firsthand all that the haves can attain. And it comes from the wealthy people who feel uncomfortable around poverty.”

Especially around people like Patrick and Danny, roofless wanderers who drink cheap vodka and wear the same clothes day after day. And Dennis, a panhandler with long, oily hair, who takes his place each morning outside the local post office.

There’s a homeless transvestite who likes to carry a tennis bag that holds his high-heeled shoes. And an elderly black woman who is missing a hand, and pushes around a rusty old shopping cart, yelling obscenities at passers-by, calling them “white devils.”

And how about the scholarly man who each day occupies the same park bench outside the local recreation center, reading borrowed library books before retiring each night to his makeshift home behind the nearby tennis courts?

Then there’s Ron, the Vietnam veteran who wants to change his life. “Today’s the day,” he says each morning, “I’m gonna get off the streets.”

Like Carvin, each has personal baggage. Some are on the lam from the law. Others are mentally ill. Some are drug addicts or alcoholics. All are hard-luck cases, down and out in San Diego’s wealthiest neighborhood.

One by one, officials say, they have pulled away from the crime and confusion of San Diego’s inner city, moving to the safety and quiet of suburbs like Poway and Rancho Bernardo. And La Jolla.

The welcome wagon has hardly been called out for them.

“These people are visual pollution,” says La Jolla socialite Nancy Hestor. “They’re simply eyesores. And they’re dangerous.”

Hestor is tired of hearing the angry mutterings of the unwashed panhandlers she says have become street fixtures. Residents have watched the homeless men toss rocks through windows and have looked past the street wanderers throwing tight-fisted uppercuts of anger into thin air.

Hestor still shudders at the image of the man who urinated on the sidewalk outside I. Magnin and the shaggy man who vomited on the steps of the post office.

“Charming,” she says. “Simply charming.”

Other La Jollans have a different attitude toward the have-nots. Take the story of James, a homeless man who for nearly seven years was unofficially adopted by several downtown merchants. He did odd jobs and kept his newfound friends up on current events until the day one owner was able to reunite him with his family, ending a 20-year separation.

“The sad part is how long it took to finally get him off the streets,” said Carol Montana, a greeting card store owner who helped James. “The thought that he languished on the street for all those years without medical care or anyone to really step in and help him. It makes you wonder.”

Because of growing community concern, the La Jolla Town Council formed a task force to investigate ways to provide that help to its homeless population.

The goal, says Town Council Trustee Jim Vitale, is to solve the riddle of the three Vs. “I divide these people into three categories,” he says of the homeless. “The victims, the varmints and the vagrants.”

The varmints, he explains, are the homeless who harass residents and cause public damage. The vagrants are the professional homeless, the people who don’t want to work, who are always on the make for a free handout.

Only through getting rid of those two groups, he says, can residents hope to reach the victims--the mentally ill and financial hardship cases who in his eyes deserve all the help they can get.

“I know I offend people by categorizing like this, but I’m looking at this like a realist,” said Vitale, a local insurance salesman. “They’re always talking about these people as victims. But, when someone is screaming at me on a public street, making my son afraid to go to church on Sunday, well, then, I believe I’m the one who’s become the victim.”

The tension between haves and have-nots in La Jolla surfaced last year during a Town Council meeting when members were interrupted by a homeless man in the audience who objected to their characterization of the homeless as vagrants and varmints.

“He was angry,” recalled Town Council member Mike Katzman, a co-chairman of the homeless task force. “He let us know his circumstances, how he became homeless. He told us flat out that he was a person, a human being, not just some caricature.”

Fellow task force member Sandra Brokaw said the group has begun planning fund-raising events and is looking for ways to identify which homeless persons are in the greatest need of help.

“We really do want to help these people,” she said. “But we also can’t help but realize the attitude among some of them that we’re an easy mark, that La Jolla is a good place to come for a free lunch.

“The point we want to make is that we all worked hard for what we got and that, whether they’re homeless or not, they’re going to have to work hard, too. Life is not a hand-out. Life is not a free ride.”

Several church congregations, operating in the belief that there should be some handouts in life for the homeless, have run individual programs to help feed and clothe La Jolla’s needy.

Recently, a handful of churches pooled their resources to open a center to dispense food, clothing and counseling. Several others participate in a nonprofit Interfaith Shelter program, offering temporary food and shelter to homeless men and women as they save money from jobs for a down payment on their own apartment.

Now they want the local business community to pitch in.

“The fact is, the churches and not-for-profit agencies have been here all along trying to do their part,” said Chris Kuebler, business administrator for the La Jolla Presbyterian Church. “Now we’re just waiting for the business community to come around.”

Even some Town Council members have their doubts about civic La Jolla’s commitment to assisting its homeless population.

“It’s frustrating from a civic level,” said Katzman, manager of the Hard Rock Cafe in downtown La Jolla who is involved through his restaurant in numerous community projects. “Because it seems a lot of people who could do some real good are more geared toward getting rid of these people.”

But La Jolla businessmen refuse to play the bad guys. They make no excuses for their battle to rid the community of its homeless.

“La Jolla is one of the most beautiful garden spots in the entire world and, frankly, people don’t come here on vacation to see the homeless,” said Ron Zappardino, owner of the Top o’ the Cove restaurant and president of Promote La Jolla, a business association for downtown merchants.

“Let’s put aside our social consciences for a moment. You could say we’re cold-hearted. But then you could ask how our businesses can survive without the right atmosphere. Hey, I give to charities like the next guy, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to make our business worse than it is.”

Simply put, Zappardino said, homeless people are bad for business.

“You’re taking your wife out for a nice dinner in La Jolla,” he said, “and some smelly, tattered person in dirty clothes comes up and tries to bum a quarter from you. What does that do to your evening? What does it do to the atmosphere?

“It spoils it, that’s what it does.”

Victor Carvin agrees with many of the complaints La Jollans have about their homeless guests. He knows how ugly a drunken panhandler can get.

He has seen the purse snatchings, the angry knife fights, the drunken men and women staggering along downtown streets.

He knows what it’s like to be sick from a weeklong hangover, so ill that it hurts to eat. He has felt the outrage of being banished from local stores by merchants who just assumed he was drunk. And that outrage, he said, breeds problems.

“If you’re sober, life can be good here,” Carvin said, drawing from a cigarette, letting the smoke rings encircle his face in wispy lassos. “When you’re drunk or doing drugs, it gets harder. People get mean.”

On a warm night in early April, Carvin had been off the streets for two weeks, sleeping in the gymnasium of a downtown La Jolla church as a participant in the Interfaith Shelter self-help program.

He had reason to feel optimistic: He had just quit drinking, “for the millionth time.”

He reflected that he had had some good moments, homeless in La Jolla. A woman had given him $20 one morning in the fast food restaurant and three women in a Jaguar stuffed $15 in his pocket as he sat on a bench outside the local library, eating a baloney sandwich. A waiter had once brought him steaming plates of gumbo outside an ethnic restaurant, and a kindly maintenance man had looked the other way for months while he slept in the church alleyway.

But he also realized that he no longer wanted a life of drugs and the 12-packs of Meisterbrau that he once guzzled over long afternoons playing Hacky-Sack in the park. Nor did he want the mornings nursing hangovers in the Jack in the Box, drinking coffee and poring over the newspaper classified section, pretending he had the money to afford a place of his own.

Instead, Carvin talked on that warm evening about a new future. With the money he was saving on room and board through the shelter program, he planned on taking an apartment and perhaps landing a job as a counselor for homeless kids.

“I’ve been on the streets so long,” he said, “I’ve seen their problems firsthand. And I think I could help.”

As far as store owner Norma Payne is concerned, the departure of people like Carvin would be good riddance.

Payne said she once was a compassionate person who wanted to help the homeless. Now she only wants them out of her hair.

Several months ago, two drunken, homeless men walked into her clothing store and began knocking over racks. Payne brandished a handgun and fired two warning shots. When one man persisted, she shot him in the buttocks.

“I’m afraid of these people now,” she said. “If I’m confronted with the same situation again, I won’t shoot for the buttocks, I’ll shoot for the chest or the face. And I won’t worry about it.”

Carol Montana can understand the anger--to a point. Her relajtionship with the community’s homeless people has been mostly positive--especially her relationship with James, the towering, soft-spoken man who pushed a cart around town.

She recalls the long hours they spent together--James lounging on the couch in her card shop, regaling her with stories about national politics and the British royal family.

Montana is glad she took the step that day and picked up the telephone and persuaded James to dial home.

Today, he’s off the streets of La Jolla.

But not Victor. Friends say he dropped out of the self-help program and is back on the streets, drinking again.