Woman Shares Luck in ‘Other’ Laguna Beach

Marsha Bode is talking about luck, big-time luck, the luck that tends to define us as human beings. Other people call this fate. Some don’t buy the idea at all.

“We feel lucky that we have so much,” Marsha is saying. She is a mother of three, 49 years old, a former school teacher, in the process of a divorce. When she compares her own lot, she looks to her friends who have less--even though she knows plenty who have more.

Marsha’s friends, some of them homeless, others just about there, will drop by the center that she manages for the Episcopal Service Alliance and pick up a bag of food, maybe some clothes, maybe once a month. It all depends.

“And it does seem like luck,” Marsha goes on. “I work hard, but they work hard too. But it’s luck of birth, who your parents are and things like that.”

Marsha is leaning against her car, an unfashionably old hatchback that has seen better days, in front of the American Legion Hall in Laguna Beach. We’ve just come back from a tour of the “other” Laguna Beach, the one that nobody paints in pastel watercolors to sell to the tourists, the one without the ocean views.

This Laguna looks like some of the uglier parts of the Third World.

Marsha, a member of the city’s volunteer Human Affairs Committee, gives away surplus government food. She delivers; this was the committee’s idea. This way they make sure that it gets into needy hands.

“There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’ in my mind,” Marsha says. “Some people say, ‘Don’t you think they are using the system? Don’t you think they are getting a free ride?’ That’s ridiculous. Everybody deserves to eat.”

This time it was canned pork, applesauce, green beans and tomatoes, as well as butter, cornmeal and flour that Marsha loaded into her car. A local supermarket threw in some packaged hotdog buns and a woman dropped off some children’s T-shirts left over from soccer season.

“Laguna Beach Soccer” are the words splashed above a red and black soccer ball on the shirt fronts. “American Youth Soccer Organization. Region 86.”

The recipients, have no idea what any of this means. For the most part, they speak Spanish only.

Raul, a barefoot 2-year-old who tells me that his mother’s at work, holds his shirt against his tiny chest. “Tomorrow I’m going to put it on!” he says.

We are in Raul’s neighborhood now, only most of the other neighbors wouldn’t exactly define it as such. The other neighbors have stilts under their houses and an expansive sea vista and wraparound decks to enjoy it all the more.

Where Raul lives is a blight on the landscape, a jumble of makeshift apartments with a few items of clothing hanging on the line, cheap cotton fabric tacked over open windows and a poor person’s security system--that is, it looks like there is nothing worth stealing here.

A friend of Marsha’s who lives in Laguna is along for this trip too, her first time. She is taking down the names of the recipients of this government largess. With the government, it seems there is always bookkeeping involved.

“I didn’t even know this neighborhood existed!” she says. She is talking about Raul’s neighborhood, the pocket-sized slum that one enters by stepping down the crooked concrete steps.

Directly across the street from Raul’s place, a rich man is building two houses, one for himself and the other on speculation. The general contractor on site asks me what “you ladies” are doing here. I tell him we are tracking down people to give away food. He doesn’t seem to approve.

“Most of the Mexicans, they’re drug dealers,” he says. “Go ahead. Ask the cops.”

The contractor’s employee, who was smoothing stucco on the side of the spec house, was born in Mexico, in Durango state. He has a wife and two kids and before his boss arrived, he had been telling me that he was very happy to have this job. It pays $100 a day, for about eight hours work.

“This is a beautiful house,” he said. “Would I like to live here? Whew.” He cocked his head and smiled shyly. He was probably wondering what kind of strange question was this. Nobody had ever asked it of him before.

What does he think, watching these poor women and their children huddled around Marsha’s car, smiling, nodding gracias, gracias , thank you very much, when they pick up this government food?

“It makes me feel kind of bad,” he said.

We move on to another stop now, a spot off Laguna Canyon Road where 12 people to a two-bedroom apartment is standard form. For this, a mother tells me, her husband pitches in with the others to pay rent of $1,200 a month.

I walk to the home of one family to let them know that Marsha has arrived. They live in what was a storage shack, made of corrugated steel. The 6-year-old girl in the dirty pink dress who lives here has never been to school because, her mother says, they’ve only just arrived. That was two months ago.

“What happened?” Marsha wants to know now as she peers into her car. She is looking at an odd number of supplies, not enough butter or flour, but more tomatoes than planned.

“How do we decide?” she asks. “We have only five butters and six people. This is something for Solomon I guess.”

But two mothers volunteer to take less and the applesauce goes to the ones with babies in tow.

Then, finally, we are ready to leave. But a man runs over, smiles, and puts his face to the window. “T-shirt?” he asks.

Sorry, he is out of luck.