Fighting It Out on Skid Row : 17 Years After Suing to Ban Arrests of Public Drunks, Fiery but Ailing Robert Sundance Still Champions Their Rights

Robert Sundance first saw the “Lights of Death” as a boy in the Mad Bear country of the Dakotas, along the Missouri River.

When he encountered them again in downtown Los Angeles this year, they followed him into the Rosslyn Hotel, where he lives in a small room that overlooks a corner of Skid Row.

Between those sightings, Sundance has lived as a modern warrior of sorts. For 40 years, he punched out fellow drunks in bars and got the tar beat out of him by cops in back alleys from Minneapolis to Seattle.

Then he sobered up and, in 1975, began battling his way to the U.S. Supreme Court with a landmark lawsuit to ban the criminal arrest of public drunks.

The “Sundance Case” made its namesake famous. Los Angeles’ big brass ring--the movie deal--glistened and Sundance briefly grabbed ahold.

In the end, though, his story never saw celluloid.

Now the 65-year-old Hunkpapa Sioux has written an autobiography of his tumultuous life. Told in the manner of a bum spinning yarns to his schnockered pals, “Sundance” is relentlessly frank and frequently brutal. Like a belligerent drunk, it shoves readers up against the hardest edges of what society delicately terms “homelessness.”

As one publisher after another passes on the 275-page manuscript, co-authored by photographer and anthropologist Marc Gaede, Sundance lives another chapter, wages another battle. This time, it’s against cancer that nailed him two years ago like a sucker punch.

*

“Hey, Sundance!” calls a woman with skin like beef jerky from her perch on a 5th Street sidewalk as the tall man with ponytailed gray hair approaches.

“Yo, Sunny, what’s happening?” shouts a man from an alley a few blocks later.

Sundance waves, flashing the tattooed nude on his right arm. Three drops of blue blood on his left dribble from a dagger tattoo hidden by a short-sleeved plaid shirt with fake pearl-and-silver buttons.

“This is an oasis on Skid Row,” says Sundance, dropping in on the United American Indian Involvement Crisis Center, a spic-and-span facility that feeds 60 to 100 American Indians a day, offers lectures on such topics as nutrition and fetal-alcohol syndrome, takes Indian children on hikes into the Sierra Nevada, and houses folks trying to recover from alcoholism.

Twenty years ago, the place threw Sundance out as a hopeless cause. Now he’s on the board of directors.

Sundance’s activism inspired much of the change that has occurred on Skid Row, says Dave Rambeau, a Paiute who works at the center. “He’s kept it up, stuck with it. He’s been relentless.”

A few minutes later on Main Street, Sundance stops to chat with Elgon (Tommy) Thomas, who has run a bright blue shoeshine stand on the corner for 25 years.

“I remember you knocked down a cop on that corner right there,” Thomas says.

It’s been a while since the police and Sundance last tangled.

And it’s been almost 50 years since he first ripped the badge off a reservation policeman and figured out, he writes, “that authority was an artificial creation and did not necessarily have to be obeyed.”

That attitude became his downfall and, in a sense, his redemption.

Robert Sundance was born on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation that spans North Dakota and South Dakota. His light skin and given name--Rupert Sibley McLaughlin--trace to his great-grandfather, U.S. Army Maj. Harry McLaughlin.

Sundance, as he later named himself, grew up between cultures and on the cusp of eras. Sioux elders still dazzled boys with tales of Little Big Horn, but the 20th Century tugged hard.

When he was 5 or 6, a rattlesnake bit him, leaving the first of what would become a lurid assortment of scars. A few years later, a more potent serpent poisoned him--bootleg whiskey, delivered to the reservation by enterprising white men in Model T Fords.

During the Depression, Sundance’s father headed to work on Montana farms. One night after work, he beat two white men in a Billings bar. As he walked home, a car appeared in the darkness and ran him down, puncturing his lung and breaking his ribs and leg.

At the hospital, Sundance says, his father lay in a hallway for 16 hours, reeking of whiskey. He died a week later of pneumonia. Sundance was 8.

A few years later near the family’s cabin in the remote Mad Bear wilderness, he noticed those mysterious lights that he believes stalk doomed people.

He’s sure his dad saw those lights just as he was run down.

But Sundance ignored the warning, succumbing to alcohol, the allure of which was only deepened by the fact that from 1832 until 1953 it was illegal in the United States to sell it to Indians.

Although printed by laser jet on crisp white paper, the manuscript of Sundance’s autobiography seems seeped in alcohol; the stench of cheap booze wafts from every paragraph, asserting its insane attraction as the boy drinks his way to a bleary approximation of manhood.

After fighting for the Navy in World War II--a priest forged his baptismal record when Sundance was 14--and another stint with the Air Force that ended with a dishonorable discharge for drunkenness, Sundance began his long migration through the nation’s Skid Rows.

Soon he had life figured out: “The priorities was booze first, the hell with food, the hell with anything else, then broads.”

Continuing his impromptu downtown tour, Sundance walks through an area that street people used to call the Devil’s Triangle--police “B wagons” would sweep through, he recalls, and the “winos used to just disappear.”

Standing amid clusters of homeless at 3rd and Main, he points across the street to a vista of chain-link, brick and corrugated sheet metal covered with graffiti: “That’s where the Franklin used to be.”

In the 1950s, the Franklin Hotel was owned by a woman who took a liking to Sundance and let him manage the building when she returned to her native Ireland.

“The first thing I did after she was gone was to drive out the regular tenants and move in my Indian friends,” he writes. “And that was the worst bunch of goddamn Indians anyone will ever find in this world.”

Sundance promptly stopped collecting rent. His new boarders converted part of the hotel into a “trick room,” in which hookers earned enough to keep the whole place drunk on cheap fortified wine. Meanwhile, the men jack-rolled bar patrons downstairs by breaking empty bottles on their heads.

“The goddamn hotel was blood galore after a night of partying, and the walls, the floors, and even the ceilings would be splattered with it,” he writes.

Sundance met his co-author in 1988 after reading about a controversial book of photographs Gaede had published depicting the brutal fate of alcoholic Indians in the “border towns” that surround Southwestern reservations.

Gaede’s unflinching portraits impressed him. And when Sundance walked into a downtown restaurant to meet him, Gaede was impressed.

As a boy, Gaede lived with his archeologist brother-in-law, camping for months at a time on Navajo reservations and playing with Hopi children.

“I know American Indians well,” Gaede says. “I can spot a Sioux by the way he walks down the street. God, they’re tough. . . . The first thing I noticed about Sundance was the strength of the man. His physical size, but also his personality. There is a strength of the spirit.”

As he listened to Sundance’s stories, Gaede says that he realized the book would be a hard sell to mainstream publishers: “He did some terrible things in his life and he didn’t want to hide those things.”

Woven into the narrative are watershed moments, such as when a car in which Sundance is passed out drunk crashes, killing a woman passenger. Sundance is sent to the Montana state prison at Deer Lodge for two years, and becomes involved in the bloody prison riots of 1957.

For the most part, Sundance’s story moves from one ugly moment to the next: He sets his bed on fire while in a drunken stupor; he sells his own passed-out brother to an amorous man for the price of a bottle of booze.

He rides freights in sub-zero Dakota winters, retches Peppermint Schnapps in a boxcar, and fights off roving gangs that get a kick out of chucking bums off the trains at 70 m.p.h.

Sundance turned his nose up at the anti-freeze some pals drank. But he wasn’t too proud--in a pinch--to drink Green Lizard after shave or Pink Lady Sterno. Or shellac.

About the only time Sundance wasn’t drunk in 38 years of alcoholism was during the 250 or more times he was jailed for public drunkenness. Or during those brief but violent spells when he was going through the delirium tremens of withdrawal.

The DTs sent Sundance into fevered fits during which he’d see monkeys scrambling up the curtains and spot Gypsies singing on rooftops.

During one such bout, however, Rupert McLaughlin split down the middle and encountered a new personality named Robert Sundance--the surname derived from the ritual dance “that implies strength and represents the essence of the Sioux Nation,” he says.

“No longer was I going to feel an outsider in this country, my country, Indian country. The whites with their European culture and religions are the foreigners, and it has been their corrupt system that put American Indians in humiliating and degrading situations.”

Even before finding his new identity, Sundance had begun a self-taught jailhouse education. He memorized huge sections of the dictionary and read widely. His reading told him there was something unjust about arresting homeless alcoholics just for being drunk on a public street.

“Criminal law is based on act and intent, and I didn’t intend to break laws . . . ,” he writes. “Alcoholics drink because they’re so damn sick they can’t help it.”

By 1971, Sundance had hand-written more than 100 writs of habeas corpus to California state judges, protesting his arrests as cruel, unusual and downright unjust.

Judges stamped them, “Denied.” Attorneys refused to take his cases.

In 1975, though, a judge passed one of Sundance’s letters to the Center for Law in the Public Interest in Los Angeles, and it landed on the desk of a young lawyer named Timothy McFlynn.

McFlynn, who now has a private practice in Vail, Colo., met Sundance in jail.

“He was larger than life,” McFlynn says. “Even in his alcoholic stupor, he knew that it couldn’t be constitutional in a civilized society to jail the sick, it just couldn’t be, and that drove him and drove him.”

As the Sundance case advanced, it drew the attention of a sympathetic media and antagonistic authorities. Sundance himself, meanwhile, bottomed out.

He estimates that he “had quit drinking through sheer willpower about 3,000 times.” He’d also been in and out of detox programs.

In the Salvation Army’s residential Harbor Light program in 1975, he struggled with the “three-headed dragon” program, addressing his drinking, his thoughts and his feelings. But two years later, he came out sober. And still fighting.

The goal of the Sundance suit, McFlynn says, was to strike down as unconstitutional a section of the California penal code that makes it a crime to be “unable to care for yourself in a public place due to intoxication.”

But the suit also argued that jailing public inebriates wasted taxpayer money when public health alternatives, such as detoxification programs, would be three times cheaper, McFlynn says.

In 1987, the California Supreme Court stopped short of declaring the law unconstitutional, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to rule on the case.

But the case’s impact was already widespread.

“The practical effect,” says McFlynn, “was to dramatically reduce the numbers of homeless alcoholics arrested and jailed for their illness, and dramatically increase the public health system alternatives. . . . “

In 1975, law enforcement authorities in Los Angeles County arrested more than 50,000 public drunks. In 1985, when the Sundance case went to the California Supreme Court, that number had fallen to fewer than 4,000.

Not everyone was pleased. “I never met a sober drunk who thought it was a good solution,” says Clancy Imislund, managing director of the Midnight Mission on Main Street.

“They were prey to the roving gangs of predators who used to beat the bejesus out of them. . . . Getting arrested was a protection for them.”

McFlynn concedes there may have been a brutal transition period after police arrests slowed. But before that, he says, the brutality was invisible:

“People didn’t know about the unspeakable misery and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.”

The office of the county-funded Indian Alcoholism Commission of California Inc., where Sundance has served as director for more than a decade, is on the third floor of a building that 30 years ago, in better days, probably had guards to run off public drunks.

Now, though, the fancy tile work is missing pieces, the stained glass is in disrepair, parts of the fancy metal grillwork on the elevators have been ripped off and the cultured marble is marred with gang graffiti.

Ask Sundance if, after 17 years of sobriety, he can’t see things from the perspective of those people who grow frustrated with public drunks and the urban decline they accelerate, or at least reflect, and he shakes his head.

“Not really,” he says. “Where are we gonna put the homeless? . . . I’m not saying don’t arrest the guy who picks up a gun and kills someone.”

The walls of his office are decorated with certificates of merit . . . of appreciation . . . of recognition. They’re also cluttered with agit-prop posters, such as one that ticks off the ways American Indians have died: A few marks for Little Big Horn, a few for Wounded Knee, and a long line of ticks for liquor.

Several bright yarn God’s eyes liven up a corner of the office. “Guy who made those drank himself to death,” Sundance says. “He was in his 30s.”

Beside the wire-reinforced windows that look out on 8th Street hang several paintings that depict Indian warriors against red backgrounds.

“He was a great painter,” Sundance says of the artist. “Really talented. Went up to the Shanty and a Mexican guy stabbed him, killed him. It’s a damn shame.”

*

Back at the Rosslyn, Sundance shows off the small room where he’s lived since sobering up. He keeps three radios tuned to country-Western stations. Three pair of cowboy boots sit on the worn carpet beside a stack of magazines. And two dusty cowboy hats hang in a closet decorated with a 1989 calendar from the King Edward saloon, on which a young woman has her blouse pulled halfway over her head.

Sundance says he’s content with his surroundings, and he only has one regret about his life: “I’m angry that I’ve got cancer after all I’ve been through. I thought nothing worse could happen to me.”

Back in the lobby, a young woman with deep brown eyes looks him over, and smiles flirtatiously.

“You’re looking good, Sundance,” she offers as he turns to go.

Then, her eyes twinkling, she feels the need to remind him and anyone within earshot: “Hell, he used to be the worst drunk out here.”