Shadows in the Distance
I found him in a small back room of a North Hollywood church, talking on a telephone. I knew it was him because of the clipped manner of his speech. When he was finished I said, “Jonathan Igwe, I presume?” It seemed right.
He laughed and said yes, and we hugged like old friends. He wasn’t the way I’d pictured him. I figured him as small and dissipated, the way poets are supposed to be, not husky and high-spirited.
“Welcome,” he said, gesturing widely to the room he seemed somehow to dominate.
He burned with vitality. There wasn’t anything about him that was either vague or unkempt, two factors that so often identify the homeless.
I couldn’t help but wonder why a guy like him would be living in the streets, scrounging for food and sleeping in his car, with no destination but the landscapes of his own imagination.
“You aren’t the way I pictured you,” I said.
“I’m African,” he said, speaking English in that marvelously clipped, book-learned way that isolates each word.
“That’s not what I mean. I mean . . . well, it doesn’t matter.”
I wrote about Jonathan a month ago after he sent me a letter talking about L.A.’s impoverished spirit. He enclosed some poetry he’d written too, about the trouble with the human race.
The guy’s no Dylan Thomas, but there was something in the plaintive tone of his verse that caught my attention. The letter closed with a p.s. that he was homeless and living in a South-Central park. I went looking for him.
I spent a day wandering around asking if anyone knew of a guy who slept in his car and wrote poetry in a lined notebook. I talked to a woman sitting under a bush who thought I was trying to steal her shopping cart full of dead dreams, and a guy who clung to a tattered piece of rag like a baby hugging his security blanket.
No one knew anything about Jonathan. You occupy your own world when you’re homeless. All you see are forms, not faces, like shadows on a Salvador Dali horizon.
I finally gave up the search and wrote about Jonathan the next day. When the column appeared, a woman phoned and said she knew him. He was a volunteer at a place called Habitat for Humanity that arranges low-cost housing for the poor. She gave me the telephone number.
It was him all right: Jonathan Chinaka Igwe, born in Lagos, Nigeria, 40 years ago, came to the U.S. in 1978 to escape a civil war. “They killed my brother,” was the way he put it, “and I was next.”
He’d been a banker in Lagos, and a semipro soccer player and writer. His family is still there.
Jonathan landed in New York with $700 in his pocket and took a Greyhound to L.A., where he went to school and worked when he could. Then he went to San Francisco. That’s where his troubles began.
“I was mugged by three white men,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “They were still beating me when the police came. My face was broken in a hundred different places. . . .”
By the time he recovered, he had no money and no job, because the catering service he’d worked for said either return now or you’re out. He was sacked when he was still in the hospital.
Jonathan ended up living in his ’78 Chevy Capri and doing odd jobs for food. He drifted south from San Francisco to L.A. and was living in the park when he wrote me.
Meanwhile, he’d heard about Habitat for Humanity and they gave him a temporary place to sleep as a house-sitter. He isn’t homeless anymore, but that will end soon and it’ll be back to sleeping in the car.
Jonathan’s quite a guy. I was with him for only a few minutes when he began lecturing me about how we don’t have to just rebuild L.A., we have to rebuild the people. “Somebody,” he said, each word ringing with the clarity of a bell, “has to say ‘I’m sorry.’ ”
He gave me a poem you could almost put to music, “Look out there, look out there/What do you see, what do you see?/ look out there at humanity. . . .”
There are 68,000 homeless people in L.A. County, and I doubt that many of them spend a lot of time writing poetry or worrying about the condition of government. Your perspective narrows when you’re hungry.
Jonathan cares a lot about everything and wants badly to emerge from that desolate side of life and write about it. He’s already had one poem published, but you don’t get rich writing poetry.
I wish him well existing out there over the Dali horizon, where hope is a shadow in the distance. “Who knows,” Jonathan says with a homeless poet’s perception of irony, “what tomorrow will bring?”
Who, indeed.
