3 Lose Their Mooring in Life’s Storm : Dilapidated Gas Station, Home to Eddie, Gary and Robert, Stands in the Path of Progress--So They’re Cast Adrift Again

In Wilmington, workers at Pacific Coast Highway and Figueroa Street are digging up an old gas station, part of a project to widen the Harbor Freeway.

They’re removing more than asphalt and dirt. They’re uprooting what for months has been home to Eddie, Gary and Robert.

Caltrans bought the property in August and has been telling the men, who live in an abandoned building on the land, that they must move. Decrepit, the tiny, cinder-block structure is not a safe place to live, the officials say.

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of homeless people in Southern California and it’s a sad commentary on our economy,” said Caltrans spokeswoman Margie Tiritillo. “But for their own protection and ours they have to leave.”

The men do not dispute Caltrans’ right to its property. They will not appear before a planning or zoning board of appeals. They do not claim unfair treatment. But they would have liked to have stayed.

As unsanitary and drafty as it is, the structure is home. In fact, it is more than home, it has been a haven for men who could not stand steady in the rush of life’s currents. Interviewed this week as they prepared to find shelter elsewhere, the men pondered the circumstances that have compelled them to join the Harbor area’s homeless.

Eddie lives in a small, unlighted room where some decorating has been done. Flies buzz outside his room and empty bottles of 40-ounce malt liquor stand against the entryway wall. He has tried to add homey touches with posters and proverbs. Like the other men, he reads by candlelight at night.

The mattress on the floor has a worn pink, white and blue comforter on top. A sign that says friendship is essential to the soul dangles from the ceiling beneath a playboy bunny symbol. Over the door hangs a sign that says “Private property, trespassing is illegal.”

Tall and spare, Eddie is barefoot on the porch in front of his room. He is clad in a Puerto Vallarta T-shirt and jeans and wears his hair in dreadlocks. He has been in the little hovel a year and a half.

“I think all of us here are capable of having a house if we wanted to,” he said. “I think the majority of us are here because of a combination of circumstances and choice. But choice plays maybe a bigger part in it than circumstance.”

Born in Jamaica, Eddie attended the University of Missouri on a track scholarship. He earned a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science and later became a substance abuse counselor. As he relates it, he used to get into the office early, to get ahead, keep it going, pay the bills, be reliable, be responsible, make enough, do enough, do it well, do it fast, faster than others and faster and faster, faster, faster.

Then, overwhelmed, he stopped.

Standing in the sunlight smoking a cigarette he bummed from a friend, Eddie is philosophical about why he lives the way he does.

“If I want to get up and go to the store, I go and clean somebody’s car and after six or seven cars I have enough money. I go to work without somebody saying, ‘Why weren’t you here earlier? Why wasn’t that done by now? When will it be ready? And this and that and this and that,’ ” he said.

The trick is to get past the initial stress of knowing where to sleep or how to get a meal. Once those problems are conquered, life as a dropout has its appeal, he said. A little beer, a little weed--nothing too heavy, he said. A hot meal when he wants to work for it and no pressure.

“To me, it’s a phase of my life. As long as I’m alive and healthy, I know God’s looking after me,” he said. “I’ve always had good intentions.

“Now you’ll probably see me on a park bench somewhere,” he said with a laugh. “No, I’m just being facetious. I know a couple of families that might allow me to stay in their garages.”

Eddie acknowledges that, psychologically, he is not ready to rejoin life’s race. If someone handed him a suit and a tie, gave him a place to live and found him a job?

“They’d have to give me time to get my head together,” he said. “I’d be lying to the person and to myself if I said I could do it. Maybe I’m physically and intellectually ready, but I’m not psychologically ready.”

Gary, 46, lives next door to Eddie in a neat room with a couch, table, rug and a worn Bible. Only the Bible, he says, is reliable and trustworthy in a malicious, chaotic world.

The FBI, the DEA, the IRS, LAPD--Gary will tell you he’s been persecuted by them all while doing undercover work for them. Nothing was ever official. He’s filed complaints and reports with officials on the local, state and federal level. “Everything’s documented” is a phrase that jumps often from his lips as his watery eyes beg for belief. If people believed him, he could climb up again.

“Right now I’m in jail. Mental and financial jail. It’s all unfair. I’m here because of unfairness,” Gary said.

He urges anyone to check out his story, verify the facts and ascertain the details. For him, unfairness is not limited to his own life, it’s pervasive. It’s evident in the crime, the meanness, the way people make life hard for one another.

When the world acknowledges that it-- not he--is out of control, Gary will return.

Gary keeps a human-shaped pinata in his room. He calls it his Rodney King pinata, and he has taped his name across the pinata’s dunce-capped head.

“See, what they did to Rodney’s body? That’s what they’ve done to my mind.”

If Eddie is in the shelter for peace and Gary feels locked down in a mental jail, Robert, who lives in a room around the back of the building, attributes his fate largely to drugs.

Robert, who turned 40 earlier this month, now washes windows for a living. He’s been off cocaine for the past two months but has wrestled with addiction off and on for the past 17 years, he said. Tall, skinny and worn-looking, the street life has taken its toll on him.

Now he’s ready for a change, and maybe having to leave the hovel will bring good things in the end. Unlike Gary and Eddie, Robert says he is ready to return to the mainstream of life and is job hunting. For now though, he earns about $25-$30 a day washing car windows. Drivers usually give him between 50 cents and $2. He knows he could make more, but he has pride.

“I’ve got a friend who holds a sign asking for food outside at the Beverly Center (in Beverly Hills), and he makes $175 to $200 a day. He tells me folks up there feel guilty when they see him.

“I don’t think people should feel guilty when they see me because they have things and I don’t,” he said. “They shouldn’t feel guilty for the simple fact that a lot of what I’m suffering is my fault,” he said.

“I’m here because of drugs. . . . By the time I did come to my senses . . . I had nothing and nowhere to go,” he said. “I don’t believe in that guilt stuff.”

Robert has been on the street for 2 1/2 years. During that time he’s left seven children and two wives to their own resources. Five of the children, sons, live with his mother-in-law in Wilmington. His two daughters live with their mother up in the city.

“My problem is that I have a self-destruct complex and whenever things get going well, I ruin it,” he said.

“I tell the boys, ‘Don’t do anything you ever see me do.’ My boys understand me--except the baby, who’s only a year old,” he said, wiping tears away with a sleeve.

“It seems like I get more understanding out of my 4-year-old than from my wife.” Robert said. “It’s strange when some 12-year-old kid will tell you that ‘It’s all right Daddy--you do the best you can,’ and the adults tell you you’re no good and you’re this and you’re that.

“I love my sons to death.”

It is almost noon and the Wednesday’s threatened rainstorm had not appeared. The sun was high in the sky and a cool breeze kept the day from getting too hot. The construction workers digging up the old gas station had not arrived, and the front-end loader in front of the shack was still.

Sitting still on the hovel’s front porch, Robert basks in the sun while talking. “I tell you, living here is great,” he said.

“Today the sun feels great and in a way it’s great to know that I’m going to wake up when I want to, work when I want to, but to know that I have no responsibility. I have no obligations to nobody for nothing at all.”