A Personal Brand of Street Smarts : Fixations: A homeless man in Irvine pursues his mission to display thought-provoking messages to motorists.
The signs are meticulously written with block letters in black paint, on paperboard covered in neat rows of two-inch masking tape, placed over several layers of previous messages. Recent signs at the corner of University Avenue and Culver Drive have read:
“THE ANSWER ENCOURAGES QUESTIONS”; “DON’T POINT”; “HEAR WITH YOUR EYES, SEE WITH YOUR EARS”; “IF LOVE AND KINDNESS DIDN’T HAVE TO BE DISCRETE, SO MUCH WOULDN’T BE NEEDED.”
Sometimes their author just puts up a self-referential sign reading “SUNBURNT FOOL.” At least half that description is apt. David sees a lot of sun, since he sits with his signs at the corner from 6:30 in the morning until 10 or later each night. A couple of feet away from him thousands of cars roar past, all sun-gleam and exhaust heat and with all the passengers’ eyes looking his way, since he may be the only thing out of place in this planned community. Some of the kids from the high school around the corner heckle him or howl as they drive past in their expensive Jeeps.
David has remarkably wavy blond hair, and looks a bit like the actor Rutger Hauer, except that there aren’t enough teeth left in David’s mouth to even make a small replica of Stonehenge.
“Do you mind if I pull up some cardboard here?” I asked, and sat as he continued working on a new sign. I’ll admit to feeling wary of him, as probably many of us are of people who sleep under bridges and live under the sun.
“I’m not poor. I’m streamlined,” he insists, pointing to the wood crate, Army duffel bag and sleeping bag that is home. Among the baggage David has dispensed with is his last name and most of his personal history. He says he’s 43, from San Diego County, a disabled vet, a former Eagle Scout and refrigeration engineer. None of that especially matters to him compared to his sense of mission.
David might not rank with the Christian ascetics of old--try Simeon Stylites, who spent his life on a 50-foot pillar in the desert--but in the past three years David has lived with his signs on the streets of 32 California cities. He’s been rained on, robbed of even his dentures and arrested eight times for obstructing the sidewalk and other minor charges. Two of those occasions were in Orange County, including in Lake Forest, where, he says, “I got to entertain a couple of psychiatrists, no big deal.” He claims to love the adversity.
He endures it all for his signs, and it’s initially difficult to see why. They seem only obtusely religious and largely have the effect of puzzling passersby. But that’s just the effect he wants.
“Sometimes I’ll put a half-finished sign up that starts ‘Faith’s greatest weapon, Evil’s greatest foe. . .’ and then leave it sitting like that for half a day, and people’ll be coming up asking, ‘What’s the last half of the sign? What’s the last part?’
“And I’ll go, ‘Purple lipstick remover!’ Haw! I like to tease them,” he guffawed.
When completed, his sign actually reads: “Faith’s greatest weapon, evil’s greatest foe, Is to be non-assuming and know what you know.”
*
He says he isn’t offering answers. That has to happen inside a person. So with his signs he tries to raise questions to “un-callous peoples’ eyes” so that they won’t assume they know everything and stop asking the questions they must to grow. When people ask all questions and accept the answers, he feels they’ll see things the way he does, which, as it happens, is a surprisingly lucid and non-dogmatic system of belief.
“I’m a one-god all-man person. Nobody should point at somebody else, at Hindus, Buddhists or whoever and say they’re wrong, because they can be following the two greatest commandments Jesus brought, which is to love your fellow man and God with all your heart. And the word ‘effective’ had better be in there: Somebody shouldn’t have to tell you that they’re a Christian. It is your actions that identify you.
“It won’t be on the front page of the newspaper: ‘Savior Arrives. Too Late For You.’ Well, the (Christian Science) Monitor might carry it, but not USA Today. There won’t be a countdown for that final day, and when it comes we’d better be very busy helping , not worrying about how little time is left,” he declared.
He doesn’t see much compassion in the world today, stating, “The Cold War is over--the cold won.” He does what he can, he says, using “the last free speech in the world,” his street corners. He’s always careful to pick one, like his present Irvine locale, that is away from residential or commercial interests that might be disturbed by him. He also tries to locate near high schools, to try to affect students who might get snared by drugs, gangs or other mind-closing traps.
When high school kids try to get his goat by telling him they love Satan, he’ll sometimes tell them that he does too.
“That throws them off the track,” he said with a laugh. “That’s how you raise kids. You don’t give them what they expect. When I was a kid I felt really in control when I could get one of those adults to say, ‘Because I said so!’ I knew then they didn’t know what they were talking about. What they should have said at that point is, ‘I don’t know,’ and included me in the answer-getting process. That wouldn’t have been what I expected.
“I’m a staunch foe of ‘Just Say No to Drugs.’ To just say no is a manifestation of putting your ownership in somebody else’s hands, of the inability to communicate a reason. And, as always, if you tell kids not to do something, you can be sure they will . Maybe the slogan should be, ‘Don’t say yes because somebody just said no because you’re probably going to just say yes, and we know that’s a no, yes?’ ”
*
David’s terminology can be a tad boggling. He goes on about people’s “owners” enough to make one think he’s full of paranoid ideas of thought control or possession. But he explains he means the self-imposed assumptions people allow to control their lives.
Asked, though, if he was talking on a similarly metaphorical level when he mentioned demons, and he immediately responded, “No, I mean with demon teeth, snarling, coming at me ripping out Bible pages. I’ve seen them with horns out of their heads.”
He thinks the devil has taken up residence in the affluent north San Diego County enclave of Rancho Santa Fe. In every town David goes to he says he is beset by demons--most often one who appears to him in a brown van--trying to tempt him from his solitary vigil. He says he just laughs at them.
He takes the demons in stride, as part of what he calls “the journey of pain.” Though he shrugs it all off, it is mapped on his face--his knee injured in an Army parachute jump, his bad hips, his time in VA hospitals and the drug-abuse-dulled years that landed him in the street a couple of years before he decided his purpose lay there.
It was only on the subject of his ruined teeth that David’s composure broke and he seemed on the verge of tears.
“That’s the closest I’d come to selling my soul, to get some teeth,” he said haltingly. “See, when I talk to kids, half the people I talk to are only looking at my teeth instead of listening to what I’m saying. I’d love to have something that makes me look right, or that I could eat with. That’s the only thing I could think of that could get me to leave a corner, if somebody were to get me to a dentist, because it would be so much help down the road.”
In each community he’s been in there have been people who have helped him, bringing him tape for his signs, shoes or clothes when he needs them, small cash donations and food.
“I don’t eat the right foods. They give me pizza and junk. Look at this”-- he lifted his faded blue Hawaiian shirt to reveal a small roll of flab--”I’ve never been like this, but since Thanksgiving they’ve really powered-on the food. At Christmas I had like 18 baskets of fruit. I started making a pyramid of them next to me to show I didn’t need more food. Sometimes I send people off with more food than they came with, pointing them to where some real poor people are.”
He sleeps “wherever my eyes will close” in bushes, under trees or under traffic bridges. He generally stays in each town a little over a month, and about every other time when he decamps he’s saved enough money to allow himself his one luxury.
“I check into a motel with a Jacuzzi for a night. I don’t have a chance to take a shower very often. So I go 25 or 30 days, then I try to sit in a Jacuzzi. That, or I don’t care if I have to find a lake or something. I can’t stand myself and have to find somewhere to soak the crud and crust off me. So I’ll take a little vacation, soak up and put myself in a different state of mind. It re-sparks me from sitting 16 hours a day behind each sign,” he said.
Though he’s open to new ways of reaching people (“It has to be unexpected. I’m always going to be a mind-blower”), he doesn’t see ever abandoning his mission. In a week or two he will depart for a new corner.
He accounts his present Irvine environs as being a particularly poor neighborhood in “spiritual currency.” In the cars speeding past he sees people caught up in pursuing the weapons and armor of money and power.
“Money is the carrot out in front of all those who are owned,” he said. “I’m here to steal from them, to take from them these blind obediences. It’s not easy for them being dangerous. It’s a lonely life. And that’s why I play the strings of conscience. I answered mine. They’re still being taunted by their own. All I have to do is set their conscience adrift, cut these little boats that they have all held in these slips of obedience. Then they’ll drift naturally toward a source of earned trust and proven wisdom.”
