Homeless Writer: The Muse Is His Master, the Sidewalk His Bed
Men find their dignity in as many ways as there are men.
Freddie Obidiah Castello III writes. His stories are about justice and fairness and about underdogs and losers who eventually get even. His screenplays, none of which has been bought or optioned or whatever it is Hollywood does, have titles like “Mailhouse Blues,” “Money Tree” and “Public Property.”
But perhaps Castello’s most compelling story is also his most concise, the one he wrote about himself on a scrap of cardboard: “Homeless Writer.”
Hundreds of people a day read Castello’s story as they wait in traffic queues near the Westward Ho Market in Sherman Oaks. Many of them surely add a mental footnote to the words Castello has penned carefully in black Magic Marker:
“Loser.”
“Drunk.”
“Lunatic.”
“Bum.”
Castello, 34, knows what people think of him. Who can blame them, really? His office is a purloined shopping cart. His home is wherever it is dry and warm and safe enough to put down his blanket for the night.
Yet for all his outward signs of destitution, Castello believes himself rich in kindness and diligence. Those, after all, are the things that matter. “What the hell do I need all that money for? I can’t take a Mercedes to the graveyard.”
Don’t get Castello wrong. The streets are a tough and lonely place. “But there are people all over the world who live like this every day,” he said. If one of his screenplays sells--something even he admits is unlikely--the first thing he plans to do is to come in out of the cold.
“Sure, I want more, but I know I’m blessed,” he said on a recent day that was both as clear and as cold as Los Angeles gets. “Life is too short and it’s beautiful--even with the little I have. My legs are strong and I’m healthy. The rest will come to me.”
For now, however, he writes about characters that rattle through his head like the memories of a life he once had and the people he once loved. About the owner of a printing shop who counterfeits money on the side. About the welfare mom who triumphs over her deadbeat boyfriends and gets them to pay child support. About a tax evader who falls in love with the Internal Revenue Service agent assigned to her case.
Writing, Castello said, comes easy to him. Not much else does.
He was born in New Orleans and graduated from high school in 1977. He did a little junior college and worked in a few fast-food joints before taking a job with the Postal Service.
Looking back, those 10 years were good ones. That is when he started writing, keeping diaries of his daily life and thoughts. That is when he met a woman and they made a baby. But that is also when the skein of Castello’s life began unraveling.
He was often late for work. When he did show up, he was not a very good worker. His boss took him aside and told Castello that if he wanted to keep his job, he would have to shape up. “I told him, ‘You’re right. I don’t think I want this job anymore,’ ” Castello recalled.
And so on Thanksgiving Day, 1990, Castello loaded up some Tupperware with leftover turkey and hopped a Greyhound bus heading west to the end of the rainbow. But there was no pot of gold waiting, just a bunch of cheap tinsel.
He stayed with family for a while, but then gradually gravitated toward the street, where he is free to do as he pleases. To this day, however, he refuses to tell his mother that he has no home.
To ease the loneliness, Castello again took up his pen. This time, he wrote screenplays, writing each out in longhand and then typing them at a local print shop. He sweeps and cleans in exchange for free copies of his scripts, which are stacked neatly in his shopping cart.
Some of the $10 to $15 he earns each day goes toward the Writers Guild of America fees he pays to protect his scripts from plagiarists. Some he has even sent to the federal copyright office in Washington, D.C.
In one scene of his most recent screenplay, “Fat People,” Castello takes aim at the waste and corruption he sees in City Hall.
After passing one city employee playing a video game and another asleep at her desk, Castello’s hero, Mr. Simshaw, and heroine, Tiffany, find their way to the mayor’s office. Inside they find hizzoner watching an X-rated movie with a scantily clad woman, who asks: “You sure that chair can hold both of us?”
Tiffany: “That’s disgusting.”
Mayor: “Didn’t your parents teach you how to knock?”
Mr. Simshaw: “As taxpayers, sir, we should have the freedom to come here at any time.”
With the mayor’s attention, Tiffany proceeds to detail a plan to renovate abandoned houses to shelter the homeless. On her way out, she reminds the mayor that he owes her one: “Please, don’t neglect my intentions to help those less fortunate. Loose lips sink ships.”
Castello’s writing is rarely without a message. In “Public Property,” he tells the story of a bum who makes it big and buys a house in the hills. Soon, all the people who ever gave him money show up, asking for some of it back.
It is Castello’s hope that life will imitate art. He has vowed not to leave Los Angeles until someone at least looks at one of his scripts. And to preempt the sort of charity-reneging that plagues the millionaire hobo in “Public Property,” Castello hands out poems or photocopied articles as “payment” to folks who take the time to smile or give him some change.
“I give people something to help them on their lives,” he said. “I meet a lot of beautiful people on the street, people who make you smile. It’s tough. But if you don’t keep a smile on your face, it’s worse.”
