Homelessness Is No Joke, but It Isn’t Always Humorless
“Are you guys tired of being interviewed?” I said to the woman in a sweat shirt who answered the door.
“No, come on in,” she said, cheerily. “We never get tired of being interviewed.”
Ah, the celebrity life. If you’re not careful, it can really go to your head, and that’s pretty much what I expected when I dropped in unannounced on the group of seven who were sitting around the TV Friday afternoon, watching the syndicated rerun of “Knight Rider.”
And why shouldn’t they be full of themselves? After all, the seven homeless people are now living in an abandoned fire station in Westminster--the one with signs saying it’s unsafe for occupancy and the mailbox notation saying “Outgoing Mail Only”--after most of them had been living in the bushes beneath the 405 Freeway and Beach Boulevard.
You talk about your upward mobility. . . .
The seven people and one shaggy dog held court for about 45 minutes, talking about the recent publicity over Caltrans’ ouster of them from under the freeway and Westminster’s desire to have them leave the abandoned fire station, owned by a beneficent citizen named Chuck Ross who has made it available for them.
It was the usual conversational fare with homeless people, with them telling their stories that run the gamut from bad luck to public misunderstanding of them to the difficulty of securing work when you have no money, car, phone or address.
Patty, the woman who answered the door, says she’s six hours short of a master’s degree in business and was making $65,000 four years ago as a purchasing agent.
How is it you can’t get a job? I asked.
“Are you going to hire me dressed like this, pushing a shopping cart and with a dog?” she says.
But how did you get from $65,000 to that situation? The recession cost her a job she had for 13 years, and eventually her money and unemployment compensation ran out, she says. She had another job but lost that one and again the unemployment ended before she found work.
Don says he’s been a plumber for more than 30 years but hasn’t been called for a job in two years. Denis says he was making $41,000 annually as recently as 1991. William says a blown-out knee cost him a 22-year career as a mechanic. Round and round they went, telling me it’s not as hard as I think to wind up in the street.
But we’ve all heard those stories before. What I wanted to know was what happens if the Westminster City Council forces them to leave a place that, finally, has put a roof over their heads.
“We’ll be back in the bushes someplace,” Denis says. “That way, we’re out of sight, out of mind.”
“Where you gonna go?” Don says, “There’s no place to go except the bushes.”
They’re hoping that Westminster city officials will follow up on discussions to find them some shelter. And strange as it may seem, some in the group are still mad that they had to leave the 405 encampment in the first place.
“We had a pretty nice camp down there,” Don says, “but it took more than a year to get that camp into halfway decent shape.”
Now, inside the old fire house, they have hot-and-cold running water, a toilet, a shower, a refrigerator and, as they say, “a base of operations.”
How do you keep from going crazy with frustration? I ask.
“You’ve got to have a sense of humor, number one,” Frank says.
“If you took everything away from someone and put them on the street with no car, no address, only one set of clothes, how long do you think they would last?” he says.
But most people can’t imagine that happening to them, I say.
“If you were to lose that job right now and when that unemployment runs out, your money runs out, you can’t afford that house payment anymore, then what are you looking at? You’re talking about living in your car. Maybe you go another year and you don’t have money to register the car, you’re going downhill always. You can’t afford insurance, you can’t keep the car because you can’t afford to put gas in it. . . . “
I get the picture.
Most of us feel we have a few layers of safety-net protection. These folks say they don’t.
They know many people think they could get jobs if they really wanted to. They each say they’ve tried but that the downward spiral that led them to homelessness makes the search tougher.
They’ve been interviewed a few times in recent weeks after their freeway encampment was dispatched. I asked if they’ve enjoyed the attention.
“Maybe this might force the government and the people to realize we’re not a bunch of hobos sitting out in the street,” Don says. “We’re people who need help from the government and deserve it.”
“They can send billions and billions of dollars to help underprivileged nations with people who are starving to death, but they’ve got just as much here on their doorstep and they don’t want to acknowledge it,” Patty says.
Trying in my own sick way to lighten their situation by suggesting they’re at least better off here than under the freeway, I said, “So, you’re in clover now, huh?”
“No,” Denis said, “I was in clover the other night. Sleeping outside by the movie theater.”
Like they said, you have to keep a sense of humor.
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.
