Homeless doesn’t mean hopeless. Or without a lesson for kids. : He May Be Down but He’s Not Out

I’ve often thought that people ought to be salaried just for what they have to put up with.

Telephone operators would make a bundle. Teachers would get a king’s ransom. Writers could live like rock stars. Charles Barkley and Madonna would need food stamps. And Freddie Obidiah Castello III would pull in six figures a year, minimum.

Castello’s life has been about as simple as Whitewater. He’s a father, a devout Catholic, failed player of the stock market, would-be inventor, former New Orleans postal worker, self-declared disciple of J. Paul Getty and Howard Hughes, aspiring poet/novelist/screenwriter and Sherman Oaks resident.

Which is to say, he lives all over Sherman Oaks: in parking garages, on bus benches, behind bushes--wherever you’re not likely to get murdered.

And one more item belongs on Castello’s grab-bag resume-- tonight at 7 he will host his own public-access TV show, “Graffiti Bridge,” named after the album. He carefully saved the $35 you need to buy a half-hour of studio time at Century Cable in Santa Monica. The purpose? To talk to kids about completing school and setting high goals.

That’s right. A homeless guy spending his paltry bucks for his own TV platform, so he can tell kids to live right. A homeless homeless guy, at that. Since the Northridge earthquake, Castello’s been afraid to sleep in the Ventura Boulevard parking garage that was home for about four months. (“It was a safe place--it was underground, it was free from the rain. And the people who worked in the building, they knew me by name.”) He’s a nomad again.

I first saw this looming, handsome gentleman months ago, standing near Ventura and Sepulveda boulevards, audaciously suggesting to haggard, barely collected drivers that they “smile.” Some gave him the finger. Some smiled. Some turned to their companions and said, “In the words of Art Linkletter, ‘people are funny!’ ” I decided to talk to him the other day because of the cardboard sign he was holding:

“HOMELESS WRITER-- PLEASE HELP--GOD BLESS.”

I like to think I’m a writer, and I sometimes feel a bit too much pecuniary affinity with homeless people. We talked for about an hour.

“A lot of people say, ‘Are you really a writer?’ ” he said. “What the hell is a writer supposed to look like? All writers are supposed to live in Bel-Air, right? Well, I don’t.”

Castello told me many things. He’s trying to patent a newspaper dispenser. He’s kept a daily diary since 1981. He’s got copyrighted original scripts and novels about two harrowing aspects of U.S. life: the postal service and the streets. He goes Downtown to buy socks and underwear (“You can get six or seven pair of socks for $5!”), but usually steers clear because “it’s too dangerous, man.” He gets fresh lettuce from a Dumpster at a nearby market, salad dressing from fast-food joints, and makes “good salads” (with a cucumber, if he has a spare 30 cents). He doesn’t get sick “much” because “they throw oranges and apples in the Dumpster every day, man--I know about the importance of getting my Vitamin C.”

A lot of people yell “get a job” at him from passing BMWs and Range Rovers. His response: “Yeah, right! You got one for me?” For the moment, he sweeps out a local print shop for the money to rent a storage space for his clothes, typewriter and scripts. Some mornings, before customers arrive, the shop owners let him type for an hour or two: a poem, a script, a letter to his 10-year-old son in New Orleans (which includes, when possible, a few dollars).

He calls the people who stop to give him a buck, or a sandwich, his “customers.” Self-deceptive euphemism? No. Just a guy keeping his pride. For every item generously offered, Castello returns a photocopy of one of his original weekly poems, and a photocopied “article of the week,” thoughtfully chosen from a magazine (like an informative piece about the safety of eating fish, from American Health magazine).

Like a fool I didn’t know, didn’t care about the next turn

The bell is ringing, and still I don’t know

why I’m here, having done nothing . . .

--excerpt from his poem-of-the-week of late March, “The Ringing of the Bell.”

“See, I grew up Catholic, man,” said Castello, in freshly laundered blue jeans, black T-shirt and green canvas jacket (“I’m not filthy, man”). “My parents, along with my Catholic upbringing, always taught me never to ask for something I don’t need, and if I do, try to put something back into the system. So I’m doing that by giving some of my poetry. . . . And I try to keep people informed.”

The TV show, which he plans to do again in June, is another effort to “put something back.”

“One student showed up (for the taping). And we talked about the importance of going to college and about graffiti,” said Castello, standing on a busy Sherman Oaks corner near his shopping cart/mobile home. “I never went to college.”

Once upon a less-troubled time, Castello says, he was a fresh-out-of-high-school, 19-year-old, $18,000-a-year letter sorter for a post office in New Orleans, with sights set high:

“I wanted to be like Howard Hughes,” he said. “If not Howard Hughes, then J. Paul Getty, because they were two of the tops. I wanted $800 million, man, that’s what I wanted. Seriously. Like they say, well, if you reach for that, even if you fall halfway, you’ll still wind up with a hundred million or two.”

Instead he wound up with $40,000 savings invested in stocks. When a broker suggested he borrow against it to make a greater investment, Castello smelled fortune, and went for broke. Which is exactly how he wound up. The year was 1984.

“I was so naive and so determined to make this thing work, and I believed in it so much,” he said, “that I had told everybody, yeah, I’m going to be a millionaire next year, and this post office is going to kiss my little so-and-so. And it didn’t work out that way. And everybody was looking at me like, yeah, we knew you wasn’t going to make it, you ain’t nothing but a loser. So that tore me down. I lost my girlfriend. So then you’ve got to look at these people every day. . . . Then I started drinking more. Because I was always a drinker. I just couldn’t take that. So I became fed up with myself. It wasn’t other people. I felt it was just human. They weren’t doing nothing to me. I set myself up.”

He quit in dejection, moved in with his parents for a few years, working on his writing. Some polite rejection letters from Hollywood were enough to encourage him to move west--four homeless years ago. And that’s all he’s really accrued since coming to Tinseltown--stock, courteous, “you’ve got promise” rejections.

“It’s a lot harder than I thought,” he’ll say, “to make contact with people.”

Right. Especially in a city where the tired cliche that “everybody’s got a screenplay” includes at least one homeless person.

The future? Castello is 34, and has, for the moment, made the San Fernando Valley his home.

“I stayed focused,” he said. “My parents weren’t quitters. I’m not a quitter. It’s just part of my breeding. I’m not a quitter. I’m just down, but I’m not out. I’ve got relatives here, but I don’t beg ‘em. I’m a grown man. I got myself in, I gotta get myself out. I’ve read about guys--financial wizards over here--one guy who went bankrupt four or five times, and came back every time. Look at Donald Trump--they try to take away his (stuff), but he comes back. So things like that keep you going.”

The party is over, the bell is ringing

Fearful of the penalty, taking so much for granted

Those simple things

Some relaxing days

Forgive me, I tell myself

Time passes so slow, but yet so fast. The bell is ringing

--From “The Ringing of the Bell,” by Freddie Obidiah Castello III.

Like I said, six figures a year, minimum.