The Reluctant Hero of Reseda

He was walking along a side street near the intersection of Sherman Way and White Oak Avenue. Even before I pulled up to the curb, Mark Burdick could tell I was another person looking for the Homeless Hero of Reseda.

He seemed wary, but his guard dropped a bit when I told him I worked with John. Tucked under his arm was Wednesday’s edition of The Times, with John Glionna’s second story about Burdick.

The first described how this 42-year-old Vietnam veteran had rescued Los Angeles Police Officer Martin Guerrero from a fiery auto accident early Sunday that claimed the lives of Guerrero’s partner and the motorist who rammed into their patrol car. The second told of how Burdick had been given the bum’s rush by the owners of a Mobil station where, unbeknown to them, he’d made a meager living washing motorists’ windows. The guy might be a hero, the station owners said, but he’s also a loiterer.

Burdick is a weathered man with thick sandy hair and blue-gray eyes. He was wearing a few days stubble and the same ensemble in which he’d been photographed the day before--black jeans, black sneakers and a T-shirt over a long sleeved undershirt. He sucked on an unfiltered Camel.

So, I asked, how’s life on the streets?

“It’s no party,” he mumbled.

*

Reluctantly he showed me his hovel. It is a small space behind a dumpster at the end of a dirt alley. The dumpster’s metal lids were flipped open and propped against a fence to provide a roof. Beneath it was Burdick’s bedroll, a couple of boxes of clothes, a few paperbacks. He does a lot of reading, he says.

Quietly he told a bit more of his story. Mark Burdick is a local boy who didn’t make good, a Reseda native who was a member of Cleveland High’s Class of ’71 and who joined the Marine Corps. On his left arm is a USMC tattoo and on his right is the word “Mom.” The day before, his mother had driven down from Newhall to take her son to visit Officer Guerrero in the hospital.

Burdick had been an ironworker who made $24 an hour in high-rise construction, then mugged himself with the usual suspects. He did drugs. “You name it, I tried it.” And, especially, he liked to drink, “from 6 a.m. ‘til midnight.” A series of drunk driving arrests, he says, cost him his livelihood.

Now that he’s homeless, he says, “Nobody wants to give you a good job. I mean a good job, not this $5-an-hour stuff. I was a skilled tradesman. . . . People say, ‘Go get a job.’ Well, it’s hard. A lot of people are on the streets. You’ve got aerospace industry people living in campers.”

Burdick looked beyond me. A woman in heels and a stylish green dress was walking up the dirt alley.

Cindy Anderson introduced herself as the director of Tree of Life Ministries, a nonprofit agency that delivers food to needy families in the San Fernando Valley. She sometimes let Burdick clean her windshield and was appalled by the station’s actions.

“I could have 100 people out there with picket signs,” she told him.

Burdick shook his head no. He didn’t want to cause trouble.

The woman was persistent. “If you want me to fight for you, I will.”

“No. I fight my own battles.”

“You’re not in this world alone, Mark.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying. There’s not a war here. . . . Why should I fight for something that’s not mine anyway?”

A Honda Accord pulled into the alley. John Glionna was bearing predictable news: Several readers had called with job offers. Burdick’s reaction was one of subdued gratitude. “Talk is talk,” he told me later.

Burdick seemed pleased just to have made some friends in the LAPD. He reached into his sock and removed a thin billfold, then extracted business cards that appreciative officers had given him. “These are like get-out-of-jail-free cards,” he said with a grin.

*

Cindy Anderson pressed a $20 bill into his hand and offered some more advice: “Don’t block yourself from the world, Mark.” She promised to check in on him.

Had he spent much time in jail? Just a few days here and there, he said, and that was years ago. Beside the drunk driving, he did time for petty theft--for stealing food from stores when he was hungry and broke.

“I’m not a criminal,” he says. His bouts with drugs and alcohol, he says, are in the past. “I still drink my beers, but that’s as far as it goes.” Burdick figures smoking is the vice that will kill him, “in about 20 years.”

A few minutes later, another visitor came up the alley, walking with a limp. He was a friend who had a car.

We walked out of the alley and said our goodbys. Mark Burdick still seemed antsy about the attention. Noon was still an hour away. Burdick and his pal were heading out to buy some beer.