It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City

Sweep the romance from the streets; it makes for a clearer picture.

There’s nothing dreamy about the Boulevard. Just a ribbon of asphalt studded with glitter dust--winking, tweaking the illusion. If one looks hard enough, there rises an allusion to the past, dim and broken like false promise.

No matter. Los Angeles, Hollywood proper, is its own Ellis Island for so many seeking something other, some sense of liberation. Specifics are an afterthought.

Underneath a brilliant sky, the blast of cold wind is like a bomb. Last night, temperatures dipped to 39 degrees. And so, the Boulevard is lonely, empty. Except for newspaper pages skidding along the Walk of Fame, the out-of-season tourist lingering over the bronzed names in the stars and, of course, Steve Le Pore, strolling, checking on his kids.

“It’s a very overwhelming situation, being in the streets,” says Le Pore, 39, executive director of My Friends Place, a Hollywood drop-in center for homeless youth.

His uniform--baseball cap, faded jeans, sweatshirt and white high tops--lends Le Pore a tourist’s affect. Incognito, he trains his eye on hidden alleyways and hamburger stands. Each face holds a story, his database unscrolling. One clicks by on a five-speed, a Pendleton tied about his waist. Their eyes meet, the tension toxic.

“Now that’s one kid I had to tell never to come back,” says Le Pore, unleashing a weary sigh that belies his vigorous gait. “I wish I could let him back in. He’s got potential.”

The boy, he explains, grabbed a female staffer, a nonnegotiable infraction. Even still, the boy’s image, no longer even a dot on the horizon, sits center of Le Pore’s consciousness.

“What is his life?” Le Pore asks, his voice rubbed raw with frustration. “Is he gonna be riding a stupid bike up and down the Boulevard for the rest of his life?”

Le Pore continues west along Hollywood Boulevard, past wig shops sporting Elvis pompadours from various eras, adult bookstores, screaming-neon souvenir kiosks. A young woman in white cowboy boots, snug sweater and miniskirt shoots across the street, interrupting not just the pace, but his stream of thought.

“Look at her,” he says, taking in the deliberateness of her stride. “She walks hard. She dresses hard. But that’s survival. Her day is to walk up and down the Boulevard and to be hard.”

*

Here in the city of Los Angeles, an estimated 4,500 homeless teenagers squat overnight in alleys or beneath overpasses. Some sleep eight to 10 in hotel rooms, lean against doorjambs or stand sentinel at corners historically significant in Hollywood’s fairy-tale lore.

My Friend’s Place, with an annual budget of $300,000, is the largest center of its kind in the city, serving 100 kids a day. Its door opens 25,000 times a year, offering everything from computer training, legal services, health screening and HIV testing to clothing, dentistry, food and an ear that really hears.

Once, Le Pore saw the kids as ghosts haunting the periphery. Like any number of urban dwellers or toilers, he trudged the streets, looking away from the curb-sitter, deaf to the requests for spare change or offers of a windshield cleaning.

“My Friend’s Place started because a friend and I were constantly confronted by these young kids,” says Le Pore, settling into a plastic patio chair in what will be his upstairs office space in its new headquarters, where Hollywood Boulevard meets Ivar Avenue. A week from opening, workers swarm both floors, laying new carpet; the smell of the fresh yellow paint stings the nose.

Back then, Le Pore worked for Landmark Entertainment Group as director of human resources. “I would walk by from the office to the car . . . constantly being harassed for spare change,” he recalls. “And we felt like we could probably better serve them by putting whatever change [we had] into something more appropriate.”

So Le Pore and Craig Scholz picked a night--Jan. 8, 1988--and, armed with 50 bags filled with fruit, a sandwich, a drink and dessert, cruised Hollywood Boulevard.

“But we were truly overwhelmed because 50 was not near enough,” Le Pore remembers. From that moment, however, he sensed a developing, albeit tenuous, rapport. “I don’t think we saw them any longer as kids who were troublemakers and kids who were hassling us. But what we really saw were kids [with] skateboards and silly little jokes.”

Those kids, Le Pore suspected, viewed the meal as just an out-of-season flash of warmth: “But we were faithful. They knew at 8 p.m. we’d be on Cherokee [Avenue] and at 9 p.m we’d be where the Boulevard crosses the freeway. For the better part of two years, honest to goodness, we never missed a Friday night. That was our commitment . . . to see this through.”

*

“Four houses!” bellows Christien, handing over eight crisp, goldenrod $100 bills to case manager Wade Trimmer, who plays banker while carefully choosing his own modest acquisitions.

Their opponent, Shawn, broadens his teen-idol smile, scratching his hint of a goatee. He glances over at their sleepy-eyed companion, Chuck, who’s sitting out, nodding off over an Incredible Hulk comic book.

“Chuck’s gonna live in this house,” Christien cracks, lining up the shiny green plastic pieces on the lip of his property. “Hey, we got a house for you, Chuck.” Christien smiles, running a hand through his hair, blond with frosted cherry tips.

The table shakes with the vibrations of laughter, enough to summon Le Pore from his upstairs office to the downstairs day room. He’s smiling, not so much like proud papa, but more like conspiratorial ring leader.

Before sitting down, he takes a turn around the room, making a mental list of pending duties: signs that should be laminated or framed, filling the clothing rack until it’s packed with a bountiful selection of clothes.

“That’s just something you don’t see often. Those smiles. The laughter,” Le Pore says, glancing over at the boys huddled around the table. “But the object is not to play Monopoly. It’s building relationships, a rapport.”

Word is filtering through the street slowly. At Teen Canteen. In some of the neighboring squats. My Friend’s Place is now, after almost three months, open again for regular business. Le Pore figures the new location will either be dead or swamped, that they may run out of food, or that a herd of kids in need won’t be able to find them.

But there’s a slow yet steady stream throughout the day. Some arrive alone, timid; others in big, noisy crews, skateboards tucked under their arms, drawing pencils stashed next to filterless cigarettes in the rolled-up brim of their watch caps. Some inquire about birth certificates and general relief.

Others want ID cards or come looking for new T-shirts to wear to their first day of work. Still others share their street-life story: those who upon arriving in L.A. got too dirty to find work; others who “could” live at home but “choose” instead to “roll with their crews.”

Like in a sunny college rec room, they eat and draw, or park themselves in front of a computer, which offers an extensive database of services from showers and hot meals to retreats and shelter.

Evenings and weekends after regular hours, the center is open for workshops and Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous meetings--and the occasional barbecue and picnic. And the Friday night feeding is a carved-in-stone tradition.

The word stays on the street literally as Le Pore’s staff sets off on foot four days a week with backpacks stocked with toiletries, snacks and clinic referral slips. For many outside, alone, they are a well-known, comforting presence.

“You hear about it just by being a Hollywood teenager on the streets,” says Boofer One. “You can come and kick it here, and it’s a whole lot better than walking up and down Hollywood Boulevard all day--being hassled by the cops.”

Most nights, Boofer says, he flops with friends in exchange for his services, such as cleaning the kitchen or tending children: “Otherwise I’d be downtown in one of those fancy cardboard condominiums.

“I been out here all my life,” he says, his eyes, his emotions obscured by sleek, silver-rimmed shades. “Sometimes it happens that way.”

*

Le Pore never intended for this to go beyond a very simple, easy-to-produce meal program.

“But a certain intimacy developed,” he says. He knew them by name, their personal likes and dislikes, bits and pieces of their jagged history: “It’s funny. I would take [people] for lunch and we’d we walk down the Boulevard and kids would scream from across the street: ‘Steve! See you Friday night!’ And my clients looked at me like I’d lost my mind because these kids looked like they were full-on terrorists.”

Le Pore’s gesture, however, became too broad to fit in after-hours.

“For whatever reason, I felt like it was something that I wanted to do,” he says. “When I told [my boss] what I was going to do I think he thought that I would be back.”

Instead, Le Pore has beat a deliberate path through Hollywood. First, in 1992, a little shoe box of a center on Las Palmas Avenue, serving 25 to 35 kids a day by his lonesome. Then, a larger space with a patio on Cherokee. And now, the new space with six paid staff, about 50 regular volunteers and about 200 “activity volunteers.”

Co-founder Scholz, now 32, says those early years were another lifetime: “I was playing music and had some part-time work. And we were both in a place in our lives where it had grown hard to rationalize not helping people in the street. . . . To me it seemed a logical step. But for him, he was making $60,000 a year, and I’d look over at him in his suit and tie and think: What is he thinking about? Is he stupid or what?”

Later, Le Pore and Scholz (who left in 1992 to pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology) assembled friends and associates, and presented a plan.

After choosing a name that evoked purpose and carried some street savvy, and forming a nonprofit organization, Le Pore and a board developed a tight focus.

“Our mission has never been to become a shelter. It’s always been to be at the trench level, right on the street,” he says, “a drop-in center to funnel kids to other agencies already established.”

With no background in running a program of any kind, Le Pore volunteered, gleaning some hands-on experience that in the end, he says, “taught me more about what I wouldn’t want to do.”

But just how far could good intentions and intuition carry him?

Fred Ali, a 20-year veteran of social work who heads Covenant House, a Hollywood-based homeless street-youth program, has seen good intentions shrivel and fade. “Not because I don’t think that they are sincere, but the day in, day out work can be frustrating,” he says. “But Steve doesn’t get his ego too wrapped up in this. He should have been doing this kind of work all along.”

Adds Paul Freese, of Public Counsel, who offers free legal counseling to Le Pore’s clients: “Working with him has reinvigorated the better part of me.”

Not everyone, however, feels that way.

Kids have thrown fruit at his head or threatened to kill him. And some neighbors have gathered debris from the alleys and showered him with the contents. Some merchants near the Cherokee site complain that the kids panhandled, broke into cars or used drugs in the alley.

Corky Ullman, executive vice president of Grant Parking, which owns the Cherokee property My Friend’s Place leased, sees the complexity of the drama: “The main complaints I got . . . about the clientele was that they were loitering, that they would defecate or urinate on the street, deterring business. Steve’s fighting an uphill battle, he believes in those kids. And something needs to be done.”

Most of those kids sleep in doorways or urinate in alleys because they’ve run out of friends to call or shun the shelters, Le Pore contends: “They are not in Hollywood just because of My Friend’s Place. They are here because of what they see on TV or in the movies. Or this is where the weather’s nicer. What we’re trying to do is get them out of here . . . into a life that is more productive.”

*

Of the 2,500 kids who visit My Friend’s Place during the course of a year, about 25, Le Pore estimates, beat the street: “Some go home. Some get into school. Some get into rehab, some get into traditional living. But if you were to translate that into dollars, what it would take to incarcerate them, we’re spending about a fifth and we are saving lives.

“We do not take a nickel from the government . . . by design. Much of that money is here today and gone tomorrow and the kids on the sidewalk have had enough taken away. To provide them a program and then say that their funding is gone is something that we choose not to do.”

Tall and barrel-chested, with a bad joke or card trick at the ready, Le Pore--the anchor, the island, the bachelor father--provides an enduring presence.

And it doesn’t recede at the close of the day. He regularly hosts youth Bible studies in his home.

“I think Steve really loves the Lord and that translates into loving people who aren’t very lovely,” says the Rev. Tom Givens of Grace Baptist Church in Santa Clarita. “In that strange world where principles have to be kept, he keeps them.”

Maybe it’s because in the realm of love, Le Pore didn’t grow up wanting. He was born and raised in Houston, with two sisters, a mother and father in the home.

Relocating to Los Angeles at 23, he jumped at the chance to take a new position with Six Flags--fueled by the opportunity to live in a place that offered a wide and different range of experiences, people and customs. After accepting an offer from Landmark some years later, he first glimpsed Hollywood, where, he says, “I came to know and meet the kids on the street.”

Throughout it, Le Pore has found a range of recipes for displacement or disaster. Each subject comes cut from different cloth, he says: “These kids whose mamas and daddies did not encourage them . . . who beat them up or . . . put cigarettes out on their backs. I mean the stories are horrific and they are true.”

Sending these runaways back to their families is seldom an option. And sometimes just what is missing is not outwardly discernible.

“These are kids from all over the country, from every socioeconomic background you could imagine,” Le Pore says. “Some have got a year of college, some have a seventh-grade education. We try to find the best alternative for them to life on the streets. Because life on the streets is death. They will end up with no teeth, pushing a cart to their grave.

“The truth is that that does not have to be the case. No matter how much damage they have done to their bodies, no matter what they are involved in, it doesn’t have to be the end of the road.”

But those dead-ends and the incremental success do test tenacity--and faith.

“I think it’s wise to worry about becoming hardened,” says case worker Trimmer. “I have to let each story sound new, be surprised by it. Acceptance is something I’ve really grown into. One of my clients killed another client,” he says, pausing, taking it in. “I’d never had to make friends with a murderer.”

Heidi Sommer, 27, Le Pore’s longtime co-worker, has seen the toll: “You get jaded when you are out here. But Steve motivates people with his sense of humor. And I’ve had my world view changed entirely. I grew up in a family who viewed the homeless as lazy, choosing to be bums, and I grew up believing it. Now I am ultra-liberal, interested in public policy because I understand how fragile the human spirit is.”

Compounding it, there are facts they all must face: Only 200 beds are available citywide for homeless teens on any given night; in late fall, no matter how long Indian summer persists, the nights eventually will turn cold; rain will fall; and, something might happen in the night that they will not be able to fix.

“I learned when we first started that I do the best I can and I go home every night knowing that,” Le Pore says. “Last year we had seven kids die on the street and that hurts me. There are some kids that we will succeed with, and there are some kids that we will bury.”

And in this world, death and near death walk hand in hand, spirits expiring oftentimes long before the body.

“The kids we are working with today are much more damaged--emotionally, physically, psychologically,” says Covenant House’s Ali.

“[They] have been on the street longer. And because of the damage have become more service resistant. They are increasingly distrustful and wary. Or are so hurt and depressed that they don’t have the psychic energy to ask for help.”

Which makes it all the more important to actively build relationships, Le Pore believes:

“I think the human spirit is the hopeful thing. What our job is, is to draw the hopefulness out. To see a kid who everybody said was useless, who would never be anything--to see that kid draw and draw well, it’s our job to walk up to them and say keep drawing. To see a young person who is articulate, and sit down next to them and say, finish your high school diploma. This is your program. That’s our job. We dole out hope. Liberally.”

*

Success sneaks in, time and again. Sometimes, it happens despite mountainous odds.

Brian and Yolanda Swanson were crashing on dusty floors or huddled together on cold rooftops above Hollywood Boulevard. Yolanda had abandoned her baby son, and Brian had plans to end his life after his $60 in traveling funds ran out. They approached My Friend’s Place one afternoon, quiet and a bit suspicious of the man behind the table passing out punch and cookies--Steve Le Pore.

“My life, the way I saw it was totally messed up,” says Brian, 24. “I was at the end of my rope, drinking a lot, doing drugs. I came to California from Minnesota, with a backpack on my back, a gun and that $60.”

Now he unloads parcels for DHL, a job he’s held for 2 1/2 years. He and Yolanda have a roof over their heads and are parents of a 16-month-old girl.

“I didn’t think I’d ever be off the streets,” Yolanda says. “My philosophy was that I was going to smoke pot and listen to rock ‘n’ roll until I died. Me and my kids.”

Brian attributes their turnaround to finding God and stumbling upon Le Pore: “He loves the kids. And someone’s got to love them.”

Le Pore doesn’t consider that so difficult or extraordinary. The kids may be as hard as the asphalt that defines that boulevard, the boulevard that defines them.

But, he says, “They are surviving a very violent, ugly life. And . . . they don’t get through by being pushovers or easy targets. They have put on the armor to survive.”

Despite it, he sees a way in, a hairline crack in the surface where others may not. At least he tries.

“Because I know,” Le Pore says, “that you go through a lot of rough to get to the diamond.”

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My Friend’s Place

Walk-in address: 6350 Hollywood Blvd., #9, Hollywood

Mailing address: P.O. Box 3867, Hollywood, CA 90078

Phone: (213) 462-4493; (800) 300-4493

Services: Group and individual counseling, substance abuse programs, on-site medical and HIV testing, dental and eye-care referrals, shelter referrals, legal aid, daily meal distribution, computer training center, picture ID cards and social security cards, mail and telephone services, clothes closet.