Of Mice and Men’s Hunt for a Home

It’s spring, and I have mice.

They don’t eat much, and I never see them. Their skitterings fascinate my dog more than any game of my devising. Their droppings and chewings are annoying, but so is junk mail. A child of Disney, I remember “Cinderella,” and wish for harmonious coexistence. A child of science, I remember hantavirus, and wish them gone.

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In a characterless courtroom that could be anywhere but happens to be in downtown Los Angeles, two young people are doing legal battle over a man old enough to be their father and a problem old enough to vex Socrates.

The young people are a deputy public defender, Mojgan Aghai, and a deputy city attorney, Dan Lowenthal.

The man is Charles Sanders. At age 59 he has the face of a raddled leprechaun and a hula-skirt fringe of white hair around a balding crown, like a medieval abbot.

And the problem is that, except for a charity bed or the public hospitality of jail or some less supervised confinement, Sanders has found no place for himself in this vast city.

So he chose the splendid old Biltmore Hotel.

You will not find his name on its guest register, but on its security logs. On more than 90 occasions across nearly two decades, Charles Sanders has been arrested at the Biltmore for defrauding an innkeeper, petty theft, trespassing and such.

He knows, says prosecutor Lowenthal, what time each kitchen opens and when every banquet room stands empty. He has been found sleeping in every passageway and bolt hole. Hotel security, says Lowenthal, calls him “old man Charlie” and swears he knows the place better than they do.

His usual haul is food, never liquor--as far as anyone knows, he has nothing to do with booze or dope--and sometimes a pitcher of coffee and a cup. Once in a while, says Lowenthal, when Sanders has slept and dined well, he dials security from a house phone in a little gesture of bravado. He sees the Biltmore as “a sanctuary,” the prosecutor believes, where he’s well treated even in custody, “as opposed to sleazy hotels associated with drugs, prostitution, getting beaten up.”

Sanders has been convicted on more than half of his 90-some arrests, across so broad a span of years and societal changes that he automatically addressed the latest municipal judge, Suzanne Person, as “sir.”

His jail stays, like his transgressions, have been brief but frequent--three days, five and, once, 60 days. Each time, and sometimes in violation of probation, he returned to the Biltmore. This time, Lowenthal was seeking two years in jail to keep him from going back.

Aghai finds this “egregious.” She represents “a lot of mentally ill clients on the street. He’s not one of them. Any kind of problem he has is a result of being on the street. . . . I asked what he wanted, he said he wanted help.”

In the old days, we might have considered Sanders a character or a bum or a jailbird. In Division 44, Judge Person considers him the buck that gets endlessly passed, the leading edge of a tsunami-sized social problem. “Mr. Sanders, you’ve got to trust me,” she told him. “I want to help you, I don’t want to make it worse. . . . I don’t want to warehouse this.”

Instead of the jury trial Lowenthal wanted, Person ordered Sanders held in jail for a month for a probation report. “He said he’ll stay away from the Biltmore,” Aghai told the judge hopefully. “He’s never said that before.”

Dan Lowenthal has his doubts that anything but bars can keep “old man Charlie” away from the Biltmore.

Lowenthal’s father is a Long Beach city councilman who encounters in his downtown district the ills his son encounters in the courtroom. Dan himself, still shiny from law school, is eager for creative sentences. He made news with the idea of sentencing a young computer chip thief to build a computer system for a high school.

Then he drew Melvin Green, whom no treatment program could hold. Melvin Green, arrested so many dozens of times for hassling customers at the Union 76 station at Western and Slauson in South-Central Los Angeles--holding their gas caps hostage for coins--that Henry Lopez, the manager, could have benefited from a speed-dial button to the LAPD’s 77th Street station.

It is quieter at Slauson and Western now, with Melvin Green in jail for two years for trespassing and possession of drug paraphernalia. Now and then, says Henry Lopez, some customer will ask, “Hey, where is the crazy guy?”

Whenever that phrase quality of life rears its head, the unposed question is: Whose quality? Choose the easy answer, “both,” and expect the rejoinder: All right, how?

*

Mice, incapable of knowing right from wrong, don’t qualify for the death penalty in my book. But mice, also incapable of knowing justice from mercy, have evaded every humane trap I have laid for them, which hardens me against them.

I want to release them into the outdoors, whence they came. Maybe, in the order of things, they’ll find their way to a cozy compost heap. Or maybe, again in the order of things, the red-tailed hawks that circle the treetops might pluck them up and eat them.