The Turning Point : Bleak Christmas Helped Inspire Homeless Woman to Change Her Life

They walk into the homeless drop-in center like the ghosts of her Christmas past, the weathered faces and lonely souls swaddled in secondhand clothes.

Cherlyn Hicks knows the signs, like the shoes that don’t fit. It’s hard to find old shoes that fit. Then there are the vacant stares and tough exteriors. She knows well those defenses of the streets.

She knows, too, how they look at her, the authority figure on the other side of the desk. In her brown rayon shirt, Palazzo pants and short, styled hairdo, she could be a model in a Brooks Brothers catalog. How could she understand?

Yet a few years ago, at just this time of year, Cherlyn Hicks was herself alone on these streets. She milled with the other hungry people at Santa Monica’s Palisades Park for a free Christmas dinner, if you could call it that. Actually, she said, it was “awful.”

She remembers gazing wistfully at the nativity scenes with their mannequin shepherds looking back, as if watching over the rag-tag flock of humanity passing by. The straw-lined displays might have been an inviting spot to spend a night were it not for the screens that kept would-be interlopers out.

She hasn’t forgotten how she slept in alleys and then, given the hierarchy of the street, was thought to be privileged because she surreptitiously moved to an abandoned house with a boyfriend. She remembers watching happy families emerging from department stores with arms full of candles and Christmas lights. “I knew what it meant,” she said. “It meant they were fixing their houses up.”

The best she could do was salvage some ornaments discarded in an alley.

So did she understand?

How could she not see something of herself in each of the desperate faces wandering in to the Ocean Park Community Center’s drop-in branch in Santa Monica. But five years after her own last homeless Christmas, she hopes they also see something of themselves in her: hope, dignity and the possibility of “a wonderful life.”

Respect for Clients

Sitting in her cubicle of an office with a poster of James Dean and an Ansel Adams photograph, Hicks’ clients eye her carefully.

Sometimes they have their children in tow, coughing, tugging. At times clients see something vaguely familiar about her, but can’t quite place her. Often she remembers them first, but says nothing.

“I’m usually never self-revealing, unless it will help,” Hicks, 38, explained.

Her meetings with clients typically begin with a friendly question. “How can I help you today?” she asks.

Hicks knows firsthand the truth of the observation by her supervisor, Tasha Coleman: “It’s amazing what a smile can do. It’s amazing what a ‘hello’ can do. It’s amazing if you treat them with respect what it can do.”

Even so, those across the table sometimes are so embarrassed at having to ask for help that Hicks has to draw out the answers, as she did recently with a husband and wife who came in with a baby in their arms.

“They didn’t want to give a lot of information. I could feel their pride in not wanting to tell,” Hicks said. But they finally confided that the man had lost his job and the baby was ill.

When the requests come, they’re often modest ones: for a sandwich, or diapers, or bus tokens, perhaps a warmer jacket.

Since November, Hicks has been a caseworker in the center’s adopt-a-family program, which places such families first in a temporary shelter then permanent housing.

Local churches and synagogues “adopt” these families, spending upward of $2,000 a year in move-in and furniture expenses. Hicks, supervisor Coleman and caseworker Maria Galvan stay in touch to help keep the families stable.

Two congregations--Kehillat Israel, a synagogue in Pacific Palisades, and Brentwood Presbyterian Church--were the first to participate in the adopt-a-family program and four others have since signed on.

In the past two years, the center has placed 10 families in permanent housing and provided temporary shelter for 40 more. An additional 15 are waiting to be “adopted.”

But most all the families, whatever their stage in the process, gathered this week at the drop-in center at 7th Street and Colorado Avenue for the program’s Christmas party. With hugs and kisses, Hicks asked each how they were doing.

A couple thanked the counselor for getting them Christmas trees and thanked her, as well, for being a “straight shooter.”

Many remain unaware of her background. And even some that do--like a young woman she counsels--find it hard to believe she really understands what they’re going through.

“Sometimes I think she listens to me because she knows I have the experience,” Hicks said. “Sometimes she gets angry at me and she says, ‘You don’t know where I’ve been.’

“I have to tell her that maybe the experience wasn’t the same but the feelings have to be.”

‘A Wonderful Life’

“I ran,” is how she explains her lost years. “I gave up on me.”

Growing up in St. Louis, she twice was an unwed teenage mother, the first time when she was 16. For a while afterward, things looked up. She even started college. She fell in love. The man, like her, worked for the U.S. Postal Service. Between them, they earned enough to move to the suburbs.

It was like the classic Jimmy Stewart film. “I had had a wonderful life,” she said. “I had a good job and [two] kids and a house in the suburbs. I had a wonderful life. I couldn’t believe it.”

It only lasted three years.

In 1989, she said, her companion left her for another woman. Just like that, she stopped believing in herself.

“I looked in the mirror and I said, ‘You know what? All your life you’ve been trying to prove that you’re more than what other people think you are--and people keep showing you that you’re nothing. That’s what you are. . . . So what I told myself I became.”

She says she began abusing alcohol and cocaine. She asked her mother, also in St. Louis, to take over care of her oldest daughter.

“I held onto my youngest daughter as best I could,” Hicks recalled, “and when I couldn’t feed her anymore I had to send her away,” asking her mother to take that girl in too.

Hicks decided she needed to flee St. Louis, “a small town in a big city,” a place where everyone knew her--and where her mother and daughters had a front row seat watching her decline.

“I had to go,” she said. “Once I gave up on me . . . I couldn’t embarrass them.”

She headed for Los Angeles and anonymity, the freedom to do whatever she wanted.

She remembers calling her mother long distance and lying that she had met a “nice man.” In fact, within a year, she was pregnant again and without prospects. The father took the new child, another daughter, and Hicks was homeless in Santa Monica.

Perhaps the low point was Christmas 1991. “I think I tried to laugh it off,” she recalled. “Tried to use it off,” with cocaine.

She remembers going to Hollywood with other street people and all of them scoffing at how “phony” California Christmas was with its gaudy decorations in pinks and blues. “No green, no snow,” she said.

Now she sees how she was approaching a turn in her life. Christmastime can be an awakening experience for those on the street--not like the gleeful awakening of children on Christmas morning, but like a slap in the face that startles a drunk out of a stupor.

The peal of church bells can reverberate with bitter irony for the homeless, for whom the promise of deliverance seems so unattainable--even deliverance by a holy child who, as the story goes, was forced by circumstances to sleep on a pile of straw in an animal shelter far from home.

But Hicks said she felt “something was going on with me the last [homeless] Christmas,” the one when she scavenged the discarded ornaments to decorate the abandoned house where she had become a squatter. A few months later, she found herself pregnant for a fourth time, now with a son.

“I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I didn’t like the way I was living. It was not OK. It was scary and I didn’t want it. Things were happening on the streets. I became afraid. Whenever I was sober, I was afraid. When I was using I was brave. You have to have that tough exterior when you’re out there. But right before I got sober I think I was seeking something. I didn’t know what it was.”

She does now. And it brings her nearly to tears to say it even five years later. Soon after she got sober, she said, the feelings she had ignored flooded her senses.

“What happened is that I”--she paused to keep her composure--”missed being needed. . . . I missed being loved.”

She began showing up at Daybreak Day Center in Santa Monica, where she could get a shower, use laundry facilities, have a meal and talk to counselors and other homeless women.

Back then, she was one of the clients.

Client to Caseworker

According to Shelter Partnership Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides housing for the homeless and tracks that population, there are 11,000 shelter beds in Los Angeles County but many more people in need of them.

Many are ill or have mental disabilities. Others are alcoholics or drug users. Some are just unemployed and broke.

Vivian Rothstein, executive director of Ocean Park Community Center, worries that things will get worse next year when cuts in grants and safety net programs take effect under newly enacted federal and state welfare reforms.

“The frightening thing for organizations like ours is there are going to be more and more [homeless],” Rothstein said. “We can’t solve the problem, although we do what we can.”

The Ocean Park Community Center is actually a network of services and shelters, including Daybreak, the one Hicks wandered into, and the 7th Street drop-in center where she now works. An outreach team seeks out the homeless and mentally disabled in parks, back alleys and jails.

By Christmas 1992, Hicks was sober--and a volunteer on Daybreak’s client advisory board, giving the staff a reality check on how well they were doing their job for the homeless.

She worked for a Miller’s Outpost store in a mall and held the job 18 months. In March 1995 she was offered a paid staff position at Daybreak, first as a counselor of women. Last month, she transferred to the adopt-a-family program.

On this Christmas morning, Hicks will be surrounded by her two youngest children, a 6-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. Another thing: Her oldest daughter flew in from St. Louis, where she is in her junior year of college, majoring in biochemistry.

This morning, it was Hicks’ plan to uphold a tradition started by her mother. She bought all of her kids and herself new pajamas. They plan just to “hang out and stay in the house,” for now it really is a home. Her apartment has two bedrooms, kitchen built-ins, and a balcony.

She says the key to turning around her life was not “fooling” herself any longer. She realized she was going to die homeless and drunk. She resolved that was not going to happen.

“I’ve had clients ask me how I did it, was it hard? I said yes, it was a struggle because anything worth having is worth fighting for. But I always tell them I’m not special. It could happen to them.”

Which brings her back to the nativity scene, and how she views it with a different eye these five years later, inspiring a touch of seasonal preaching. “The king of all kings came from a manger,” she said.