Someday, Between Drinks, They’ll Go to Visit Bobby

The drunks on Beacon Street sit at their usual spot, watching the ships head to sea.

At dawn, they come out of the weeds and alleys and cheap hotels. After City Hall Market opens at 6 a.m., they gather on the same concrete stairs above the San Pedro waterfront and crack the day’s first beers.

They call Brad Bergquist “Chief.” The 44-year-old Chicago native wears an Army hat, a tight Cubs T-shirt and a denim jacket that holds a bottle of berry-flavored malt liquor. By afternoon, he can still speak clearly and stand on an even keel.

“Chief, what happened to Bobby?” they ask.

They had heard only rumors about their friend, who, by their accounts, spends most of his days in a stupor.

Bergquist tells them, but the conversation veers right and left, then dissolves into the cold sea breeze.

They joke. They watch their old buddy Bart Guzman do push-ups to show he is still strong despite the years since his stint in the Salvadoran army. He hasn’t been around for a while and slurs something about jail. His friend Leo wears an oversized cowboy hat and flashes a gaptoothed grin at the homeless woman with whom he is flirting.

They all move a few yards to a spot where the sun streams through the swaying palms and jacarandas. They mumble when a beautiful blond girl emerges from the Norwegian church across the street. “Oh my God, there she is. There’s your girlfriend,” one says to another, then is embarrassed that he spoke too loudly.

The conversation drifts away with the wind again. Then they come back to Bobby. They say he could never deal with his past--with the notion that he once played professional baseball for the Minnesota Twins, with his service in Vietnam.

They wonder how the fire started.

“Oh, man,” Paul Pfaff says urgently. “Let’s take care of our friend.”

Robert Alyea, 53, is on a respirator in critical condition at County-USC Medical Center with third-degree burns covering the lower third of his body. He told police and doctors that someone doused him with gasoline and set him on fire while he was sleeping behind some bushes.

Bergquist was walking down Beacon late Saturday night a week ago. He was looking for Alyea, whom he owed a drink, when he saw a flickering light below the eaves of the Norwegian church. He approached and saw his friend passed out, with flames lapping at his pants.

Frantically, Bergquist dragged Alyea into the street, trying to get him to a puddle in the gutter. Alyea started screaming, “I didn’t do this!” Then the manager of the church ran out and threw a bucket of water on him.

Kenny, a man with wispy blond hair and surfer shorts, interrupts the story to ask, “Did you smell anything like kerosene, Chief?”

“No, I think he was so loaded he flicked a cigarette and it didn’t fly as far as he thought it did.”

“But a cigarette usually goes out by itself,” says Kenny, who then stands up and walks down the stairs to the ice plant. He vomits over the rail, then pulls a comb out of his back pocket and fixes his hair.

When he returns, the group decides, with a surge of excitement, to visit Alyea tomorrow. Today, Bergquist says, they need to let the doctors do what they need to do. The others nod and gaze off, then go back to their drinks.

None of them visited Alyea on Sunday or Monday or the rest of the week. His family hasn’t seen him in years but has been notified of his condition. His older brother, Brant Alyea, who lives in New Jersey, had long suspected he was homeless.

“Everyone in the family was trying to help him,” he said over the phone. “Usually what he does, he goes to the VA hospital, goes straight and makes it for two or three weeks and goes on another bender.”

Robert Alyea served in the Army, but never in Vietnam, his brother said. He never played professional baseball. He was a bus driver after high school--until alcohol doused any spark of ambition.

Brant Alyea did play for the Twins back in the 1960s, and his brother would later impersonate him. No one knows why Bobby dropped out of his own life. He was a well-adjusted adolescent, his family said.

His twin brother is an officer in the service, they said, married with two beautiful kids.

His family took Bobby into their homes to help him clean up his act, but he began stealing to buy alcohol, Brant said. Afterward, Bobby would feel so guilty he would disappear. Eventually, his brother said, they gave up on him.

“There’s nothing we can do. What can we do?” Brant asked. “There’s not much of a story. He’s just another homeless drunk. He’s a lost soul.”

In San Pedro, Bobby is known for bringing bouquets of flowers to the rescue workers who feed him a couple times a week. He is a beloved member of a melting pot band of homeless. He is one among the winos and war veterans, the whites, blacks, Filipinos, Mexicans and Central Americans who circulate in and out of local halfway houses and watch the ships head across the Pacific.

Some cling to illustrious pasts, real or imagined. They pick up bottles and cans, maybe collect enough change for a nightcap at Sam’s Alhambra tavern, which the morning bartender says has been “pouring the stuff that lights you up” since Prohibition ended.

Hunched in the dim light over the bar at Sam’s around 8 a.m. Thursday, Bergquist lifts his second screwdriver of the morning and talks about Bobby to his friend Al, an aging diabetic with a wizened resemblance to John Muir.

“I used to go with him on his flower hunts,” Bergquist says. “We’d reach over fences to pick people’s roses. I still got scars where a dog bit me.”

As he speaks, a woman who has been cussing up a storm outside at the stairs comes in and hits him on the back, screaming that he made her lose a bet. The bartender ushers her out, and Bergquist mumbles something about her always trying to scam him out of a drink.

Today, he says, he wants to be alone. He’s sick of the endless “regurgitated” conversations on the stairs. He got his pension check from the Navy two days before, and this is the time for fancy drinks alone at Sam’s.

But he misses Bobby. “I don’t even sleep at night,” he says.

One of these days, he’s going to go visit him.

“For sure,” he says. “As soon as the dust settles.”