Seeing the Homeless One Face at a Time

Where is Jamila? I have her Christmas present, and she’s nowhere to be found.

Until she disappeared more than a month ago, she’s been about as regular a presence around The Times building as anybody who works inside it.

She is a soldier, a veteran in the army of more or less homeless, that population that may have a bed in a shelter or an SRO hotel for a time, until money or friends vanish--the population that may eat well this time of year, when consciences are stirred, and eat poorly six months from now, when consciences are at the beach.

When the makers of public policy debate these people--public toilets for the homeless, encampments for the homeless--they exist as a demographic one.

When you see them each day, they begin to populate the album of your mind, one face at a time. Some are the deserving poor, some the undeserving. Some are mad and muttering, inhabiting the furious tornado of their own minds. Some, like Jamila, are sharp and canny at surviving their circumstances. Life slowly chisels us to fit our niches; she could not last a day doing my job, and I certainly could not last a day surviving what she does.

*

Once, we had street characters who were not street people. Eileen Anderson danced in a green swimsuit at a downtown corner, often tossing whatever ball was the sport of the season. She sang songs, and ran for mayor. Gen. Hershey Bar, protesting the draft and the Vietnam War, marched through downtown tricked out in tinsel decorations and an Army officer’s full-dress uniform.

While I have been here, generations of homeless have appeared and vanished, into prisons, or hospitals, or rehab, or potter’s field.

One man wore a face the color of an old penny--the color, I was told, of the alcoholic in the last stages of his disease, of his life. His shoulders had a vulture’s hunch to them, but he always wore a suit coat, and a shirt as clean as a pane of window glass, and almost as transparent.

One man stood at the corner and preached the Bible in an auctioneer’s monotone. He declaimed verse after verse with a foam cup of water balanced on his head, and when the word of God made him thirsty enough, he stopped, took a swallow, put the cup back on his head and started where he left off.

One man, still young and pert, greeted us with “Hello, young professionals!” and improvised verses. He spent his summers begging at the beach in Venice; downtown, he said, was too hot for him, and he pitied us for being stuck in the city.

Years ago, walking back from lunch in Little Tokyo, we spotted a 6-foot-tall stuffed Woody Woodpecker outside a souvenir shop. His red plush was sun-faded, and one foot had been gnawed off by rats, so we got him for $15. We lugged him back to the office and set him in the editor’s chair as a joke.

Some weeks after we tossed Woody into the trash, we heard that he had not gone to a landfill after all. A homeless woman had retrieved him. In the daytime, he rode about in her shopping cart. At night, they bedded down in the shelter of bushes, the two of them, the woman’s arm stretched across the strapping stuffed woodpecker as tenderly as if they were husband and wife.

*

We play favorites, choose beneficiaries for our haphazard charity. I buy food for the fellow who plays banjo outside my market. He asks for carrot juice and spinach tortellini. I give money to the quiet, bearded man who has a cardboard “Homeless Are People Too” sign clipped to his little cart. I give money to the man in a wheelchair who talks politics, or tells me that I’m dressed just like Bette Davis, or Princess Di.

But where is Jamila?

We know her on sight, a small, wiry woman who could be 35 but has, I am told, confessed to 50. Sometimes she sells incense or trinkets, but mostly she gets by on style. She can be charming; sometimes, she can be sullen. Her importunings drove one man to change his route to the garage just to avoid her. One friend gives her $20 at a time. Others, from those days when she looks wretched, began giving her food instead of money.

I give her clothes. A mulberry wool peacoat got her through last winter, but it was lost in one of her many moves. And I’ve given her a few of the things that can make a woman feel like a woman--a bit of costume jewelry, a bonus lipstick in a shade I don’t wear. She has a way about her that, like the man in the scrupulously white shirt, says she has not given up.

I wonder where she is. It’s getting cold at night, and she could probably use a new coat.

*

Patt Morrison’s column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.