An Artist Emerges From the Bush

In the “405 bush camp,” Crazy Jim, Phil, Buddy and Wes were just a few of the guys Randy Gavazzo got to know. He took their pictures. He watched them scrounge for food. He saw them lay off liquor and look for handouts or jobs.

They lived in a gully off the 405 Freeway, not far from the veterans hospital in West L.A., just off the Wilshire offramp. They called it a “bush camp” because that was old slang from the war years, back in Vietnam.

To the best of Gavazzo’s knowledge, this encampment was the only “clean and sober” one of its kind, a cluster of homeless men who took pride in barring booze and dope.

A handmade sign that Gavazzo photographed hung from a tree. It read: “This Is a Sober Camp. Please Ring Bell Before Entering.”

The bell was a pan and spoon.

It existed until May 1995, when the camp--situated on federal land leased to Caltrans--had to be dismantled. This was right around the time Crazy Jim’s tent caught fire.

A guy known only as Klein had begun hanging around camp, and Gavazzo heard that things got ugly.

“Supposedly, Crazy Jim threw Klein’s dog down a well, and Klein retaliated by shooting a flare into Jim’s tent.”

The vets were given 24 hours to clear out.

One of them drew “Have a Nice Day” and a happy face on a hunk of cardboard, then stuck it on a branch on his way out. Gavazzo photographed that too.

Then he went back to the VA hospital, where he lived.

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You go through the portico of the stately, 106-year-old Bradbury Building, with its open cage elevators and five-story-high glass roof, to find artists arranging their works for a new exhibit.

Sculptures, paintings, painted furniture, vivid photographs, they will all be part of a “Short Stories: Los Angeles, 1999” show that opens today in downtown L.A., in the landmark building at 3rd and Broadway. Work by 11 local artists will be featured daily until Aug. 21, with a reception open to the public today from 2 to 5.

“This is my hero,” says Robin Valle, the show’s curator, patting Randy Gavazzo on the back.

Back when he was prowling the streets of Pomona, penniless, living hand to mouth, Gavazzo didn’t always know where to turn next. Or when he was going from one veterans medical facility to another, he couldn’t be sure where he would end up.

It was like when he got out of the Army in the early ‘70s and lived in the streets of San Francisco for a while.

“Haight-Ashbury was going downhill,” he says, “and I was going downhill with it.”

Now he is standing here, explaining his art to you.

Pencil shavings.

You have to look carefully to realize what they are. They look like paintings more than photographs. They look like Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers, opening wide. They look like peeled apple cores, the skins fanning out into odd loops and curls.

“I remember showing it to one person who thought it was a rhinoceros,” Gavazzo says. “They said, ‘Look, there’s the horn.’ ”

Nope, not rhino powder. Just plain old sharpened pencils, graphite whittled down, texturally dark and dramatic.

Gavazzo, 51, enjoyed a good reaction to his “405 Bush Camp” photo gallery at a California Institute of the Arts exhibit in 1997. Now he’s trying something new. Something that perhaps will catch somebody’s eye, so perhaps he can pay his bills.

He lives in an apartment he can’t really afford, not on $700 a month from disability benefits.

“That’s rent, $700,” he says. “What do you live on after that?”

But it beats being homeless.

It also is an improvement on being admitted to a VA hospital in January 1994, mere blocks from the Northridge earthquake’s epicenter. Gavazzo had practically just arrived when the 6.7 quake hit, causing destruction and death.

He moved from one VA facility to another to another.

Prone to excruciating pain, fatigue and fevers as high as 105, Gavazzo was eventually diagnosed with adult onset Stills’ syndrome, a rare condition that generally affects juveniles.

It is similar to rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease of unknown origin that is characterized by inflammation and deformity of the joints.

Not what an artist needs.

“He’s had a lot of bad breaks,” Valle says of Gavazzo, to whom she taught art at Chaffey Community College after he began to get his life back in order. “But he just keeps going and going.”

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After growing up in Buffalo, where he says he quit school to support a grandmother who raised him, Gavazzo did get some bad breaks. He also made some mistakes.

He moved to California with good intentions, but lost his way after leaving the Army. Like a lot of veterans in the ‘70s, he had difficulty finding work. He took drugs and ended up spending years on the streets.

Now he takes medication for an illness that doctors aren’t entirely sure how to treat. And he devotes himself to his art.

“I don’t want people looking at me as some poster boy,” Gavazzo says.

They won’t, even though now he probably could design some pretty remarkable-looking posters.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com