A Dignified Life in the Midst of L.A.’s Downtrodden

Robert Highsmith lives in a small room in a flophouse in downtown L.A.

He has a bed, two TVs because the color television doesn’t get Channel 4 and the black-and-white does, but no remote controls. He has two maps, one of the United States and one of the world because he likes to look at them. He also has a lot of body lotion, big pink and yellow bottles lined up on a tiny dresser, because a woman he was once in love with liked cosmetics and always had a bunch of stuff like that around.

“She got me started,” he says.

Outside his room, at the end of a sparsely lit hall--a long walk in the middle of the night and a scary walk at any time--are a couple of toilets and a shower. A cockroach crawls across the floor.

It is nearing rush hour on the street in front of Highsmith’s room, and from his bay window he watches as downtown empties. He is wearing nice slacks and a T-shirt that looks ironed, and except for a huge mole on his forehead, he resembles Bill Cosby. He smiles at the thought.

His chair faces out the window and a red blanket covers the sill where he rests his arm. “My grandfather let me come visit him when I was a kid, and I remember he was always looking out the window,” Highsmith says. “He always sat alone. He had a room upstairs in a boardinghouse, and as I got about a half a block away, I could see him looking for me. I didn’t understand it because his kids, except for my father, were all professionals, and I remember wondering why my grandfather was living in a place like that. Why was he living in somebody else’s house? I don’t know, maybe that is where I got it.”

Robert Highsmith has been living in somebody else’s house most of his adult life, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. Even when he made enough money to get out, even when he fell in love with a woman who left, he chose to stay downtown.

More people to help, he says.

“I try to tell people about my life and how I have never given up,” Highsmith says. “I like to try to help them get off the street. It’s more of a mental help for them than anything else, a shoulder to cry on.”

Highsmith says he drinks but is not a drunk; he does not do drugs; he plays the horses but not excessively; and he has always worked, all anomalies in the downtown jungle. One of his friends calls Highsmith’s survival a miracle. Highsmith calls it a strong faith in God and himself.

“I remember when I was 19 back in New York, and I was on the street drinking some wine. Leslie Uggams walked by--she was on her way to a singing lesson--and she looked at me and said, ‘Bobby, you should be ashamed of yourself.’ That stuck with me, because here was this girl, going out of the area to try and make things better for her and her family, and I was out there drinking wine. It touched my heart.”

Highsmith has never had a family to make things better for. Says he has never had a goal. Never considered the future. Never even thought past today. Until now.

Most of his friends in the downtown area have died. He lost his longtime job as a produce-truck driver because the company went out of business. It took him five months to find a temporary driving job--which he hopes will become permanent--so now he’s behind on his rent. As testament to the goodwill he has inspired in others, the owners of the flophouse let him stay through the lean times.

Now, at 59, he has suddenly tired of the drug dealers hanging around outside his hotel. He is sick of the noise and trash, and can regularly be seen sweeping the sidewalk of his block.

“I just want to see it get done,” he says.

“I guess for the first time in my life, I am asking, ‘OK, Bob, what’s next?’ It’s a foreign way for me to think.”

*

It’s Tuesday night at Hank’s Bar and American Grill on Grand Avenue, and the man who never used to think about tomorrow is also thinking about his past. Highsmith greets the half a dozen patrons by name, orders a beer and talks about his major regret--not giving up the downtown life for a woman.

“She was an alcoholic when I met her, and I thought I could help her, and I think I did,” he says. “But when she stopped drinking, she wanted our life to be different. She worked as a maid before she started selling cosmetics, and she wanted to live like her customers did. But I was comfortable where I was. The thing was, she thought I was better than this.”

Others have felt the same. “The only thing I don’t understand is why he never got out of the ghetto,” says a longtime friend who didn’t want his name used. “Bob has performed a miracle. He has managed to survive in the jungle and still keep his dignity. He has never asked anybody for anything, and I don’t know a person who doesn’t like that guy. But how can you be happy with what he has got? You hope that tomorrow will be a better day, and all of a sudden you wake up and you are an old man and where have you gone?”

When Highsmith was 19 and living in New York, he was approached at Penn Station by a seemingly successful man. The man asked him to drive him around town and take him to the places where Highsmith hung out. “And so I did,” Highsmith says. “He was a rich guy, he owned a sand and gravel company in New York. I drove him around until 4 a.m. and he had so much fun. He said he just wanted to be normal, to go where regular people go, where there are no stuffed shirts.

“Some of my friends and I talked about that. We figured it must not be all that nice having money, because these people are looking to go where we go.”