Shelter From the Cold

The rain on Skid Row turns thwarting and mean, soaking cardboard homes until they sag like drenched, tired hope. On sidewalks, people try futilely to stay dry, hunching up against buildings, shifting from foot to foot, while a man stands alone shouting angrily in the middle of the street--water and debris swirling all around him, rain streaming down his face.

Holt Meyer pulls up in a van behind the Los Angeles Mission. He knows the paralyzing force of Skid Row rain. When he was on the streets, his quest for drugs and booze could be deterred only by the periodic fear of encroaching insanity and death--or mornings like this, when he needed to get warm more than he needed to get loaded.

He grew up in the Midwest, where winters brew snow and ice, fiercely and suddenly. But this is the cold he remembers most, the kind that soaks through skin, remains deep within and numbs the heart.

“I’ll never forget it,” he says.

Ten men scamper to the van, ducking their heads as if raindrops were made of stone. They, too, know this rain. Among them is John Kelly, fresh out of prison. When he lived on the streets, he would pray, “Please, Lord, if it rains, don’t let it rain downtown.” Even while incarcerated, when he would look out and see a leaden sky, he would remember the cold and pray for those on Skid Row.

Kelly is two weeks into a mission rehabilitation program designed to give a new start to those willing to try. Meyer, 40, graduated from the program two years ago and figures it saved his life, so now he tries to pay back what was given to him.

While in the program, Meyer would climb into this same van on Sundays and be greeted by a man with a smile on his face and coffee stains on his shirt.

“Hey, brother, what’s Jesus doing in your life today?” the Rev. P.D James would bellow. James would look for other passengers, but almost always Meyer rode alone to Faith Community Church of the Nazarene in Yorba Linda.

It was a world apart from Skid Row. On Meyer’s first visit, his attention was drawn to the eucalyptus trees--tall and flowing--behind the church. Since childhood, he has seen beauty in trees, or perhaps it is the beauty of the world when viewed from the top of them.

He would climb towering oaks and build treehouses on high branches, carrying up one board at a time, purposefully making the structure difficult, even dangerous, to reach. It was a place to ponder, and he would sit alone for hours, viewing the horizon by day and stars by night.

Meyer never felt a sense of belonging as a child. He was abandoned at birth, he was told, left at the doorstep of an orphanage in Seoul, South Korea, that was named after a Christian man named Holt. An American couple called Meyer adopted him as a baby, which is how a child with nothing, not even a name, became Holt Meyer.

Meyer was around few children of Asian ancestry in Lawrence, Kan., where he grew up. Other children poked fun, and Meyer responded with his fists. At age 13, he was sent to military boarding school. It was the beginning of an estrangement from his parents that continues almost 30 years later. Meyer says that he never was close to his parents but that he will always be grateful to them for rescuing him from the orphanage. He thinks about them from time to time but has lost contact. The last letter he wrote them was returned to sender.

It seems too late now to become a family, he says. Sometimes you wait too long, and life changes too much.

The Rev. James is gone too, and it is Meyer who drives the van early each Sunday morning. He is an usher at the church, teaches Sunday school and is starting a mentoring program for young boys. He owns his own business--tree care, landscaping, construction--and sometimes he hires men from the mission for day work. It is his way of building a bridge between the contrasting worlds of Yorba Linda and Skid Row.

He not only brings men from the mission to his church, but also takes church members to Skid Row, so they can see what it is to be without a home, see the faces of the street, hear the voices. And witness the cold.

They Meet to Talk

About Lost Faith

They gather in a circle each Sunday, the men from the mission and members of the church. Today Meyer leads them in a discussion of lost faith.

Joe Rowe, 55, says that once his children were grown and he and his wife were divorced, he no longer felt needed. Life, he says, lost purpose and direction, and that’s when crack cocaine took control. He ended up in the mission and will graduate from the rehabilitation program later this month.

Meyer explains to the group that as a child, he was taught that God would punish him if he was bad. When his parents put him in military school, he felt abandoned. God, he assumed, was punishing him for getting in fights. Immediately after high school, he entered the military and served in Vietnam, where he was shot in the arm and caught in a fiery explosion.

“After that,” he says, “I had nothing to do with God or the Bible. That was a big turning point in my life. That’s when I lost my faith.”

Upon release from the military, Meyer attended San Francisco State, but his life was controlled by alcohol, and he dropped out after a year. It was in San Francisco that he first lived on the streets, first felt the cold.

Initially, homelessness scared him, he says, enough to sober him up and move to Los Angeles, where he found work in construction. It became the pattern that he would repeat a dozen or more times: sobering up, working, crashing. It always seemed a matter of time--weeks, months or years--before he wound up back on Skid Row.

But there is a fine line, he says, a point of no return. Meyer knew it was there but could not see it. He was frightened to think that he might not spot it until after he had gone beyond it.

“You see people talking to themselves, and they’re crazy and their fingernails are growing out,” he says. “They’re just gone. That’s scary, and I would tell myself, ‘Man, I can’t let that happen to me.’ Then you look around one day and see how close you are to becoming that. I got really close.”

Alcohol turned him violent, and no one wanted to be around him, so in the end he drank alone in closets. He could feel the alcohol killing him, and in 1986 he quit drinking. It was not so much a matter of healing as it was finding something new: crack cocaine.

Ten years later, Meyer was walking over a downtown bridge when he stopped to look down on the Harbor Freeway. He was no longer a kid in a tree, no longer a soldier floating beneath a parachute toward the ground. Holt Meyer was a junkie.

Looking back on his life, nothing seemed to work out for him. He was standing on the railing of the freeway ready to jump when two police officers spotted him and took him off the bridge. They talked to him, bought him a meal and found him a bed for the night. They seemed like nice guys, Meyer says, they seemed to care.

“That right there gave me hope.”

Later that year, Meyer checked into the program at the mission, where he lived for 18 months. It was hard--a strict regimen of work, Bible study, prayer and job training, Meyer says, but he knew he had to stick with it.

“All I knew was quitting, and this was a chance to finish something that I started,” he says. “I knew I had to finish.”

Members of the Sunday school group say it helps to learn from someone who has been where they have been. Meyer understands what it’s like to live the same day over and over again, to be without hope or faith in tomorrow.

“Hope, that’s the main thing he gives us,” Rowe says. “We can look at him, and we know where he’s been . . . and we can see where he is now. A lot of people see us as being worthless, but he understands. He’s a good representative of hope.”

Meyer encourages the men to introduce themselves to members of the congregation, to share with them. Their life experiences give them important insights, he says, and they have much to offer those whose lives have traveled far different paths.

“I think we get more out of it than they do,” says Maureen Levine, a member of the church. “They are inspiring. They have pulled themselves up from the bottom through faith. They show the strength of what can happen through faith, and that blesses all of us.”

In the church, Meyer has found a home and a family, he says, a circle of friends who need each other. He lives with a member of the congregation in Fullerton, and on Sundays, children see him and run to him. He feels needed for the first time.

Before entering the mission, Meyer was married for about a year. He has a daughter who must be 5 or 6 by now. Just like his parents, Meyer says, too much time has passed--to enter his daughter’s life would be an intrusion. She is better off without him.

But there will come a time when she seeks him out.

“I know she’ll want to find me,” he says. “I want to be here when she does.”

He will try to answer her questions, tell his story, how he climbed to great heights as a child and fell from great heights as a man. He will tell her about starting life with nothing--not even a name--and he will tell her about faith and hope, about rain and a chill inside that never goes away.