Being Homeless in Beverly Hills : Poverty: One man ekes out a day-to-day existence on the streets of his native city.

Surrounded by all those smiling photographs that fill Beverly Hills High School’s 1983 yearbook, the one mug shot of Greg Parnas looms across the years as a picture of loneliness.

The school’s academic decathlon team won top honors in the county. Student parking permits jumped to $197.50 a year. And Oingo Boingo rocked 1,000 students on campus. In a yearbook that reveals an abundance of fun and much anticipation of the future, Parnas wears a sober expression, as if he had been told not to smile.

“I didn’t stand out in high school, just worked hard and got decent grades,” said Parnas, seated on a bench in Reeves Park, his favorite spot, in Beverly Hills. “I was a basic student dealing with family problems.”

His mother suffered a massive stroke and died a month after his high school graduation. Two years later, he flunked out of UCLA. And then a few years after that, his father also had a stroke and died.

Suddenly, Parnas, an only child, found himself slipping through the cracks and into a world of drugs and alcohol. He lost his parents’ rent-controlled apartment. Soon he was penniless, eking out a day-to-day existence on the streets of the same affluent city where he was born.

He was homeless in Beverly Hills.

“The first time I lay down on the sidewalk and had to go to sleep, I cried,” said Parnas, gesturing with hands that have scuffled with the elements. “The thought of being totally homeless never occurred to me. Kids here drive $20,000 cars. But I never felt a part of this place. I always wanted to run from it. But I can’t.”

Parnas, now 34, has been on the streets for five years. He is one of what city officials estimate are three to four dozen chronically homeless people in Beverly Hills.

The city is not a magnet for the newly homeless, those who suddenly find themselves without jobs and a place to stay. Here, city officials and caseworkers say, are street veterans who have learned how to circumvent the city’s tough laws against them. They share the same kinds of ailments that plague all homeless populations: mental illness, extreme poverty and drug and alcohol abuse. But there is a special poignancy to their existence when seen through the eyes of a native son.

“We live like nomads,” Parnas said, dressed in clean T-shirt, jeans and sneakers he obtained from a church charity. “We have to stay constantly on the move.”

Parnas frequently sleeps in various doorways, but he won’t say just where. He wants to avoid being hassled by the police or others competing for shelter. He navigates the city’s alleyways and explores its trash bins for treasures. He finds things and fixes them up (like the vintage guitar he sold for $45). He has panhandled for change and found occasional work as a valet parking attendant for fancy boutiques and restaurants. He is a regular at the churches that offer free meals.

Parnas travels with a backpack he calls his “condominium.” Inside, he keeps a sleeping bag, clothing, a birth certificate, a high school diploma, a UCLA transcript, his father’s World War II medal and a couple of family pictures.

While friends describe him as emotionally fragile, he says life on the streets has become a source of comfort, of permanence. That concerns city officials and social workers.

“The longer they are out on the street, the further out of the loop they are and the harder it is to bring them back in,” said Gina Drummond, an outreach manager for People Assisting the Homeless, a West Los Angeles-based organization contracted by Beverly Hills to help the homeless.

Beverly Hills’ homeless regulars include the elderly couple who live in Roxbury Park by day and sleep on a bus bench at night; the middle-age former stockbroker who spends his nights in the doorway of All Saints Episcopal Church; the 46-year-old South Carolina native who shouts obscenities and claims to have Beverly Hills real estate interests. And then there is a Japanese immigrant who, despite family requests to return home, prefers to live by the foot of a tree with his belongings stuffed in shopping bags.

“They are regulars and they have their territories that they use for their fund-raising,” City Councilman Les Bronte said. “There are people who frequent the commercial area and from time to time they have to be reminded what the guidelines are.”

In 1993, Beverly Hills enacted codes cracking down on problems associated with the homeless. Those rules banned aggressive panhandling, drinking in public, loitering and leaving personal items on public property. The city receives an average of 1,100 complaints a year regarding the homeless, police say. As part of the city outreach program, police officers have accompanied caseworkers from PATH on 26 missions encouraging the homeless to seek help.

City officials say they are not trying to sweep a problem out of the city. But because there are no homeless shelters in Beverly Hills, they stress that they must seek long-term help outside the community.

“We never say leave the city and go to Santa Monica,” said Lt. Ed Kreins, Beverly Hills police spokesman. “But if you are not going to obey the law, you will be cited or arrested. If you can’t deal with the rules, you don’t have to stay. But it is not like [we are saying] get out of town.”

For someone like Isaac Young, 50, who has been homeless in Beverly Hills since 1993, the message is clear. He walks the streets sometimes until 5:30 a.m., when the doors of Good Shepherd Catholic Church open for early Mass. In the back of the church he finds sanctuary, a place to nap where he knows the priest won’t kick him out.

For three years, the Mississippi native slept at night on the fourth-floor stairwell of a fashionable medical office building. He stayed there so long that the building managers felt obliged to give him an official eviction notice. Young still chuckles at the irony.

Among the city’s homeless, Young is a local celebrity, reciting poetry and playing the piano in the parish of All Saints Episcopal Church every Monday during the church feeding program. Young recites his verses from memory because he cannot read. With the help of church volunteers, he produced a few dozen copies of his six-page work titled “One Man Can Make a Difference,” which he sells for $4.

“Now I don’t have to panhandle,” he said. “They say a fair exchange is not robbery.”

Joanna Cory, director of the homeless ministry at All Saints Episcopal Church, said residents have become weary of the plight of the homeless.

“People want to do something, but they don’t know what is appropriate,” she said.

Greg Parnas has tasted that frustration, and he has some of his own. Over the years, Parnas says, he has struggled with a drug and alcohol problem.

“It was my decision to drop out,” said Parnas, who says he has put his faith in God. “I couldn’t hold a decent job. I couldn’t take the pressure to succeed in Beverly Hills. This place is not for me.”

But just giving Parnas a job would not be a viable solution, said Cory.

“He has some demons he is grappling with,” she said, adding that “until he is able to work through them, I don’t think he will be able to be employable.”

The Rev. R. John Perling, pastor of Mt. Calvary Church in Beverly Hills, agrees.

“One minute he’s fine,” said Perling, who has known Parnas for years. “He worked with my wife and my daughter arranging flowers in the backyard, and then two days later he’s screaming, ripping off his clothes.”

Someday, Parnas says, he plans to leave the city of his birth.

Meanwhile, he tried to shake some of the demons from his past a few months back when he revisited his old apartment building, in the flats south of Wilshire Boulevard. He recalled the times he spent in his apartment with his parents. He reminisced about the baseball games down the block on the Beverly Vista Elementary School playground.

He turned away and began walking toward an alley when he ran into a familiar face.

“There is a woman I remember,” he said. “Weren’t you my science teacher?”

Marilyn Smith, Beverly Vista’s seventh-grade science teacher, recalled the face.

“It’s a delight to see you here,” she said. “You were always a sweet kid, never gave anyone any trouble. What are you doing now?”

Parnas told his former teacher that he was homeless.

Smith was stunned by his response. She told him he should go back to college, get some training. “You can become an X-ray technician, a physical therapist, anything,” she told him. “You have a Beverly Hills High School diploma and no one can take that away from you.”

Parnas smiled, promised to look into it and get back to her with his progress. As he walked into the alley, there were tears in his eyes.

“Like seeing yourself grow up,” he said.

Then he went back to the park.