SPECTERS ON THE STREET

Statistics gathered by the Institute for the Study of Homelessness and Poverty at the Weingart Center, an L.A.-based nonprofit research and service organization, reveal the scope of the problem: In Los Angeles County, 153 agencies operate 331 homeless shelters with 13,632 beds. Still, about 84,000 county residents have nowhere to call home on any given night. * But statistics, of course, don’t explain what daily life is like for the older men and women who, by choice or circumstance, live in the streets for days, weeks, months or years. In addition to the predators who target the old and weak, they face indifference, indignities and the common health problems of aging. Times staff photographer Genaro Molina spent much of last year documenting the lives of the elderly homeless in L.A. Novelist Walter Mosley, the author of 11 books, has featured homeless L.A. ex-convict Socrates Fortlow in two of his books. The people in these photographs, they remind us, are not now and never were statistics.

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When I first saw Genaro Molina’s photographs, I experienced a range of emotions. I was moved by the suffering and community of these mostly elder citizens who are without resources and property. I felt anger that the richest country in the history of the world is unable to accommodate those of us who suffer. To some degree I experienced pride in the dignity that the human race strives to maintain no matter the degree of adversity.

But most profoundly I felt guilt at my own failure in addressing this monumental shame.

As I paged through these photographs, my emotions led me down a road I’ve traveled before. On that road I experienced anger and righteous outrage while condemning those who allow this disgrace to continue. The anger felt right but didn’t offer much that is tangible; it didn’t show me the way to end the marginalization of our elderly, our poor and our dispossessed.

All this came together for me in a memory.

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I MET A WOMAN WHO WAS SINGING THE PRAISES of New York City, where I now live. “I hear that they have a very good mayor there,” she said. When I asked her what exactly it was that she had heard, she replied, “He got rid of the homeless.”

I hear it everywhere; at supermarkets in Santa Monica, at political cocktail parties in Washington, D.C., among suburban commuters and their children considering a return to the city. Cleaned up the homeless, removed the homeless, took care of the homeless problem. Mayors, police chiefs and vigilante-like city councils around the nation going after the so-called homeless like so many Earp brothers at the OK Corral. I say so-called because I think the term homeless, like Oakie in its day, places a stigma on an unfortunate group of people and diminishes them.

In New York, they targeted these already hard-pressed survivors by arresting them for misdemeanors such as urinating in public or drunkenness. Once arrested, fingerprints were taken and records checked, and many were incarcerated for outstanding warrants or crimes they might have previously committed. This project was celebrated by those who fear the specter of poverty and misery camping on our doorstep.

At the same time, Grand Central Station and the Port Authority were getting face-lifts that included removing the squatters from the waiting rooms and the underground tunnels; the parks were spruced up and signs appeared in subway cars admonishing those who might consider giving money to anyone asking for a handout. Panhandling is illegal, the signs read. Give to the appropriate charity if you wish to help the unfortunate.

Our dispossessed population is further criminalized by a sensational and callous media, when indigent men and women are suspected of attacks against the normals on the streets. It’s not a single individual who commits the crime, it’s a whole class of unfortunate citizens.

All of this went through my mind when the woman, who was very nice, was complimenting New York’s particular war on poverty. I thought many things but didn’t say them because most people become defensive when a large social problem is presented as part of their responsibility. This becomes apparent when you see their animosity about the so-called homeless. They’re feared, seen as threats, as eyesores, as lazy good-for-nothings who would rather lounge around in their jury-rigged shelters than get a real job at Vons.

No one seems to understand about the poverty of young mothers (often just children themselves). No one seems to understand the effects of schizophrenia, psychosis, Alzheimer’s disease or the consequences of a simple nervous breakdown or a bout with depression.

Most of us know how fragile the econo-systems of our own lives are; that six months of incapacity might mean repossession of property, cancellation of policies, and eviction. We realize the threat, but maybe we haven’t spent enough time considering what it takes to crawl out of the pit of dispossession and poverty. Without an address you can’t have credit or a bank account, you can’t apply for a job or reliably receive mail. You cannot legally urinate in public, to be sure, but there are no private places in your life. If you get drunk you risk jail, but if you stay sober you risk madness. City shelters offer some refuge, but there is little privacy and it only takes one or two criminals or madmen to make these communal spaces unbearable.

I almost broached these issues with the woman I met, but I held back because I knew her answers before I could speak. Everyone has a family, she might have said, a mother or father, a friend they could turn to. A loved one, husband or wife, would be there for me, or anyone in my family.

Many people believe this drivel. In times of health and happiness and love there is nothing we cannot conquer. But not all marriages, or even bonds of blood, can overcome the hard times of poverty and mental illness. Sometimes we outlive the ones who love us; sometimes they simply drift away.

Too many of us blame the sufferer for his misery. If no one loves you it must be some shortcoming on your part; you are only reaping the lonely crop that you have sown.

I wanted to make an eloquent argument that anyone, including this woman, would understand. I wanted to make her think about comparable social issues: how women were marginalized by overt sexism and an unwritten double standard; how black men and women in this country are still fighting for respect 135 years after the end of the Civil War; how the elderly are ignored and exploited by a youth-oriented culture that has somehow managed to ignore education; how the mentally ill and learning disabled are vilified by a society that believes in the hierarchy of wealth more than in the decency inherent in democracy.

I wanted to be friendly, to make a gentle comment that would find the weakness in my friend’s beliefs. I failed.

“you know,” i said in a low tone, “those people you’re referring to, those homeless as you call them, are United States citizens. Most of them have the same right to vote that you do and they are equal to us by proclamation of the Constitution.”

“I know that,” she said in a voice much louder than mine. “I didn’t say anything about that. I was just talking about that mayor cleaning up the city.”

“How do you clean up a citizen?” I asked. “How does it work that we can vote for an official and then celebrate him for removing our fellow citizens from sight? Why is a man or woman who is without the money for a home no longer given the rights that you and I have?”

“They have rights,” she said with all of the defensiveness I had hoped to avoid.

“Can they vote?”

“I don’t know.”

“Isn’t it your responsibility to know that all Americans have a voice in how our country is run?”

“They gave up that right when they didn’t get a job . . . .” The talk went on for a while. Nothing was settled. I failed to make her understand what I believe is true: that America has abandoned its dream of liberty for all.

When I see these images of so-called homeless men and women--marginalized, broken and forgotten--I can’t help but wonder what lies beneath. What rot has entered our hearts for us to allow such suffering right outside our doors? And if this degree of pain is acceptable as a part of our everyday existence, what must be happening in the rest of the world? The United States of America is the only superpower left. Our culture and our money are fueling changes around the world. If we can watch our own people disintegrate, what will we accept among the nations that are fast becoming the vassals of our economy?

As much as I believe that all of America is culpable, as much as I feel that my argument is true, if I haven’t made that argument forcefully enough that others understand, then I’m just as guilty as those I indict.

The old woman living in tatters and cruising the dumpsters for a meal is an image that indicts all of America. None of us will be vindicated until she is able to close the door on that sad chapter of our lives.

RONALD “NEAT” POWELL

At age 60, Ronald “Neat” Powell was among those street people ages 50 to 65 who the National Coalition for the Homeless says “frequently fall between the cracks: not old enough to receive Medicare, but their physical health, aggravated by poor nutrition and severe living conditions, may resemble that of a 70-year-old.” Powell ended up on the streets several years ago. His mental illness was compounded there by an infection that forced doctors to remove the lower half of his left leg and a toe on his right foot. He relied on a rickety wheelchair as he sang for food, clothing and money at favorite spots downtown near 7th and Figueroa streets. A few days each month, a general-relief check allowed him the luxury of a motel room. Most nights, though, he placed empty soda cans around his wheelchair to alert him to thieves and slept on a cardboard mattress in the parking lot of the First United Methodist Church on South Flower Street. Powell was found dead there at 8:30 a.m. on Dec. 6 last year. “Nobody cared,” said Arturo Burciaga, a security guard at the nearby Original Pantry Cafe. “It was like he was a ghost. Society sees, but it doesn’t recognize.”

WILLIE MAY SINCLAIR

Willie May Sinclair was 80 years old when she began living with her five cats under a blue tarp behind the garage of a South-Central Los Angeles home. During that time, a cyclone fence was all that separated Sinclair from a pack of feral dogs.

Among her scattered possessions was a tattered photograph of a beautiful and apparently prosperous Sinclair as a young woman. She said that she had modeled for Ebony and other magazines. Forced to move, her new home became a dilapidated two-story building down the street, vacant except for several crack addicts who, like Sinclair, had to enter through a side window. She spent her 81st birthday there.

With the help of her son and Portals, a local outreach organization, Sinclair eventually found temporary shelter in a board-and-care facility. But she was too independent to stay for very long.

HENRY ROLLINS

With southbound Harbor Freeway motorists roaring past just yards away, Henry Rollins filled a pot from a plastic water jug and placed it on his propane stove. When it came to a boil, he added the raw chicken innards that he had dug out of a dumpster behind a Chinatown restaurant. Sitting on his flea-infested mattress, he carefully cut peppers and onions into a pan on his lap with arthritic hands that clearly made cooking a painful chore.

Rollins lived mostly alone, but sometimes he welcomed younger and stronger men into his camp. They provide him with support, friendship and protection, which he needs since losing one eye in an accident years ago and the slow erosion of his sight in the other due to a cataract. That condition limits the types of day labor he can do, and so he sometimes asks for handouts.

“If I could save enough money, I could get one of those laser eye surgeries and they can get rid of it in a little amount of time,” said Rollins, who often worried what would become of his dog, Chorizo, if anything ever happened to him.

The dog was all Rollins had left several months later after Caltrans workers swept through his encampment early one morning, carting away his mattress, radio, propane stove, pots and clothing. He moved to a camp with another homeless man alongside a recycling center near downtown Los Angeles. Unable to keep his dog there, he gave Chorizo to a group of homeless men living in Griffith Park.

CHARLES LONE WOLF

Charles Lone Wolf, 60, said he started living on the streets after his wife and father both died within a year. He has four children he hasn’t seen for years, he said, but added: “I don’t have nobody. I’m just lonely. That’s why I drink. I don’t have nobody no more.” He sobbed into his hands. “I’m just tired of sleeping on the streets. I just want to die.”

Dozens of agencies are working to help L.A.’s street survivors, including people such as the Rev. Alfonso Macias, chaplain of the Los Angeles Mission. While driving the mission van down a particularly filthy alley in the MacArthur Park area, Macias found Lone Wolf sleeping on a thin piece of cardboard, flies covering an open sore on his nose. Macias took Lone Wolf to a detox center on skid row, where Lone Wolf thanked Macias but soon returned to the streets.