From deep, deep in the cotton-pickin' red clay'd piney woods o' east Texas, I bring you the tales of my sister Bethzilla, hideous freakin' white trash welfare-cheatin' pill-popping, bowl-smoking, vodka-swilling redneck swamp thing what done crawled up out of the danged boggy bottoms of Uncertain, Texas and also of Momma, a transplanted, dirt-floored, rice paddy, hand-raised Cajun girl from the south Texas depression era. Take a look see. Go ahead, lookee.
My homeless, RV-dwelling attorney goes ballistic on the subject of George W Bush an interview in the U.S. Vets homeless veterans shelter in Inglewood, CA. A series.
Interviewing a homeless, RV-dwelling ex-attorney in my Inglewood, California U.S. Vets homeless veterans shelter transitional living facility dorm room on the little humors one can find in homelessness. A series.
Interviewing a homeless, RV-dwelling self-avowed anarchist at my homeless veterans shelter dorm room on his reactions to the evils of politicians. A series.
Homelessness wasn't thrust upon me. I chose it as an adventure. I made 6 months of preparations to move into the street. I was bored with my life and wanted a one year adventure. Turned out to be 5 years. It's a whole lot easier to move in to the street than to get back off it.
One of my goals was to spend a night in every rattrap crack motel in Los Angeles County until I could declare a winner of the worst crack motel in L.A. I finally found it on Sunset Boulevard: The Sunset Pacific. A little 11-unit motel that tried to burn down while I was sleeping it came in a very close second place.
I was working most of the time I was homeless; in gas stations, driving call girls or as a movie extra. That helped, but I think the thing that helped me endure most was when I adopted a senile dementia-inflicted 72 year-old homeless Jewish attorney who kept me very busy with his daily dramas, too busy to think about teenagers shooting at me for sport, cops rousting me, vigilante homeowners kicking my ass or the muggers (I was mugged 7 times in two years but I'm proud of my 7-0 record there).
I just recently learned that my homeless attorney, Donald Steinberg, has passed away.
Details are sketchy. I hadn't heard from the aromatic old gypsy in several months and contacted a guy who lives in a car in Westwood (Gordon The Hollywood Anarchist) who contacted a guy who lives in an Inglewood homeless veterans shelter (Uncle Miltie) who contacted a woman who lives in a car in a Gardena church parking lot (Lost Lisa) who broke the news. Donald is dead.
I live in east Texas now, but when I was homeless in L.A., Donald was the windmill-jousting, old hippie reprobate who taught me that we must have the courage to be happy, even living in cardboard boxes under bridges.
The above interviews touched on Donald's neverending battles with The Movealong Police, who perpetually herd homeless people in L.A. from one neighborhood to the next, never giving us more than 72 hours respite in one spot.
For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, And her mouth is smoother than oil, But her end is bitter as wormwood . . . Her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them. ----Proverbs 5:3-6
by James Jarvis
excerpt from Westside (tales of life at a seaside veterans shelter)
My homeless attorney, Don the RV-dwelling, dog poop-smelling, 73 year-old Jewish hippie I adopted last year when we were both living in RVs on the street, spends a lot of time here at the veterans shelter.
In the mornings, he brings me fresh dumpster sushi to store in my little dorm refrigerator. We usually spend about half an hour in that little fridge, changing out the old dumpster sushi for the new. Then he usually watches TV in the mess hall or movie room downstairs until I wake up in the afternoon. Then we have a couple of hours of bible study, sometimes three or four, until the chow hall opens at 5:30 for dinner.
I am assisting Don in his conversion to Christianity and it ain't no walk in the park, let me tell you. Don is the last of the stiff-necked Jews and I have a lot of cheek turning to do while he works out the kinks. . . not to mention the smell of the two large dogs Don sleeps with in my old RV. THAT causes a lot of head turning, too.
I try to get Don to take a shower at my place as much as I can, but Don forgets. He forgets a lot of things, like where he left his keys to the RV or where he left his RV. I keep a spare set of keys to everything he has in my dorm room. I also keep the number of the prepaid cell phone I gave him and the combination to his storage. Don's soul in in God's hands alone, but his possessions are surely in mine.
Today we had to change a flat tire on Don's RV. What a pain in the butt that was. Those big 16 and a half inch tires aren't all that easy to toss around and have you ever tried to jack up an RV? That's no walk in the park, either. And we had to do it in the rain. I bitched and griped and complained for about ten minutes, as I guess I do with all of my family, but gave it up as soon as I looked in the old man's grateful eyes.
Some 38 year-old woman, a speed freak drug addict in full bloom in her addiction, is trying to get Don to move in with her in her guest house apartment behind her mother's house in lower Inglewood. She wants to set up housekeeping with the old fart. She met him on the street yesterday when he was trying to grunt off the flat tire on the RV and already has him buying groceries for her mom.
The old man lives on a tight, fixed Social Security pension income which is heavily drained already by his addict daughter. Don says this woman, Stilleta, will cook and clean for him . . . even do his laundry and sleep with him and hinted already at marriage. Don asked me what I thought of the whirlwind arrangement.
Delivered a brand new car battery to the old man, my homeless attorney, this morning at 5:30 a.m. The RV he's living in, my old El Dorado, was parked in a dark spot on 86th street near Watts. It's a quiet side street in a residential neighborhood. I pulled up in my loud diesel pickup, parked in front of someone's house and crossed over to the weather-beaten RV with its stack of gypsy caravan boxes, rugs and spare propane tanks tied to the rear bumper. I banged on the side of the camper.
"Battery delivery! Battery for a Mr. Donald Steinberg!" I shouted. The dogs came to the window, the Pit Bull and the German Shepherd. They didn't bark. They know me. I got them out of doggy jail once. They owe me the courtesy of not barking.
I had just gotten off my shift as a security guard in Culver City. I was still in my guard uniform, including the police jacket with the big, shiny badge pinned on. I shined my big Maglite flashlight, which doubles as a night stick, into the rear window.
The El Dorado has the look of an abandoned vehicle. At best, it looks like the kind of RV people use for storage space only. It really doesn't look as if it can move and it hasn't moved for over a month. Leaves are piled up around the tires. A couple of early morning joggers came jogging by and smiled at me as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a uniformed, badged man to be banging on an apparently vacant RV at 5:30 in the morning.
"Battery delivery!" I repeated loudly, mostly for their benefit. For some reason, I felt the need to explain myself to these strangers. They never broke their stride, jogging on down the street. This is, after all, Los Angeles County.
The old man needs the battery for his little $500 car, parked further on down the street. He needs the car running so he can go visit his new girlfriend. If a 73 year-old man has got the pluck to date a 38 year-old woman, who am I to judge? I can always petition the court later if he gets himself into some bad trouble.
This is a true story of a 72 year-old homeless man who was living in an RV on the streets of Los Angeles. He took his dogs walking one day and when he came back, his home on wheels was gone.
Turns out he had $26,000.00 in unpaid parking tickets on that RV (in Los Angeles, you have to move your vehicle every 72 hours even if it's parked in front of your own house) and the police had impounded the old man's RV and were looking to arrest him for the unpaid parking tickets.
The old man came to us at the U.S. Vets homeless military veterans shelter in Inglewood for help. He had another RV, a brakeless old monstrocity that had been sitting in storage for 7 years. The storage folks wouldn't let him live in the RV on the storage facility grounds, so the old man had to find a safe place to park his home on wheels on the streets.
Trouble was, the old wreck didn't move (or stop) very well. He couldn't keep moving it every 72 hours.
Then the old man had found a church 8 miles from the storage facility that would let him park his stored wreck in their private property back parking lot. Perfect. The cops couldn't ticket him on private property.
The trouble was, how to get the RV from here to there. The brakes were shot. The steering linkage was bad. The wheels might fly off at any moment. The old man couldn't just drive the death trap through normal heavy stop and go Los Angeles traffic. People would get killed.
We came up with a plan. At 4 o'clock in the morning when traffic was lightest, the old man would cannon ball the 40-foot monstrocity across 8 miles of Rosecrans Boulevard running every red light that presented itself with Gordon The Hollywood Anarchist running interference with his $200 Nigerian Chevy while I ran my deisel pickup behind the RV, push-starting the bus every time the motor stalled.
It worked. Traffic laws were brazenly broken, but no one was killed that foggy morning in Torrance. It was a triumph of the will for the working homeless, the final solution for my homeless Jewish attorney's parking ticket problems. And no lazy-assed, inept or corrupt social worker was bothered in this operation.
An interview with my homeless attorney concerning tactics homeless folk use to eat well. Try the dumpster sushi. It's not as bad as it sounds! Part of a series about my homeless attorney.
My homeless attorney is headed for the elderly chain gang in Los Angeles for thousands and thousands of dollars worth of unpaid parking tickets. A series.
Steve and Louise try to lure my homeless attorney away from his South Central streets to the Longbeach arts community where they can get him social services. A series. Distributed by Tubemogul.
Image by James Jarvis via Flickr
