Being homeless has got to suck, especially if you’re
struggling to get off the street. I’ve never been homeless,
and I pray to the gods I’ll never be. But I just spent a
whole night talking to people who are, were, or were on the
verge.
It’s hard, after such humanizing contact, to embrace any
monolithic theory about the homeless, to decide just what exactly
our collective responsibility is for them. Knowing there is no such
thing as an archetypal bum makes it equally difficult to justify a
yes or a no to that question, “Spare any change?”
The people I talked to were taking part in an unprecedented
county-wide head count of the homeless in Los Angeles. The same
thing is happening across the nation due to a new requirement the
federal government placed on social service agencies competing for
millions in subsidies. They’ve got to back up their fund
requests with hard numbers.
It’s all part of the Bush administration’s
insistence on accountability and the never-ending Republican
obsession with cutting waste ““ two concepts about as
controversial as saying that 84,000 people in Los Angeles county
shouldn’t be forced to sleep on the street, or saying it
sucks that 3 million people are homeless in this country.
I’m all for accountability, but if you want to get
controversial, let’s extend it from the homeless on the
street all the way up to the corporate suites above Wall Street.
Unfortunately, that’s a level of accountability that seems to
give Republicans a fear of heights.
Part of Westwood’s homeless population that most likely
didn’t get counted that night were the people who sleep in
UCLA’s libraries and buildings. Some of you may have seen
them, but most of you probably have never even heard about them.
They’re here, I promise you. They’re part of the
underworld universe of every public university.
A former UCLA Community Service Officer gave me a tour recently
of the Young Research Library. He declined to identify himself
because of a CSO gag-order policy. “The fifth floor
dude,” he said as the elevator doors popped open.
“It’s famous. It’s notorious. Some people think
it’s haunted, but it’s not ghosts ““ it’s
just a bunch of crazy homeless people.”
They aren’t attracted to the fifth floor because
they’re really into military science, although an estimated
11 percent of their overall population are U.S. war veterans, so
maybe that has something to do with it. They’re instead drawn
to the fifth floor by the private reading rooms, a nice crash pad
compared to the street. Same goes for the breakout rooms in
Anderson and certain spots in Hershey Hall.
The fifth floor also has janitor rooms equipped with what look
like tiny bath tubs to clean dirty mops in, which the homeless use
for cleaning their own mops, I guess. They also make good hiding
places when CSOs make their final rounds before closing down. The
fifth floor also gets less student traffic and patrolling than the
others ““ and hopefully it’ll stay that way after this
article.
There are many kinds of homeless characters haunting Young.
There’s dictionary guy, who can frequently be found leafing
word for word through the alphabet of definitions in the unabridged
Oxford English Dictionary. At last count he was at G, as in ghost:
“a returning or haunting memory or image.”
There’s Ph.D. guy, who is rumored to have gotten within an
inch of attaining the degree at UCLA before he snapped, and now
spends a lot of time in the library. The scary thing is that
sometimes I feel like I’m just one bad essay away from
becoming that guy.
There was one homeless guy who emptied an entire row of books
and made a bed of books between the racks. Think of the irony of
using thousands of pages of intellectual thought as a mattress.
The homeless I met on the night of the count were people of all
ages, races and backgrounds. Matthew Adams, 50, a black ex-con and
business-owner-turned-homeless by some twist of fate.
Nick Fiaschetti, 24, white, a deeply Christian aspiring singer
from Texas on the verge of homelessness. For Fiaschetti, a Bush
voter, it’s either the street or the military.
Jisele Sanchez, 39, a Latina woman who quit her long career in
customer service to do something more fulfilling and is now faced
with the choice of returning to her hated economic sector or being
homeless.
After seeing all this, I wondered exactly how much of our taxes
go to helping the homeless on an individual level. Could I know who
received our taxes, I might not be haunted in my sleep by the
panhandler I didn’t oblige with my pocket change.
But this turns out to be virtually impossible. Trying to trace a
penny from your pocket through government distribution and into the
hands of a homeless person in the form of a blanket or a hot meal
is made too complicated by the amount of bureaucracy between points
A and B.
“Unfortunately, this kind of information is not really
available,” said Annie Patnaude, deputy press secretary for
the National Taxpayers Union. “Although it certainly should
be.”
So what is our collective responsibility toward the homeless?
Should you pony up a buck in response to “Spare any
change”? Is every homeless person deserving of it? There
really is only one surefire way to know. Take a minute and get to
know them ““ you might end up the richer person in the
exchange. And if you’re having any trouble with the subject,
you can check them out at your local university library.
Lukacs is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
olukacs@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.