On the weekend of April 28th, Los Angeles held a volunteer weekend called "Big Sunday", done in partnership with the Office of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa. I participated in a "Homeless Biography Project" at the Volunteer Drop-In Center on LA's infamous "skid row". Writers were paired up with one of L.A.s hardcore homeless and then wrote their stories.Here is the biography I wrote for Gary Gordon:
Gary Gordon’s Biography
As told to Robert Ramirez
Life through the eyes of a homeless man
Gary Gordon‘s eyes are striking. In the course of my interview with him, I must admit that I lost my train of thought several times looking into those remarkable grey blue eyes surrounded by that unusual pool of yellow. You see, Gary has contracted Hepatitis-C from living on the streets and one of its side-effects, jaundice, has left the whites of his eyes yellow. That contrast; pools of yellow offset by an island of shaded blue is prominent, almost haunting. It is this intensity in his eyes that serve to conceal a calm, gentle, articulate man who was led to the streets as much by his inability to deal with life’s disappointments as he was his own shortcomings. But I’m getting ahead of myself and like all of life’s stories - Gary’s needs to be told from the beginning.
A Happy, Normal Childhood
Gary Gordon was born on June 14th, 1956 in Beaumont, TX to Amar and Mildred Gordon. He had 3 siblings; John Boy, Raymond, and Diane and by any standard had a very normal, happy childhood. His father worked and was a consummate provider. As Gary puts it, “My father was the provider and problem solver. If you ever had a problem, it was his problem and he would do what he had to do to solve it.”
The living that Gary’s father afforded them as a steel worker allowed his mom Mildred to be a stay-at-home Mother. She cooked, cleaned, and cared for the children. The Gordon’s were a religious family and never missed services on Sunday. Gary explained, “the only excuse for missing mass on Sunday was if you were in the hospital.” The family attended Mckay Methodist Church, (Gary can still quote the church’s exact address from memory), and Sunday was a day of rest in the household.
“My father would do nothing on Sundays. He wouldn’t work or cook or clean. He would rest. But my Mother would teach us to cook on those days. Biscuits, chitlins, chicken, yams, greens, stews, soups. She would also teach us to sew and clean, the men too. We all knew how to keep the house.”
As I continued to pry into the details of Gary’s youth, all the while marveling at its normalcy and happiness, (he was never abused and didn’t come from a broken home - as is the presumption with so many who live on the streets), it occurred to me that these memories that he was relating to me were ones that had long since been buried. The smile that came across his face as he recounted stories of his Aunt Maddie’s farm on Lake Charles in Louisiana (the Gordon’s would make the trip once a month) was literally ear to ear. His eyes beamed and he grinned as he recounted the music that filled the rooms of his childhood home.
“My father was a blues man. Anything by Bobby Blass, B.B. King, Shirley Cesar. My mother loved gospel music; Mehaleia Jackson, The Davis Sisters, Thomas Dorsey and the 5 Blind Boys out of Alabama. We always played music in my house.”
Education was stressed in the family and Gary graduated from Hebert High School in 1973. He was a lettermen in football and track. “I had all this energy that I couldn’t get out at home, so I let it all out at school.” For the last few years of his schooling he worked a part-time job (as many young men his age do) at Wayne Gordon Food Store. “I worked for Mr. Levy in produce. Part-time during the school year and pretty much full-time in the summers.”
His high school sweetheart? Her name was Patricia Joseph. “She lives in Mesa, Arizona now.” He explained, to my surprise, that he knew of her whereabouts and had kept in touch. “You bet we kept in touch, she’s a telecommunications operator and has 3 kids. The first one was named after me.” Gary proclaims proudly.
His first car? A 1962 Dodge Standard, he smiles as he reminisces. “I bought that car from my mother’s good Caucasian lady friend named Miss Charlotte. That woman loved me so much she told me one day, ‘Why don’t you give me $50 dollars for this here car.’ And she turned over the pink slip on the spot, even though I didn’t pay her for another month.”
As I sat with Gary on the floor of the Volunteer Drop In Center on San Julian Street, and pressed him for more details on his youth, a youth that he had not recounted in such a long time, I couldn’t help but marvel at how ordinary it all was. His story could easily have been mine or anyone else’s that you might come across in a boardroom, coffee house, or local pub. A happy, religious childhood where music, education, and chores were the orders of the day. Childhood sweethearts, first cars, and summer jobs. So how did Gary find himself at this end? What brought him to this seemingly lowly state?
Disappointment and Institutionalization
Where does a man’s breaking point lie? How much despair and misery is too much to deal with? Surely in this life’s journey we all encounter obstacles. Pitfalls and setbacks define us as much as our accomplishments, and in some cases much more, but at what point can the trials of life become too much of a burden to deal with?
Gary’s older sister Diane died from illness when she was 28. His brother John Boy committed suicide at the age of 24. Of his 3 siblings, only Raymond (his half-brother) remained when Gary first landed in jail at the age of 21.
“At that time, it was all about the hustle. All about having a little something to hold onto. One day I was walking down these Railroad Tracks with my two buddies. We came up on this house and my friend Sonny went up in there and he comes out with a bunch of guns and rifles.”
At the urging of his friends, Gary stashed the weapons at his home until they could find someone who might want to buy them.
“I knew my Uncle Roy was a sportsman and liked hunting, so I told him I had some rifles and if he wanted to buy them. I didn’t know that my Uncle Roy’s boss was the guy whose house we had stolen them from. My Uncle Roy put two and two together and told his boss that he knew who had stolen his guns. He picked me up at my house and told me to grab the guns, that he knew someone who wanted them. We came around that corner and all kinds of cop cars pulled us over. My uncle knew exactly what was goin’ on. He turned me right over to the police.”
Despite having no prior criminal record, Gary was denied probation and sentenced to 3 years in jail. He only served 6 months. “I didn’t learn nothing being in there, I landed right back in.” Two years later, in fact, Gary was back in jail after being caught burglarizing a pharmacy. “Even though it was a pharmacy, I wasn’t arrested stealing drugs. It was one of those stores that had nice watches and rings. That’s what I was after.” For his second offense, Gary was sentenced to 6 years, this time he would serve 4 of them.
On recounting his experience in jail: “On the inside, it’s predator and prey. All I learned in the pen was how to watch my own ass. You couldn’t ever show any weakness or you’d be torn apart… It’s just like out here on The Row (referring to Skid Row). You can’t walk around here and show any kind of weakness or these fools out here will take whatever they want from you. Sometimes you have to fight, once they know you ain’t rollin’ over, they leave you alone.”
Consider that in the 10 years between his 20th and 30th birthdays, Gary had lost his 2 blood siblings, one to disease, the other to suicide. His uncle turned him over to police and he had done two stints in the penitentiary. He also had developed a drinking habit which further alienated him from his family.
“I get a brick thrown in my face by my auntie. Hot coffee thrown in my face by my cousin. They’d tell me; ‘you ain’t no good, you this and that, you’re an alcoholic, but my uncle Jesse had me layin’ concrete with him full time and he told me, it’s either the alcohol or it’s the job. He gave me that chance.”
It was also about this time that Gary met the love of his life, Linda Turner. Despite the setbacks of jail, family loss, and betrayal, Gary found himself on his feet with a good job and the love of a good woman. A calm that prefaced the storm to come.
“I went blank, and I’ve been messed up ever since.”
Gary lived with Linda and cared for her and her two children from a previous relationship. “I told her, they’ll never want for anything.” At the time Gary was working as a concrete layer making $19 dollars an hour and working constantly. Like the blueprint his father had laid out in his youth, Gary was the consummate provider for his family. He recounts when all this changed,
“I remember I got called into work on a Sunday and I hurt myself on the job. I broke my hand and got sent to the hospital. I came home early that day and walked in on Linda and my best friend, Davey Jackson, in bed together. I went blank, and I’ve been messed up ever since. I felt like everything that I could trust was gone. That was my trigger, I’ve been messed up ever since.”
Gary was 38 years old and although he had struggled with alcohol to a certain degree up until that point, it consumed him from that moment on. His residence changed from a home in Beaumont, TX with Linda and her children to the streets of the city in which he found himself. His will to maintain a residence, job, or any level of sobriety vanished.
“My biggest problem is that I look for love in all the wrong places and I figure that why don’t nobody love me back. And that’s the part I don’t get. I’ve done everything I could for the people that I love. And it seems that it’s never enough.”
The Culture of Poverty: Life on ‘The Row’
Los Angeles’ infamous “Skid Row” is a 50 square-block area home to some 15,000 people, giving it the highest concentration of homeless in the country. It is where the forgotten of our society go to be unseen. More then half of them suffering from one or more disabilities including mental illness, substance abuse, and other health conditions. It is an area plagued by crime, drugs, and disease; and Gary calls it home.
“Dying (is) as easy as living, especially when you’re on skid row.” Gary explains flatly. “There’s not a lot of hope out here for people.”
Like so many on these streets, Gary’s main concern is feeding his addiction. One that he has managed to limit to alcohol. When asked how he is able to avoid the scourge of drugs that so many fall victim to on these streets, he begins to list the names of those he called friends who had died from overdose.
“R.L Banks, Pee-Wee Knight, Sonny Ray James, all of them, OD’d on heroin. Mama Payne’s heart exploded from smoking crack, she died in Glendale. Ellie, I called her ‘sexy eyes’ cuz she had these real pretty eyes, she was smoking meth and looked so drawn up, like a grape shriveling to a raisin. All of them, gone.”
Feeding these addictions, is a drug and alcohol trade that is surprisingly profitable. “The main drug up here on San Julian is heroin right now. From Gladys (Avenue) down, it’s crack. It’s everywhere, especially around the first of the month when those checks come in...” When asked about the “checks” he referred to Gary explained what I found to be a shocking truth about the homeless “economy”. The homeless who qualify for benefits and aid use the local missions and volunteer drop in centers as a mailing address to receive government issued checks. Checks they then turn around and cash at the local establishments.
“G.R., SSI, V.A., all those checks are mailed down here. If you come out here on the 1st of the month, you’ll see a line of about 500 people on the street for mail call. They get that check and head straight to the liquor store.” How are these checks cashed with no bank accounts and no identification? “These government checks are gold. FDIC insured, so you don’t need an ID to cash them at these liquor stores. They’re getting their money no matter what, you put your mark and buy you some liquor and maybe a little food, and get the rest in cash. Then it’s straight to the dope man. From the 1st to the 10th of the month, there’s lots of money out here. These homeless are out here stimulating the economy. These liquor stores down here, these Pakistanis and Arabs and Koreans, they won’t even look at you at the end of the month, cuz they know you got no money, but come the 1st of the month, it’s a different story.”
I turned the conversation to crime and whether Gary feared for his life living on the streets. He drew parallels to his time spent in the penitentiary, explaining that the lessons he learned there apply to his life on skid row. “It’s predator and prey out here.” He explained, “just like when you’re inside (jail).” He also went on to describe how individuals cliqued together for protection, especially when it was time to sleep. Gary and his two counterparts, or his “left” and his “right” as he called them, would sleep in shifts, like soldiers in the brush during a war.
“When I go to sleep out here, I got my right and my left. My man Cuba is my right, Baby Boy is my left… we take turns sleeping so no one can’t come up on us at night. When you’re sleeping, you’re vulnerable.”
The police that patrol Central City East (the area in Los Angeles where Skid Row is located) are fighting a losing battle on a daily basis. With more then 10,000 transients roaming The Row, most of them focused on getting money to feed their addictions, the choices for law enforcement are few. The officers in this area find themselves corralling the homeless more then anything, making sure they don’t leave their designated areas and drive down the value of the surrounding real estate. The disparity of wealth is striking. A little more then a mile away, development is well under way on the $1 Billion Dollar Los Angeles Sports and Entertainment District, (also popularly called Times Square West, or L.A. Live). All the while the problems on the row persist, the police powerless to make any difference here, mainly because locking up these individuals does little to address their very real medical problems. A fact that is not lost on Gary:
“The majority of people that get out of jail, they come down here, they see somebody, they know somebody. They’re not gonna give them a hug and a kiss, they’re gonna give them a hit… When they get out of jail, they’re not gonna run to mama’s house, they’re gonna run to The Row and get what they want.”
Basic Human Dignity
The concept of basic human dignity, that the intrinsic value of a man is something that is possessed by the least of us and cannot be bought, sold, or more importantly, lost under any circumstances seems forgotten here on The Row. As I made the walk up San Julain Street to the Volunteer Drop In Center to conduct my interview, I passed hundreds of homeless. So many of them in wheelchairs, others clearly struggling with mental health issues. Still others, however, like Gary were lucid and articulate. Gary reads the newspaper and has opinions on everything from sports to religion to politics. During our conversation he referenced current events like the Virginia Tech shootings and the Immigration reform debate that is polarizing our populace. He also drew salient parallels to the state of affairs on The Row and the tragedy that resulted from Hurricane Katrina.
“It’s gonna take a martyr. It’s gonna take something like what happened in New Orleans to happen here on The Row for people to pay attention. People are sick out here and it’s going to take a lot of them dying at once to bring attention to the problems here with the MHMR (Mental Health Mental Retardation) and homeless.”
President John F. Kennedy was once quoted as saying, “I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose…” A mantra that so clearly is lost here on these streets. So many of our forgotten and neglected are here, hiding in plain sight, caught in a vicious cycle of institutionalization and addiction. They don’t have the resources to improve their condition or the self-esteem or pride to demand change. Meanwhile, the people of this city hurry about their business. Many working, living, dining and drinking mere blocks from the largest homeless population in the country.
The first question that I wrote down in preparing for this interview was one of the last I asked. What would make things better here on The Row? Gary didn’t hesitate a second in offering his answer, but it had little to do with government funding or access to resources.
“More people coming down here, stopping and not looking at you like you’re nobody, because you are somebody. More people coming down here and talking to the people that are here. That would make things better. There are very sick people out here, it makes you feel so much better when someone stops and treats you with respect.”
Some two and a half hours after we had started our interview, I looked into Gary’s soulful blue-grey eyes with a new found respect. I realized that his sharing his story allowed me to see the state of affairs here through those remarkable eyes and through the eyes of the countless homeless who call ‘The Row’ home. And from their perspective, things here are bleak.
“As long as you’re on The Row, things don’t change. The minuses are adding up for me out here. Like I said, dyin’ is as easy as livin’, especially when you’re on The Row.”
