The View From a Doorway

I stood in the doorway of a store during the storms we were having and watched the rain fall through the gloom.

A few moments earlier I had been out in it wearing only jeans, sneakers and a light jacket, and by the time I ducked into the doorway I was pretty wet.

I dislike being drenched and cold, but the glory of my position in life is that I know I’m never very far from being warm and dry.

I have a home, I have more clothes than I can wear, and I have money to buy additional clothes if I’m wet and away from home.

My moment in the doorway was not accidental. I had gone there for a purpose, to imagine myself in the rain with no place to go but a temporary shelter, which is the condition of about 80,000 people in L.A. County.

I wanted to be in a frame of mind to write about them, to feel some of their pain, even though I knew that was really impossible. The best I could do was to see what they saw, though views are filtered through emotions.

What my first plan had been was to rent a wheelchair and roll down the street in the rain, but that was too blatantly theatrical. I let my beard grow and didn’t get my hair cut so I could play the part.

It was a gimmick I used years ago to write about the wheelchair people. We did a lot of that once, posing as someone we weren’t in order to get a feel for what-it-was-like. All we got were stories that dripped with false tears and a sense of guilt over using another’s pain for our own purposes.

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What motivated my desire to write about the homeless from the position of that doorway was a woman named Gerri Willinger. You’ve probably seen her around Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade. She’s 48, has short, graying hair, a kind of wry smile and is in a wheelchair. When I met her, she was homeless.

If you tried at all to hold a conversation with her, you found she was almost impossible to understand. Her speech is badly slurred, and the tendency is to dismiss her as a drunk or a druggie.

A lot of homeless people are just that, and others suffer from mental imbalances so severe that they’re almost dysfunctional. They’re on the street because the state ended its policy of “warehousing” some years ago and the ones we call crazies fled like frightened children into the crowds.

Willinger isn’t like that. She was pretty much raised by a grandfather she calls an anarchist and studied cultural anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. The old man was a tough, stubborn Hungarian who looked like Ronald Coleman and loved to explore new places.

“He was like a father to me,” Willinger said one day as I pushed her around town in her wheelchair. “When he died, my mother wanted to give away his wolfhounds because she was afraid they’d bite my sister Bobbi. I said why not give Bobbi away instead?”

They came to L.A. about 25 years ago from Milwaukee looking for work and a new life, but her mother died and Willinger was in a car accident and everything fell apart.

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Her troubles actually predate that. As a child, she was given radiation treatment to shrink her tonsils and it created an autoimmune disease no one has been able to figure out. Later, she suffered from encephalitis.

The auto accident occurred in 1986 and left her in a coma for three days with a ruptured aorta and damaged liver. Poor medical treatment, she says, caused problems with her speech and her ability to walk.

Pushed around by a system that failed her, Willinger ended up on the street about two years ago, living in doorways, fighting off rape attempts, stewing over the events that had put her there.

“I do not want to exist to ease your conscience,” she once wrote in a poem. “How often do you wonder what I looked like when I was?”

I met her the first time when she was cited by the Santa Monica police for blocking a sidewalk and, put off by her slurred speech, I dismissed her as a drunk. Later, the brilliant satirist-writer-editor Paul Krassner set me straight, and I sought her out.

He sent me another poem she wrote: “I used to be able to write poems,/but poetry, I see, is not written./It comes from an inside that/I do not possess anymore.”

The last I heard, Willinger had saved up enough state disability money to get her own place. I’m glad she’s off the street, but she’ll always somehow epitomize those who remain there.

I stood in the doorway a long time watching the melancholy rain, and then went home, dried myself, changed clothes and sat by a roaring fire, thinking about Gerri and the people in the storm.

Al Martinez can be reached online at [email protected].