The Night and the Rain

I was out late one night a few months back driving around in the rain, looking for whatever I could find. Even as a kid I wandered at night a lot, prowling through the mysteries that darkness conceals. I don’t know why exactly. My stepdad called it looking for wolves.

On this particular evening I stopped for coffee at a Denny’s in the Valley, because 24-hour places are where the night people gather, and they’re a breed apart. As I sipped hot coffee I overheard a conversation between a woman who had just wandered in and an old guy at the counter.

I don’t know if she was a hooker or just a homeless person working the man for a place to flop. At some point she brought out a crumpled piece of paper from a pocket and began reading from it. As I listened I realized she was reading him poetry she’d written.

The poem was about the night and the rain, and if it didn’t scan all that well it still burned with desperation, the way good poetry should. The man hardly even looked up as she read, more interested in his sausage and eggs than in her words and rhythms. Pretty soon she folded up her poem and left.

I was thinking about her the other day as I talked with a man who writes poetry for an L.A. newspaper called the Homeless Writer’s Journal. His poems, like the woman’s, are dark with night and rain, shaping their imagery in shadows that fall across the face of the moon.

*

He calls himself Victor and writes about “the cardboard community,” as “Rows of hard smokers/sick, twitching, enthralled/Lost children set free/from a searing stockade/with a need to inject to escape this charade. . . . “ He sees “Sad eyes shift glowing/some poison inhaled/A brief twisted dance/the rush of the know/That part of this high that brought us so low. . . .”

Victor has been on the streets off and on for about 10 years all over California, curling up in doorways or in the stairwells of parking garages. He works occasionally and makes enough for a hotel room somewhere, using whatever money he has left to ride buses around town. That’s where he writes his poetry.

“I guess,” he says in a voice that’s almost a mumble, “I need movement to create. I need to ride.”

He’s a 36-year-old black man who came west out of Florida to work in film production. He went to a trade school for awhile, but ran out of money and eventually wound up homeless.

Now he’s on the Westside undergoing rehabilitation to get back into the mainstream. It’s a story not unlike those told a thousand times over by the street people. They never dreamed they’d be the way they are and can’t explain how it happened. One night they have a room and a bed, the next night nothing.

What separates Victor from most of the rest of them is that he’s able to shape his world in words that create pictures, wandering through the endless seasons for “a sad place to rest.” He sees life in a box as a metaphor for survival.

His poetry was judged good enough to win a semester’s study in writing at USC. Recently he read his work at Pepperdine University.

*

Victor had a nervous breakdown not too many years ago. “I snapped a rocket somewhere along the way,” he says, hinting that maybe it was because of the marijuana he was smoking back then. He doesn’t do that anymore.

As he talks he draws back into himself to a place so remote that he’s hard to reach. But even in that world of rain and darkness, he sees hope. “I want to go back to school someday,” he says in an oddly offhanded manner, as though seeking affirmation of his goals. “I want a job and I want a wife. But I’m not all that optimistic anymore.”

Optimism is a brief flash of light in the world occupied by those who sleep on the street. They see it as tiny dreams and puffs of smoke, as the remembered bells of a church and as worlds changed to include them in.

Unlike Victor, so many of those in his cardboard community are content to spend the remainder of their lives there, clinging to a skewed belief that there is “freedom” in eating out of dumpsters.

One of them, a tall, lean, suburban-raised homeless man, sees redemption in “living good” and dignity in never breaking the law. What he sees when he eats from dumpsters is not the degradation of living on garbage but the tragedy of food wasted while so many hunger.

Their lives for the most part are darkened by the night and the rain that the woman in Denny’s knew about. Victor knows about it too, and even if he never makes it off the street, we’ll at least learn more about the plight of those without homes through the rich, dark charity of his poetry.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com