An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  Around four o’clock, Leroy makes an entrance with the envelopes. “Darnell!” he booms. “Ruth! Paul!” The checks, a monthly disability stipend, are for six hundred and thirty-two dollars, and almost everybody gets one. To qualify for S.S.I., you must be unable to hold a job, and you must have a doctor who’ll attest to the severity of your impairment. It is important, too, to have been hospitalized at least once; the average here is five times. S.S.I. may seem to be an uncomplicated subsidy, but it isn’t. Once your name goes on the roll, you’ve admitted your failure to live independently and acquired another badge that marks you as crazy.

  It can be as difficult to get off S.S.I. as it is to get on. One month in a licensed California board-and-care costs a state-set fee of five hundred and fifty-eight dollars, so after Rodrigo pays the Loopers he’ll have seventy-four dollars to last him until his next check. He puts on his colorless coat and heads for the corner market, where he has to settle a thirteen-dollar tab for highly priced toiletries and cans of soda. Ruth tells me she’s going to treat herself to sushi, and Paul—a plump, brilliant New Yorker with the glowing eyes of a Talmudic scholar—says he’s going to a Chinese restaurant for a four-course meal.

  I ask Anatole if he has any plans to celebrate, but he says he doubts it—he’s a bit tired. On other paydays, he has eaten lobster at Fisherman’s Wharf, had a half-dozen pizzas delivered to the Chateau, or gone on long taxi rides to no particular destination—an emperor, briefly, of all he surveys.

  * * *

  Every weekday morning after breakfast, the Loopers, who are seldom idle, drive their old station wagon to Eddy Street, in the Tenderloin, where they run a hundred-and fifty-nine-room residential hotel called the Cadillac. On a windy March day, I join them in their office—a cluttered room behind the front desk furnished with antiques Kathy has reclaimed from the hotel basement. The pieces are all in California Mission style and date from the turn of the century, when the Cadillac had a staff of thirty maids and catered to the elite. Its tenants now are people on welfare, alcoholics drying out, elderly pensioners, ex-cons, and a handful of ambulatory mental patients whose doctors have certified that they are not likely to commit suicide or arson. When I walk in, Kathy is doing some bookkeeping and Leroy is talking on the phone.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he says, holding the receiver a few inches from his ear. “Well, we do thank you for the offer, but we just can’t use two hundred hamburgers for the banquet. We got this cooking school in North Beach, they’re going to fix us a nice, sit-down dinner …. I understand that. It’s very generous of you.” Raising his eyes toward the heavens, Leroy whispers to us, “Man wants me to serve his burgers at a banquet Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s coming to. You feed a politician franchise food, she’ll never do you any favors.”

  The Cadillac is Leroy’s power base. He’s a boss in the district, and he has an assortment of titles—chairman of the Tenderloin Crime Abatement Committee, chairman of San Francisco Alive’s Tenderloin Cleanup Committee, and chairman of the Tenderloin Community Fund. I asked him once about the last title, and he laughed, and said, “The developers who build down here have to contribute to our community programs, and I get to hand that money out.” When Leroy looks out a hotel window, he doesn’t always register the details of Eddy Street. Instead, he sees the same archetypal inner-city strip he roamed as a boy. Same pitfalls, same temptations.

  Leroy’s activities in the Tenderloin—all voluntary—are a logical extension of the kind of public-service work he began back in Harlem. A local philanthropist who knew about the work offered to sell the Cadillac to Reality House West on a no-money-down basis in 1977, as a private venture in urban renewal, and after Leroy discussed the offer with Kathy he closed the deal with a handshake and threw himself into a campaign to revive the place. He had it cleaned, painted, redecorated, and fumigated, killing off several generations of roaches. The hotel is now a handsome beige monument in a landscape of decay, and its rooms, which rent for about two hundred dollars a month, are safe and secure.

  Buying the Cadillac gave the Loopers some economic leverage, and Kathy was glad about this, since she was bored with the suburbs and wanted to move to a more spacious house in town. So she began shopping around in San Francisco and soon discovered that everything on the market was either too small or too cute or too ugly. Then one night in 1977, by chance, she drove home through the Mission—a mostly Hispanic district then, where, in those days, property was still affordable—and saw a ramshackle Victorian mansion that appealed to her immensely. A superstitious person, she felt that it was destined to be hers, and in the morning she learned from a realtor that the place was indeed for sale.

  The asking price was a lofty three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, but in ritzier areas that bought you only a gingerbread shoebox; and there was also a low-interest assumable loan available. At the same time, the mansion had problems, both structural and ethical. The foundation was shot, termites had eaten away many acres of wood, and the owner housed about a dozen boarders, all chronic mental patients, who would have to be evicted before anybody could take possession. This owner, an elderly woman, apparently had a romantic turn of mind. Imagining that her house bore a resemblance to the stately ones in Bordeaux, she had named it Chateau Laura.

  In light of the problems, Kathy considered her options. A trip to the library taught her that since the nineteen-sixties, when anti-psychotic drugs were first widely prescribed, and patients—supposedly more tractable, and more capable of living independently—were released from hospitals into the community, board-and-care homes like the Chateau had become the principal long-term shelters for people with chronic mental illness. In California, as in New York, beds in public hospitals were so scarce that you had to be a 5150—the police code for someone who is dangerous to himself or others—just to get one. Although Kathy knew that schizophrenics could be difficult to handle, she began to wonder if perhaps she and Leroy should keep the boarders. (An owner of a home can earn a profit, but to do so honestly, without scrimping, is hard. Since 1977, forty-one homes in the city have closed, partly because of rising taxes and insurance rates.) After all, they had lots of experience with junkies, who were not exactly pussycats; and, besides, they could use the extra cash to meet their monthly mortgage payments.

  The Loopers took over the mansion in 1978 and decided to rename it for one of their children. Chateau Camlo? Chateau Malik? No—Chateau Agape. “We had no idea what we were getting into!” Leroy cries as he paces around the office.

  “No idea!” Kathy may be half his size, but she matches him in volume. “You know what? The Department of Public Works had condemned that house in 1952, and we had to correct all the violations. There were buckets on every floor to catch the rain, and we had to rewire and replumb. We sealed off part of the basement, because of the termites. What else? Oh, yeah. Community Care Licensing, over in Emeryville. They didn’t want to give us a board-and-care license. They made us install all these special features, like an intercom. You know how often we use it? Never. Plus they were concerned about Leroy’s background.”

  “My ‘background,’” Leroy mutters, in disdain.

  “And they were worried about our kids, what they should or shouldn’t be exposed to. ‘Hey, man!’ I told them.” Kathy jabs a thumb into her chest. “‘I’m their mother. I make those decisions!’ So they backed down on that issue. Then the older boys, they went on strike. They didn’t want to move. They were happy in the suburbs, living out there like little Yuppies.

  “Finally, they gave in, but they hated the Chateau at first. It embarrassed them—it was so old. They called it the Mystery House.”

  “You can’t blame ’em,” Leroy says. “Some of our neighbors thought the house was haunted. Paperboy, he was afraid to come around. It took us six months to get a paper delivered.”

  “Anyhow, once we had our license we had to start coping with our boarders,” Kathy says. “And we were not ready for it. We didn’t know a thing about mental illness.”<
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  Leroy shakes his head in amazement. “We had some strange people in there. This one fellow, he’d had about half of a transgender operation, and he didn’t have enough money for the other half. He had a big old beard, and he’d put on lipstick and eye shadow and sit around in a silk dress that was falling off him. A couple of other people, they drank all the time. We brought in a doctor, he looked ’em over and said, ‘Hell, they’re so sick they might as well be drunk.’

  “Because that’s how it is in some board-and-cares, you understand? Only, we didn’t know it then. We were honestly shocked. We just felt so sorry for everybody—and the sorrier we felt, the worse they got. I mean, we had people decompensating all over the place! Every five minutes or so, we were phoning the police. Somebody was always riding off to the hospital in an ambulance. You know what that costs? A bed in psych emergency? About six hundred dollars a night and taxpayers get stuck with the tab.

  “It’s criminal, really. Some schizophrenics, they hate to bother with their toenails and we had a podiatrist who’d come by, spend a minute clipping, and send these huge bills to Medi-Cal. Then, you’ve got your psychiatrists therapizing and formulating, and half the time they tell you something different from what you’ve seen with your own eyes. Things were getting out of control! We had to do something, so we quit feeling sorry for everybody and tried to be crystal clear about who we were and what our purpose was. And you know what? When we began to change, the house began to change.”

  * * *

  There’s a big party at the Chateau. The Loopers are hosting a soiree for Art Agnos, a Democratic assemblyman who has a good record on mental-health issues and is running for mayor, hoping to succeed Dianne Feinstein. Kathy has laid out a homemade buffet of dolmas and spanakopita, and scads of social workers, politicians, and mental-health professionals—perhaps two hundred of them—are piling food on paper plates and filling cups with fruity punch. Leroy is in his element, circling the crowd, clapping backs, and gathering in anybody who comes within fifteen feet of him—dipping, with his long arms, into a swarming sea.

  “Hello, Reverend!” he shouts to a friend, a Baptist minister.

  “Well, hello, Leroy!”

  “Agnos for Mayor, hear?”

  “All right, then.”

  I watch Ruth walk by, leading some guests on a tour of the upstairs rooms. She has been doing this all evening, and she’s exhausted, dragging from the effort of fielding so many questions. Why do people talk so much? Other residents are pinning name tags on lapels, or pretending to be invisible and making one stab after another at the food. Off in a corner, Anatole sits by himself, looking glum. He has shaved for the occasion, though not very skillfully, and I can’t help feeling that he wishes he could be off in an apartment of his own somewhere. But when he last lived alone, in a seedy downtown dive, he pretended to be an F.B.I. man to fend off the sharks who prey on the mentally ill; and that was worse, he claims, than giving up his privacy.

  On my way to the buffet, I stop and ask him what he thinks of the candidate.

  “Oh, Agnos has some fine ideas!” he exclaims. And then he adds with no intent to be satiric, “Course, I’ve heard a lot of them before.”

  I take some cheese and bread from the table, and then join Paul by the kitchen counter. He is unusually animated, and I remark on this. “It’s because I feel safe in crowds,” he confides, leaning closer and joking about his waistline. He has a soft, round, slope-shouldered body. The only child of Polish Jews, survivors of a concentration camp, he graduated near the top of his class at Bronx Science in New York—this was about twenty years ago—and was set to attend college, but he swallowed a bottleful of aspirin that summer and landed in Bellevue instead. Awkward in public and terrified in private, he didn’t think he was capable of transforming himself into the person everyone imagined he could be.

  Once, Paul told me about a hiking trip he’d made to the Housatonic River when he was in his early twenties and, as he put it, “still struggling to create an identity.” He described the trees and the water, the mild air and the green earth, all in crystalline detail, and there emerged out of his description a portrait of the self he was craving—easygoing, at one with nature, free. But when he was home again he found everything the same, and fell victim to obsessions, including an irrepressible attachment to anything Irish. I asked if he ever heard voices, like Duane. No, he said, but painful electric currents would sometimes shoot through him, as if he were being poked with a cattle prod.

  This past Sunday, at the weekly house meeting, Paul was a hero. While everybody was sitting in the dining room and listening to a litany of ordinary grievances (a broken door lock, a faucet in need of fixing), a distraught woman of middle age, Bea, rose to address us. She was as haughty as a Back Bay matron and could have been speaking from a rostrum in the sky. Swaying from side to side, almost dancing, she said, “I am sorry to have to mention this, but people here have been stealing from me since last November.”

  Anthony Smith, the assistant house manager, remained calm. A quiet, intelligent black man, as large in most dimensions as Leroy, he is an artist in his free time, and works in many mediums. “What have you lost?” he asked.

  “I don’t care to discuss specifics.”

  “Have you reported the thefts to the Loopers?”

  Bea sways. “That has nothing to do with it.”

  A ripple went through the room, a wave of discomfort. Bea’s paranoia, however unjustified, reached out and touched the paranoia latent in everyone else. Residents were squirming in their chairs, but then Paul stood up to respond. His attitude was uncritical, even supportive. He referred to his own “drab, acquisitive personality” and admitted that he sometimes became so fond of his possessions that he panicked if he couldn’t find something right away. Then, with conciliatory humor, he reminded Bea that those at the Chateau were inclined to be—well, suspicious, and that this suspicion had to be guarded against.

  He was so tactful that his words seemed to put the house back in order, restoring a subtle balance, along with clarity. Defused, Bea quit swaying, but she did not offer an apology. She has since left to live for free in a Catholic Charities shelter. I saw her on Mission Street just recently, barefoot, chattering to herself.

  The women at the Chateau, nine of them, have a tougher time with schizophrenia than the men, primarily because their condition is more severe. In general, only the most difficult female patients wind up in board-and-cares; as a rule, a family will go a long way to protect and harbor a daughter, a sister, or a mother before admitting defeat. The women are less manageable, more prone to mood swings and wild displays of emotion. They may experience their isolation more acutely, for they seem to have a greater longing to connect with what’s outside them. Only one man at the house has ever lived with a woman, but a number of the women have been married, or still are, and a few have children. Often the younger women give off a sharp charge of sexual energy, but it dissipates fast, like an idea that can’t be held on to.

  By eight o’clock, the party is concluding. The last guests depart, carrying off sandwiches and pastries, and through a debris of napkins and crushed crepe-paper streamers move two Looper kids, Camlo and Agape, helping their mother clean up.

  Camlo, who is ten now, has a round, expressive face and—like his sister—skin the color of cafe au lait. If it bothers him to live at the Chateau, he doesn’t show it. He frequently searches out Anatole for a game of Scrabble, just as Malik and Esan used to do when they were his age. He is interested in space travel, and dreams of being an astronaut, while Agape, at fifteen, thinks she may want to be a doctor, maybe even a psychiatrist. She is a scholarship student at University High School, long-legged, enthusiastic, and a basketball star. To grow up in an ordinary house, she said to me once, would be merely ordinary.

  * * *

  Among the first changes the Loopers made in 1978 when they felt the Chateau slipping out of control was to draw a sharp line between their lives and the lives of the
ir boarders. From the start, they have occupied a big, high-ceilinged room, like a grand Victorian parlor, at the back of the house, down a hallway from the kitchen, and at first people kept dropping in at odd hours to report, for instance, that there was arsenic in the city’s water supply. “From now on, we’re only here if it’s real,” Leroy told the residents, laying down the law to preserve his own sanity, and this came as a shock to everyone, because, as clients of the mental-health system, they were used to being treated like irresponsible adolescents. The suggestion that they were mature enough to respect the Loopers’ privacy and also to distinguish between fact and fiction granted them a humanity they were often denied.

  Then, the Loopers posted a strict set of house rules. No alcohol or street drugs would be allowed on the premises, and there would be no more fistfights or shoving matches to resolve disputes. Anyone who wanted to smoke had to do it downstairs or out in the garden, because Kathy was tired of worrying about the Chateau burning to the ground. At eleven o’clock every night, Leroy locked the front door, and anyone who stayed out later than that without permission was welcome to sleep in the bushes. The Loopers also became more selective about accepting referrals, refusing to admit anybody who had a history of substance abuse. (On the streets, left to their own devices, mental patients often fall into the trap of medicating themselves with anything that’s handy.) The message in all this was clear: schizophrenia is an illness, not an excuse for bad behavior.

  For whatever reason, the residents seemed to improve. They were not so listless, and began to take pride in how they looked. But it troubled Leroy and Kathy that they still passed their days in limbo, lounging around and staring into space. So they insisted, despite complaints, that everybody attend a day-treatment center during the week. These centers are sociable places, offering classes in such things as music and handicrafts, along with some counselling; and though they don’t really prepare a client to live independently, they do force people to interact, to speak and be conscious—an accomplishment if you’ve been doing nothing but smoking Camels and watching “Wheel of Fortune” for the last three years.