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Giorgio
(Continued from page 1) he got that cessation of benefits letter and checks stopped coming. As usual, his story is punctuated with asides, sometimes tirades, about the cost of a Korean car parked nearby, about a stoned or drunk tattooed guy who sat on his bus bench and bothered him. He veers to a tale about his restaurant days when Elizabeth Taylor sat at the bar at noon and was drunk by 2 p.m., about unisex hair salons, about how smells affect people. “Some people can’t stand the smell of cigarettes … some can’t stand the smell of dog food or cat poo.” Giorgio believes he cannot get shelter until he gets his money. That isn’t technically true, but steps to getting housed are confusing, and there are more people in need than there are available beds. Just do a Google search “How does a homeless person
Larchmont Chronicle
SEPTEMBER 2021
SECTION ONE
find housing in Los Angeles,” and dozens of governmental and nonprofit agencies pop up. Giorgio has neither a computer nor a phone, so navigating these services is difficult. Help is out there In fact, numerous people who know Giorgio from the Boulevard or have observed him on his daiGIORGIO pushes his cart up Larchmont ly walks around the wearing his signature knit beanie. neighborhood want to help him and have con- proached about housing he tacted friends at agencies that repeats his mantra, “I need my work in this arena. The People money! Money first! … When Concern, a group of profes- I get my check we can talk sionals and volunteers whose about [housing].” He pauses, mission it is to end homeless- then continues, “Something ness, has apparently taken up happened to me, nobody cares the Giorgio cause and has tried about it. Nobody’s concerned to reach out to him. if I have money in my pocket Out of respect for client or not. That I have difficulty privacy, The People Concern with my family, with the govdoesn’t discuss specifics of ernment for unemployment their work, but when I ask benefits, all things like that. Giorgio whether he’s been ap- They don’t care.”
They do care, it turns out, but it isn’t easy to turn sympathy into success. “It takes time to build up the trust of people to keep them going toward housing,” observes The Rev. Betsy Anderson, a lifelong local resident who is an Episcopal priest with a pastoral ministry at Skid Row Boulevard through the Church of the Nazarene outreach center. “Street people are survivors. They know how to protect their privacy. They don’t want to follow someone else’s rules.” Rev. Anderson first met Giorgio when they were neighbors; she in a home on Lorraine Boulevard and he on a bus bench at the corner, on Third Street. She worried about him. Rev. Anderson is one of the people who sought help for Giorgio. She once asked if he
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wanted to be housed, and he told her that he did, so she called homeless advocate Marilyn Wells, whose six-month column “The NIMBY Diaries” appeared in the Larchmont Chronicle this spring, and who co-founded Stories from the Frontline. Wells had heard about Giorgio from numerous sources and so spread the word. Do-gooders “Giorgio is very savvy about do-gooders,” Rev. Anderson cautions. “… People who want to help him but don’t have the resources to help.” Most Angelenos see evidence of our city’s failure on homelessness every day: adults cocooned in blankets in front of pandemic-closed stores or standing with cardboard signs asking for help. We see tent cities in alleys, in front of abandoned warehouses, clustered at the ends of our blocks. The problem seems unsolvable and too often we just walk by. There’s something about Giorgio, however, with his knit beanie and flushed cheeks, with his endless opinions and (mostly) friendly demeanor, that calls to people. While speaking with Giorgio one day, a steady stream of passersby helped him in little ways. “Do you want coffee?” one man asked on his way into Peet’s. “Yes! With cream and extra sugar!” Giorgio answered. “Do you want this breakfast taco?” someone else asks. “Thank you, I’ll take it!” The shopping cart “I gotta change shopping carts,” Giorgio announces one morning. “It’s broken. I cannot put a lot of things in there.” The cart appears to be held together with bungee cords, and the frame is bent. A few weeks prior, an out-of-control car careened across Beverly Boulevard onto the sidewalk and smacked into his cart, spilling books, papers, clothing, blankets and cigarettes everywhere and breaking his only piece of property. Giorgio recounts, “It was about 1:30 [in the morning].” He lost quite a few of his possessions in the crash, but he was alright. “If I hadn’t stood up from the bench [where he sleeps], he would have hit me. He’s lucky, too. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know who it was. Man, woman, someone under the influence of drugs or alcohol.” Giorgio wondered if the driver would have been hurt if the car hadn’t hit the cart and instead bounced into oncoming traffic. “Nothing happened to him when he hit the shopping cart.” That leaves Giorgio with a dilemma, finding another shopping cart. He won’t just take one from Pavilion’s. “Sometimes you find a shopping cart in an alley,” he explains. “Last time I gave $10 to a homeless guy under a bridge. He had about two or three. One was empty. I said, ‘I’ll give you $10 (Please turn to page 31)
