Disturbed Ground (3 page)

As peculiar as Bert was, Judy found his eccentricities endearing and his vulnerability disarming. Her relationship with him deepened over the summer. And when she decided to undertake a video project on homeless persons, she asked Bert if he would mind doing an interview.

Rumpled, dirty, with his large belly protruding from beneath a plaid shirt, Bert wasn't the most photogenic subject, but he agreed. Judy hoisted her video-camera and Bert followed her to a side of the building, where they started taping. But it was a false start: It was getting late, and after just a few questions they agreed to resume the next day.

When Judy arrived at Detox the next morning, she was stunned by Bert's transformation: He was clean, his hair was nicely combed, and he was wearing a neat khaki shirt. Judy realized that it was easy to underestimate someone like Bert.

During the interview, she learned a bit more about her puzzling friend. When she asked whether he would rather live in the city or in the country, Bert said he preferred the city—a trivial exchange that only later gained significance.

When Bert murmured that he had "no place to live," Judy asked, "Which is better, Detox or a boarding home?"

"Boarding home," he replied.

"If we could find you one, would you rather live in a boarding home?"

"Yeah."

The interview was marred by Bert's nearly unintelligible mumbling, but it heightened Judy's commitment to helping him. In a way, Judy made herself Bert's private guardian. As one observer put it, Judy not only befriended Bert, "she adopted him."

With her wide smile and graying, sandy-blond hair, Judy Moise had the sunny good looks of a plump, middle-aged Doris Day; she looked like she'd be more at home at a school board meeting than on the front lines in the losing battle against homelessness. And she hadn't arrived at this job through carefully planned career goals, nor through some pious calling. It was rather a way to purge her personal demons, for behind those lively eyes lay a private pool of pain.

Divorced in 1978, self-described as having been "privileged" and "somewhat unrealistic," Judy had at first felt liberated by the fresh opportunities facing her after eighteen years as a housewife. With her children nearly grown, she felt her life accelerating toward new horizons. She was caught utterly off-balance when, just six months later, schizophrenia hit her family with double punches. First her twenty-seven-year-old stepson, who'd been depressed since college and had complained of hearing voices, committed suicide. Two weeks later, her seventeen-year-old son, Todd, had a psychotic break, succumbing to delusions Judy could neither understand nor penetrate.

Her first clear impulse was to get Todd into the best private hospital she could find. But even with her ex-husband's help, she could scarcely stretch her income to cover the bills. Working first in a sandwich shop, then selling hearing aids, she struggled to maintain a modest home for herself and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Britt. And she worried constantly that Britt was getting shortchanged, her ordinary emotional needs eclipsed by her brother's extraordinary ones.

Meanwhile, Judy's visits to Todd's hospital left her increasingly disturbed over his treatment. After a year, he seemed to be getting
worse, not better. She took him out of the hospital, determined to find better treatment within the mental health services offered in Sacramento, but was again slapped by reality. Her son ended up housed in "sleazy hotels"—a big step down from his upper-middle-class youth. When Judy complained, she was informed that this was unfortunately the only placement available.

Unconvinced, Judy clung to the belief that if she could only find the
right agency, the right administrator, the right doctor, the right medica
tion, she could turn things around and help Todd recover. “There's got to be something out there that can help my son,” she insisted.

She spent hours in the library poring over all she could find on schizophrenia and its treatments. She sent letters, made phone calls, nagged anyone she thought could help. But she met mostly with indifference, even hostility. Just trying to get her son's medication changed was tougher than getting a credit card company to admit a billing error. Apparently, mothers weren't supposed to take such an active interest in their children's treatment.

Finally, Judy realized there was nothing left but to relent, stop fighting, and enter the jaws of the beast. She joined volunteer groups, such as the California Alliance of Mental Illness (CAMI)
,
a support group for families of the mentally ill, and the California Planning Council of Mental Health. Only then did she understand that she wasn't fighting an irrational, malevolent system, but rather one crippled by insufficient funds and conflicting policies.

At the same time, Judy was being drawn into her son's friends' problems. One might ask her to help him find a better doctor, another to file a complaint with a caseworker. Applying herself with characteristic energy, she became an advocate without meaning to. She fell into it. It suited her.

Now sensitized to the problems of the mentally ill, Judy was troubled to see so many unkempt people walking the streets, muttering to themselves. "These people clearly can't cope," she mused, "but they're not getting any help."

It seemed obvious to Judy that rather than waiting for such bewildered souls to locate their offices, mental health workers ought to go directly to the streets. So, when Judy heard that the Volunteers of America was opening two positions for "street counselors" who would do exactly that, she snapped up an application. Never mind that she was only a paraprofessional, not a credentialed social worker; that's what they were looking for.

By May 1986, Judy Moise was working with a partner, driving around in a VOA van, and, as she put it, "rescuing" people. Spying a disheveled woman on a bench surrounded by bags of belongings, Judy might plop down beside her and offer assistance. Or the pager might send the VOA team to intercept a man who was ranting on a street comer so they could try to persuade him to come in for assessment and services.

Driving such people to hospitals, shelters, or social service agencies, Judy and her partner often had to roll down the van's windows, even on cold days, to dilute the stench of urine-soaked clothes and unwashed humanity.

The job was poorly paid and emotionally demanding, but Judy didn't moan about how hard it was. Instead, she concentrated on the rewards of the job. "I have a success story every week," she declared. "Yesterday, I found two missing people."

Few things pleased her more than seeing people she had helped off the streets living better lives: in apartments, cleaned up, taking better care of themselves. With the help of proper medication, they often regained clarity, judgment, and self-esteem.

And now she was determined to help Bert Montoya.

While Judy didn't usually place people—instead serving as an intermediary, getting unbalanced people off the street and into the care of other social workers who then found homes—her boss had given her permission recently to do "occasional placement" in just this sort of case.

One day, Judy learned from a Detox staffer that Bert had briefly lived in a boardinghouse called Altos House. She was elated; this meant Bert's Social Security number had to be on record! She dashed to the boardinghouse, and sure enough, the proprietor's books yielded a number. But when she took it up with the Social Security Administration, it didn't check out. It wasn't Bert's.

Help came in the fall of 1986, when Beth Valentine joined Judy at the Volunteers of America. Judy had known Beth for years: She was her best friend's daughter, and Judy had watched Beth grow from a child of promise to a woman of character. Now a tenacious thirty-year-old, Beth's more measured, no-nonsense style was a nice complement to Judy's effervescence. Soon Judy and Beth were working together full-time, helping some two hundred people a month.

Best of all, Beth shared Judy's enthusiasm for helping Bert. But trying to locate some record of him was like cracking open nutshells and finding nothing inside. Judy and Beth contacted an ever-
lengthening list of people, querying some thirty agencies and individuals.
Ultimately, they were rewarded with not one, but
two
Social Security numbers attributed to Bert. Neither turned out to be valid.

Having exhausted all other options, the VOA co-workers reluctantly took Bert to the Immigration Office. This was a calculated risk. Though originally from Costa Rica, Bert insisted that he was a U.S. citizen. Still, he had no proof of this, and contacting Immigration could easily backfire: If Bert proved to be here illegally, he could be deported. But it seemed their only option.

At the Immigration Office, Judy and Beth were told that Bert couldn't be issued an ID without fingerprints, so they should take him to the Department of Motor Vehicles to be fingerprinted. But the DMV refused to take Bert's fingerprints without official identification.

Catch 22.

Instead of gnashing their teeth and slamming doors when they hit a roadblock, Judy and Beth tried another approach. They prayed. They stopped at the St. Francis Assisi Catholic Church, a grand old sanctuary that offered the perfect place to kneel and pray. Parting at the doorway, each made her private rounds—lighting candles, gazing up at the luminous, stained-glass images—ending up at the foot of a beautiful, gilt-edged rendering of Our Lady of Guadalupe. The Dark Madonna. The patron saint of the downtrodden.

They'd long felt that their prayers for Bert were best directed to Our Lady, and her image was always with them, even in the van. When pressed for time, they sometimes prayed on the go, sending their prayers rolling up from the city streets. After so many months of frustrating dead ends, any smidgen of divine favor could only help.

"Beth and I always prayed," Judy reflected, "and some door always opened."

In May 1987 came a turning point. Judy had tried and failed to compile a comprehensive history of Bert. Now, at an office specializing in advocacy services for Hispanics (called, appropriately, Central Guadalupe), a woman interviewed Bert in Spanish. For the first time, they learned that Bert's name wasn't Alberto, but Alvaro Jose Rafael Gonzales Montoya. Born in Costa Rica on September 8, 1956, he'd come to New Orleans in 1962 with his mother, sister, niece, and nephew.

Armed with this new information, Judy Moise composed a letter to the U.S. Embassy in San Jose, Costa Rica, requesting confirmation of Bert's identification. Popping it into the mail, she turned and told Beth, "All we can do is hope and pray that he entered the country legally."

Months later, a letter from the consul general arrived, including the original birth certificate for Alvaro Jose Rafael Gonzalez Montoya!

With a bit more paperwork and a few more dollars donated by friends, the digits of Bert's Social Security number finally rang into place like a row of cherries on a slot machine. More than a year of gambling with bureaucracies had finally won a smile from Lady Luck: Bert was a legal citizen, with a legal identity, and was therefore legally entitled to government benefits. Finally, he could leave his limbo at Detox.

But where could he go?

Bert balked at taking narcoleptics, but most boardinghouse operators refused to accept tenants who heard voices
unless
they took medication, so finding a home for him would be doubly difficult.

After another appeal to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Judy and her colleague sought recommendations. Peggy Nickerson, a hardworking, compassionate soul, seemed a logical resource. As a "street counselor" with St. Paul's Senior Center, Nickerson assisted the elderly homeless, so her work often meshed with theirs. Nickerson suggested that Bert might be happy in a home run by a woman named Dorothea Puente.

Puente was that rare find, she said: a widow who ran a good clean boardinghouse yet didn't flinch at housing difficult types, such as alcoholics. "Puente has an edge," Nickerson told them. "She can work with street people. She doesn't freak out."

Judy and Beth decided to give Dorothea Puente a try, and they jotted down her address: 1426 F Street.

CHAPTER 3

On the clear, crisp morning of February 1, 1988, the VOA van pulled up in front of a blue-and-white two-story Victorian house on F Street. From the outside, it looked promising: clean and well-tended without being prim.