What they’d like is a breed of homeless who are clean and quiet.

You remember Christmas. It was that brief period last December when the milk of human kindness fairly bubbled from our ears, so high was the level of charity stewing around in our Christian souls.

You remember the homeless. They were the people we erected tents for during Christmas, the derelicts we fell all over ourselves to feed, the new poor we paraded around town in holy tribute to our perfect rectitude.

We took them into our homes and crammed them full of turkey, cried over their calamities and vowed in voices choked with emotion that the time had come to bring the spirit-battered flotsam of an affluent society back ashore.

But that was December, and this is March.

The striped tents on the lawns around City Hall have long since been struck, and so has the rhetoric of beneficence that flapped like a yellow banner in the shifting breezes of Christmas caprice.

Peace on earth, good will toward who?

The homeless just aren’t popular anymore. It’s out of style to give a damn about the 30,000 or so human beings without a place to go or a meal to eat who drift like lost children through the streets and canyons of L.A.

Get a job. Get a haircut. Get ahold of yourself! Go away.

Consider the case of the Fiesta Motel.

It’s an unimposing place amid car shops and fast-food restaurants on North Hollywood’s Lankershim Boulevard, a street less noted for elegance than tedium. The neighborhoods flanking the thoroughfare are downward modest. The motel fits in.

Since the first of the month, the Fiesta has made 20 rooms available to the homeless under a plan funded by the federal government. Each person gets a $15-a-day voucher for a temporary place to stay. No one gets rich.

It was owner Leslie Goldhammer’s idea. He knew what it was like to be homeless. A Hungarian Jew, he had many relatives who died in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Goldhammer lived by hiding and running. No home of his own and nothing to eat.

At war’s end, he came to this country, worked hard and ended up on the high side of society. Now he wants to give something back. But the neighbors around the Fiesta are fighting him.

They say the program is importing addicts, drunks and thieves. Stan Goldhammer, the owner’s son, says that’s a lie.

Ninety percent of those on vouchers are women and children, he angrily insists. “We could fill the place every night with bums and crooks, but we’ve eliminated them to provide for the homeless. Is this what happens when you try to help?”

I talked with the Fiesta’s neighbors on Stagg Street, down Blythe, along Simpson.

“Nobody wants homeless people around here,” a 300-pound machinist said. He greeted me shirtless and ate meat with his fingers from a plate on a coffee table. Thick rolls of fat gird his middle. “We don’t want no trash.”

“They’re hardened drifters,” a bleached-blonde manicurist said. A cigarette just crushed still burned in an ashtray. She lit another. “If they were just old, OK, but they’re not. They’re off the streets.” Her eyes burned with anger. “They’re tougher than hell.”

“I don’t want them anywhere near me,” a man in his undershirt said from behind a screen door clogged with dust. A baby cried somewhere in the house. He shouted for it to shut up. “They’re filthy bums,” he said. The door slammed shut.

It was that way. Put ‘em in jail. Put ‘em in the poorhouse. Put ‘em on a bus bound for nowhere. Just get them out of here.

What they’d like is a breed of homeless who are clean and quiet. Decent folks in pressed coveralls and gingham dresses temporarily down on their luck but working hard to rise above the gnawing guilt of their own inadequacies.

A middle-aged woman said to me that, if the homeless believed in God, they wouldn’t be homeless. God provides for the good, doesn’t he? “Shame on them!” she said.

We are an imperfect species. The derelicts among us are even less perfect. Didn’t we know that last Christmas? They’re a sad and tortured element of society, strangled by their own misery, paralyzed by the awesome requirements of simply getting started.

Rising from bed is a challenge, working an effort, succeeding an impossibility.

There may be junkies among them. Drunks, too. Poverty saps the spirit and kills the visions that shape a man’s tomorrows. Dreams provide the psychic energy required to galvanize the soul. Without dreams, the only escape is down a path blurred by booze and drugs, where being you doesn’t hurt as much.

The neighbors around the Fiesta Motel may well succeed in ending the program Les Goldhammer initiated to provide for the homeless. But it won’t matter. All those thieving bums and hungry women and shabby kids have to do is hang on for another nine months.

There’ll be turkey all around at Christmas time. And enough Christian charity to make you wonder just where in the hell it all goes the day the tree comes down.