A Little Solace on the Street

“Beth lives in the Valley with her grandma.”

Lucky Beth, whoever she is. She doesn’t have to scavenge for a hellish living beneath the 7th Street bridge by Santa Fe Avenue, where her residence is immortalized in graffiti.

But for a dozen other unfortunates, this is as close to home sweet home as the Fates will allow. The carpet here is broken glass and squalor. Central heating is provided by a flaming garbage can. And that indispensable mainstay of domesticity, a tiny portable TV, faces east toward the railroad tracks by the Los Angeles River.

The low moan of a engine attracts the inhabitants of this village. As James Pelayo pulls his black Jeep Cherokee to a crunching stop, they gather around and place their orders.

“You got some tennis shoes my size?” says a thin woman in a black turban who identifies herself only as Laurie. “I wear a Size 8.”

‘Twas six weeks after Christmas, and all through the town other people were jump-starting the year in all the usual ways--shedding weight, starting over. But while many had packed away their seasonably charitable impulses with their holiday best, homeless activist Pelayo was back on the beat.

“Some people do it because they want people to pat them on the back,” fellow volunteer Celeste Iida says. “He doesn’t want that. He just wants to be able to do it.”

On Christmas morning, Pelayo’s grass-roots group had mounted a massive giveaway on the lawn of City Hall. More than 350 homeless people walked away with sweaters, food, underwear and toys.

It was a giant step from Pelayo’s first solo treks downtown seven years ago. He later joined forces with other homeless activists who coalesced two years ago as Your Loving Neighbors Project, based in Pelayo’s Fairfax District apartment.

Now Pelayo steers the community group in his spare time, and its 80 volunteers pitch in where they can. He rallies the troops by harnessing a time-honored donation-and-people-gathering technique--word of mouth. Eventually, Pelayo wants the group to help place the homeless in permanent housing.

Pelayo, a 30-year-old general manager for a restaurant-supply company, makes monthly forays into downtown’s unseemly cracks and crevices. He goes armed with T-shirts, bologna sandwiches, metallic emergency blankets and bottles of pina colada-scented body shampoo.

“I have the capability of collecting things,” he says. “Somebody needs it. You give it to them. It’s as simple as that.”

Farther north on Santa Fe, Pelayo pulls over near another underpass settlement that’s fenced off from the street. Here comes Sweet Tooth, so dubbed because she runs to Pelayo as if she’s chasing an ice cream truck.

She prospects among the piles in the back of Pelayo’s truck and comes up with sheer gold--a black leather skirt, a red teddy and sport shoes, Size 5 1/2.

“It’ll be tight on my feet,” she says, considering her hale Size 8s, “but I’m going to squeeze my feet into them because I like them.”

Before Pelayo leaves, Sweet Tooth will point him toward another squatter area where a small child lives because, she says, everyone has to look out for each other.

“These people out here have stone hearts because they’ve been hurt so much,” Pelayo says. “A lot are intelligent, but they’re running away from their problems. But when they see people caring, it’s good for them to see. One thing I learned is that the best thing all of us can have is a friend out here.”