A home for the holidays

Danette Goulet

Since 1989 Jimmy Carter has wandered the streets of Huntington Beach.

He’s quiet, shy, helpful and homeless.

“I was living with my brother when someone did the wrong thing to me

and I ended up here with nothing to eat,” said the 45-year-old transient.

This month, his 12-year struggle to survive on the streets ended.

Carter has a warm bed to sleep in and will soon have a place of his own.

For the past month he has been sleeping in the spare bedroom of the

house Cecilia Boal and her husband rent and share with roommates in

Huntington Beach.

But this situation is just temporary. Soon he will have a place of his

own, Boal assures him.

It will be a change from a life that has always been rough, Carter

said, though his troubles really began in the late 1980s. He had been

working as a custodian for the Rancho Unified School District. He was

riding his motorcycle home one evening -- going 45 mph, he recalled --

when a truck came by. Someone leaned out of the passenger side window and

struck him with a bat.

“I was living with my brother in Van Nuys after someone tried to kill

me,” he said. “The person he was living with, she did the wrong thing,

and told me to leave.”

Unable to work and with no where to turn, Carter said he looked to

God. And that, he said, led him down to Huntington Beach, where he spent

the last 12 years just scraping by.

“When I first got here I used to walk toward Knotts Berry Farm and I’d

beg for pennies,” Carter remembered quietly.

“Do you have a penny?” “Can you spare a penny,” he’d ask.

“Or I’d find pennies on the ground and pick them up. I’d do that from

6 p.m. to 5 a.m.,” Carter said. “I would have 45 cents and I would get a

loaf of bread. Sometimes if I had more I’d get a cup of coffee too. If I

had any more I’d get two cups of coffee -- one in the morning and then

one at night. I did that for more than a year.”

Carter changed the path he wandered, or his “schedule” as he calls it,

but his quality of life remained poor.

“Then I met her,” Cater said, sending a shy smile toward Boal,

standing nearby, arms crossed, looking both motherly and protective.

“Without her I wouldn’t be alive right now.”

In 1992, Boal came across Carter on the beach just south of the pier.

She was handing out bag lunches to the homeless.

“She helped me quite a bit. She brought me clothes and lunches,”

Carter said.

Carter continued to live the life of a transient. Always on the move,

roving about to pass the time and stay out of trouble.

He didn’t stay in one spot for too long, he said, and was careful

where he went, to stay out of trouble with the police.

“I had to fit in with their schedule on my homeless schedule. I had to

be out of their way,” he said. “It never stays the same, their schedule.

I had to be on my toes.”

Carter would walk and look for change or sit and read his Bible. He

slept on bus stop benches, in public restrooms or near stores and

Laundromats.

“At first I tried to sleep on the beach and I found out I couldn’t,”

he said. “Sometimes I’d sleep in restrooms or by a store, but anything

could happen. The best thing to do if you’re tired is to stop and try to

take a nap -- maybe you’ll get an hour.”

Through all this, Carter never associated with other transients,

feeling it was safer to be on his own.

After all the years, Carter is well known around the pier and south

side.

He got to know many fisherman and other locals who walk out the pier

on a regular basis.

“Everyone knows Jimmy,” said Marian Johnson, who owns the Let’s Go

Fishing bait shop on the pier with her husband, Cliff. “He’s just really

a nice guy.”

A fisherman, known on the pier as “John the Greek,” gave Carter a

fishing pole, and the Johnsons gave him a reel.

“I fished all that summer,” Carter said. “This year I was able to

start helping people at the bait shop.”

The timing was right, Marian Johnson said.

“My husband had surgery and Jimmy would lift stuff for him, when I

wasn’t here. We’d give him a cup of soup or something,” Johnson said.

“He’s very helpful.”

Most endearing, she said, was his polite nature. He would always

steeple his hands, she demonstrated, and ask so politely for coffee.

“I never heard him say anything bad -- he’s very shy and very, very

polite,” she said with a strong smile. “I’ve never seen him ask anyone

for money -- people just knew him.”

And yet, when the fisherman went home at night and the Johnson’s

closed up shop, he remained.

“I don’t know where he slept -- I often wondered,” Johnson said.

Now, where Carter will sleep from night to night will no longer be a

mystery to him or those who care about him.

Although Boal brought Carter food for 10 years, it was just two years

ago that she realized there may be more she could do for him.

“I feed a lot of homeless people, but he’s just different,” Boal said

of her desire to do more.

So she decided to make a few calls. She called welfare, certain that

he must be eligible for some kind of aid. She was right. It took two

years of taking him in for physical and mental evaluations, filling out

reams of paper work and making countless phone calls, but this month,

Carter has begun receiving Social Security disability checks.

Boal is now searching for a board and care facility for Carter, where

he will have a room of his own and three square meals a day.

“There hasn’t been many nights in the last 10 years that he has gotten

a good nights sleep -- now he does,” Boal said.

Carter is grateful and tired, he said.

“I actually am happy finally,” he said. “Before this, I was not

allowed to be a person -- I had to pretend I was, but I wasn’t.”