THE “VULTURES” ARE PEOPLE TOO
Penny, a homeless woman that Leah (one of my students) had encountered during our documentary project this past semester, is still hanging out at the same Starbucks, next to the Korean market on the corner of Devonshire...

THE “VULTURES” ARE PEOPLE TOO

Penny, a homeless woman that Leah (one of my students) had encountered during our documentary project this past semester, is still hanging out at the same Starbucks, next to the Korean market on the corner of Devonshire and Reseda. When I stopped in recently, she recognized me, or pretended to, and we got into a long and surprisingly easy conversation. Probably in her thirties, she looks older, weathered and tanned in summer wear—faded jean shorts, red tank top with the word Independent across the chest. Manly hands, thick arms and legs. She’s got the smile of a seven-year-old blonde girl posing for her school portrait, and it’s genuine but heart-wrenchingly sad. Very sentimental, she is quick to tear up at the slightest sign of compassion or real human concern toward her. 

She gave me the lowdown on some of the other transient folks that frequent this spot, including the man we used to always find her with, Randy, who seems to have moved on to a peripheral location. When I showed her the photographs of James Montag, another regular here that Lena had interviewed briefly, she said, “Hey, that guy!” I told her that he had just left a few minutes earlier, but she didn’t seem too interested.

After awhile she went back outside, and while I wrote this I could see her sitting not four feet away, outside the plate glass window, talking with a guy she described as a real “road man,” in terms one might have been used to associate with hobos, but who really knows—he’s been all over the country though, and is according to Penny a very mellow cat. 

Penny tells me she lives with her sister in a nearby neighborhood; they put up with her as long as she’s not drinking. At one point we were both smiling, even sharing a laugh when she told me about a documentary project she had been part of in Texas some years ago, she and her fellow homeless soaking wet in skimpy plastic raincoats a lunchroom they were at gave them to wear against a storm. “Yeah, by that time I was so wet I said why not, go ahead,” she recalled, and they filmed her. I said something to the effect that there are a lot of documentaries but not enough solutions, and her eyes watered one more time. We chatted some more, and then she was outside again, behind the plate glass.

At dusk, Penny and the road man left together, and the other transients who spend a lot of time at this particular location also drifted off. As I was leaving, I overheard a man say to his friends, with the smugness one normally associates with a total asshole: “Well the vultures have all gone. You have to get here early (to get a table outside), they’re all over the place.”