Downtown Shelter Provides Haven for Women Badly Battered by Life

For Elisa McCoy and Gracie Saucedo, the dreams are basic--as tangible, it would seem, as a meal and a bed for the night.

“When I get out of here,” said McCoy, a tattooed 20-year-old from Chicago, “I want a place to stay. I want a job. I want to have a healthy kid. I want to do it up right this time. I want a good man, a yard with a white picket fence, a dog. . . . Is that too much to ask?”

For Saucedo, a 31-year-old from Logan Heights, a man better than the last one would be enough.

“Could he be supportive, loving, caring?” she asked with a hurt smile. “Could he not lie and cheat and steal? Could he make me happy? Could he promise to love me--and then do it?”

McCoy and Saucedo are “roommates,” sharing accommodations with 58 others. Home is the YWCA Women’s Shelter, hard by the trolley tracks, at C Street and 10th Avenue downtown. They sleep on mats in an airy aerobics room or in the gymnasium, under the basketball goals.

These are women slam-dunked by life. Some are schizophrenic. Some are manic-depressive. Some were beaten by husbands or fathers, or tossed out of homes by mothers. Some lost their children or don’t know where they are. Many look puzzled when asked, “What went wrong?”

Filled to Capacity

Dozens of these women are recovering from drugs or alcohol. In some cases, recovery has gone on only since breakfast. Promises of sobriety are sometimes expressed with booze still on the breath.

The shelter was born in 1985 through a grant from the San Diego Housing Commission. It was filled to capacity almost overnight and has since housed women ranging in age from 18 to 89. The women come from all walks of life, directors say, but have in common the distinction of being homeless.

Many come from--and will return--to very mean streets.

“We have a saying here,” said Ann Sanderson, one of three administrators overseeing the program. “Any woman is one husband and two paychecks away from being homeless. In other words, lose a husband or two paychecks, and you could be here too.”

In many ways, Sanderson said, feminism has offered these women a cruel irony: It has given them the freedom to leave ghoulish situations, but, once they do, it fails to offer sanctuary or quick protection.

“So these aren’t just homeless people,” Sanderson said. “They are homeless women , and in that sense, they’re their very own category.”

Sanderson and Sonja L. Martens, director of the downtown YWCA, say the shelter’s 5 dozen women illustrate tellingly the contention that America is full of haves and have-nots.

“Many of these women come here with no clothes to wear,” Sanderson said. “They have no ID. They’re literally have-nots. Say they apply for SSI (federal disability payments). With no ID, no clothes, no address and no phone for callbacks, how are they going to get it? The answer is, most don’t get it, and then the public wonders why. They wonder why these women can’t help themselves.”

A New Beginning

The shelter provides food, clothing, a bed for the night--or many nights. It also provides job counseling, health care (including visits by a county-paid psychologist) and companionship. It generates the feeling that a new beginning might be possible.

Some women have been at the shelter as long as six months, some for only a few hours. Many of the women in charge--”second-generation,” they’re called--came to the shelter as homeless as the women they try to help.

These include Dorothy Touchette, whose last name is pronounced like the French word touche . Touchette is a tall, tough 50-year-old from Oakland who came to the program from a women’s prison in Nashville, Tenn. She was convicted of grand larceny and given a five-year sentence. She claims to have stolen less than $5, a six-pack of beer and five packages of cigarettes from the top of a man’s refrigerator.

Why was the sentence so harsh?

“I pleaded guilty, and it was my fifth or sixth felony conviction,” she said dryly.

Touchette is largely empowered to enforce the rules. They include a drug- and alcohol-free environment; no violence, and no sexual activity, with men or women. (Men are not allowed in the rooms, and as many as six women supervise quarters.)

Touchette gets to know all the women, including the ones most maimed by life--battered women, rape victims or “throwaways. Spousal or parental throwaways. We get lots of ‘em.”

To a woman, the residents like Touchette. They dig her aura of having been there. She said she walked to San Diego in 1987 while in desperate need of gallbladder surgery. Doctors working for the Salvation Army failed to detect her problem, she said, so she was expelled, suspected of being a drunk.

Funding Is a Problem

Happily, she was welcomed at the shelter, given food, a bedroll and immediate medical care. Now that she’s part of the paid staff, she’s paying back the cost of the operation.

The shelter could use money of its own. Funding is a problem and may reach crisis proportions. Director Martens said that as much as $50,000 is collected each year through private contributions. The County of San Diego provides $18 a night, for 22 residents apiece who fit the category of mentally ill. That funding may vanish by December, right in the middle of the fiscal year.

In 1987, emergency funding was relieved through a last-minute $25,000 donation from Joan Kroc. The shelter has managed to use only the interest from that gift, but now, Martens said, she may have to take from the principal. The shelter receives $4 a day, per bed, from the Federal Emergency Mobilization Act but is dependent on the county’s allotment.

“By the time that money runs out, we’ll need about $60,000 to continue our level of operation,” she said.

Women come to the shelter traveling different paths, which often sound like Dante’s levels of hell. Elisa McCoy said her fiance kicked her out of the house in East Los Angeles after his ex-girlfriend wanted to renew the romance. Gracie Saucedo was living in a “house for the homeless” but got kicked out when the woman running the place said she just wasn’t welcome anymore.

McCoy’s father died of cancer when she was 16. She lived with her mother for a while but hardly relished the prospect--she said her mother had beaten her for at least 12 years.

“She used to tie me to a bed and just whip away at me,” she said. “Dad told me she was in a mental institution twice. When he died, my last line of defense was gone.”

McCoy has a 2-year-old daughter living with McCoy’s stepmother. Saucedo has three children, ages 14, 8 and 2. She said they live with her sister. Someday, she hopes, they will again live with her.

“It’s real depressing,” Saucedo said with a teary sigh. “Real depressing.”

How does she handle depression?

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Oh, you know ,” McCoy said playfully.

Saucedo managed a weak smile.

McCoy cradled in her hands four books by children’s author Judy Blume.

“I like them because they’re lifelike,” she said. “You know, stories about girls losing their virginity . . . ending up in places like this.”

Kristine Zimmerman, a crew-cut 20-year-old from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, said she came to the shelter after a) dropping out of college; b) having her parents kick her out for having dropped out of college without their permission; c) having her grandmother kick her out of her house in Oceanside for “not being productive,” and d) ending up on the streets “finding out what life was really all about.”

Zimmerman confessed to waging a “serious” battle with drugs and alcohol. The shelter offers counseling in recovery, as well as 12-Step programs related to both addictions.

She said “the feeling of being clean” is different from any she’s known. She called it a new sensation.

“I had forgotten what being clean was all about,” she said. “You know, you really don’t need drugs to function. There’s something to be said for clarity .”

Cathy Litherland, 25, from rural Indiana, has yet to know such clarity. As of mid-day Wednesday, Litherland had not yet spent a night in the shelter.

“I want a change in my life style,” she said. She rubbed the big tattoo on her arm that said J-A-C-K. “I’ve been hooking (working as a prostitute) for 15 years. I started at age 10. A man came up and paid me for my time.”

Litherland said her mother was an alcoholic, her father a pipe fitter she never saw. She left her home “by Kentucky, near the toll bridge” to move to Denver, and a life of prostitution and pimps.

She likes the money hookers make--”$800 to $900 on a good night”--and hasn’t ruled out returning to the streets once she leaves the shelter. She has thought of becoming a computer lab technician, she said, “ ‘cause the money’s real bitchen.”

She came to the shelter, like many of these women, after “bottoming out.” She tired of one too many nights of violence with pimps or johns. Her roughest experience was having “a client” torture her for 2 1/2 hours on Christmas Eve.

“He tied me to a chair and beat the crap out of me,” she said evenly.