New Keys Unlock a Better Life for Ernest

Ernest Adams, who barely survived a barbaric beating last summer, is off the streets.

After 19 years on the pavement -- several of them near the west end of the 3rd Street tunnel in downtown Los Angeles, where he suffered a serious brain injury when he was attacked by bat-wielding hoodlums on a bum-bashing rampage -- Adams took an apartment last week.

When I visited his one-room flat in Little Tokyo on Thursday, he took his keys out of his pocket and held them up as if they were precious jewels.

“I feel like I’m 5 or 10 feet off the ground,” he said, cracking himself up with delight.

The place had no furniture yet; Adams was still waiting for St. Vincent de Paul to deliver the sofa, bed, desk and chair he bought for $140. But he was already feeling at home and smiling like a kid, proud as could be.

“Come with me,” said Adams, 56, who lost his left eye in the beating. “Come see this.”

He took me down the hall to the laundry room, where he opened the dryer and washer to show me his comforter and a swirl of clothes. And this was just steps from his door, he said with amazement, followed by another belly laugh. What could be more convenient?

Stories like this one give me hope that better days are ahead on skid row, but to be honest, I haven’t been terribly impressed by early results of the city’s new focus on improving conditions there. Valuable time is being frittered away debating grand police strategies when a far greater need is for someone to take charge and deliver a master plan for mental health, housing and rehab services. More on that in coming days.

But let’s get back to Adams, who, like a lot of other people downtown, needed some help battling the multi-headed beast of modern bureaucracy to get off the streets. He had to tackle medical, Social Security and housing issues. He also had to learn to see past the madness of his life in a noisy, dirty and dangerous environment.

“All we could do was lead him to the option, and then he took control of his own life,” said Brady Westwater, a downtown activist. Westwater was one of several friends of Adams who found the right balance between prodding and supporting him when Adams went straight back to the scene of his beating after being released from the hospital last fall.

“It’s basically about developing a relationship of trust and mutual respect.... You treat them as a person, and they treat you as a person back.”

Up to the last minute, Adams wasn’t sure about taking hold of those new keys. He had to deal with the fear of acquiring something he might not be able to hold on to, and he had to abandon the familiar -- however harsh and inhuman -- for the unknown.

Getting beaten so badly was what finally did it for him, Adams said. Ironically, it brought him a clarity he had not known for years. He looked at his life and decided he had surrendered his pride and dignity in living the way he did. He was panhandling to survive and sleeping upright in a chair for years, and he wanted, finally, to show his friends and himself that he could do better.

With support from Westwater and the staff at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center to get him started, Adams put his affairs in order, started receiving Social Security disability payments and applied for subsidized housing. Then one day last week he scrounged a shopping cart and used it to lug his possessions through the tunnel to his new home.

He paused after entering his apartment and looked into the depths of the empty space. He locked the door behind him, conscious of the strangeness of his own security. He walked to the center of the room, struck by the quiet, sat down on the floor and prayed.

“I felt a heaviness,” he said. “I became super-tired.”

It was because he had let down his defenses, he said. For the first time in years, he was relaxed, and he collapsed in peaceful slumber.

“I slept nine hours straight, and I was rested. I’ve put my life together. I woke up with a strange satisfaction, fulfillment, comfort. I was in this place alone.”

When he woke up, he was amazed to see that his ankles weren’t swollen. They always swelled when he slept upright in his lawn chair, he said, because there was weight on them all night. He soon found, however, that sleeping indoors takes some getting used to.

“I woke up in the middle of the night one night, terrified by the silence.”

Adams, a voracious reader who is now working on Maureen Dowd’s “Are Men Necessary?”, stacked his books on the floor of the one-room flat and put his clothing in neat piles. He positioned the lawn chair where he could read by the kitchen lamp, and then he went shopping for supplies.

He took the bus to the Vons at 3rd and Vermont, where he bought hamburger, macaroni, onions, green pepper, marinara sauce, coffee and kitchen linens with ducks on them. He went to Big Lots on Broadway, where he bought a seven-piece Chef du Jour cookware set, but he was too tired that night to make his first home-cooked meal in years.

When he woke up the next day, he could no longer wait, and so he decided to make spaghetti for breakfast. When it was ready, though, he realized he’d forgotten something.

Plates.

“I had to wait for it to cool down so I could eat it out of the pan.”

I reminded Adams that I was holding $500 for him that was sent to me by the Gleitsman Foundation, a Westside nonprofit group.

Adams asked me to hold on to it, for now.

“I want to do this for myself,” he said.

He’s a little worried, he admitted, about making the rent and utilities and handling all the other bills. But he wants to do it on his own as much as possible, and eventually get a job that puts him off the dole entirely.

“I’ve got to focus,” he said, vowing not to go back to the streets. “Order is indispensable now. This is no game.”

Adams is the eldest of nine sons born to Nanette Adams of Newark, N.J., who has been desperately worried about her son for years.

She has been unable to understand how so smart a young man ended up on the streets without an explanation that makes any sense, and with no interest in help from family.

I called her to tell her the good news, and she was beside herself.

“Oh thank God!” she shrieked, telling me she’d been feeling low of late and needed a pickup.

I told her about her son having spaghetti for breakfast, and she laughed, saying he might have gotten that from her.

With nine children, she said, planning meals while holding down a job wasn’t easy, and sometimes they had breakfast for dinner and vice versa.

Mrs. Adams said that for all the pain she’s endured worrying about her troubled son, she always knew he was a decent and loving man with a big heart.

“I’ve been praying as much as I can each and every day,” she said. “This is the most beautiful news I’ve heard in a long time.”

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Reach the columnist at [email protected] and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez.