Saturday I met Wilbert.  Wilbert lives on the sidewalk on Venice Blvd west of Abbot Kinney, where Farmer’s market is on Fridays.  I was looking for bundles of stuff to see if they (the bundles) would disappear into the new Venice Beach storage container.
Monday the storage container at the beach opens for homeless people to deposit belongings so they, the homeless, can go to the shelters. Shelters only allow people with belongings approximating the size of a back pack.
And Wilbert was sitting among a long line of stuff.  I had been to Ocean Front Walk to look there but this was the largest grouping of “stuff.”  I took the photo below and then asked the man sitting in the middle his name.

“My name is Wilbert, not Wilbur,” he said with a smile.
I told him what I was doing and asked him if he would be willing to put his stuff in the storage container so he could go to the shelter.  He let me know in no uncertain terms that he was not going to any shelter now or in the future.  He smiled and said he was happy where he was.  I then asked him where he was.  And he said “right here.  On this sidewalk is where I sleep, live.  Been in Venice 13 years.”
“We recycle”, he said. We includes two to three others who live in close proximity on the sidewalk.  There were sacks of cans up against the fence.  He said a truck comes along and trucker pays him or them and then the truck goes to the recycle place.
He told me at 58 he was on social security.  I asked him if it was social security disability and he said yes.
Wilbert plans to go to Alaska sometime.  He said he has a house being built there and then I realized I was getting the results of the alcoholic adlib.  He went on in his adlib to tell me he had been in a massacre in Virginia in 1957.  His dad got the Bronze star in Korea, which could be true.  He was orphaned at four.  It was hard to separate the real from what he had made his life.  He wasn’t drunk.  But then if one continuously drinks all day, does one get drunk?  He was just an amenable person who was drinking and had been drinking.
We got back to what was real.  I asked him if people lived on the other side of the fence and he said “yes about eight or nine and then some live in parking lot on down.”  Other side of the fence is where the Friday Farmer’s Market is held.  He implied that he was not wanted or it wasn’t safe on the other side, but then, maybe, it was that he just preferred where he was.  It was a hard read at that point.
“Now when the ‘seasonable’ people come, that (area on other side of fence) gets a lot of people,” he explained.  “They have groups of 13 or more.”
I asked him what seasonable meant.  I think that was the term.  When I asked him what it meant he said, “They come in spring, then summer, and then they are gone.  They come in groups of 13 or more.  They are dudes.  They have great clothing. They know a lot.  They come in buses.  I don’t know where they get their money.  Some are on their way to San Diego, I think.”
Some days one just lucks out.  One goes out to see if a storage container will be used by the homeless so they can go to a shelter. Instead, one meets Wilbert who has all the answers.  Just a lucky day!