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For a couple that's been together such a long time, Paul Aiu and Sharon Hemingway seem unusually affectionate. They finish each other's sentences, sleep in each other's arms every night, and even eat from the same plate. After almost twenty-five years together, they spend hardly a minute apart.
Lately, the two can be found on Glendale Boulevard, the former center of Los Angeles's silent-film industry, a block from where Charlie Chaplin invented the Tramp. Hints of Chaplin's character — a vagrant whose sunny demeanor rose above his impoverishment — can be seen nearly a century later in Paul and Sharon, who have been homeless since November. Each night, they crawl into their sleeping bags behind the Hi-Ho Drive 'n Market, which Paul sweeps out every morning in exchange for a space behind the owner's Dumpster where he and Sharon can stash their belongings.
"The owner usually offers me a soda, but I never take it," Paul tells me, clutching a cardboard sign asking for work. Adds Sharon, a tiny white-haired woman who clings to his arm and beams an endearing smile, "We don't want to owe anything to anybody."
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Self-sufficiency may seem a quixotic goal when you spend your days panhandling, but "we get by," says Paul, fifty-seven, who's just split a cheeseburger with Sharon, sixty-five. "We're never hungry. Actually, our stomachs have gotten smaller."
Still, every time I see them, I ask if they need anything, and they always politely refuse. They're not starving, but they are looking forward to finding a way off the streets — particularly Sharon. "Paul is so trusting, everybody wants to take advantage of him," she explains. The other day, she says Paul gave money to a homeless woman who was digging through the garbage.
"Nobody should have to do that," says Paul.
"It was probably an act," chastises Sharon, explaining that she's "the suspicious one."
At this, Paul laughs. "She keeps me out of trouble," he says. "That's how we survive."
The more I hang out with them, the clearer it is that he's right. Homeless couples like Paul and Sharon can offer each other support and protection from the city's myriad perils. Life on the streets is more dangerous than ever, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, which has been tracking a continuous upward trend in attacks on homeless people since 1999. As a couple, neither Paul nor Sharon need to be on guard all the time, they tell me. And they make a good team: Sharon feels physically safe with Paul, and Paul says Sharon has better instincts for dangerous situations. A few weeks ago, for instance, Paul was accused of shoplifting a pack of gum from a Vons grocery store.
Sharon feels physically safe with Paul, and Paul says Sharon has better instincts when it comes to dangerous situations than he does.
"I can become a bulldog," she says. "I asked the manager, 'Do you really think homeless people would steal gum? Then why don't you call the cops and have them search his bag?'" The Vons manager let Paul go.
"It's always been like that between us," Paul tells me. He was thirty-three when they met, a draft-dodger from Hawaii who'd moved to Idaho to study computer science. Instead, he dropped out to work as a landscaper and musician. "Primordial Soup," he grins, recalling the name of his band. At a show he met Sharon, an alcoholic with an estranged daughter in her twenties. Recently widowed, and with a two-year-old daughter of his own, Paul immediately fell in love. But their relationship progressed slowly. Sharon spent six months trying to dry out on his couch before anything physical happened.
"When I met Paul, I felt like I'd finally met someone normal," she says. "All my friends did was drink." Paul ended up nailing the doors and windows shut to stop Sharon's friends from dropping off bottles of booze. "They called it gifts from the Easter Bunny," he says.
Eventually, he decided he had to get Sharon out of Boise; some musician friends hooked them up with a job selling concessions for the Grateful Dead. At some point during their long, strange trip, Sharon was born again in Marin County, and finally quit drinking for good. The two ended up in the hippie enclave of Pahoa, Hawaii, where Paul resumed his studies at the University of Hilo and worked as a janitor at night. But Sharon felt lonely on the Big Island, so much so that she was tempted to start drinking again. Two semesters short of Paul's graduation, she begged him to quit so they could move to Honolulu.
