He Has His Walking Points

Over the bridge, on Whittier Boulevard, Hopper stopped at a liquor store to buy cold water and Gatorade. He gulped it quickly, as he stepped in and out of slivers of shade. There were shops here -- little brightly painted ones like the yellow Lupita Mini Market, with its painted beer mug plugging cervezas. Restaurants offered menudo and carnitas Michoacan. Interspersed were homes -- one with a statue garden featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and swans. With all of this life came sidewalk trash cans, which is why Hopper drank fast. He's learned his lesson, stuck clutching an empty bottle for block after block, with nowhere to chuck it. In many places, the city doesn't seem to expect walkers, he said. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, this notion that people don't walk here.

In Boyle Heights, Hopper passed people waiting at bus stops. They walked in and out of stores and climbed out of cars. Here and there, someone strained to lug the shopping home. One man wheeled a 5-gallon bottle of water in a baby stroller. An old woman in a flowered violet housedress tried, on unsteady legs, to maneuver a purple umbrella and two grocery bags.

No one but Hopper seemed to be walking just to walk.

"Sometimes I think I'm the only person who walks in L.A. voluntarily," he said.

*

Walking in Los Angeles can be lonely.

Luckily, Hopper is a loner.

He has always been a little out of step. It got him kicked out of kindergarten. In that classroom of more than half a century ago, each morning the children gathered cross-legged for circle time. There they sat, in one tidy group -- except for Hopper, who lay on the floor all by himself. The teacher handed out beads. The kids were supposed to slide them on and off a string. But Hopper liked to knot, so he knotted his beads in place.

Hopper's marriage of more than two decades produced two grown kids he loves. But when it ended, he understood: He wasn't made to be part of a pair.

"I like the freedom of being alone. If I decide to turn down a street, I don't have to ask, 'Do you want to turn here?' "

A private man, Hopper maintains a strict code of personal space. It keeps him from photographing people. It keeps him from approaching strangers. It keeps him off residential streets. It will keep him in the future out of skid row, although he has walked there before.

"A lot of these people, they're called homeless, but skid row, that's really their home. I don't want to seem like I'm gawking," he said.