Mungaray said she once found "Bronson" sleeping in her white Chevette, naked. Another day she saw him walking down the street with her sweat pants, which she had hung out to dry. She decided she didn't want them back. My own father once caught him trying to break into his beat-up Datsun.
Lt. Mario Bravo, a 76-year-old retired security officer who worked at the hospital from the early 1960s to the 1990s and is still on its advisory board, recently cleared up the "Bronson" mystery.
"His name was Eddie. I think it was Eddie Garcia," he said, and he wasn't Charles Bronson's brother. Bravo gave the homeless man money for food but also kicked him out of the hospital when he became belligerent. "Some people said Charles Bronson picked him up with a limo at the gas station. [But] they weren't even related."
When I was growing up in the neighborhood, just about everyone was Mexican or Mexican American. In its own way, County-USC injected some multiculturalism into the neighborhood. The homeless came from everywhere -- a veritable United Colors of Benetton of street people.
They slept on street corners or beneath shrubs beside hospital buildings or hidden inside the building. On rare occasions, a mentally troubled soul might walk into a home and simply sit in a living room with a confounded smile on his face.
Some of them frequented a store just down the block from the hospital known simply as Liquor, Liquor, thanks to a wrap-around marquee that touted the store's most popular product. Patients would trudge toward the store, still wearing their hospital gowns and foam slippers and clutching their IV poles.
"It was very frustrating," said Martha Navarro, a nurse at County-USC since the early 1990s. "The nurses were working their behinds off trying to get these patients stabilized, and what would they do? They would go down the hill and come right back up in worse shape than before.
"They would buy liquor, or if they were diabetic, they would go down hill and eat away and come back with their blood sugars sky-high," Navarro continued, "And you were like, 'What did I do? Did I forget to give them their medication? Did I forget to do something?' "
Nearly 20 years after she arrived at County-USC, Navarro said, some homeless people still call the hospital home. If you walk into the old emergency room waiting room at night, you see them nodding off, trying to stay warm, leaning on hospital-issued bags full of clothes. They also sleep, hidden, in various nooks of the old building, particularly in the increasingly empty floors near the top. In a way, it makes sense. After all, engraved on the entrance to the State Street foyer is a covenant that reads:
