Living life under a freeway overpass

I caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye, as my bus pulled off the Harbor Freeway. It looked like an elaborate fort, spreading out from a concrete wall alongside a busy offramp near USC. I could make out a bed and couch, rimmed by what looked like bookcases. And on the sidewalk out front, a child-size table and chairs.

The bus driver told me it had been there for months. He'd heard that a family was homesteading there.

So I paid a visit, prepared for a story of pain and loss.

Instead, I found Eddie Dotson.

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It was dark when I stopped by on Wednesday night, so I took my friend Johnny along. As we approached, he called out, "Hey, anyone there?"

Dotson pulled back the tarp and answered the "door," a silver sunshade propped up at the end of a walkway of carpet remnants. He let me peek in, apologizing first that it wasn't as neat at he liked. "I didn't get around today to doing my laundry."

But inside looked tidy to me. A bowl of fresh fruit was on a table. His bed was made with a patterned comforter. There was even a bathroom, walled off by a cardboard box.

Outside, a coffee table was set with matching candleholders. Another bed and a wicker sofa were flanked by bookcases. And a set of golf clubs leaned against his tarpaulin wall.

Dotson and I chatted briefly in the dark, outside the freeway shelter he shares with his puppy, a stray he rescued from a busy intersection. I'm not going to give the location of Dotson's place. In winter 2007 the Sentinel, a local black newspaper, wrote about his previous encampment, and two days later police cleared it away.

"My place then was really nice," he told me. "I had a king-sized bed, a living room, a kitchen." He gestured toward a patch of grimy sidewalk. "The master bedroom was over there. . . . I had some nice paintings, some antiques. My library had over 100 books."

He had so many clothes, for men and women. "If I had a date and the young lady didn't have anything appropriate for where we were going, I could say, 'Just pick out something you want.' "

The police officers were nice enough, he said. "But they crushed my stuff, put it in a big old trash truck and carted it off."

He spent the next nine months sleeping on park benches and camped out under freeway overpasses, pushing a shopping cart filled with clothes, blankets and his golf clubs. He refused to move into a shelter: "There are too many people who need those beds." And he didn't like the constant moving around.