Down And Out -- but Determined

By Margot Hornblower

Joyce Brown, a 40-year-old former stenographer, has lived for the past year on a Manhattan sidewalk. Crouched over a hot-air vent, she fended off winter sleet. Panhandling, she dined for $7 a day on juice, a quart of milk, a pint of ice cream and a chicken cutlet from the corner delicatessen. She relieved herself in the gutter, huddled beneath a tattered coat. Crazy or not, Brown claims to know what she wants. "Some people are street people," she says. "That's the life they choose to lead."

But when New York City Mayor Edward Koch ordered social workers to begin rounding up the homeless mentally ill last month, Brown was the first person picked up and forcibly committed to Bellevue Hospital. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia. Brown, represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, contested her "incarceration." Last week she won the first round in what promises to be a landmark court battle over the rights of the homeless, many of whom suffer from psychiatric disorders.

Other communities are watching closely. "How do we answer the old question 'Am I my brother's keeper'?" asked Randolph Arndt, a spokesman for the National League of Cities. "As a nation, we believe in caring, but we also believe that individual rights deserve protection." In New York 25 people have been committed so far, but many more may be affected. Like Brown, thousands choose to live on the street rather than in crowded, dangerous city shelters. Often they are victims of deinstitutionalization, the policy under which states over the past 20 years have emptied mental hospitals of their less severely handicapped patients. However, adequate community facilities have yet to be built.

It was no accident that Brown became a test case. Under pressure to deal with derelicts who freeze in the shadows of Manhattan's luxury skyscrapers, Koch met Brown last spring on a tour with other city officials. When he was told that she could not legally be committed unless she was in imminent danger, the mayor replied, "You're loony yourself." He went on to make Brown a cause celebre in speeches and interviews.

According to city workers, Brown was "dirty and incoherent." She screamed. She cursed. She tore up paper money and burned it. She defecated in her clothes. When a psychiatrist offered her a bag lunch, she threw it back. "Billie Boggs," she called herself, after a local television personality. She cooed over babies and hurled abuse at black men. Sometimes she sang. A favorite: How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?

But when Brown appeared before Judge Robert Lippmann five days after her commitment to Bellevue, she was calm and articulate. The nearest public toilet was at Grand Central Terminal, too far to walk, she explained. She tore up money when she had enough for the day because it was dangerous to carry cash at night. Yet do-gooders persisted. "I've heard people say, 'Take it, it will make me feel good,' or 'I'm only trying to help you,' " Brown complained. "Is it my job to make them feel good?"

Brown learned to recognize the city workers, who several times took her in handcuffs to a hospital, only to be told by psychiatrists that she could not be committed against her will. Their insistence enraged her. She tossed back their food and yelled at them. She adopted aliases to hide from her sisters, who wanted her institutionalized. As for life on the street, she told the judge, "You have to be experienced. I'm a professional."

In picking a fight with Brown, the city chose an unusual case. The daughter of New Jersey factory workers, Brown grew up in a loving family, according to a sister who asked not to be identified. Their father was ordained as a Methodist minister. "We were raised to have middle-class values," the sister said. "The judge and the civil liberties lawyers say that her life-style is O.K. Given what Joyce once was, given what we want Joyce to be again, that is definitely not O.K.! To sleep and defecate on the street . . . Is that what people are reduced to?"

Brown graduated from high school and worked for ten years as a secretary at the human rights commission in Elizabeth, N.J. Never married, she lived at home until her mother's death in 1979. She was a drug user and in 1983 lost her job because of poor attendance. She lived off and on with her sisters but fought with them, and was kicked out of a Newark shelter because of disruptive behavior.

Four city psychiatrists testified that Brown was crazy. Three psychiatrists, hired by Brown's attorneys, found her sane, albeit eccentric. Throwing up his hands at the experts, Judge Lippmann quoted the Roman poet Juvenal: "Bitter poverty has no harder pang than that it makes men ridiculous." He found Brown to be "educated, intelligent." In court "she displayed a sense of humor, pride, a fierce independence of spirit." Neither suicidal nor malnourished, Brown can meet her own essential needs. Street life may be an "offense to aesthetic senses," the judge declared, but "freedom, constitutionally guaranteed, is the right of all, no less of those who are mentally ill . . . beggars can be choosers."

The city is contesting Lippmann's ruling, and until an appeals court takes up the matter next week, Brown remains at Bellevue. Koch is bitter. "God forbid this woman will go back on the street," he said. If anything happens to Brown, he warns, "the blood of that woman is on the judge's head."

Whatever the outcome of the case, hospitalization is unlikely to help many of the homeless. New York faces a dire shortage of beds for the mentally ill. A larger problem, says Robert Hayes, counsel to the National Coalition for the Homeless, is that "when patients lucky enough to get beds leave, they have no place to go." No place, that is, except the street.

With reporting by Wayne Svoboda/New York