ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : The Death of an Important Man Named Lou : The realities of life on the streets caught up to him last month.

The funeral Mass of Louis James McChesney was attended by strangers in the back yard of a Santa Ana homeless shelter. Lou died last month of the complications of AIDS. He was 43.

It’s remarkable Lou McChesney lived that long. The man had already battled and survived colon cancer, diabetes, combat in Vietnam and an addiction to heroin. In a sense it was heroin that killed him, the HIV entering his arm through a hypodermic needle.

Lou was a carpet layer and linoleum man. He was “Carpet King” according to old stationery. And if Lou’s tales are true, he outfitted many subdivisions. in the seventies and eighties.

I met Lou after his fall in 1988 when he came to our house for a free meal. He had achieved the dissipated Vietnam veteran look: scrawny yet strong, mustache, dirty T-shirt, holes in the jeans. Lou, however, stood out from the other homeless people because of his exceptional politeness and enthusiasm. In no time he was repairing the seams of the linoleum in on the kitchen floor.

Lou stayed with us for three weeks. After work he and a veteran buddy would hover over our donated piano. Their stay was cathartic. I witnessed their war wounds heal, and my anti-war orthodoxies soften. Then I learned they were sharing needles in their room. I asked them to leave.

Over the next few years Lou would appear as if by telepathy when something needed fixing. I was glad our friendship endured. He came to store his insulin here. And, on rare occasions, he slept in back when the wounds from colon surgery were too gaping for him to lie on the street.

Then he would sit in the back yard and talk about the good old days, most often the subject was fishing. At night he would disburden his past: brutal father, alcoholic mother, wife who left him, son killed in the Army. Hell, I don’t know if all this was true. There was so much blarney. His words were sleights-of-mind.

Reality caught Lou last year. He was at UCI Medical Center. The door to his room had the warning: “Face Mask Required.” Inside was tuberculosis, pneumonia, an emaciated body in an oxygen tent. Lou was dying. It was at this late hour that Lou’s last love, Renee, reappeared.

Renee and Lou met on a hazy Friday morning in 1982. For the next three years they shared rooms and bottles and problems. It was a matter of time before Renee caught Lou slamming drugs, and the romance ended.

These many years later, Renee, in recovery from alcohol, resides at our house. She followed Lou from the hospital to the hospice. For the remaining months of Lou’s life she rode the bus to Long Beach four times a week, and sat with her friend, read him stories, listened to his pain.

On Aug. 12, at 6:02 p.m., Lou’s lungs finally collapsed.

The funeral Mass took place in our back yard at sunset. No family attended. The homeless guys that knew Lou were either in jail or had fled Santa Ana for fear of the camping ordinance. It was a circle of strangers that honored him. Renee prayed with simple thanks for her reunion with Lou and for our house that aided her sobriety.

I did not speak then but felt with clarity that it was rather people like Renee and Lou who deserved the thanks for helping us all recover our humanity. When the priest talked about “many rooms in my Father’s mansion,” I saw a flock of crows, more than I’ve ever seen in one place, fly west toward the sun, like souls leaving purgatory.