Pursuing the American Dream From One End of Beach Blvd. to the Other : Grant Davis doesn't have a home right now. But he does have the Ark. And a business.

By PATRICK MOTT

June 12, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Grant Davis calls it his Ark, but it looks more like a contraption out of a Dr. Seuss book.

Bristling with blinking lights and bungee cords, coiled with rubber and metal tubing, bulging with more extra compartments than a Home Shopping Network carry-on bag and sprouting a wiggling American flag, the thing is easily the most unlikely vehicle on Beach Boulevard.

But, hitched to the back of a mountain bike, it comprises everything in the world that Davis owns, and is symbolic of much of what he does.

Davis, 49, may be homeless and without a car, but he is still doggedly trying to make his floor cleaning business go. Rather than fold the enterprise when he was forced to give up his van two years ago, Davis bought a bike from the Salvation Army for $25, built a rolling rig for his floor-cleaning machine from spare parts, added several trimmings, hitched it all together and pedaled off to drum up business.

If there is such a thing as high-tech homeless, Davis exemplifies it. Armed with a beeper, an answering service and an on-board computer and printer that provide readouts of clients and potential clients, Davis has become almost as familiar a sight along the Beach Boulevard corridor as OCTA buses.

“I’ve got all the bugs out now,” said Davis happily. “Now I can just hook right up and go any time.”

More of a working hobo than a directionless homeless person (“I don’t associate myself with that word,” he says), Davis wasn’t always so cheerful about his lot.

Over the past 10 years, he says, he has made several attempts to get a floor-cleaning business off the ground and has met with checkered success at best. The decade was marked by setback after setback.

After getting a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Cal State Fullerton in 1978, Davis, a native of Kentucky, married and worked at a handful of jobs. He was, he said, a quality control manager in the folding-carton industry and at a circuit board company, an appraiser and, when the small companies for which he worked released him as a result of companywide layoffs, he later worked as a janitor, a newspaper carrier and, eventually, a claims adjuster for an insurance company.

However, he said, during his insurance stint he decided “that I could have a $45 cleaning job here and a $45 job there and beat what the insurance company was paying me. Suddenly I saw that there were carpets and other things all over that needed to be cleaned, and I said to myself, ‘I have found it.’ I quit the insurance company to open my own cleaning business.”

The move, however, was not to his wife’s liking, and friction turned to divorce three years later. The resulting settlement, along with payments on a house in Santa Ana, Davis said, began to eat up his modest profits.

Between 1987 and 1989 Davis said the business was grossing about $35,000 a year, but the money continued to disappear in house payments and as a result of maintenance to a balky van and other debts. He borrowed money even as he lost it and became caught in a vicious financial circle.

By the end of 1989, still struggling and living with friends, he was told that his father in Kentucky had died, but he found that he had been eliminated from his will.

The little money Davis was making at his floor cleaning business decreased even more after the Gulf War when, he says, “people just stopped spending money. My business fell off to about $1,500 a month, and by December of 1991 it was down to about $300 a month.” It was not enough to keep up payments on a van, and he found himself without a way to transport his floor cleaning machine.

“I took the van back and pedaled my little bicycle away,” he said.

Possessed of strong religious convictions, Davis likened his predicament to Noah’s: “I saw the flood was going to come,” he said, “and I thought maybe I can pull (the machine) behind a bicycle.”

Living out of a motel in Costa Mesa and making use of a small storage space at a U-Haul agency nearby, Davis began building his rig out of metal tubing.

By May of 1992, he said, “it was time to launch the Ark. But I didn’t even know if the police would let me take it down the road.”

He found out quickly. On his first test ride, after the initial pleasure of discovering that the rig worked smoothly, Davis said he pedaled up to a Costa Mesa police roadblock. The officers, he said, were curious but waved him through when he asked to be allowed to continue northward.

The roadblock, Davis said, was for a passing parade, which he considered to be a good omen.

“It was like I had a big welcoming party,” he said.

He lived the next nine months pedaling the length of Beach Boulevard from Huntington Beach to La Habra by day, picking up piecework when people would stop him and ask about his unusual cargo.

On weekend nights, he said, he would sleep at outdoor campsites at Featherly Regional Park in Yorba Linda, and during the week would make use of motels along his route or occasionally catch a nap in one of his clients’ buildings when he finished his work.

He became gas-powered again for a time last year, he said, when a person he got to know on his route gave him a used car, but the car was only good for a few months. In March, after the car suffered a major breakdown, Davis was back in the saddle of his bicycle--this time a multigeared mountain bike obtained in a barter deal with a client.

The work continued to be only sporadic, Davis said, mostly spur-of-the-moment jobs requested by people who would stop him to chat.

But, though he was at his lowest ebb financially, Davis said he began over the next few weeks to feel buoyed. Solidly religious and infectiously friendly, he began to be a recognizable figure along Beach Boulevard, and he began to see his ramblings as a personal pilgrimage as much as a quest for work.

“Everybody, when they find out what I’m doing out there, has been with me,” Davis said. “There’s a lot of camaraderie out there. Pedestrians, cyclists, business people, other homeless people, kids, truckers, bus drivers--they all give you that smile. I wish everyone could have this kind of experience for about two hours a day.”

Davis said he’s never had a close call in traffic, day or night (“Those lights on the back of the Ark, they stop everybody. “) and never been victimized. Ask him about adventures on the road and he’ll talk about people he extends a hand to along the way--the blind man who had walked out of one of his sandals and was searching for it on a corner, or the woman with a sprained ankle who asked for help crossing the street.

Ask him if he ever gets tired pedaling the Ark and he’ll say yes, but he often travels small distances. Then, after he’s taken time out along his route to talk to a young man with cancer, “if you think you’re tired, you’re not after listening to that.”

His longtime customers have become friends.

“He’s an angel,” said Amer Masri, owner of Ince Beach Market in Huntington Beach, where Davis has cleaned floors for about five years. “He’s honest, and he’d never hurt a fly. He works for less than anyone else; he’s very good at it, and even though he barely makes enough money for himself (“About $700 a month now, and I eat most of that up.”) if someone’s hungry out on the street he’ll take them somewhere to eat. I’ve seen it. You don’t find people like him.”

At two Super Cuts hair salons at both ends of Davis’ route--one in Huntington Beach, one in Whittier--employees say they look forward to his visits.

“He usually comes in on Monday,” said Monica Contreras, a receptionist in the Whittier shop, “and he does an outstanding job. He’s just a wonderful person.

“On Monday mornings he’s there to brighten up your day. It’s nice to see someone going out of their way to do their job. Some people don’t even like to take the bus to go to work, but he’s always there, rain or shine.”

At the Huntington Beach shop, manager Chris Henderson called Davis “wonderful. I’m real comfortable with him, and we share a lot of the same viewpoints. We chat a lot when he’s here. Both of us are optimists who have an attitude more of gratitude for what we have than pity. And he really cares if we like the job he’s doing.”

No, Davis said, he doesn’t want to continue doing business from the seat of his bike forever. He has learned to keep a computer log of current and potential customers along his route, and the list is slowly growing.

Eventually, he hopes to be able to buy a reconditioned postal truck, which he said would be ideal for transporting both the floor-cleaning machine and the bike. He would, he said, use the truck for long-distance travel and keep the bike and the Ark for shorter distances.

“I go with dreams,” he said. “With that (arrangement) I think I could do $2,000 worth of business a month. I still believe, with the proper attention to detail, it could be unlimited.”

For the time being, however, Davis said he looks at his life on the road as a confirmation of peoples’ better natures and of their need for one another.

“My work seems to have different meanings to different people,” he said. “The way I see it now, it’s worth my while to temporarily give people this experience. It’s worth a little pain.

“I didn’t know what the American dream was until I started pulling the Ark. The people in this country, if they see clearly what you’re doing, they’re with you.

“There’s no negativeness.”