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Being homeless has got to suck, especially if you’re struggling to get off the street. I’ve never been homeless, and I pray to the gods I’ll never be. But I just spent a whole night talking to people who are, were, or were on the verge.

It’s hard, after such humanizing contact, to embrace any monolithic theory about the homeless, to decide just what exactly our collective responsibility is for them. Knowing there is no such thing as an archetypal bum makes it equally difficult to justify a yes or a no to that question, “Spare any change?”

The people I talked to were taking part in an unprecedented county-wide head count of the homeless in Los Angeles. The same thing is happening across the nation due to a new requirement the federal government placed on social service agencies competing for millions in subsidies. They’ve got to back up their fund requests with hard numbers.

It’s all part of the Bush administration’s insistence on accountability and the never-ending Republican obsession with cutting waste – two concepts about as controversial as saying that 84,000 people in Los Angeles county shouldn’t be forced to sleep on the street, or saying it sucks that 3 million people are homeless in this country.

I’m all for accountability, but if you want to get controversial, let’s extend it from the homeless on the street all the way up to the corporate suites above Wall Street. Unfortunately, that’s a level of accountability that seems to give Republicans a fear of heights.

Part of Westwood’s homeless population that most likely didn’t get counted that night were the people who sleep in UCLA’s libraries and buildings. Some of you may have seen them, but most of you probably have never even heard about them. They’re here, I promise you. They’re part of the underworld universe of every public university.

A former UCLA Community Service Officer gave me a tour recently of the Young Research Library. He declined to identify himself because of a CSO gag-order policy. “The fifth floor dude,” he said as the elevator doors popped open. “It’s famous. It’s notorious. Some people think it’s haunted, but it’s not ghosts – it’s just a bunch of crazy homeless people.”

They aren’t attracted to the fifth floor because they’re really into military science, although an estimated 11 percent of their overall population are U.S. war veterans, so maybe that has something to do with it. They’re instead drawn to the fifth floor by the private reading rooms, a nice crash pad compared to the street. Same goes for the breakout rooms in Anderson and certain spots in Hershey Hall.

The fifth floor also has janitor rooms equipped with what look like tiny bath tubs to clean dirty mops in, which the homeless use for cleaning their own mops, I guess. They also make good hiding places when CSOs make their final rounds before closing down. The fifth floor also gets less student traffic and patrolling than the others – and hopefully it’ll stay that way after this article.

There are many kinds of homeless characters haunting Young. There’s dictionary guy, who can frequently be found leafing word for word through the alphabet of definitions in the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary. At last count he was at G, as in ghost: “a returning or haunting memory or image.”

There’s Ph.D. guy, who is rumored to have gotten within an inch of attaining the degree at UCLA before he snapped, and now spends a lot of time in the library. The scary thing is that sometimes I feel like I’m just one bad essay away from becoming that guy.

There was one homeless guy who emptied an entire row of books and made a bed of books between the racks. Think of the irony of using thousands of pages of intellectual thought as a mattress.

The homeless I met on the night of the count were people of all ages, races and backgrounds. Matthew Adams, 50, a black ex-con and business-owner-turned-homeless by some twist of fate.

Nick Fiaschetti, 24, white, a deeply Christian aspiring singer from Texas on the verge of homelessness. For Fiaschetti, a Bush voter, it’s either the street or the military.

Jisele Sanchez, 39, a Latina woman who quit her long career in customer service to do something more fulfilling and is now faced with the choice of returning to her hated economic sector or being homeless.

After seeing all this, I wondered exactly how much of our taxes go to helping the homeless on an individual level. Could I know who received our taxes, I might not be haunted in my sleep by the panhandler I didn’t oblige with my pocket change.

But this turns out to be virtually impossible. Trying to trace a penny from your pocket through government distribution and into the hands of a homeless person in the form of a blanket or a hot meal is made too complicated by the amount of bureaucracy between points A and B.

“Unfortunately, this kind of information is not really available,” said Annie Patnaude, deputy press secretary for the National Taxpayers Union. “Although it certainly should be.”

So what is our collective responsibility toward the homeless? Should you pony up a buck in response to “Spare any change”? Is every homeless person deserving of it? There really is only one surefire way to know. Take a minute and get to know them – you might end up the richer person in the exchange. And if you’re having any trouble with the subject, you can check them out at your local university library.

Lukacs is a third-year history student. E-mail him at olukacs@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.