Kiosk - The City within the City (page 4)

The City within the City
(conclusion)

Skid Row is a place where the friendless find acceptance, or at least tolerance. Out on the streets, two men sit down next to a wheelchair-bound man to make sure he is okay, while everyone else walks past, staring. Support groups meet daily, like the Skid Row Drifters, who have gotten together for years in San Julian Park at dusk, a place where I see a man shouting out to those around him, offering the last mouthful from his plate of soggy beans.

There are people like the director of the Midnight Mission who used to be homeless himself, before he worked his way back up. There are activists and volunteers on every block, and there are former addicts, like Michael, who despite having lost his license to practice law decades ago, has virtually become the community’s lawyer, always ready to help people understand their rights.

This rough-and-tumble community, full of personalities, memories, problems and pride, is being scattered by developers, landlords, and the police. Already there are fewer people on the streets. The side of a building that residents call the “Berlin Wall,” which is infamous for the hundreds of people usually camped along it, is sometimes vacant in the daytime. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s promise to clean up the area, a statement made by mayors of L.A. for fifty years, has been getting rid of the people along with the trash.

The need for help can be seen in the eyes of an aged hotel resident with a long white beard who tells me he is lucky to get $12,000 a year; that at the end of the month, he eats dog food because he is too proud to beg. I listen to a teenage girl who describes how crack addicts and syringes line the hallways of her family’s hotel. A man whom I walk up Sixth Street with talks constantly about Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Beirut, where he “couldn’t seem to get himself killed,” he says. He mentions someone named “Psycho” from the Marines and the Battleship Iowa. “Volkswagen-sized” shells he says, as he bounds down the street, trying to mimic the shell’s movement with the arc of his hand. People stare at him. They stare at me for talking to him. I get the tiniest sense of what it is like to be made inhuman through the frigid looks of strangers.

Another day, I look up at the sixth floor of the Frontier hotel, and see a boy of no more than eight playing at the windowsill. Caution tape billows from the windows above him, where residents have been moved out. The tape stands in place of the Christmas lights, crucifixes, and laundry that fill the windows of other hotels in the area. Only four tenants remain in the building. Soon the boy’s room too will be vacated for incoming lofts.

The boy turns over a pair of binoculars in his hands, and moves them up to his eyes. I watch him as he looks out and over the street below: East Fifth Street, “The Nickel.” He looks past the shapes of people and the tops of buildings, gazing over more than a century of architecture. He looks down at the two cops standing on the corner and the huddle of men around the adult bookshop. He takes in the sounds and smells of the streets: the honking of cars, the smell of trash and exhaust, and the collective footsteps of thousands of people. He stares out and he surveys what is left of the neighborhood he calls home.