August 17, 2006
No Place To Call Our Own
An LAPD crackdown on skid row crime is showing signs of faltering, with arrests plummeting and a police survey showing a threefold increase in homeless encampments in the district, it was reported Thursday.
This morning was business as usual. The beautiful girlfriend dropped me off at the post office. I looked at my watch, cursed softly to myself and slammed the box shut, instinctively locking it and stuffing the keys into my pocket as I broke into a light jog through the bare, almost sterile-looking post office wing. I hit the door and headed straight to my normal bus stop. A few paces away, I noticed a guy standing there, draped in a dilapidated jacket, walking back and forth and muttering to himself. I turned away from him to see if the bus was approaching, and suddenly a “HEY MOTHERFUCKER WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE FUCKING DOING” pierced the air. I wheeled back around to see a jogger nervously dashing away from the guy in the jacket. After a bit of deliberation, I decided to go up the street and catch the bus there.
I sat in the bus, watching as a tired-looking Mexican mother shuffled her two kids off of the bus. Their eyes were wide-open, and they looked around, taking in everything as the mother steeled her gaze and kept on pressing forward, past a bearded, barefoot man smoking in a doorway. He watched them pass and kept smoking. Then he reached down, digging for just a moment before bringing a tallboy wrapped in a paper bag to his lips. He drank deeply.
The light turned green and the bus continued on down the street.
I went out for lunch with a co-worker. We chatted about life, religion, pets, everything as we trudged to our destination, glad to be away from the stuffy cubicles and the deadlines. We passed a tired-looking old man who jingled a coffee-cup full of change as we passed. I gave him a few coins. On the way back from the restaurant, we passed a wizened old woman in a dirty neon-blue jumper with a sign that said “Very sick. Need money for medical treatment.” I handed her a quarter.
As the clock neared 5:00, I checked my pockets for bus fare.
No change.
I asked around until a co-worker produced five crisp, clean dollar bills for my mangled, crumpled fiver. I thanked her, gathered my stuff, and rushed to the bus stop.
The bus clattered over a bump on the boulevard and pulled to a stop. As I stepped off of the bus, a hunched-over woman in a purple wide-brimmed hat and a dirty black dress slowly pushed a shopping cart laden with cans, papers, and various other shit across the street. A young guy in a new Acura pulled up to the stop sign and made an exasperated face as she slowly crossed his path. He furrowed his brow and honked his horn, and the woman paid him no mind. She continued on at the same deliberate pace she had started out with early this morning, and the same deliberate pace that would carry her to wherever she managed to find shelter tonight.
Posted by Jake at August 17, 2006 10:41 PM
|
