Across the dusty plain—past the city sleeping in a sea of streetlights and sound that stretches from the beaches and boardwalks through the smog smothered streets and trash choked viaducts to the Sierra Madre mountain range that separates the arid desert from manicured hedges, watered lawns, and soapy suds slinking off washed cars to sink down grated drains—a red rock canyon climbs above the brush and plain stretching out to meet the clear blue sky.  Its entrance can barely be discerned, a narrow gap in a wall of cliffs shooting skyward in brilliant streaks of red and white rock.  But in that unassuming entrance, those that know stand in reverent awe and wonder – this is the entrance to the maze of Mojave.

The legend of the canyon is closely kept, passed down from generation to generation.  But echoes of a rumor of it are whispered in the dark, under moonless skies in the howling wind between the shadows of desert encampments of recreational vehicles.  In ghost towns, long since abandoned after the bust of a century old gold rush, you can hear the words if you listen close—to the rust rattling in the desert wind when it gusts past at the break of day.  Its’ words are whispered in hushed tones by hobos drinking in desolate encampments huddled around oil drum campfires on the edge of the metropolis.

The canyon, they say, snakes upwards in a steep narrow ravine flanked by loose rock that periodically falls in an avalanche of dust—pebbles whizzing past like bullets, and grapefruit sized boulders like cannon balls, the grey granite and brown and tan rock hurtling down from fiendishly high cliffs; temperamental slopes that don’t like being disturbed, and mistrust visitors.

If you could make it past the gauntlet of loose rock, through the ravine flanked by brutal cliffs on either side, the canyon seems to end after a harrowing gauntlet—a mile and a half of loose footholds, sand, and gravel; one loud cough, or a kicked rock, will surely lead to the canyon swallowing the traveler who disturbs the silence.

One rumor says the true believers break through telepathically, others suggest a hidden cave, but whichever is right, this bitter end to the narrow and steep ravine is the beginning of the second passageway.

For here the subterranean network of caverns rise to their highest point, and within these caves, the vast southwestern desert aquifer, the precious liquid sustaining life, gushes up from beneath the earth’s crust.  A sip of this water, at this pure, unadulterated source, cures all disease.  A glass brings vitality and fertility.  This water, they say, is what the conquistadors vainly searched for, perishing in the desert’s arid sun as they traveled north, proceeded by pestilence, leaving a path of scorched and plundered indigenous villages behind them—searching for the mythical fountain of life.

But did they really perish?  And what would it be like; to live forever, but lose your soul?

Council St & N Vermont, Los Angeles, CA 90004

November 8, 2018

8:23 am

On the morning of Thursday November 8, 2018, City of Los Angeles municipal employees had been tasked with seizing and destroying a homeless man’s meager possessions on Council St just west of North Vermont Avenue, a block south of the Beverley/Vermont Red Line station.  Several Los Angeles Police Department squad cars and a Department of Streets and Sanitation garbage truck had blocked the street to carry out this task.  On the north side of the sidewalk, a row of personal belongings lay scattered on the ground; a tent, the tent’s residents’ clothes, and other accumulated property, arranged in heaps on the sidewalk next to a fence separating the parking lot from the sidewalk.

Men dressed in head to toe white bio-hazard suits, white face masks, wearing bright blue gloves moved quietly and methodically, throwing a homeless man’s belongings into the garbage truck.  A uniformed officer wearing gloves and a mask similarly stood, grabbing trash and belongings with a silver metal pole from which an extendable claw grabbed soiled sweaters and rags, operated by a wire running down the pole’s side, and a trigger at its handle.  A tall lanky white man with long dirty blond hair fumbled on the sidewalk; he struggled to close a clear plastic 60 pound garbage bag—the only item he would be allowed to keep.

A group of three of the workers decked in bio-hazard gear grabbed a white metal clothes rack– complete with a mirror, several clothes hangers, and a few white collared button-down dress shirts, presumably property of the homeless individual who wore them when heading out to apply for different jobs.  They hoisted the entire rack, mirror and all,  into a trash compactor, which in a high pitched wine of hydraulic pumps intermixed with a steady periodic crunch–the crunch of the flimsy metal clothes rack, glass mirror with its carved ornate white wooden frame, clothes hangers, and clothes, splintered, shattered, and crushed between two sheets of think dump truck steel powered by that winning hydraulic press.

As I turned around my car to leave, I nodded to two male cops, sitting in their squad card talking to a female officer who was leaning against one car’s passenger side door.  They nodded back.  Who knew that the LAPD police academy would prepare these officers to throw away the few meager possessions of Angelenos hard on their luck—whose only crime was trying to survive to save up the cash to pay the first months rent and a security deposit on an apartment of their own.

It was the day after the 2018 mid-term elections.  Armed federal Homeland Security police, wearing all-black uniforms with the bright yellow initials D.H.S. emblazoned on their body armor, surrounded a half dozen men and women on Los Angeles’ westside, just south of Wilshire Blvd, on Veteran Ave.   Along with several patrol cards and a big yellow dump truck, they had surrounded the group, who were rummaging through their possessions in a tent encampment on a stretch of city sidewalk, blocks from the University of California Los Angeles.  One white woman, her hair knotted in disheveled mangled clumps atop her head, stood wearing dirty sweatpants.  She was carefully disassembling her tent, folding the tent poles and rolling up the canvass, as several officers stood by watching on the sidewalk adjacent to the West Los Angeles Federal Building.  At the end of the sidewalk, next to a public park—a tall black man stood pacing.  He walked in slow nervous circles near an armed federal officer.  The armed man wore dark sunglasses, standing under the bright noon sun, his hand resting comfortably on the pistol holster strapped to a belt around his waist.  I could see the grey socked foot and dusty ankle of a person rummaging and gathering his or her possessions as best one could when surrounded by police, in a tent at the edge of that same sidewalk, next to a black painted wrought iron fence that separated the government complex from a public park.

I approached the officer and asked what the feds were doing clearing a homeless encampment in Los Angeles.  Was this even their jurisdiction?  The officer replied that the Federal Building, and adjoining sidewalk, indeed, was federal property.

The tall black man I saw before hovered around a man in a wheelchair.  I asked him whether he lived here—pointing at the tent encampment the police were clearing.  He replied adamantly, “No way!  I’m from Venice. They are nicer to the homeless over there.”  The man in the wheelchair was mumbling about his stuff—and I noticed he wore a blue and white hospital bracelet on his right wrist.  The name said Michael Evans—age 55.  Michael said he had been discharged from the UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center the day before yesterday—he was in the ER waiting for what seemed like forever, but then when he said he was a U.S. Navy veteran, they said they couldn’t treat him—he had to go the VA.

The VA is a few miles from UCLA Medical Center; you walk a mile down Westwood Blvd to Wilshire Blvd, take a right, and pass the Los Angeles National Cemetery, with its row after row of white tombstones for American soldiers killed in combat.  Avoiding cars speeding up and off the freeway on-ramp, one crosses under the I-405 freeway, and a few hundred yards later, arrive at the VA Hospital.  It’s a little less than two miles, a rough road for a sick man in a wheelchair.

“Did UCLA Hospital arrange you transport to the VA?”  I asked.  He squirmed by the question, uncomfortably adjusting himself in his seat.  “No,” he muttered, grumbling.  “I wheeled myself out.” Michael said he served in the US Navy from 1980 to 1984.  I took a closer look at him.  A white man with a dark and grimy sunburned neck, his nails were painted a dark pine forest green, and his feet—well he wore flip flops—his feet were so swollen that no shoe would have been able to fit them.  His right foot spread out like in a massive flat puddle of flesh collecting on the ground—a cartoon caricature of a foot, far removed from what a healthy foot should look like.  He could barely wheel himself at all, his chair sinking into the soft dirt and clumps of park grass.  His arms were bony and thin, it didn’t seem like he wasn’t used to wheeling himself around the city all day.

Michael said he had to use the bathroom, asking a uniformed sheriff deputy where a public restroom might be.  He also seemed upset by my questioning, as I exclaimed accusatorily that what the hospital might have discharged him illegally.  The County cop, a Latino officer in his mid-50’s with a thick bushy greying mustache and buzz cut, raised his hand off his holster, pointed towards the middle of the park, and said there was a bathroom there he could use, before returning his arm to its former position.  As we were talking a young woman, wearing a soiled white t-shirt covering her chest and torso, arrived seemingly out of nowhere.  “I’ll take you sweetie; you have to go to the bathroom?”  She asked, raising her voice at the end in a high-pitched tone of concern.  “Yes,” he nodded affirmatively.  “Here, come with me.”  She grabbed the wheelchair’s back handles and began to push it across the park.  “You trust me, right?” She asked.  Michael nodded, happy to leave the sight of the police, my prying investigation, and grateful for the chance to finally pee.

State Senator Ed Hernandez lost a bid to become California’s next Lieutenant Governor, the day before.  Senator Hernandez was a key sponsor SB 1152, a bill designed to stop hospital homeless patient dumping, which Governor Jerry Brown signed into law at the end of September.  The new law requires California hospitals to implement homeless patient discharge policies; to assure that homeless patients have a place to go, are offered a ride there, and aren’t just dumped on the sidewalk somewhere, or pushed out of the ER to the nearest bus stop.  Unfortunately for Michael Evans, the law doesn’t fully go into effect until July 1st, 2019; what UCLA did might still be technically legal, maybe.  While there are other laws that help sick homeless vets like Michael; such as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, and the city of Los Angeles’ 2008 ordinance against patient dumping in skid row, they are notoriously difficult to enforce.  The most hospitals ever have had to do is to settle out of court every couple of years with LA City Attorney Mike Feuer’s office for a few hundred thousand dollars—a million dollar fine at most.  Far less than what their risk-management departments calculated cost savings from denying America’s homeless, disoriented, mentally ill, sick, and poor necessary medical care.  Hopefully the new law will change this barbaric practice.

But at least there are unsung heroes, like the young homeless woman, who, scantily clad, in need of a bath, living on the street engaged in who knows what or worse to survive—had the heart to offer a helping hand.  With no salary but thank you, no motivation but compassion, she offered to wheel Michael to a nearby bathroom, to help him so he wouldn’t soil or piss himself.  UCLA Ronald Reagan Medical Center is the 7^th top rated hospital in the United States of America with over $3.8 billion dollars in annual revenue.

By Daniel Lichtenstein-Boris

The trail crossed a clear blue river full of boulders and rushing water.  The pine and birch trees cast a shaded canopy over the dusty trail ascending upwards, flanked by steep grass and fields of grey and red gravel, topped by spires of solid red rock, the ragged ridge-lines of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountain range.  The river ran down from a greenish blue lake surrounded by melting snow patches, boulders, and towering cliffs, a remote valley far removed from the crowds, cars, and smog of the city.  The trail starts at the end of a paved road that rises above a desert valley, just south of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, about a five to six-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles.  Sweating up this trail in the mid-summer heat, maneuvering around the flaking trunks of tall redwood trees next to a rushing mountain stream, I ran into Cody.  Cody was a tall burly deer hunter, who carried a bow and arrow strapped onto his over-sized red metal frame backpack loaded down with tent, stove, sleeping bag, and other back-country woods camping provisions.

We started talking.  He was just hiking down the mountain, and probably hadn’t talked to, much less seen, anyone for at least three or four days.  Over 6 foot five inches tall, with a long red beard, wide arms, and bulging biceps, Cody carried the heavy pack like he barely noticed it.  He had hiked up past Steel Lake on Friday, scouted around, and tried to find some deer to hunt, but there weren’t any.  Cody lived above 4,000 feet in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada—he had lived there his whole life.  “I love it here, in the mountains,” I inhaled a deep breath.  “The air is so nice, and clean.”  He asked me where I was from.  “I live in LA,” I replied, exhaling slowly clearing my lungs, and replenishing them again.

“LA?  He asked, raising an eyebrow.  “My girlfriend went to college down there, at Cal-State Fullerton.”  He would travel down to Southern California a lot to visit her.  He’s a back-country road type of guy, so the freeways— Interstate 5, the 210, the 90, the 60—”They are such a mess,” he shuddered at the thought of sitting in traffic.  “Man, they really bugged me.  There was this one place,” he recalled, “where freeways merged.  You had to cross from one side of the freeway to the other; changing six lanes really fat.  Talk about nerve wrecking.  If you didn’t make the turn, you would have to double back.  It sometimes took a half-hour or more in traffic just to get back to where you were going.”

Cody’s girlfriend now lives in the bay area.  She is a geologist, studying rocks, and works for the Government; the U.S. Geological Services.  “She rents an Air-Bnb out there,” Cody explained, “A house where four or five different people live.  You don’t want to know how much it costs; it’s one of the richest zip codes in America,” he continued.  “The geological service mostly does work overseas, looking at rocks and mineral wealth in China, North Korea, places like that,” Cody explained.  “She doesn’t get to travel much.  Mostly she sits at a desk and looks at a computer screen.”

Cody looked out through the pine trees to the valley floor, a pale tan haze thousands of feet below.  “We grew up together, he reminisced.  I could tell he had been thinking about his high school sweet heart a lot on that trip in the woods.  “We would hike and check out the rocks together in the foothills above Fresno.  Now she sits at a desk, sending and answering emails, crunching numbers, and data, coordinating field trips all over the world,” he explained.  “Sometimes they even go to the Owens Valley, you probably saw all the volcanic rock on the way up from LA.”  He pointed at the valley below.  “We were hiking over there once, and she kept stopping, picking up different stones to examine them.  All I want to do is check out rocks!  She’d tell me.  Instead I’m in a cubicle all day,” Cody related.  “She is there in Palo Alto three weeks a month; then gets to come home for a week,” he sighed.

He hated traveling to San Francisco, the in your face rainbows, the flamboyance of it.  The rainbow colored Wells Fargo ATM—he didn’t really mind that—it was kind of cool actually, but it is so in your face—so ever present.  He ran into a protest, I mean a protest, he said the word like it was an insult, then looked at me, furrowing his brow expectantly, to see if we were speaking the same language.  “Argh,” he shuddered.  Some parts of the city just disgusted him.  “There are so many homeless, and so much poverty—yet these people protest, they are in your face about being soooo liberal.  Walking in some parts of San Francisco, it is just gross.  I mean there are big piles of human shit just sitting there, in the middle of the street.  It’s disgusting,” Cody emphasized.

“California is the richest state in America.  The Golden State, they say.  But all the wealth pushes up the cost of living and no one can afford anything.”

“It’s bad in LA too,” I said.

He said he spent more time in Orange County than LA- which was at least a little bit isolated, as well as in Hollywood—he could see all the homeless there.  I asked him what he did for work. He was a mechanic, a machinist.  He made big and small machines for difference companies, for the government.  He was pretty specialized.  He had his own company so he could do work—40 hours of work in three days if he wanted to, and then take time off, so he could go hunting.    “Nice, I replied, beats working for someone, you can set your own schedule, you have control of your life.”  We parted ways, but first he told me a bit about conditions up ahead.  “It’s nice really.  I don’t expect any storms or rain.  Also, there weren’t too many mosquitoes.  With the changing weather, there was an early thaw.  All the mosquitoes laid eggs that hatched, but then it refroze, and a lot of them died.  He only got bit once or twice all weekend.

The road back to LA stretches across hundreds of miles of desert—a hot sandy desert its once lush and wet lakes and marshes have dried up, leaving a bright white glittering salty sea shimmering in the  blinding sun, a victim of both the ever decreasing precipitation and snow melt, and the concrete viaducts stretching for hundreds of miles diverting all the water flowing from the entire mountain range to the Los Angeles County Department of Water and Power- to sustain the Southern Californian sprawl.

Fifteen years ago, thousands of high school and college students at hundreds of campuses across the country went on strike—walking out of class against the looming war in Iraq, in a movement called Books not Bombs.

President George W. Bush, falsely declaring that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a terrorist threat, accused him of building weapons of mass destruction.  Bush set his sights on invasion and occupation, to finish a war his father had started.  In the US, we were still shocked and scared, reeling from the attacks of September 11th, planned and executed by Osama Bin Laden, who was closely connected to the Saudi royal family (U.S. troops had been stationed in Saudi Arabia since the first Gulf War).  The U.S. media dutifully repeated Bush’s lies of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, whipping the public into hysteria and fear.

At the University of Chicago, we all walked out, streaming out of class and packing the historic Rockefeller Chapel to the pews.  We walked out for our futures, to stop the barbarity and hate that we knew would only come back to hurt us all in a cycle of violence and retribution.  Students left class and took action at over forty schools in the Chicago land area on March 5th, 2003.  We held a massive rally on March 16th, with 20,000 youth filling Daley Plaza in Chicago.  Students from another 50 schools walked out on March 20th, the day the US began bombing Baghdad.

We marched for peace then, and the youth are marching again for peace now.  On March 14th, one month after latest school shooting in Parkland, Florida, students at over 3,000 high schools protested for peace and to learn in safety, walking out against gun violence, and the constant cycle of terror and counter-terror.

In 2004, we also marched.  We gathered 1,500 signatures in a week calling on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign, delivering them to our senators in Chicago’s Federal Plaza.  Students and faculty of the University of Chicago were overwhelmingly disgusted by the illegal and vicious torture and the sadistic pornographic violence that was unearthed in Abu Gharib.  We witnessed a few of the least revolting pictures released; soldiers taking gruesome selfies in front of degraded Iraqi prisoners whom they forced to perform sex acts on each other, and whom they tortured psychologically and physically.  That barbarity, that violence, that hate, and the pain that comes with it that the U.S. Government has unleashed overseas, has come back like a boomerang to our own country.

The demons unleashed through middle east wars have not only manifested in America through mass shootings.  I remember in 2003 and 2004, soldiers came back from Afghanistan hooked on heroin.  One man, at a party in Lincoln park, as he smoked a pipe of some opium, told me that they had methadone clinics on the flights back from Kabul to Germany where soldiers were treated for heroin withdraw.  After the CIA supported drug lords, or warlords, who took control of Taliban territory with heavy air support in 2001, heroin poppy field cultivation increased dramatically in an Afghanistan no longer under Sharia law.  US troops, unlike their European coalition counterparts, couldn’t even get any beer, much less hard liquor to calm their nerves, the veteran explained as he took another hit off the pipe.  It wasn’t allowed at their mess hall meals on base, to take the edge off the stress and tension of war.  All that was around was opium, Afghanis had plenty, and it was easy to get.  These veterans returned, and the demand for that addictive drug returned with them.  The violence in Chicago along the west side’s 290 expressway, called the “heroin highway,” the distribution center of the Midwest’s drug trade, is a casualty of that addiction.  The ever-increasing prescription opium epidemic is another fallout.

The casualties of war aren’t always those dead on the battlefield.  I remember in 2015, I was barbequing in Michigan City Indiana on Labor Day with veterans of a platoon of marines who had gone in on the first invasion of Iraq- the vanguard of the American force driving north from Kuwait to sack Baghdad.  Three or four of the guys had PTSD, most had trouble keeping jobs.

Another friend of mine lost his job in the great recession in 2008.  We went to college together; he was called up from the army reserves.   He went to Afghanistan, then Iraq, then went back twice again with the military contractor KBR because mercenaries with Vice President Dick Cheney’s oil company, Haliburton, whose name was changed to KBR, made triple what US Army soldiers made doing the same work.  When the great recession hit, and he lost his job, he was working in San Francisco in marketing.  His rent was around $4,000 a month.  He left the country he fought for; living unemployed was too expensive in the United States, he told me, so he moved to Asia with his savings, to “ball on a budget.”

Anyway, here we are again.  School shootings and mass shooting events have increased dramatically in the United States.  Police shoot innocent civilians, as if black lives don’t matter, and when citizens protest, they occupy the hood with armored personnel carriers and assault rifles, purchased for cheap from the Defense Department which procured them originally to occupy Iraqi cities.  Rather than invest in education, jobs, and infrastructure, our tax dollars have gone to war abroad.  Whole segments of the population are deemed disposable.  They are shot mercilessly, like foster child Laquan McDonald, murdered by the police on video in plain sight, then the evidence covered up by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel until after his reelection.

We have glorified and become desensitized to violence.  Sandy Hook, Parkland, San Bernardino, Las Vegas; there are too many mass shootings to count.  The rhetoric of hate, militarism, then denunciation of terrorists, the celebration of waterboarding; the calls to bomb other countries in the name of freedom, the troops calling civilians sand niggers, and all sorts of other racial slurs and insults, the covered-up massacres, rapes, and tortures, the senseless violence and disregard for human life; it has all come back to us to haunt us.

As we waged war overseas, the US military trained a generation of teenagers to prepare for drone warfare and dispassionate murder.  The Defense Department and Silicon Valley venture capitalists funded and produced hyper-real, first person, three-dimensional video games, where teenage boys spent hours killing monsters, zombies, and terrorists.  Shows like the walking dead and others in the zombie apocalypse dramas have infected the popular psyche, and their message has become all pervasive.  It is OK to shoot people, they are just zombies, lifeless masses of flesh, doing what they are told, commuting to work, or school, and to their next class when the school bell rings.  They are only zombies; they aren’t real people with emotions, dreams, feelings, and aspirations.  The Arab civilian, the black male, the young student.  We have been programmed to believe they aren’t people.  Their lives don’t matter.  There are no consequences for their deaths.

It is time for a new generation to take up the torch of peace and liberty, to walk out and demand justice.  And a new generation is answering that call. People are doing more now to rise and resist the barbarity.  We’ve had massive rallies against gun violence and massive protests.

The women’s march; there were half a million women in the streets.  The women’s march now is like immigrant rights protests more than a decade, now 12 years ago, when through Spanish language radio, the entire community took to the streets.  Over half a million people took to the streets in Chicago, over a million in Los Angeles.  The women’s march today also is a protest for peace and against the glorified sexualized violence of masculinity, money, and power manifested through rape, sadistic bondage, domination, and sadomasochism.  This image of the powerful masculine sexually virulent male is touted as an ideal by the nation’s president and the media.  For example, pornography website pornhub, with its streaming videos that celebrate the degradation of women, including gagging, torture, and gang rape, is the 15th most popular website in the United States according to a company that tracks internet traffic.  CNN is the 25th most popular by contrast; millions of men jerk off to fetishized violence daily.

This desensitization of human life, this replacement of the fetish of violence and domination for love and compassion, has corrupted the nation’s psyche.  We knew 15 years ago when we organized walkouts against Bush’s wars, marches against government condoned sadistic sexualized torture, that the terror our tax dollars unleashed would one day come back to haunt us.

There have been no major terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since, that is true.  But we have been corrupted by the violence overseas, and are turning on each other here at home, a new school shooting every week, high profile celebrities and CEOs exposed as serial rapists, a president separating refugee children from their mothers’ arms and calling them gang members, and animals.

But though Obama did not deliver a change we could believe in, have we given up hope?  Have they broken our spirits?  No, they have not. They will not.  It has been a long slog these years.

President Trump is on TV, dismissing our trauma and pain, denigrating whole ethnic groups, celebrating American military might, its potential for violence, and his sexual prowess.  The stock market is soaring since congress enacted his corporate tax cuts, he proclaims, things couldn’t be better now that President Trump is Making America Great Again.  But what is not on TV, everyone knows; all the new jobs since the great recession are now temp gigs and freelance work with low pay and no benefits.  There is skyrocketing rent, and skyrocketing homelessness.  We have been robbed of our futures, crushed under stagnant wages and high interest student loans.  We can’t afford to buy a home, much less start a family.  Youth are living with their parents longer and longer.   The news says the economy couldn’t be better, we are in the longest economic expansion ever, and the stock market is soaring.  But good jobs haven’t come back, and the factories in Cleveland, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Racine, Wisconsin, Rockford, Illinois, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania continue to decay and rust.  Is this the best we will ever get?

No, it is not.  We can do better than this.

So, this Memorial Day, we honor the casualties of war, and we salute the youth who have lost their fear.  With courage and determination, they speak truth to power; they demand a future.  Again they are taking to the streets.  They now walk out of class for Books not Bullets, just as we did 15 years before for Books not Bombs.

A Few Good Men: Portraits of Homelessness

A Salute from the Sidewalk

One morning I went to take the train to work.  A man sat across from the entrance of the Hollywood/Western Red line station.  Scrawny, in his early 30’s, he held a sign that read, “Homeless Hungry Disabled Vet.”  I had no food or cash.  All I did was tell him sheepishly, “Sorry, I don’t have anything.”  Most commuters pretended he did not exist; they looked down at their feet, walking briskly past.  “Thank you for your service,” I gave him a sheepish salute as I walked by.

Exiting the train station at my stop, walking to work on sidewalks where homeless sleep on cardboard boxes wrapped in soiled blankets covered by clear plastic that sticks to garments like shrink wrapped cellophane, I saw a man wearing a Vietnam Veterans ball cap—a white man with a full head of snow-white hair puffing out from beneath his hat.  His beard extended a foot beneath his chin, unkempt full of scraggly salt and peppered gristles growing in different directions.  The six-foot-five vet stood upright with perfect posture.  He looked destitute, and in no rush, as he meandered across the sidewalk like he had nothing to do but loiter all day.

I saluted him, and he, in return, did the same with a curt right hand quickly raised to his hat’s brim as I walked past.

Mathew

Mathew Meyers.  That was his name, he told me.  He also wore it on his right wrist—on a hospital bracelet; white plastic with the name printed in clear black type. He was pushing a wheelchair slowly down a sidewalk composed of rows of grey concrete slabs, with bits of black dirt and plastic bottle caps crammed between each crack.  A bed roll, and few clothes piled up in the wheelchair were neatly folded, stacked up slightly above the back of the chair.  His hair grey and white with a few streaks of dirty blond flowed wildly down off the back of his head, mangled in knots and large clumps.  His beard descended four inches, covering his chin.

Mathew stopped me as I walked home from work; he asked for some change. He had been homeless two weeks, he told me.  After his most recent stroke he was discharged to the Ellis Hotel, where he dutifully paid his rent.  “I gave a blank money order to the property manager,” he explained laboredly, as if defending himself on the witness stand.  The manager gave him a receipt.  Later on, while he was out, the same manager entered his room, and took that receipt—pocketing his rent money, Matthew accused in a slurred drawl.  It seemed painful for him to talk as he attempted to enunciate clearly—a side of his face dropped flaccidly from the stroke.   “I was evicted.”

This wasn’t his first stroke, he mentioned that he had one before.  A lady and her daughter, he began to relate.  They lived in Riverside, or San Bernardino—somewhere inland—they took his Social Security checks.  $1,400 a month.  He had been trying to get his benefits restored. He had been going down to the Social Security office.  “The bureaucracy…. well, it is so frustrating.  It’s almost impossible.”  Mathew is 64 years old.

He used to be a mechanic.  He worked in LA’s once thriving aerospace industry.  He built aircraft parts and machines working at a massive factory; the hanger extended multiple football fields.  They built planes and war weapons for Boeing and Lockheed Martin.  He was non-union, but made good money, $18 an hour, which was a lot back then, in the early 80’s.  He even worked on the Tomahawk cruise missiles used in Operation Desert Storm, he related with pride.

I reached into my pocket.  All I had was a dollar and eight cents.  I felt impotent to help.  “Good luck,” I said as I handed him the money.

He stuffed the dollar into his faded blue jeans.  The pants were three sizes too big and could have easily fit two of him—they were kept up by a worn cheap belt.  As I left, Mathew continued walking, pushing his wheelchair down the sidewalk.  I turned my head and looked down at my feet as I walked away.  Central American day laborers stood at the entrance of the Home Depot parking lot, running to vans and Pickup trucks hustling for work.  Office workers sat on a Starbucks’ patio sipping lattes.  In the past year Lockheed Martin made over $5.5 billion dollars in profits, beating Wall Street analysts already optimistic expectations.  Boeing, with profit margin approaching 10%, made over $17 billion off its aerospace and defense businesses.

Elroy

A white couple sat on the sidewalk outside the grocery store Food 4 Less with their pit bull, who lay panting heavily in the late afternoon heat, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.  The man held a sign on a piece of used cardboard, the word “Hungry” scrawled with a black magic marker.  I stopped, and offered him a banana out of my lunch bag.  He said he didn’t eat them.  I dug into the bag.  I had some walnuts and raisins, which I offered.  He ate walnuts, and his partner, well, she ate raisins.

He was in Operation Desert Shield, he told me, and was in the military before Operation Desert Storm, when the first president Bush sent troops to protect the Saudi oil pipelines back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.  He was shot by friendly fire, he continued, and lifted his shirt to display his battle scars.  He had been shot several times in the stomach, and had a piece of metal still in his chest, and a metal plate in his left hand where his wrist had been shattered.  This happened three months after being deployed to the Saudi desert.

After emerged from a coma and left the hospital, the soldier who shot him came to visit to apologize.  He was livid—and lost it.  He started beating the man with a metal pole.  The military gave him a dishonorable discharge; assault on an officer with a deadly weapon.  “I mean here I was,” he explained, “having just recovered after months in the hospital, in a coma, and the man who shot me had been promoted to an officer.”  He got no benefits. “They said I was too violent for the military.  I mean imagine that!  It’s a profession where your job is violence.”

“A few months after that,” he continued, “I was at my neighborhood bar drinking.”  The bar was near his childhood home; he had known the bartender his whole life.

“I saw a man hit the girl he was with, a tiny blond thing.  I walked over to him to tell the guy to cut it out.  The man swung at me, so I beat him, and when I turned to walk away, he broke a beer bottle off on the back of my head.  So, I turned around, and beat him again.  I turned to walk away, and this time the man swung a glass pitcher and it broke on me, glass shards sticking into my neck.  So, I beat him again, and again tried to leave.  This time, he stabbed me between the ribs with a broken off pool stick, so I beat him until he stopped moving.  Bruised and bloody, I told the bartender I was going to home.  I left the bar and started walking.  A few blocks later, the police were there waiting for me.  I ended up doing nine years for involuntary manslaughter.”

The man had a giant Fuck You tattoo on his forehead.  By this time, I dumped my bag of raisins into the bag of walnuts, and then poured half of the mixture into the empty bag, and handed it to the couple.  They began sharing.  The woman picked out the raisins, the man the walnuts.  “Be careful,” I warned him.  “Those walnuts upset my stomach earlier.”

“They don’t bother me,” he replied, “I used to eat black walnuts as a child back east.”  He passed the bag back to his other half.

“Thanks for the food,” he grinned between bites.

“You know, I once stopped a woman from getting gang raped.  It was right after we moved to California.”  He looked over at his partner; she nodded approvingly, validating his memory.  “I saw a group of guys surrounding a woman in a parking lot in San Bernardino.  One man dropped his pants, and as they closed in, she reached out to pull them back up.  I wasn’t sure hat to do.  I asked a guy we were with if he wanted to stop them, he turned to me saying…. I’m not getting involved, there are too many of them.  So, I ran towards them alone, and with the full momentum of my body and speed, walloped one guy—punching him in the face.  His eyes rolled back into his head.  She got away—I only got stabbed,” he smiled, grinning from ear to ear in a goofy grimace.  He looked over at his partner, and their eyes connected.  “He was only in the hospital a few days,” she beamed proudly. “My man.”.

“So here I am,” he turned back towards me, “Thanks for the food.”

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Elroy, but they call me Bull”

Vincent

Wheelchair bound, Vincent sat near the crowded subway train’s side entrance.  He was headed to Pershing Square to panhandle.  His fingers were short, swollen, calloused, dirty, and pudgy.  A flap of skin hung beneath his double chin, like a stork carrying a baby on a Saturday morning cartoon TV show.  He wore a black hat with the insignia of the United States Marine Corp; the western hemisphere pierced by a ship’s anchor, with an eagle perched on top.  He had a Semper Fi marine tattoo inked on his right inside forearm, and a faded red and blue tattoo of an American flag on the other, in dire need of a touch up.  Vincent told me he did nine tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia; he received two purple hearts and one bronze star.

He served in the Marines 21 years.  “In the first Gulf War,” he explained, “We had to bury ourselves in the sand—it would rain oil.”  He had a bullet in his tail bone and ankle.  Once he was shot by friendly fire.  His buddy fired his weapon by accident, and it ricocheted off of his Sherman tank and hit the inside of his ankle.  Vincent had a stroke three years ago—that’s when he was discharged from the Army, and can’t remember a lot.  He goes to the VA for medical care, but he doesn’t get any disability pay, he told me.

Sometimes he has nightmares, he confessed.  He’s been living in a tent under the overpass on 17th and Main with his girlfriend, and when a truck thunders on the freeway overhead, a motorcycle passes by, or a car’s muffler kicks, he sometimes wakes up thinking he’s in the desert, and under attack with incoming mortar fire.  “My girlfriend has to calm me down, telling me no baby, were in LA, you are state-side, so I can get back to sleep.”  He told me they wanted to head to Santa Barbara to live with his Cousin; if only he could get the money together for a train ticket.

My stop was next.  I shook Vincent’s hand and pressed a $20-dollar bill into his palm.  He took off his hat, placed it in his lap, and clasped his hands together.  Looking up, he began to pray, mouthing some indecipherable words silently to the creator.  The train slowed, stopped, and its’ doors slid open.  I stepped off onto the station platform.

In September 2018 as the U.S. war in Afghanistan enters its 17th year, President Donald Trump signed bipartisan legislation to spend $200 Billion on Veterans Affairs, and $675 Billion for the Department of Defense next year.  The US spends more on its military than China, Russia, England, France, Japan, India, and Saudi Arabia combined.  I still haven’t seen any TV cameras at all those Presidential “Support Our Troops” rallies at military base air hangers fade to a shot of a career soldier and war hero living under a freeway overpass.

I hope Vincent made it to Santa Barbara.

George

George sat under the shade of an ancient oak tree, playing the blues in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park. He picked the strings of his guitar, which was hooked up to an amp powered by a street pole’s electrical outlet connected to a long orange extension cord.  It was a hot, sunny day, but under the tree it was nice and cool.  A breeze blew in from the southeast that caressed and gently kissed the naked skin.  George, born in 1942, was 75 years old.  A lifelong musician, he still plays now and then on Wednesdays and Sundays for a couple different congregations.  “We are blessed,” he told me, taking a break from the music, and placing his hand over the instrument’s strings to calm their vibration.  We sat quietly as birds chirped, inhaling the smell of mid-summer’s cut grass.

He had been a city bus driver, and retired when he turned 65—with both social security and a pension.  He was a truck driver before that.  Reflecting, he related how he survived a tour of duty in Vietnam, lived briefly in Chicago, and managed to make it through the crack cocaine epidemic that decimated his home town of Compton.  “Thank God.”  He was a former addict himself, but had recovered, “Praise the lord,” though he still smoked weed like most musicians, George confessed smiling.

When he retired ten years ago, he thought his pension and social security would be enough to live off of.  Sure, he made some mistakes in his life, but he had bounced back.  Even so, he never saved enough to buy a house.  But the rent south of the University of Southern California has skyrocketed with the campus’s expansion.  The influx of students has driven up the cost of housing for neighborhood residents.  “I’ve seen a lot of foreign students from Asia—Korea, Taiwan, and China.   They enroll at USC, and their families buy them a home to live in the four years they are here—it’s an investment for them.  The cost of living has skyrocketed.  I couldn’t afford the rising rent.”  George told me he has been living in his van for the past three years.  He has family; nieces, nephews, and cousins, but he doesn’t want to be a burden on them.  We talked some more, comparing notes of housing costs and way of living in southern California compared to back east.  “It’s almost impossible to live.  With the new football stadium they’re building in Inglewood, it is only going to get worse,” he mentioned.  “LA sure is nice,” he sighed, squinting at the sunlight shining through the swaying tree leaves, “but it sure is expensive.”

Hollywood

A homeless couple lay asleep on the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame, wrapped in blankets and each other’s arms.  A white woman curled up in her partners’ embrace, her head resting on his side between his hip bone and rib.  His arm, a dark melanin of exposed forearm and fingers, extended over her shoulder blade.  Here they were breathing peacefully, dreaming.  I walked past the pink imprints etched with the names of movie stars and recording artists with platinum record sales, tiptoeing on the sidewalk so as not to disturb them.  Concert goers walked hurriedly past.  A nearby storefront window reflected a plasma TV facing the street, advertising Google’s Artificial Intelligence.  Not smart enough to solve California’s housing crisis, I mused cynically.

And so, we are, across the swaying silhouettes of human life—the valleys, mountains, hills, and distant cities; places where men and women live, grow, and reproduce; where they care for each other in sickness and health—places like here; where we are born, die, and wander about in between, conscious of this earth a short while.  I’ve never seen many of these places.  I’ve never been there.  But I can imagine. I think of their customs, cuisine, and the architecture of their streets; the taste of the drinks they sip at dusk while watching the sun set, sitting on verandas, balconies, front stoops, and dwelling entrances.  All I know is those people I never met, across the block, across town, and on the other side of the world, they are witnessing the same eternal rhythm as I, the swaying back and forth; the attraction, repulsion, hope, despair, desire, disgust, idealism, burnout, fulfillment, and  frustration—those human emotions—the lust, contempt, love, hate, despondency, motivation, fear, courage, indignation, and forgiveness; paired together like dusk and dawn across time and space.

I entered a bar down the street from the young lovers sleeping on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  A band played.  The drums, they say—the conga drum beat reflects the echo of past generations, conjuring the energy of all who have come before us with its sound, bringing their color, passion, their sweat and labor—the harvest of humanity’s efforts—to the present place and time.  The trumpets lifted—musicians blew their horns to summon the artistic muses from their rest.  The room began to sway, to move, and shimmer.  Feet shuffled in rhythm.  Bodies danced in a harmonious give and take, a push and pull, like ocean waves lapping the beaches of human motivation, the dimensions of compassion, the orchestra of foot traffic, and the sweat of backs and anxious brow, wrinkled in worried concentration.  Without the power generated from this friction, the tired monotony of wage labor, the basic struggle for subsistence, would crush humanity in its persistent grind.  Life’s doldrums, its infinite obstacles, the overwhelming enormity of suffering, drowning our creativity, hope, and compassion, strangles the breath; choking off our faith in each other, in our own goodness, subjugating our spirit in a daily routine of labor to pay next month’s rent; to secure a safe space to sleep content.

It’s more than the fear of falling—of being evicted, of becoming the homeless man or woman wrapped in dirty linens, sleeping on the streets amidst the fame, fortune, brass posts and cloth cordons separating adorning crowds from red carpet Oscar awardees on Hollywood Boulevard’s sidewalk of patterned pink stars that motivates us to continue.  It’s the excitement, the courageous fascination, the tension—that magical rhythmic pulse careening through our veins and arteries—jumping from one body to the next, twirling its’ captivating essence around painted nails and curved hips, satin lace, red and pink skirts, crisp white collared button shirts and black neckties—the life energy that propels forward human ingenuity and kindness; to triumph past the pain of neighbors crushed by indifference, contempt, cruelty, and carelessness—that steels our resolve to remain human through it all.

Good Samaritan

The other day I stopped to get tacos on my lunch break.  As I waited for my order to be completed, a woman inched towards the restaurant’s entrance in wheelchair, her face cut and bruised, her right arm in a sling and cast, her left leg encased in a plastic brace over another plastered cast.  She wheeled herself to the front entrance, and called for help.  Do you have any rice, or beans—she called in Spanish.  She had just been discharged from Westlake’s Good Samaritan Hospital.  She was homeless, and had been raped and beaten by a group of men while living on skid row, I overheard her relate to the restaurant’s female cashier in Spanish as customers ate their lunch.  President Trump was on TV again, calling Latin American immigrants gang members and animals.  The Telemundo news anchor continued their ongoing coverage of the latest escalation of government cruelty; detaining refugee families, and incarcerating children and parents in separate camps.  The television flashed to a picture of a dog kennel sized cage, the cell where the news broadcaster indicated immigrant children were detained, concentrated together in a sweltering Texas desert camp, made passive zombies with heavy doses of psychotropic medication.  It was taking a while to get my tacos; I kept thinking of everything I had to do that day, as I sat watching the news.

One of the cooks, a Salvadoran woman in her late 30’s or early 40’s wearing a net over her tied up hair, emerged from the kitchen with five plates of food.  She stepped outside and placed the bag, with its stacks of meals in white Styrofoam containers, in the discharged patient’s lap.  She carefully placed a small hand on the woman’s shoulder, ever so gently.  Take care of yourself.  Good luck, may you be well, she told her their native tongue.

I smiled.  My food could wait