Whole Life Times: Skidrow Saints & Super Heroes

June 2007 | Feature

Skidrow Saints & Super Heroes

What does it mean when one of the strongest economies in the world allows thousands to live in squalor in the shadows of skyscrapers?

By Sam Slovick

I wanna be president,” Leylony tells me. A relentless implosion of frenetic fun and games, the elfin 8-year-old in the beanie and oversized khaki T-shirt climbs on my lap, before scrambling up my back and onto my shoulders. He’s affectionate in a way I’m familiar with after living and working on Skid Row for a couple of years, a neighborhood LAPD Chief Bratton calls “the biggest social disaster in America.” Kids down here are always desperate for positive adult male contact.

The School on Wheels storefront on San Pedro and 5th is a sanctuary in the mouth of madness. Desks with donated computers line one wall of the bright, airy room; in the center, a long brown wood veneer table buzzes with industry of children drawing, coloring and finishing homework under the watchful tutelage of volunteers. The nonprofit works with homeless kindergartners through 12th graders, providing supplies, locating lost records and teaching in welfare hotels, SRO’s (Single Room Occupancy hotels) and the Missions.

Just outside big street level windows, a staggering procession of disenfranchised homeless, addicts, vets, mentally ill, parolees and drug dealers endlessly march. Tonight promises a hard sleep on concrete, with rats running across ankles, a deafening cacophony of sirens and the relentless stench of urine seeping into their tents… if they’re lucky enough to own one.

The backdrop to their campground is dramatic: the glittering downtown skyline, five-star hotels, condos with a view recently snatched up by the upper echelons, skyscrapers housing billion-dollar corporate consortiums. Worlds collide as penthouse meets pavement in capitalist America, but Leylony doesn’t seem to notice.

He leans in and whispers into my ear. “God is telling you to get a house,” he says, interpreting the divine message being imparted to his fellow Skid Row brethren. I consider that he may be an avatar, an incarnation of some ancient Hindu deity just about to hit his stride. But he breaks the spell by jumping on my lap and putting me in a half nelson before going into his chimpanzee impersonation, screeching and scratching his armpit.

“They have to sleep on the street,” he confides, motioning to the slow parade in the fun house mirror a few feet away through the glass. “I know that’s bad. It’s dirty on the ground. No fun.”

“People don’t help them because they’re old people. Because they don’t care because they’re homeless,” he reasons. “God is in their heart, but God said ‘no’… because they don’t care about them homeless people… I don’t know the answer to it. You gotta know peoples’ name before you know.”

Leylony is talking about the lack of compassion, rooted in capitalist indoctrination, whereby leaders expressing the general consensus ignore the housing crisis. He’s referring to the disturbing reality that there is no exclusively material solution for resolving the problem… that a society is measured by how it cares for its most vulnerable… the widows, orphans and strangers in the land.

At least that’s what I think he’s getting at. He’s a subtle communicator, but these prepubescent enlightened types always are. You really need to read between the lines.

A closer look at the fine print reveals that around 90,000 people in Los Angeles County don’t have a place to call home. About 11,000 of those live in the streets, missions and welfare hotels of downtown, concentrated in the less than one square-mile area of Skid Row that butts up against the opulent abundance of the financial district, just to the east.

Numbers are tricky down here. They depend on who’s doing the calculating. Missions need to keep the body count up. The cops and the politicians need to keep it down… but not out. County and city officials play an endless shell game, recently unveiling two major plans to combat homelessness. “Combat” meaning, keep the dance alive and keep them in the game. Keep their salaries coming and their major medical and dental coverage active. But perhaps I’ve just become a little cynical.

Officials are mobilizing to move the majority of homeless out of Skid Row. The LA city plan spreads services to 87 communities in the county, at a cost of $12 billion over 10 years. The County Board of Supervisors is geared to spend $100 million to create new emergency shelters in other neighborhoods. The Midnight Mission and The Union Rescue Mission are the current megaplex Skid Row shelters, with huge kitchens and expansive, ultra-modern facilities to house and feed the throngs. The Midnight Mission alone estimates it served 800,000 free meals last year.

Apparently money’s not the problem; Beverly Hills fundraisers and donations keep the privately funded coffers full. Apparently the problem is something else. That said, if I found myself without a home and a dollar, I’d be grateful for their charity. It’s a complicated scenario, and like Leylony, I don’t know the answer to it.

Down the street and around the corner, there’s another colorful room-full of kids in another Skid Row storefront school, Para Los Niños on 7th Street at Maple. At the head of the class is an ex-nun named Alice Callahan. Now an ordained Episcopal priest with a master’s degree in divinity, she started and runs the non-profit that serves mostly garment workers and their families.

Alice is compact and middle-aged, with a pageboy haircut, comfortable running shoes and khaki skirt, a sort of self-imposed uniform. An infamous neighborhood presence, she hands out homeless rights flyers, and has taken city government and the cops to court.

Alice is a force to be reckoned with, a Skid Row saint with a decidedly earthly understanding of how we got where we are today. “The solution is a very material solution,” she asserts. “[The solution is to create] an adequate supply of affordable housing in the Skid Row area. It’s very attainable. They’re homeless because they don’t have sufficient housing. They’re not homeless ‘cause they’re drug addicts or unemployed, or because they have a criminal background. Clearly Beverly Hills and San Marino are filled with people who match that description.”

“We’re a capitalist society,” she continues, matter-of-factly. “We function well when a certain number of people are on the bottom and unemployed. When unemployment dips too much, we raise interest rates, knock it back down, so wages won’t rise. The capitalist system requires a certain number of people be unemployed to keep wages suppressed.”

I suggest the solution to ending suffering might be both material and spiritual.

“It’s an economic solution,” she counters flatly. “It’s not tied to spiritual beliefs. It has nothing to do with what people in the country believe, religiously speaking. It’s what people in the country believe economically and socially speaking. If we wanted to house everyone and provide healthcare tomorrow, we could. We could do it at a cost savings.”

And though that may be true, it overlooks the key question. What are the moral and spiritual implications of a community that can fairly call itself both “the richest county in the country” and the “Homeless Capital of America?” What does it mean when one of the strongest economies in the world allows thousands of people to live in squalor in the shadows of skyscrapers?

“There’s a culture, and what goes with the culture is an economic policy and a way of understanding,” Alice offers. “Despite all evidence to the contrary, I think there’s still a solid belief in the bootstraps ethic. People believe that everybody who wants to can get ahead. Everybody’s been indoctrinated into that system since childhood. People… even when they’re suffering under the capitalist system, they’re still buying into it.”

“No one’s even interested in entertaining the notion of guaranteed housing for everybody,” she continues tartly. “That’s not even a goal. Even the most progressive politicians aren’t espousing that point of view, because it costs money that flies directly in the face of the interests of those putting money in their political coffers. I mean how would Villaraigosa stand up and defend poor peoples’ housing when developers who give him the money for his campaign and his future campaigns are opposed to it? It’s not going to happen.”

Outside School on Wheels, an aging black wheelchair-bound hustler, legless and wearing a pimp suit, rolls past cops on horseback. The school’s glass window mutes the usual soundtrack of fire truck, police and ambulance sirens.

Inside, Cesar is having a difficult time sitting still. The hormonal chaos at work in his thin 12 year-old frame makes it hard to focus.

“Compassion… it’s one of my spelling words,” he squints, recalling his lessons. “Compassion… C O M P A S S I O N. Yes, I know what it is. I have it,” assures the 5th grader, who lives at the Union Rescue Mission with his mom and sister.

Why does Cesar think the suffering persists? “Probably cuz they’re greedy,” he speculates. “Some of ‘em care, some of ‘em just wanna keep their money to their self.”

The squirming Latino kid with the bright darting eyes and the big smile used to live in Fresno with his grandmother before they came here. He’s not sure exactly where his dad is. “I know who he is though,” he says, “He’s somewhere in Pomona.”

“Lunch is my favorite subject,” Cesar jokes, giggling. Kids down here in the human zoo are constantly scrutinized by the media, so Cesar knows the drill and is anticipating some tough questions.

“It’s a ‘right, I kinda like it here a little bit.” He stretches the truth, then comes correct. “I don’t like it that much. Well, I don’t like…” he motions out the window to the street. “It’s scary. I don’t go out by myself. I go out with my mom and my sister. There’s shooting and murder and drug dealing… but we do fun stuff. We go to the gym, we do Play Station and watch movies.” I wonder if Cesar is aware of just how many parolees and registered sex offenders are dropped off in his neighborhood upon release from prison.

“God is the person that made [Skid Row] up. He’s the one that — I don’t know… The people probably do it by theirselves. They probably lost their houses because they were doing something bad.”

Cesar takes a big breath, pondering the laws of cause and effect in the blue chair by the window. Like Leylony, I suspect he may have been reincarnated for the express purpose of imparting divine wisdom to disarm those who take the time to listen. He seems to understand that human intervention is futile in the karmic realm, that detached indifference with regard to material matters is the best course.

“There’s nothing else really to do,” he muses. “I would tell ‘em to make more houses and keep the city clean. Don’t matter.”

In regard to his spelling word for the day, he suggests outsiders make a pilgrimage to Skid Row, strictly in order to achieve an enlightened empathy. “Come down here and look down here,” he prescribes. “Because one day it might be you.”

From this decidedly challenging point of departure, I can’t speculate on where Cesar’s path might lead. I imagine it will require a Herculean effort on his part, along with full support from family and school officials for him to mark a steady course.

He asks me a question as we part. “Have you seen that movie Rocky Balboa?”

I tell him that in fact I have. I don’t tell him that I’m not sure that Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Skid Row superhero Alice Callahan can save the day. For the answer to this street level crisis, I think we might need to look up from the pavement.

Nrsimhananda (aka David Shapiro) has more in common with Skid Row kids like Leylony and Cesar than just the ceaseless supply of kinetic energy at work in his lean, fit frame. A Hare Krishna devotee since the ’70s, the not quite 60-year-old is a walking Vedic encyclopedia and sort of elder statesman in the LA Krishna community. He brings an eastern perspective to the decidedly western dilemma of downtown.

“Capitalism and socialism… all these ‘isms’ are really two sides of the same coin,” he counsels. “The moral issues have become so foggy. In the Bhagavad-Gita, which is thousands of years old, Krishna gives his disciple the tenets of spiritual life, on how to perform an act in the material world in a spiritual way. ‘Well, what about charity?’ the disciple asks. Krishna says, ‘Well there’s charity in the mode of goodness, and there’s charity in the mode of passion, and then there’s charity in the mode of ignorance, and the type of charity you give will produce a similar result. For example, if you give a drunk a drink, that’s charity in the mode of ignorance.’”

As he speaks, I think about the vanloads of well-intentioned would-be philanthropists who show up on Skid Row every day, handing out sandwiches and Bible verses. Their assistance is not so… helpful. If you’re getting curb service, why bother going inside? Besides, you can’t smoke crack and have sex in the Missions, even if the food is good.

“Ultimately philanthropy is a feel-good presentation,” Nrsimhananda continues. “We’ll give some money and feel a little better about ourselves. We need to transcend that paradigm of charity. What is the charity that will actually help everyone transcend the conditional life, no matter what situation? It really requires such an engaged investigation, the kind that we haven’t created in our country [since] the space program.”

Okay, so back to the money tree. That’s surely gonna cost a bundle, at a time when even NASA can’t make ends meet.

“We’ve been throwing money at homelessness since Johnson’s idea of the great society, and what have we got?” Nrsimhananda asks. “We need to elect people who are true leaders, who can lead from both a spiritual and material point of view. Our heroes are self-indulgent pop stars, not the Mother Theresa’s or Swami Prabhupada’s or Mahatma Ghandi’s. Our leaders are absolutely representing the collective conscious. The homeless are a symptom of the collective problem.”

He’s right, but it’s complicated. I’ve been down here for a few years now. The more I know the people and their stories, the less I understand for sure. For now, I’m rolling with Leylony on this one… I don’t know the answer to it. You gotta know peoples’ name before you know.

Former Skid Row resident Sam Slovick’s intimate relationships with the homeless of downtown LA have inspired him to write extensively about the area fo r LA Weekly. He has also published in Vibe, Details, Interview, Nylon, Angeleno, LA YOGA and others. For those seeking practical, non-denominational volunteer opportunities in downtown, Slovick recommends United Coalition East Prevention Project (socialmodel.com/prevent_united .php), School on Wheels (schoolonwheels.org) and Central City Community Outreach (lacentralcity.org).

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