Ryanimay Repulsa Strikes Again !

This is an article I submitted for my literary journalism class at UCI .  It was a ton of hard work, but it ended up being my greatest college experience .  I spent some time hanging out with an old homeless man in Los Angeles for a few days .  I don’t know if he’s still alive today, but it would take a lot to bring this man down .  Let’s hope he’s resting peacefully either way .

This work is written in the format of an actual article so it’s a VERY long read !  Stop now unless you’ve got the time .  And I do hope it holds your attention long enough to enjoy it .  This article is an example of my writing at an intended professional level .  Not like most of these bloggy poem-ish things I seem to put up .

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November 25, 2008

Surviving Poverty and Violence in the Rich City

It is November 3, 2008.  The elevated skyline of L.A. exhibits the fruits of those with wealth and power, and high-rise buildings tower over the unfortunate remainders of the money-making equation.  The glory of these structures is an uplifting sight to behold yet inversely discouraging to those who view it from the lowest point possible.

A raggedy old man hikes exhaustedly across the busy city intersection like a drained fugitive trudging through deep snow.  His speed is slower than the darkness which gradually begins to cover the metropolitan area of Westwood, where the sun now sets behind skyscrapers of steel and glass before escaping unnoticed into the unseen horizon.  He nearly becomes engulfed in the shadows, as his dark skin blends together with his black parka; his face and hands being the only visible evidence of human exterior.  Covered almost completely in blackness from the hood over his knitted cap, to his tattered slacks and worn-out shoes, he drags a black rolling suitcase toward the curb of Santa Monica Blvd. while gathering the stares of red-lighted motorists and the curiosities of backseat children.  A woman in a large SUV locks her eyes on the old man, who appears and moves like an unemployed grim reaper.  The ends of her lips weigh down into an expression of pity, but only for a moment.  The traffic light shifts colors and her face returns to a default blank.  He never notices the stares anymore, as variant and frequent as they are.  He’s been around these streets too long to care.  The neighborhood knows him as “Pops,” and at age 71, he has been homeless for nearly 40 years.

“My blood pressure is going crazy.  Gotta breathe.”  And breathe is precisely what he attempts to do.  But the rhythmic noise of his wheezing accompanies every lungful of air he manages to catch.  He stops his trekking in a plaza parking lot, on the corner of Santa Monica and Wilshire, planting his hand for support on the top of a broken brick wall which reaches only to his waist.  Like a kickstand on a bicycle, it appears that his arm is the last thing keeping him standing.

His face is a crude scowl, with a complexion like withered black leather.  The darkness is in total contrast to the snowy beard which hangs from the ends of his chin, as white as age can ever truly lighten.  He dons a nearly toothless smile, with blank spaces commemorating his brief career as a boxer in the 70s.  His mouth is left with as many teeth as there are days in a week, and he would normally be smiling with them if not for the coughs that interrupt his intake.

He drags himself across the lot to an empty Jamba Juice, and hauls open the door as if it were a dungeon’s gate.  A young man behind the counter begins to fiddle with fruit trays and used containers.

“Jamba Juice green tea!”  Pops shouts.  “I want a Jamba Juice green tea, cuz I need to calm down over here!”  Pops has the words and volume of a jittery, hyper-active old man, but shows only the slightest and slowest movement as he stands waiting impatiently at the opposite end of the counter.

Without a word, the young man transforms his meaningless shelf fidgets into drink-making, having a filled cup within moments, and placing it in front of Pops while saying, “Green tea,” in what sounds like a question form.

“Now I gotta have corn with this, and that’s from Koo Koo Roo, then I need a beef bowl with lots of onions at Yoshinoya!”  Pops says aloud as he takes the large cup of green tea, leaving the worker with a blank stare and an aura of anxiety.

Later that evening, at the Yoshinoya, Pops reaches the front of the line ready to order the last of his required meal.  He stands at the far left register with four people waiting their turn behind him.  There is an equal amount of visible workers behind the counter, but only one employee currently on cashier duty.  She stands lazily with sleepy drooping eyelids and an expression of neutrality fixed onto her face.

“I want a beef bowl, and gimme lots of onions.” Pops says.

“Okay, so you don’t want onions?” mistakenly asks the middle-aged lady behind the register.

Pops instantly lets out a sigh of frustration.  He places his hands on the counter and bows his head.  The lady at the register can only stand silently and wait for the next word.

“Look.”  Pops says as he lifts his head to meet her eye contact.  “You gotta… learn… how to listen.”

His words cut a solid line across the counter and drew a clear cut division of confrontation.  The worker adjusts her visor and leans in to bravely match the moment’s intensity.

“Well, what I had THOUGHT you said was…” she begins to explain sternly in a Hispanic inner-city accent until being interrupted by Pops.

“If you don’t listen, you don’t learn!” Pops struggles to raise his voice but only results in acquiring a fuzzier rasp.  “Everybody here knows I don’t like to speak loud, so you have to listen!  It’s simple!  Beef bowl with lots of onions!”

The lady shoots out a gust of breath and shakes her head while lifting up her hands in apparent stress.

Another night worker who was watching the scene approaches from the kitchen.  He’s a heavy built Hispanic man with gothic calligraphy tattoos running down both arms and creeping out of his collar and up his neck.  He leans in and slams both hands on the counter, splitting the air between Pops and the register worker.

“Is it just extra onions you want?” The man says calmly.

“Right.  Now is that so hard?”

“Nope, I’ll have it for you right away, Pops.”  The man repeats the order through a wide opening between the registers and the kitchen.  He appears to be familiar with Pops, as most Westwood dwellers and workers have come to be.

As the night went on, Pops sits in the farthest corner of the Yoshinoya, creating a forcefield radius against any potential dine-in customers.  He takes the corn and dumps it into the beef bowl, stirring the mixture consistently with a plastic fork as if it were being tumbled by winds.

Pops has always felt a hostile sensitivity toward people not listening.  This stems from a deep root in a history of violence.

It was in the mid 1950s when Pops was a war protester.  However, he was drafted and sent to Korea despite his expressed opinion.  Pops doesn’t remember a large portion of what happened during the war, but the things he can’t shake off are more than enough luggage to carry.

“They made me kill lots of people.  I’m afraid if I get too hungry, I’ll start having flashbacks again.”

He returned from the war with nerve problems and doctors diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia.  To his surprise and disappointment, the government he fought for had done nothing to take care of him.  By the 1960s, Pops was married with two kids and living in Washington D.C.  However, his family turned to Islam, rejecting their Christian faith which Pops values greatly.  His daughter grew militant and began organizing plans to “kill white people,” and Pops fled his family in fear, confusion, and with a sad certainty that he no longer belonged with them.  To this day, they still receive his social security checks.

Pops invested his faith in God through the decades since then, allowing his beliefs to light the way.  He has drifted from coast to coast, finally settling down in the district of Westwood, where he has appointed himself to be a makeshift caretaker over the homeless community for almost 30 years.

“God is helping me so I don’t need to help myself.  I want to help other people.” Pops states.

Out on the streets, it is routine to be a victim of theft.  There have been numerous times when Pops is asleep on the sidewalk, an alley, or a bench, and he wakes up to the feeling of somebody stealing the coat right off his back.   At times, he wakes up from the noise of another person rummaging through his bags.

“I always let them take it.  If they woke me up and asked for it, I’d let them take it.”  Pops says.  But, his admirable views on dealing with theft unfortunately spill into views on violence as well.

It was only a few years ago that Pops suffered a near-death assault on the streets of Westwood.  A Mercedes pulled over to the curb where Pops was standing, and a man with a lead pipe exited the car and came running toward him.  Pops was severely beat in broad daylight and not one person had intervened to help.  The stranger swung the pipe mercilessly, and Pops had done his best to block the strikes with his arms, but he soon grew tired and dizzy and gave up resistance.  At that point, the attacker ran away, returned to the car, and fled the scene.  According to Pops, this type of situation is sadly normal to the homeless.

The LAPD would unfortunately agree, as they hold records indicating 22 counts of senseless violence against the homeless in 2006, and an increase of 65% for 2007.  Although violent crimes in general are down by 5.2% this year, “attacks on the homeless are likely to be higher since the occurrences are seldom reported,” say the executive directors of The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

The homeless are a difficult group to protect since violence against them is not considered a hate crime.  Therefore, the penalty is much lighter than attacks motivated by racism or prejudice.

The majority of assaults on homeless people are carried out by teenagers.  This creates a stir and a caution within the homeless community of Westwood, since the area is shared with students of UCLA.

Eric Park is an economics student living on campus at UCLA who has never met Pops, but has seen him multiple times at the food plaza, and walking up and down Santa Monica Blvd.  Eric carries the physical profile of an average Asian-American student, equipped with a short and tidy haircut, untucked polo shirt and washed out, blue denim jeans.  He stands lanky and hunched, and speaks with an impartial tone, almost devoid of intensity.  He is gathered at a circular table with 3 of his peers, who almost seem interchangeable with one another, seeing as their physical features are nearly identical to Eric’s.  They appear to be situated comfortably at their regular spot on campus, amidst a crossroad of pathways almost directly outside the gym.

“Just last month, we all heard about that homeless guy on Wilshire.”  Eric remembers.   “That was a real shock.  It was sad, but it felt weird.”

Eric glances to his friends who trade gazes of agreement.

“That’s how you know people are just doing it for fun.”

Eric refers to the incident on October 9, where a homeless man by the name of John McGraham was murdered by being doused with gasoline and lit on fire as he was sleeping in his usual spot on Wilshire Boulevard.  The assailant had exited a stopped car to perform this act, and immediately sped off thereafter.  The criminal is still presently at large.

The National Coalition for the Homeless reports that 1 in 4 attacks against a homeless person ends in murder.  Eric is not surprised at the statistic, “I would expect homeless people to be in bad physical condition, so they’d probably die a lot easier.  And doesn’t Westwood kind of want them gone, anyway?  The city probably won’t work that hard to find the killer.”

Eric’s shoulders accompany the comment with a shrug.  His words are a sad personal truth that he and his peers can easily accept.

Later that week, Pops is walking north on Santa Monica Blvd.  There’s a recreational center where he can frequently be found, and it’s located across the street from a place very valuable to him.
Pops stands in the daylight, still dressed in the same black collection of fabrics that drape him into a dark figure almost ghastly.  He stares across the road toward a cluster of buildings which bear the appearance and format of a college dorm area.  The community is gated and fenced, but the housing block is still perfectly visible through the bars.  In the center of the structural group, a park can be seen with pathways like a hub connecting each building together.  The facility does well to blend itself between the baseball field and office building which surrounds each side.

It is actually a transitional housing section, which the Salvation Army has named, The Village.  Homeless people come here to get a much-needed boost on life by learning job skills, quitting addictions, and building positive living habits.  What qualifies them as homeless depends on The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development’s requirement.  Their income must be at or below 40% of the area median income for Los Angeles County, as shown in the form 990 found on guidestar.org.

Pops, along with all others who aren’t residents, is not allowed into the community.

“A shelter is a bad place.  People will steal from you and hurt you.  But the Salvation Army is different.  The lucky people get to sleep here.”  Pops explains as he begins walking across the street to approach the front gate of The Village.

Standing at the large green door which grants or denies access to the facility, Pops reads aloud a boldly printed sign posted on the fencing.

“Do not allow anyone to follow you into the community!” He says harshly.

There is another sign accompanying it which states the prosecution extent to trespassers.  There is zero tolerance at this facility.

A woman Pops knows only as “Martha” opens the green door from the opposite side and exits the grounds.  She’s an old bulky overweight woman probably in her late fifties, with short, dirty brown hair that appears burnt at the ends.  Her overcoat is an odd brown which shows fossil evidence of once being yellow, and her black pants increase in soil density the closer they reach her mud-ridden boots.  She walks with a mysterious unease, causing her to automatically tilt over on each step, and her face remains frozen in a stoic depression as if to tell a story at its final chapter.

“She was having problems with her legs after her husband beat her.  Her legs get worse and she came back from the doctors like this.  No hugs, smiles, or words.  The doctor must’ve stolen her joy.  She used to be like the sun.”  Pops says with a sneer as he follows behind Martha as she silently hobbles off toward Wilshire.

Martha enters a donut shop at the food plaza where Pops frequents.  She occupies a corner table and stares blankly into space despite being next to a clear window.  Once Pops sees her settled down, he releases a sigh of relief and walks toward the underpass of the 405 freeway, one block west, sharing his thoughts along the way.

“The number one killer of the homeless is pride.  I don’t think it’s diseases, or violence, or mental issues.  I’ve seen more people out here die because they didn’t want to accept a sandwich.”  Pops says as he looks down onto the sidewalk that moves underneath his steps.  “A lot of these people will starve to death before they accept help.  That’s why sometimes they don’t accept your food.  They still believe they can make it on their own.”

Pops halts for a moment to adjust a strap on his rolling suitcase.  Untying it causes a large front pocket to open, since the zipper was previously broken.

“I mean, we don’t got homes, but we still have heart.  We have lives and we have names.”

Pops pulls out a torn faux leather wallet.  The inside is filled with scraps of white paper with scrawled penmanship and wrinkled up wrappers.  Among the apparent junk is a card that looks like a driver’s license.
It’s his military service identification card.

“If I didn’t still have this, I’d probably forget what mine was,”

And on it, the photograph of a young, brave soldier by the name of Richard Franklin, Jr.

. ryan