Santa Monica -1

Posted on September 24, 2002 in Photos Travels - So Cal

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California is the delta where a mighty estuary of humanity finds the sea. I had not done an urban photo walk since 1992 when I passed through Paris on the way to former Yugoslavia. The repetitive halts that Skits called to discuss what to eat, to guide some stray, or to allow some blogger a chance to find respite in a lavatory gave me plenty of opportunities to slip beyond the fringe for a few pictures.

I hesitate to call those I found rafted along the sidewalks “flotsam” or any word recalling debris because they are people, not discarded cans, pebbly bits of cracked styrofoam, cigarette butts, or oil slicks. The white plastic bags they pushed around on the steel carts that they’d salvaged from abandoned factories or warehouses held coiled clothes and maybe a bit of food. Hands invited offerings of money for food, bus tickets home, or money to pay a fine. They slept on the lawns overlooking the sea, the growl of traffic and shush of the waves enclosing them in rooms with walls of sound.

I’ve often heard people complain that the homeless are lazy. It’s a lot of work to keep pushing those carts, to keep moving one step ahead of local police who are eager to bust you for loitering. I’ve heard that the state of their dress indicates that they are not so bad off: they don’t run around pantless like the poor in the shanty towns around Rio or Bogota. Who can go naked in America without being arrested, however? Who can survive even a Los Angeles winter without clothes?

I have never had the spiritual power, the money, or the will within me to do much for the homeless except vote for those who would do something to re-enfranchise them with jobs, decent disability insurance, and housing. The fact that I sometimes carry camera equipment whose sale would fetch enough to feed and house a person for a couple of months does not fail to batter me with its irony.

I gave the fellow in the picture at the top a dollar, a lousy dollar, for the picture. Later, as I walked down Second Avenue towards the parking garage, a woman asked if I had a quarter to give. I padded my pocket. I had no change. “I’m sorry,” I said, weakly.”

“God bless you, Sir,” she said. “God bless you anyways.”

I walked on. If it were not for Lynn, I would probably be on those streets. Who am I, I rebuke myself, to lord my relative affluence over them? And yet I am no St. Martin or St. Francis. I know not how to divide my cloak except by granting handouts. I’m just one befuddled man. And part of that same stream as these I show here.

The clever boys with their toys also float these ways. Santa Monica’s chic brings the privileged for the food and the bars. Francisco and I both spotted the fellow who knelt on a scooter, chatting into a cel phone. He proved more wary and dismayed of our attentions than any of those who lived in the streets. Just after he passed, I saw a fellow I’d seen earlier, a guy with a stubbled balcony chin and a build like a seaman. He talked to himself as he strolled to the end of the pier and he was still talking to himself when I saw him passing the statue of St. Monica.

I cannot say for certain what he was: a poet who declaimed harsh verses as he strutted among the crowd or a madman. “He took him down,” he called when I first saw him. “He took him down and that was that.” If I had not had my appointment and if Lynn hadn’t been with me, I might have followed him, partly to see where he went and partly to hear what he had to say and how he said it.

He left as he came. A wave of traffic tossed him into my path as I headed for the pier and another took him out of my sight when he crossed the street and disappeared down an alley.