The Homeless Capades

I moved to downtown Los Angeles recently, and it’s been pretty exciting.

There’s plenty of noise, but of a different sort than the old Mexican neighborhood. The police helicopters, ice cream trucks, honking carts, car alarms, the mariachi band (really), the dogs, the cats, the birds, the catbirds, the mockingbirds that mocked the catbirds, and that guy who would constantly blast his horn at random, cacophonous intervals independent of the hour of day or night–these have all been replaced by the stops and starts of buses, live bands, and homeless people, who like to scream while they defecate.

There really are an astounding surplus of these (homeless people). I can’t imagine why they’d want to loiter downtown instead of the beach, but questions like those are only a few inches down the rabbit hole of perplexing homeless behavior. Living here has given me the opportunity to go a bit deeper, and I intend to make the most of it.

Here are a few of the characters I’ve come across so far. Having recently been told that the homeless are indeed people, I’m using out of courtesy what I’ve decided are their real names:

Black Mark Twain – I’m not even exaggerating, he looks Photoshopped. And though he lacked the author’s vocabulary, he made up for it with simplicity of language, limiting himself to just one word: “Vaginas.”

“Vaginas. Vaginas vaginas, vaginas vaginas vaginas. Vaginas.”

Our proximity on the bus made me a little uncomfortable, but probably not as much so as the young woman he was talking to.

C. - This guy approached me just as I was exiting the local Rite Aid, enjoying my scoop of Thrifty brand Mint Chip for Poor People ice cream. He looked at me sideways and growled, “Just how many of you are there?”

Do you think he was talking about:

A. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?

B. The duality of man?

C. I’m a crazy homeless person who should be ignored, but you’re going to be thinking about our interaction for weeks, thereby making you sorry you ever made eye contact with me in the first place?

The Woman Who Is Probably Watching Me Right Now – I was dozing off on the Metro Rail, jolted out of my sleep by these strange gospel jingles. Short and saccharine little rhymes you might learn in Sunday School. When I heard the weird guttural intonations, I realized they were not coming from a child of God, but rather a woman of Satan. She had a shaved head and black eyes and sang the way Billie Holiday would if she had psychologically regressed into a child. With AIDS. She was a real-life horror movie, the most disturbing thing I had ever seen, and I felt that if displeased she could dissolve me from the inside out somehow.

The Ten-dollars-and-fifty-cents-on-sale-at-Wal-Mart Man – To be fair, I don’t know if he’s homeless. But he’s definitely legless. His torso is capped watertight by a silver tarpaulin and he roams the streets using two wooden handles to propel himself forward. The world is his pommelhorse.

And no, I don’t know how he goes to the bathroom either, but I imagine he just shits the tarp and then donates it as shelter to the Santa Monica homeless, which explains why they smell worse.