After a close call with police, who were placing notices to vacate on camps in one of the places they tried to stay for the night, they trailed a couple of the men when they packed up to leave. Taylor had the idea that perhaps the men would lead them somewhere where the chances of getting hassled by police was lower. And if not, the worst that could happen was that they would discover other potentially useful places in the city. Instead, they ended up on a street that made them both all too aware of their inexperience.
When the Union Rescue Mission in LA opened its doors in the 1800s, people without jobs, hobos and transient workers congregated there because it was the last train stop in the country. Naturally, the infrastructure that built up around it catered specifically to both transience and poverty. In the late 1900s, the city adopted a “policy of containment” whereby the services for the homeless and needy were moved directly to the places where they had already naturally collected. The area was called Skid Row.
The scene that greeted Taylor and Aria was one they’d have expected to see on the television after a national disaster in a third world country – not on an ordinary night of the year in the United States. The street was lined with disheveled tents and makeshift plastic tarps, propped up over piles of clutter. Hundreds – maybe even thousands – of men, woman and children, rotting under the iron hand of poverty. Shopping carts full of every possession that their owners had. A paralyzing smell. Urine and feces stained the sidewalks, but people didn’t seem to care, or couldn’t care because there was nothing they could do about it. Drunk and high, or having succumbed to the decay of hunger, people sprawled out against the pavement and chain-link fences. Luxury lofts rose above the blighted lane, like specters cruelly reminding the people below of the luxuries that they would never have. Aria could feel the precarious overcast of crime lurking just underneath the patrolling eye of the cop cars that seemed to be making supervising rounds throughout the area. Concerned with criminal justice instead of human rights, they felt more like sharks ready to attack at any moment.
An internal warning of danger screamed at her through her nerves. She couldn’t stay there. “I can’t do this,” she said, expecting to be met with resistance. But there was none.
“Yeah, fuck this, let’s just go back to Walmart tonight, this is disgusting,” Taylor said. They did an about-face and walked back the way they had come, hoping to go unnoticed. During the walk back to Walmart, the initial shock of the experience compelled them to exchange remarks back and forth, in search of mutual validation about how bad the place had been. And then both Taylor and Aria fell into a self-preoccupied silence.
Now that her period had started, Aria was regretting running away more than ever. Suddenly the problems that had caused her to run away seemed minimal in comparison to what she was facing now. The details of her former life seemed sweeter than she had originally believed. So many things she had taken for granted. The memory of them moved in slow motion, like a scene from a movie deliberately trying to be nostalgic.
She was in torment. Before finding a hiding place to lie down for the night with Taylor, Aria sat in a stall in the Walmart bathroom and cried.
CHAPTER 11
Bravery had a way of finding Aria, where mercy would not. They say a woman can’t be until a girl dies, and the girl inside Aria was dying. Either that or she was retreating into the dark recesses beyond her reach. Her innocence was not welcome in this new life. Like all women on the streets, she had been forced to accept that there were people who found beauty only in broken things, people who hid their secrets behind the voiceless. But these people did not admire what was already broken; instead, they broke things to create that pleasure for themselves. They did not confide in people who would keep the shame of their demons safe because of vulnerability. They placed the stains on their conscience inside those who could not speak for themselves, instead of cleansing them.
Aria was learning the hard way that life for anyone on the streets was not as free as she had once imagined because life on the streets was not safe. It was even less safe if you were a woman. Hypothermia, heatstroke, rape, violence, infection, sunburn, arrest, insanity, injuries with nowhere to go to treat them, hunger and malnutrition seemed to follow you when you lived out on the street, like an invisible vulture, simply waiting for you to take a fall. And choosing a companion who was as out of place and flamboyant a target as Taylor made it even less safe.
They decided to spend their day at the closest library they could find to seek a safe refuge. Upon arriving, they went their separate ways inside the building. Taylor went to look for jobs online at the computer lab and Aria found a corner with a collection of chairs. She picked up a large cookbook with which she intended to conceal the fact that she was napping. She weighed her exhaustion against the chances that doing so would get her in trouble and decided that she still looked more like a student who was not preoccupied with her appearance than someone who had come in off the street. She hoped that anyone who saw her there would find the fact that she had fallen asleep more endearing than offensive. She drifted off into a dreamless sleep that was far deeper than she had intended.
She was awoken by a hand on her shoulder. “The library is closing,” a woman said in a tone that suggested she felt bad for having
