Read Online Dead is Better by Jo Perry - Free Book Online

carts piled high with plastic garbage bags and nylon suitcases, mummy-shapes on the sidewalk covered in blankets and sleeping bags and boxes from which the legs of sleeping human beings extend. A few blocks away, the high-rise building, City Hall, the new LAPD administration building, and the wing-like Disney Concert Hall begin to shine gold in the emerging sunrise.
    In life I avoided—among most unpleasant and difficult things—this place. I banished Skid Row and its people from my thoughts. Sure, every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Mother’s Day there’d be a TV news story showing famous actors and actresses wearing aprons and serving a holiday meals on paper plates to a long line of homeless people.
    Once in a while I’d send a check to one “rescue” mission or another. But as I look around, nobody here looks even slightly rescued. A tsunami of bad luck and failure carried these people here on a wave of garbage and debris.
    A black and white police car turns the corner, then slows while the officer inside sweeps a flashlight across the inert bodies and detritus along the street and illuminates a crude mural painted on an old brick wall: “Wings of Hope,” in thick white cursive over a brown doorway, with white angels with pink faces and yellow hair, their wings extended like butterflies, above the W and the H.
    In smaller letters, “God is Love! All Are Welcome!” is painted in sky blue. I pass through the closed door first, Rose right behind me, into a dark hallway. We pass a small reception area with a desk, a desk chair and about 10 of those white plastic chairs they sell at Rite Aid; a large meeting room with a dry-erase board up front; a small corner room filled with cardboard boxes of shoes, pants, shirts, underwear, and blankets. I see a staircase leading to a second floor. A sign on the landing says, Men’s/Women’s Dorms.
    In the back I find what I am looking for, a large kitchen equipped with a serving station like those in school cafeterias, and long dining tables covered with black and white checked oilcloth and more of those white chairs.
    There are no cupboards, just long stainless steel tables and shelves covered with canned, packaged and boxed foods: jars of mayonnaise and jam, cans of tuna, huge shrink-wrapped packages of spaghetti, bags of bruised onions, oranges, apples, hot dog buns; loaves of bread, packages of cookies, clear bags of doughnuts.
    I see no boxes or products with the Happy Andy logo.

36.
    “ . . . we are all equal in the presence of death.”
    —Pubilius Syrus

    ***

    Rose moves from the kitchen area and floats, like a diver slowly ascending to the surface, up the back stairs. I follow, and pass handwritten signs on the landing wall that say “Men’s Dorm” with a left-pointing arrow, and “Women’s Dorm” with an arrow pointing to the right. Other signs announce “Men’s Restroom/Showers,” “Women’s Restroom/Showers,” “No Smoking at Any Time,” “No Alcohol, Medications or Controlled Substances Allowed. No Weapons.” “Quiet Hours from 9 PM to 7 AM.”
    A picture of Jesus is taped to the wall at the landing.
    We melt through a wall next to the closed door marked “Men’s Dorm.” Inside, a little light comes from a small street-facing window covered with blinds. The room is crowded with bunk beds and gray metal lockers, stacked one on another. We drift from bed to bed. Most of the men have beards, many with mouths open in sleep, exposing missing, broken, or yellowed teeth and emitting snores. There are a few young guys—a handsome man who appears to be about twenty-five sleeping on his side; a slender young man with his hair dyed purple and tattoos of spiders on his face.
    Rose takes me on a tour of the women’s dorm as well: A slender, pretty African American woman whose hair is braided in elaborate cornrows lies on her side, awake, clutching a filthy teddy bear. There are women with white hair, brown hair, black hair, auburn hair. One woman so