The people I met were that night were all different. I met a boy who had hitchhiked the country and looked and smelled like a dumpster, his daily occupation was diving into dumpsters and collecting cans all day long. The boy slept on a bench, right on the main street, exposed to the elements every night, with no blanket. He told me he hiked the country and made money cleaning the rims on big trucks and he really liked the Insane Clown Posse".
I talked to and became friends with Bryce, a really clean cut middle aged guy who sat on a bench on the corner of the Promenade every day, all day in an expensive suit which he never changed and slept on a piece of cardboard behind a pizza place. He was a real estate guy, he lost it all in one big swoop, the house in Beverly Hills, all of it and he had given up. He had some things that he had salvaged which were in a storage unit, he carried nothing on his person, just his suit, which he never changed as he sat on the same bench day in and day out doing absolutely nothing.
As the evening turned to morning I passed by the bundled up bodies strewn across the Santa Monica beach towards the ocean, they were like parking cones, lining the sand and waiting for the beach police to drive by them and wake them up and tell them to move on, or take them to jail. I heard a man screaming into the darkness and looked to my side and a big burly man named "Thor" was staring down on me, he told me he couldn't sleep and asked me for a cigarette and then walked away again, shouting curses at the darkness of the night. I sat there for a while and watched him disappear into the mist, wondering what kind of bullet I had just dodged, the man was tormented.
Strolling down the beach I thought of how horrible it could be out here and I wondered what I had done to deserve the good fortune that came my way every day and be in the same environment as these folks. I approached the lifeguard stands where me and m friends had bonded the previous nights and I saw a low rider bicycle parked next to the tower. My friends were gone and that experience of my life was coming to a conclusion, I walked up to the our spot and a skinny shirtless tattooed man darted out of the darkness with a long shiny knife, he placed it at my neck and looked at me with an empty glare unlike any other I had ever seen. "Go away motherfucker" said the man and I went. My nights at the life guard stand between the towers had come to a close. I brisked away and caught the bus and rode it until it came to its last stop.
The last stop on the bus was in Skid Row, it was almost as if life was showing me the worst of the worst, like I was on a safely guided tour on the brink of danger, watching the belly of the beast rumble from the inside out. I wandered through the streets as the crackheads whisked by, people in tents, lining the streets, people in garbage and people on bikes. There were screams and snores and the sounds of painful sex in the air and no one looked at me as I stared at them in both sympathy and disgust. This was the bottom of the barrel that I was witnessing in real time and marched through it like a warrior off to battle. There was a reason I was living this nightmare and walking through unscathed. I rode the bus until daylight and would never return to this part of the city. I was blessed and I had things to do so I began mapping the plans for what was next.
As always, thanks for reading. I haven't been as consistent of late, but the story moves on. Please share if you see fit and "like" me on Facebook Tilly's
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