Counting the homeless
on hopelessness and hope
Every January, we go out for the annual homeless count. And that’s exactly what it sounds like. In Los Angeles, where we live, there are something like 75,518 people experiencing homeless on any given night. Those are the last year’s numbers.
We have that figure because on three consecutive nights — the last weekend of January — volunteers go out and count the homeless on the streets of LA. Katie works at a homeless nonprofit and so we do a lot of things with them. Community Christmas parties and stuff like that. Her group serves an area called South Central and of the 75,518 homeless people in Los Angeles, they helped around 24,000 of them. So yeah, it’s a lot. South Central has the highest number of homeless families in Los Angeles. And outside of Skid Row, it has the highest number of homeless individuals.
Anyway, we help out every January. The count is organized by census tracks. Some of it is done on foot, (here’s an LA Times photo essay of that) and some of it is done by car. This year we helped out with a registration desk type of thing, but last year, we went out in a van. I asked to go to the heaviest area they had; they said we couldn’t do that on foot. From my notebooks, here’s a bit of the sketch I got down:
… we approached one street and the large muscle-backed driver up front told us to be ready to count and to count fast because we couldn’t spend any more time there than we had to. We stopped at the end of the street and you couldn’t see into it. The streetlights had been knocked out. The street had the look of an abyss about it. Trash was piled high on the curbs beside tarps covering heaps of god-knows-what. A body moved across the dim headlights and its eyes were wild in its head. On the other streets, we were counting RVs but there were no RVs on this street. We drove down the middle and you thought you saw more bodies darting away into the darkness, but you couldn’t be sure. There was a boat, filled-up and overflowing with trash and the bow was on fire. But even this gave no light, immediately, on each side of the orange glow, the trash became formless and the darkness swallowed the firelight within a few feet of the flames. The street was so crowded with trash that we were barely able to get through and the woman sitting beside me said that one year, a barrage of bottles was thrown at their van as they drove that street …
I wrote that a year ago, but I remember it all. I remember the fat-yellow moon over the street. I remember that it was a full moon. It seemed unthinkable that this same moon could hang over this Dantean street and hang also over some glimmering place like the US Capitol, where I often walked outside and looked at the same fat-yellow moon. On the best of moments — a few minutes on either side of midnight — it’s of those moons so fat and warm you can feel it on your face.
The same moon was there this year, as we stood in the parking lot of Katie’s office. I suppose that abyss/street must have been there too and somebody must have counted it. I wanted to go back out, but they had enough volunteers. It’s a bit selfish, but I’ll tell you one reason why I wanted to go out — because I remember getting back to the parking lot last year and noticing this tangible feeling of hope. Maybe noticing isn’t a strong enough verb, it’s passive but I’ll say that I was totally enveloped by a feeling of hope.
This is rare, this feeling of hope. Very, very rare. It comes off some people. I used to work in a warehouse with a formerly homeless guy named Greg who had it. But when you get a lot of these people together — and many of the people Katie works with are formerly homeless — it feeds on itself, fills everything up like clear water in a cold glass. And, even though I didn’t go out for the count, I felt that hope again this year in the parking lot — as I always do. It’s a pulling sort of feeling. Like the pull of a tide.
When I was a kid, I used to go to the Catholic soup kitchen with my grandmother, where you could feel a touch of the same hope. But it didn’t hit you in the face. If anything, the hope was slightly blunted by religion — a religious obligation is not necessarily a commitment in the right direction. It’s too carrot-and-stick. But still, I noticed it.
Anyway, I noticed it this year too. That unrestricted and almost baptismal feeling of hope. There are certain feelings, certain vibes in life that we believe are worth chasing. That’s why that whole find your beach Corona Beer™ campaign was so big. Everybody wants to look at the world through amber-shaded glasses. But the whole find your beach feeling wears off, eventually you have to leave the beach. And most of it wears away, it probably doesn’t affect you that much. But that feeling of hope, I remember it distinctly. It can sink into your bones. I remember how it moved. And that vibe, I believe is one worth chasing.