Member-only story
Homelessness is More Than Lesshomeness
Waze directed me to, “Continue straight for half a mile,” but I needed to come to a complete stop at the red light first. I looked over my left shoulder toward the sidewalk to take in my unfamiliar surroundings of the downtown Los Angeles streets.
From the safety of my locked sedan driver’s seat, I watched as an old homeless man sitting on the ground brought a syringe across his body to inject a clear amber liquid into his upper arm. It was broad daylight and no one batted an eye as he shot up, except for me, whose eyes rounded by the millisecond.
There was no privacy, no shelter to hide his shame, likely from years of cumulative pain beginning with a rough childhood and continuing into a sad adulthood. This man was left out on the streets and forgotten; our broken system unable to catch him before he fell through the cracks and tumbled down without a way to climb out.
I watched in total astonishment as the drugs he either begged or bartered for caused his mouth to gape open and make his eyes flutter back. I watched in total horror as the expression on his face changed from agony to a momentary look of ecstasy.
