Nobody Knows Your Name

From a hamburger stand in L.A.’s Skid Row you can look west toward the towers of commerce that rise in the near distance, like cathedrals of a fairy world whose very existence mocks the reality of the streets below.

The contrast is remarkable. At the corner of 7th and Maple, life is broken down into its most basic components, devoid of the subtleties that characterize more favored communities.

Skid Row is a place where one’s future is limited to an inward vision of survival, where hot food rests at the rainbow’s end and a safe night’s sleep is the most you can expect.

No such basic requirements occupy the minds of those behind the gleaming windows of the fairy towers.

Hope and ambition are allowed to flourish there and one can look ahead with impunity to another distance called the future.

The difference between the streets and the towers is the limits of the dreams of those who occupy them.

I’ve been a part of both worlds at different times, but rarely have I spent a more compelling morning than I did with a poet named Dino on that corner of Skid Row.

Not long removed from the streets himself, he remains somehow an immutable part of the sadness that characterizes this noisy place.

As a result, he is able to capture its cadence of shout and siren, and create the imagery that translates the beat into words and verse.

Dino, more than most, knows that poetry is born in dark places of the soul, and this is one of the darkest places of them all.

His real name is Willie Lewis and he’s one of the founders of the Homeless Writers Coalition, a group trying to shed light into the shadows.

Its members, both homeless and once-homeless, believe if mainstream America could really see into that heart of darkness it would better understand what it takes to crawl back into the light.

Prose has always provided a pathway between worlds, just as 7th Street provides a metaphor of linkage between this bleak Row and that place where the towers rise.

Poetry offers an added dimension of pain, emerging from those anguished depths of human grief that blend body and spirit into disquieting emotions.

Dino does that well. He was raised on the streets of L.A., did time in prison and lost his family to drugs before ending up in a cardboard box in the very place where we sat that morning.

He’s a slight man with gapped front teeth and a manner of speaking that embodies the poetry he writes in less calamitous moments.

Listen as he says, “On the streets, man, no one knows who you are, no one knows your name. If I say I’m Ralph Brown, that’s who I am until I change my mind. All the needs are met here for somebody who doesn’t want anything.”

He says that as sirens of a fire engine shriek down the sad steet, and as men shout to be heard by each other, because no one else gives a damn.

He’s talking about the lure of the street and how some people just don’t want to leave because it’s a place to hide from the kind of pain most of them can’t even articulate.

That’s why it’s up to guys like Dino, a kind of poet of the pavement, to tell us what it’s all about.

“This is like any other neighborhood, only with less,” he says as we leave the hamburger place and walk down Maple.

We pass a guy sleeping against a wall and another trying to sell junk jewelry to a group of workers.

There’s a public telephone at one corner. Dino explains that a few of the street people hang out there hoping someone will use a credit card number to make a call.

They’ll watch him punch in the code, memorize the number and sell it for maybe $20 to someone reaching out to his long-distance past. You do what you have to do to get by.

“There’s no greater physical danger here than anyplace else,” Dino says. “People have a tendency to respect each other when another guy’s respect is all you’ve got.”

We stop in the middle of the block and Dino says if he and I should get in a fight and he should pull a knife, someone would come up an say, “Hey, Dino, think it over, man, is that what you really wanna do?”

“They wouldn’t get in the way of the knife,” Dino says, “but they’d give you a moment to figure out you don’t need that kind of trouble.”

We walk and he says, “Things get a little intense when you’re hungry.”

Writers are drawn to each by a common need to communicate.

I can understand the desire to express that which stirs the soul, even though I can’t explain it, and I hope the poetry of the street somehow manages to reach the towers in the distance.

It has reached me in ways Dino could never imagine.