Dogs in the Street

A cop I knew called them “the dead” for the way they lay on the streets and in the alleys, oblivious to rain and wind, stinking from their own urine and rotting in clothes they hadn’t changed for years.

“It’s a pity,” the cop would say, “you couldn’t just put ‘em to sleep the way you do dogs. It wouldn’t matter to anybody. They’re dead anyhow.”

It’s an attitude that still sends chills through me, and I think about it as I ride the mean streets with Tom Mayo, on the south side of downtown.

Tom is talking about the same kinds of people the cop was talking about, but in different terms.

“When I see a guy like that,” he is saying, “lying there with crap in his pants, a guy no one else will touch, I see myself, because that’s the way I was until I hit the wall.”

We pass a wino sprawled half on his back, half on his side, his shirt front stained with vomit.

“I used to lay right there,” Tom says, slowing his old station wagon to study the man. “If you weren’t with me, I’d pick him up and take him someplace, but they get violent and I can’t take the chance.

“A guy like that needs help no matter where he is, in Beverly Hills or on the street. Skid Row is a state of mind more than a specific place.”

These are wise words coming from a big, gruff 300-pounder, a guy who’s been a drunk for most of his 41 years. But Tom Mayo is not an average guy and his work doesn’t constitute a normal job.

Downtown they call him a boozer cruiser.

You can spot him almost any day of the week, any time of the day, leaning over one of those dead men, shaking him gently. “You want help, brother?” he says. “You need a lift?”

“We’ve got to ask them that,” he tells me, “because you can’t take them to a mission or a hospital or a detox center unless they want to go. But even a wiggle of the finger is a yes as far as I’m concerned.”

Mayo was a builder until alcohol sent him teetering off the edge of his own life. At the bottom of the fall was Skid Row.

He was there for maybe a year until he woke up one morning not knowing where he was and not being able to get rid of the shakes even after eight half-bottles of wine, the size they call short dogs.

Tom says he hit the wall, which means reaching that point where you either get straight or die. He passed out and somehow ended up in a hospital. That was almost four years ago. He hasn’t had a drink since.

Now he drives one of two station wagons for People in Progress, an organization that’s been helping the worst kinds of drunks for 16 years.

Tom and four others cruise a 15-square-block sector of downtown, picking up the kinds of winos the cop was talking about and getting them the care they need.

People in Progress is funded by both the city and county and some private donations. Most of its staff are, like Mayo, recovering drunks, including its project director, an old friend named Nolan Warner.

Warner called one day and told me how the boozer cruisers offer an alternative to the drunk tank. Everybody is worth saving, he said. Come see.

I’ve learned a lot from ex-drunks over the years about pain and humanity. I’ve found them oddly compassionate people who, though often unable to deal with their own anguish, can perceive it in others.

Tom Mayo is that kind of guy.

Skid Row is no Lullaby Lane. Brains go wet here and three or four winos die every night. Tom was given up for dead three times and even toe-tagged once.

Alcohol is always the underlying cause, either through sickness or violence. It can kill you from the inside or the outside. Mayo had to fight for his life more than once when he was on the Row, sometimes defending a bottle, sometimes trying to get one.

Even scooping up drunks in the boozer cruiser he’s had guns and knives pulled on him. As he says that he rubs his throat, remembering the guy who looped piano wire around his neck.

Winos aren’t the easiest people to help.

I guess that’s why you don’t see a lot of celebrities rushing around South Main the way they do in Santa Monica, where they can work a soup line for a couple of hours and call it a day.

The Row is for guys like Mayo, who haul in 60 to 80 drunks a day and try to get them on their feet again.

He’s gotten to know the people and sometimes comes down on his own, after working hours, to bring a guy a blanket or sneak someone into a mission.

“I was here once,” he tells them. Then he talks about when he hit the wall and staggered back from the impact to get a better look at his life.

“Maybe we save some,” he says to me. “Who knows?”

We pass a guy flat on his face in an alley. Tom shakes his head sadly. He’s thinking again how much it looks like him, a long time ago.