Getting an Update on ‘Road Not Taken’ at Burned-Out Mall

From high above the twisted, blackened metal beams of the Parkview Mall, on a second floor without a floor, came a quiet scritch-scratching, like the sound of a hoe in stony soil.

There, precariously balanced and barely distinguishable from the wreckage, was a ragtag human figure by the name of Wanda.

Just when you thought concrete rubble could yield no more stories, like Wanda, they emerge.

What are you doing up there? I asked, squinting against the late day sun.

“Aluminum,” she replied, snipping away at a piece of loose siding with the care of a home seamstress taking out a hem. “When I started out, the guys thought I was crazy, but when they saw how much money I was making they began doing it too.”

The riots, it turns out, were a short-lived boon to the homeless. Left in the rubble were window frames, hinges, ashtrays, doorknobs, and miles of wiring. Working hard, people who were used to taking in $5 a day scrounging for soda cans could earn $200 a day.

Now, the rubble’s been picked over.

“We’re getting some terrible scavengers,” Wanda said. “They don’t dismantle; they destroy. I salvage.”

Her choice of language prompted me to ask where she went to college.

“SC,” she said. “I used to be a Trojan.”

She said her name was Wanda Lawson. She had lived for years in San Diego, gotten a government grant to study at Mexico’s National Autonomous University and planned to teach until she was diverted by a job that, with overtime, paid $50,000 a year.

I listened in wonder. Except for the part about USC, on paper we sounded the same. We were also the same age, had one child apiece, and had been put out of work a few years ago by job-related back injuries.

Yet she was doing a high-wire act 20 feet in the air with no safety net below, homeless and unemployed. I was standing on terra firma, mortgaged to the hilt and late for an interview. Why, with all our similarities, was she there and I here? How much did it have to do with the fact that she was black and I was white? That she lived south of the Santa Monica Freeway, and I lived north?

I left, but I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

A week later, I headed for the corner of 3rd and Bonnie Brae, where the homeless and the barely housed converge to sell their day’s findings to a man with a yellow van that says “Barbara Ann” on the side. He, in turn, sells their booty to a recycling firm that says its intake is back to normal after tripling in the wake of the riots.

Attesting to the fact that the easy pickings are gone, two men with callused hands were disemboweling long snakes of aluminum conduit, pulling out copper wire and leaving great unruly heaps of aluminum spirals. “Clean” copper goes for 50 cents a pound.

Is Wanda around? I asked.

They looked up with respect. You know Wanda?

Not until the third day did I find her--at the helm of a shopping cart. She was living part time on the street, part time in a local flophouse, and had just finished two jelly doughnuts bought with the proceeds of a choice section of copper pipe.

She opened the conversation by quoting “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka’s story about the bureaucratic little salesman who turns into a giant insect.

“Remember how the salesman’s voice got squeaky when he was turning into the cockroach?” she asked. “That’s how I know I’ve been on the street too long. My voice is getting high, harsh. Life on the streets is too mundane.”

Recycling had gotten her back to work, only to realize there were better jobs elsewhere.

“This is harder than I’ve ever worked in my life,” she complained. “The hours are terrible. And there’s no medical insurance. I’m thinking of getting a 9-to-5 job.”

A few years before, she said, she had a young son, two angelfish and too many cars to fit in her garage. She had never married and never fully prepared for the bad times. Her mother had a stroke, her brother died and her adolescent son ran away.

One day, Wanda said, she just walked out her front door and turned left. On the corner, half a block away, were four drug dealers. With her income, it didn’t take long to cultivate a $100-a-day habit.

“I don’t deal well with depression,” she concluded, “So, I’m out on sabbatical.”

I realized as she spoke that I had wanted someone or something to blame for the exaggerated differences in our lives and she was blaming no one but herself. I had come seeking a woman of color who was both me and not me, an alter ego who had lived the sort of life I had only observed and could make the kinds of judgments off-limits to journalists.

Instead, I found just another human being who was scared by the riots, scared all the more so because she had no place to hide. She regretted that decent merchants who had helped out homeless people had been burned out by “mob rule.”

So she goes about recycling their buildings, lifting out whole charred window frames so carefully as to not break a single pane. She told me she would call if she went into drug rehab that week; her son, in a foster home, was graduating from high school with a scholarship and she didn’t want him to see her this way.

But she didn’t call.

Waiting, I found myself thinking of the different paths we had taken through life. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” came to mind. That was the assigned theme of my valedictory address in high school. As I recall, I didn’t really know what to say because the only road I had ever taken started right outside my door.

Even if I accept Wanda’s explanation that the difference in our lives was because of her decision to walk down to the corner one day, it seems worthwhile to point out that we lived on different streets, she and I. And that if I had walked out my front door that day as she had, the only person I might have found on the corner was an old man watering geraniums.