A Lady in the Jungle

When Sandra Robbins, a grandmother from Brentwood, was assigned to Skid Row as part of a UCLA master’s class in social welfare she damned near died.

The only other time she’d been there was on a field trip a month earlier when a screaming woman had chased her down the street. It scared her silly.

“What did I know of all this?” she said the other day, walking past the homeless encampments scattered along 5th Street near San Pedro. “I was a lady who did lunches. Skid Row? Forget it!”

She’s a petite person of 49 with long blond hair and traces of an accent reminiscent of her native Tennessee. Seeing her, you’d say she belonged in one of the smart cafes that line San Vicente Boulevard, not in a place where life exists on the edge.

A former English teacher, Robbins was assigned to the Weingart Center in the heart of the Row for a nine-month internship toward a master’s degree in social welfare. She was to counsel people wallowing in despair with nothing to lose but their nightmares.

When she told her husband, Bernie, the owner of an electronics company, she wanted to do it, he said, “Go ahead, but you’re not taking the Mercedes.”

Their perception of Skid Row wasn’t inaccurate. It’s not a place for nice ladies who do lunches and drive expensive cars. Bernie was right. It’s best to leave the Mercedes home when you come to the Row.

*

Skid Row is a state of mind as much as it is a place. Despair lives there and so does danger. An ex-con stops Robbins to tell her if it weren’t for his bad luck, he’d have no luck at all. A recovering crack addict says at one time he’d have cut her throat for her earrings. A man screams that he wants respect. A woman cries “because everything hurts so much.”

What makes the Row seem even more terrible and forlorn are the skyscrapers that rise in the near distance. You can see them clearly from the openings of the cardboard lean-tos, tantalizing symbols of success and well-being, like the spires of a castle in which royalty feasts while peasants go hungry.

“I came to Skid Row reciting the 23rd Psalm,” Robbins says with a quick laugh as we pass a man glaring from a doorway. Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death...

The weather is appropriately gloomy over the Row this day, one of those melancholy mornings of dark skies and drizzles. Robbins is something of an anomaly in the gloom, with her almost platinum hair, light skin and blue eyes; a small area of light in a region of almost overwhelming darkness.

Men with nothing to do and no place to go greet her as she passes. People she’s counseled God-bless her. She has been, to many, their last chance.

Robbins began studying social work while volunteering at the Westwood VA Hospital, helping veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorders. She did it as a tribute to a friend killed during the Vietnam War.

“I didn’t wake up every morning wanting to do good,” she says as we step around a man lying across the sidewalk. “But I learned something on Skid Row. These are our brothers here. These are our families.”

*

It was an education for Robbins, a long reach beyond the tidy lawns of Brentwood to the littered streets of Downtown. She found not bums, but people in misery. She found not derelicts, but people with dreams.

“There’s a lot of pain here, but there’s hope too,” she says, hunched over coffee in the Weingart cafeteria. A young man in a hooded sweat shirt sits at a piano, picking out a tune. It’s a small, lonesome melody, lost in the noise of a crowd gathering for a free lunch.

“Not everyone on Skid Row has given up,” she says. Her voice rises over the din. “They still think they can be president of GM, and if they put as much effort into that as they do into buying dope, maybe they can be.”

For the past eight weeks, Robbins has worked with a half-dozen prison parolees recovering from substance abuse. They met every Monday and talked about hope and change and life beyond their anguish.

“Their No. 1 goal is to get out of here,” she says. “There’s an openness to them, an honesty. There are no facades on Skid Row.”

It is the final day of her internship. Her nine months had given birth to new realizations, while simultaneously bringing a little light to a jungle in the city. When she bade goodby to her class of parolees, one of them said, “Don’t forget us.” She replied in a voice as gentle as a breeze over Memphis, “I never will.”

Then she returned to Brentwood and left Skid Row behind, a little less hopeful than it was.