Creativity Endures Where Hope Is Long Gone

He’s served his country in Nam

and lived

. . . a standing ovation I give.

But, as us all, was lured in an

oppressed kinda way,

So society locked him down to make

him pay. . . .

He walked the bowels of the prison

walls. . . .

He’s taken a life, both here and

there,

And only in justification, on that

he swear. . . .

--Verse on the skid row poetry wall

*

Crack cocaine, not literature, is the biggest draw on this hard section of 5th Street, a windowless landscape of buildings and razor wire.

J.J. Jones lives on the sidewalk here, in possibly the bleakest corner of Los Angeles. He is 55, with no future. His rheumy eyes watch the street, his spare clothes wadded into a plastic trash bag at his hip.

Like so many on skid row, he recounts a life of pain--from his years stoking the fires of a foundry furnace to his layoff and his two strokes. Ten years after hitting bottom, Jones picked out this particular bit of pavement because of the wall: the fragmented, multicolored, sad, heartfelt, hopeful, angry, rusted, faded, misspelled expanse of poetry inscribed here a decade ago by homeless writers.

“I came by and saw it one day in ‘94, and I’ve been sitting here ever since,” says Jones, who leans against the west end of the wall, near San Pedro Street, wearing a dirty cap and untied gym shoes.

Jones never met the subject of the lament about the onetime Vietnam soldier sent to prison, and has no idea who it was. But he understands the heartache.

“This wall, to me it’s a part of me,” Jones says. “There are things on that wall I’ve actually experienced in life. I’ve been on drugs, I’ve been in prison, I’ve seen people shot and killed with my own eyes. To me it’s a monument of some kind that will never be destroyed.”

. . . It’s cocain and Satan, I’m

willing to bet

That brings out that Dr. Jekyll and

Mr. Hyde effect.

I guess it’s so hard to concieve,

No one really cares in a real time of

need.

Some of the lines are just fragments--names, memorials. “R.I.P. Shelia Kaye 1992,” reads an epitaph to a woman killed in a drug shooting. Expressions of cynicism and hurt compete for attention with those of love and hope. It is all a jumble--red, black, white, green, blue paint, and places where the words are chipping or faded.

The east half of the wall, covering one end of a printing plant, is two stories high, filled with not only poetry but also giant murals of those who live in this nether world. At 5th and Crocker Street, the hub of the crack trade, the wall arcs around a corner, becoming guttered like corrugated tin. Farther west, off by itself, is a section made of rusted sheet metal that blocks entry to a vacant lot. It is topped with bent iron spikes and razor wire.

Unwritten rules preserve the wall. The nameless building owners have allowed it to remain, and the gangs do not touch it. No one adds to it, no one vandalizes it, without dealing with men like Big Mike, a chieftain in the informal political structure of skid row.

“This wall is very significant, as you can see by reading what’s on the wall,” says Big Mike, who is 6 foot 7 and rangy, with his cornrows tied back and a thin, gray-flecked beard. “People drive through the underworld, or the ghetto, and think, ‘So many losers--they don’t have any talent.’ That’s not true. Downtown has so many talented people that took a fall. People with talent you can’t believe.”

The wall has been known for years as the Berlin Wall. The name derives from the original, a symbol of oppression, suffering and despair. “Those people in Germany, that was a physical barrier,” says Big Mike. “This is a mental barrier.”

We must get closer to the essence

of life,

But be aware that it takes courage

and strife.

Expand your mind, don’t let it

wither and die,

For it will lift your spirits high to

the sky.

Most of the poetry was painted between 1989 and 1993 by members of the Homeless Writers Coalition, a tiny group that gained a measure of notoriety during a time of resurgence for the downtown art colony. When founded in 1989, the coalition met at Another Planet, a coffeehouse (and former gas station) where members hung out and read for passersby.

Another Planet burned down that year, but, against sizable odds, the group has survived. Meetings are held at a nearby homeless shelter.

A number of those who put their stamp on the wall have moved on. Some have sobered up, even found homes in the suburbs. That fact has inspired men like Rocky Lee, a former addict. Looking at the wall, he says, “reminds me of my addiction days” and gives him encouragement to stay clean.

“I know just about everybody who put their names on there,” Lee says. “A lot of them are doing good.”

If I kill a man who has killed a man,

what manner of man am I?

Leroy Jackson is one member of the Homeless Writers who remains on skid row.

He has a gift.

“You can give him any subject, anything you name, and he can spit you out a poem on it,” says one friend. “He doesn’t practice or nothing.”

Jackson is a genial man of 51 who is aware of the passing time--14 years, so far, on the streets. The gray has crept into his beard. He has lost a front tooth. He is vague about his past and talks of moving on, though he is comfortable here in what he calls an alternative society.

None of his own poetry occupies the wall, which disappoints him, but Jackson beams when I ask him for a rhyme about it. He pauses a second, then his hands move and the words spill out:

In a desolate place where men

stand tall,

They take their pens out to write

poems on the wall.

They transfer their minds and

places to be,

They put down ideas for all to

see. . . .

He goes on and on, hands working, eyes fixed as if reading some screen in his mind. The lines come too fast for my pen. I lose the thread of them. I ask Jackson to repeat the latter stanzas, but he only grins and makes a poof motion with his fingers.

His art, like hope, disappears in the breeze.

“As soon as I composed it, it vanished.”