a ticket to a concrete zoo

It’s nearly summer again, and in America’s Finest City, that means the homeless are re-migrating.

My bedroom window looks out on two of the camps. I’ve come to recognize some of their faces in the year that I’ve inhabited this gentrified apartment building.

I see the trash collector walk by with his wagon, stopping at each can to pick out receipts and the refuse of the rich. A large wooden spoon is strapped to his back. He reminds me of the Borrowers, and I wonder what he’s collecting these seemingly mundane scraps for. Art? Money?

The skinny old man is lugging around a grocery bag, as usual, and his basketball shorts are halfway down his ass again. I turn away out of respect; he doesn’t seem to know that he’s auditioning to be a plumber.

There’s a lady that howls like a wolf sometimes when the sun goes down and the moon casts a silvery glow on the apartments of the nearly empty highrise. I guess I would feel wild too if I was barred from the Pearly Gates by a fat cat with two yachts and a summer home in La Jolla.

Sleep doesn’t come easily to me because that’s when the schizophrenics wander, lost and screaming. They take out their anger or sadness or fear on trash bins, trees, and even pieces of gum on the sidewalk. The world sees them, but they see a landscape invisible to the rest of us. The incoherent sounds seem like a cry. “Hello, is anybody else here? Can you see what I see?”

Some fight like alley cats over turf or an empty Happy Meal box. After it’s over, they sit on stoops, licking their wounds.

I feel like, by paying my rent every month, I’ve got a monthly pass to a human zoo. Instead of being entertained, I feel ashamed. Even when I try to look away, I see their most private moments. I am an unwilling onlooker to human misery.

Others don’t seem to mind. Some of my neighbors look down from their balconies and laugh as someone is taken away in an ambulance, screaming about conspiracies and the imminent arrival of the FBI. They enjoy the show from behind their glass walls.

I wish that I could break open the doors barring them from that high rise down the street and fill those empty rooms with the wild women, the midnight screamers, the junk collectors, and the grocery toters.

Isn’t it ironic that the way to free them from their cage is to give them an enclosure?