There is often a row of women sitting outside A Woman’s Place, a shelter for 56 women beneath the 13th Street freeway.
Some lean on walkers, their feet too swollen to do much else. Others wear heels. They eat, smoke or doze off. Earplugs supplied by traveling nurses help block out the rumble of traffic.
At 9:30 a.m. today, the usual crowd was replaced by city employees: Police, two Homeless Outreach Team workers, and a Department of Public Works crew.
A DPW employee in a hazmat suit power-washed the sidewalk. A paramedic warned me to step away from the spray; he wasn’t sure what chemicals might be in the liquid. He couldn’t say if this was a routine cleaning, the paramedic said. He just shows up where he’s told to.
Around the corner, on Erie Street, sat Lillyonna, polishing off a melting popsicle. Around her, broken glass sparkled in the direct sun. A handful of people pushed overflowing carts over bumps in the rough cement. One person, dressed only in their underwear, sat in a wheelchair and shaved their legs.
Lillyonna’s popsicle, miraculously, never dripped onto her white tank top. Dainty red bows were visible on her bra straps, which neatly aligned with the two ribbons tattooed beneath her collarbone.
Lillyonna’s ex-boyfriend was an aspiring tattoo artist, she said, placing particular emphasis on “aspiring.” The 31-year-old did not explain if the ex was responsible for the ribbons, but he was the one who tattooed “Get Some” on her knuckles, a catchphrase from her fighting days.
Lillyonna explained all of this while sitting in a man’s lap. He sat on a vintage wooden chair with his arms wrapped around her waist and his head shaded by a piece of cardboard pressed against a chain-link fence. For most of the time, he slept.
Lillyonna sometimes stays at A Woman’s Place, she said, and had been there recently. On the street, she’s been approached by homeless outreach workers.
They mean well, she said, but can’t actually help when there aren’t any beds available. So Lillyonna continues to traipse up and down the city, from Mission to Bayshore to the Tenderloin, staying in shelters.
“If it’s illegal to be homeless, we need more housing,” she said. “What do you want us to do?”
Besides housing, Lillyonna continued, unfazed by a pick-up truck speeding down the street, she would like a case manager to teach her “life-management skills.”
She’s tried seeing a city-funded mental-health professional. She’s also visited a Tenderloin pharmacy to get a buprenorphine prescription to help her detox. When her mother died, however, she stopped going.
“That’s recovery, right?” she shrugged. “It can be hard.”
More sob stories about people who have been offered taxpayer-funded help repeatedly but refuse, preferring to take drugs in public and destroy the public commons while demanding a monthly stipend for food/drugs in lieu of working and a 2-bedroom apartment they are allowed to live in for free forever.
There are lots of DPW workers on Mission around 15th and 16th Streets these days, keeping the sidewalks clean that were previously starting to look like LA Skid Row.
graffitied