Cavi & Carrots: The Tao of Skid Row

Disclaimer: I did not violate the confidentiality of any current or past clients in this post. Future clients? One can only hope.

I was struck by two things when I first started working on Skid Row (well, three if you count the smell) in Los Angeles. The first was how infrequently I was panhandled. It's like somebody called a truce. There are exceptions, sure, but usually it will either be so casually offhand that you are convinced somebody really did just need a quarter for the bus, or it will be so aggressive that you can tell the person is targeting you to make a point of some sort. A point such as: I don't appreciate you parking on my street, white boy. But the point is: panhandling is shockingly rare. As if somebody called a cease fire.

The second thing that I noticed, not that I could avoid noticing, was that people were always trying to sell me drugs. It's probably happened to me over 50 times in the past 3 months, although it seems like it is starting to decline somewhat recently. I didn't understand the slang at first, but you usually know someone is offering you drugs without knowing: because they are strangers talking to you in clipped and hushed tones, and because in Skid Row they are in my experience always relatively well-dressed and fit young black males. And sometimes if you look at their down-turned hand you will see a tiny nugget of crack resting between their knuckles like a Parmesan booger. They always, and I mean always say some variation or combination of the following three phrases:

"Cavi cavi! Buddha Buddha!"

"You good, my man? You straight?"

or

"Nickels. Dimes. Big nickels."

Cavi means crack (possibly from "caviar") and Buddha is weed but in this context always means low-grade Mexican skunk. These are the only drugs that are ever explicitly on offer. Sometimes I'm tempted to ask about the a la carte menu out of sheer curiosity, but I don't because I don't know if that could be potentially construed as illegal activity. Whatever your position on the morality/health/sanity of drug use, buying drugs in Skid Row would be like getting albacore sashimi from a guy pushing one of those ice cream hand-trucks around a Target parking lot. Caveat emptor times 5 million. You can smell the skunk burning at all hours at certain corners, especially by parks and in front of some of the largest residential hotels. The smell of crack is IMO very hard to detect with so many other smells in the area, especially because it is most often smoked inside public toilets.

I was a bit surprised when I spoke to other staff at my agency to learn that most of them had almost never been offered drugs of any kind on the streets. In some cases, they wear their employee IDs around their necks, essentially a clove of garlic. Most women (and most of my co-workers are women) get a constant stream of pick up lines ranging from extremely charming (impromptu a capella performances), to ineffective but hilarious ("I would love to take you home for the night. No? How about an hour? Fifteen minutes?"), to aggressive, super-explicit, or obviously psychotic (btw, if you work in this field, the psychotic ones don't bother you). Most of my male co-workers are black and they also seem to be offered drugs less often than me, and say they are more often propositioned by hookers. This has only happened to me once, and the woman's line was "Hey, are you divorced? No? Well you can have me anyways." So basically the vibe I'm putting out is divorced addict. Maybe it's the beard?

There is one other reaction I get consistently on the street and it is cubed when I wear sunglasses. Some people think I'm an undercover. They will point at me and say "that's the one" or "watch that one" or even "5-0!", obviously trying to let me know they are aware of my presence instead of just communicating that info to eachother which could be done through very simple code. I've been told repeatedly that the whole Skid Row area, but especially Gladys Park and San Julian Park, are loaded with undercover cops. If this is the case I can't imagine how easy it must be to make distribution arrests unless the vast majority of small-scale dealing is totally ignored 99% of the time. This is obviously a system rife for corruption, discrimination, or abuse. But I'm sure it's preferable to both cops (who can roll informants when they need to make a statistic without having to process an endless torrent of nickel dealers) and the dealers themselves, who stand a good chance of staying in the black if they have the right combination of tact, timing, and scale.

A cursory study of LA history will teach you that the drug war did not create Skid Row, even though in the past few decades the drug war has come to largely define it. Rather, Skid Row is what happened when Christian charity tried to catch up with the serrated edge of railroad capitalism. Prostitution, alcoholism, residential hotels, and a large disabled population were an inevitable outcome of large numbers of poor migrant males attracted to the frontier for dangerous and usually seasonal work. But the difference in Los Angeles was that there was no place else to go. Skid Row was the end of the line, and many missionary churches saw a relatively captive population whose souls could easily be won with a little good news and a lot of free stuff. And the shit-stained powdered-gravy train has rolled on into the present, low-grade socialism for capitalism's damaged goods, unbelievably prime for that hyper-capitalist enterprise known as the drug war.

Skid Row is a soft target. People with limited mainstream economic viability and galaxies of pain crammed together along sidewalks fed with a steady trickle of free resources. A drug that offers motivation, self confidence, the illusion of affordability, and enough energy and desperate clarity to push it's user to earn enough for the next hit. And over time the accumulation of more and more soldiers who have been so institutionalized and stigmatized by the rest of society due to their past convictions that it starts to look rational to view drugs sales, even low-volume street corner drug sales, not as a job but a profession.

You're probably wondering where the carrots come in? Well, Skid Row is a place where everything imaginable has value, all the way down to recyclable trash which you will almost never see littering the otherwise garbage-strewn streets. But there is one item that is so ubiquitous that it will be seen strewn randomly around the streets: in fact I'll bet that if you want this item you would probably only have to scan the sidewalk for three blocks to be almost guaranteed to find it. . .unattractively labelled cans of carrots! Imagine this existing in the slums of India or Nigeria! For that matter, imagine a can of carrots sitting unclaimed for days on the streets of 1930s Los Angeles. No way! It would be cracked open and cooked over a tiny fire! But look around Skid Row and you will see what looks superficially like Third World poverty. And that's because the resources, no matter how many we throw at the problem, will always get hoovered up by dealers. And what is the incentive for an ambitious and/or pension minded civil servant of any stripe to change the problem? About the same as the incentive for a dealers to obey the laws that have made them into permanent sub-citizens. How much incentive is that? About one can of carrots worth.