7:30 AM - 2003-02-07
plastic tiger
Back east, skin left exposed to the winter night wears hard. Blood flushes the surface, tissues crack, snot freezes, and the faces of the homeless are etched in glacial relief. By contrast, LA's skid row is warm and still. A Sargasso Sea of vice in which human flotsam becomes hopelessly mired. Years pass downtown, decades even, and the driftwood people keep on driftin'. Getting high and bleaching out...watery eyes spread pale and loose behind thick, clinic-issue, eyeglasses. Features eroding to reveal the gnarly caricature beneath. Whatever measure of greatness this community might lay claim to (some of these old-timers hit the beaches in Nam', some served in Korea) was thrust upon it years ago, and its citizens hunker now in a bivouac pitched well off the trail of history.
There's this purity in the baseness of their daily objective; a single-mindedness to gettin' high that distills the myriad hustles playing out here into one big, apolitical, expenditure of life-force. Like lichen on a rock, pulsing under some distant Icelandic sun; that same level of focus. Space-shuttles could be falling, smallpox missile, whatever...we gots to get high.
Anyway, for reasons good and bad, I've been spending a lot of time downtown. And there's this one dude, an indigent sidewalk peddler. A big, heavyset, black dude wrapped in layer after soiled layer of army surplus clothing who sits silent and cross-legged on fifth street with his merchandise arrayed on a wool blanket spread beside him. And what this guy sells is tiny plastic barnyard and safari animals. The kind whose little dorsal-fins of flashing betray their injection-molding factory origins, remember those? (I was always more fascinated with the flashing than the toy, and felt compelled to chew it off my animals, army men, etc.).
So I'm sure this guy fishes them out of a dumpster somewhere (one of LA's many ironies is that "skid row" and the "toy district" are geographically synonymous), but there's a certain humility about the way he sorts and sells them: chickens, dogs, goats, and other small animals are 5 cents, cows, zebras and tigers are 10; 15 cents'll get you a horse or a rhino. All lined up on his blanket there...with rotten motherfuckers yelling all around and doing god-only-knows what in pursuit of the rock, I dunno. There's just something inherently noble about toys, and when I see 'em in that context it really hits home.
Which is why I have a plastic tiger in pocket. (And you thought I was just happy to see you...).
