Echo Park

my home away from home. i’m holding out for the perfect apartment. its lush, beautiful, eclectic, bohemian, rich in culture and history, vibrant.

Echo park is both the name of a neighborhood and the name of a park within the neighborhood. The neighborhood itself has a ghetto reputation, but it is getting gentrified, and expensive. So it is kind of a trendy neighborhood now. I went pedal boating here on the lake in the park. That was fun. But the park itself and the water is dirty, and there are creepy kind of people who hang out in that park, so use your commmon sense.

Pushing through stupor, fatigue, and straitjacketing layers of late summer heat, I stood up from the unscheduled nap with just enough time to dress hastily and drive hurriedly to the office of Juventud, Inc. where someone named José R. would be watching for me when I arrived to participate in the Thursday night outreach. My car’s air-conditioning was itself fatigued and stupefied from a whole summer of overexertion; it was awakening as slowly as I. My car and I held sweating, peevish company with each other as we lumbered towards that dismal stretch of Sunset Boulevard that was our destination.

While completing a master in clinical psychology degree program, I had enrolled in a course entitled HIV and AIDS Counseling. Our instructor had given us the assignment to seek out some agency that extended services to people with HIV and AIDS and to volunteer in some capacity other than counseling. Grunt work. He wanted us to be in a position to attend to a different subset of stimuli than we do when engaging in “talk therapy,” to experience this universe as viewed through a different set of filters. I had made the necessary arrangements, and was now driving to meet the men who would oversee me in this project.

Along the way, I sluggishly practiced introducing myself to José in Spanish and found I couldn’t roll my r’s. The torch singer on KLOV-Radio Amor proclaimed that he had never known tears nor sadness, No jamás lloré, era tan felíz, that is, until meeting the dedicatee, hasta que te conocí, who was both the object of his affection and the cause of his anguish. I caught myself considering putting off the project for one day. I elected to push on.

Creeping through Echo Park congestion, I considered once again how much the district resembles a border town, a sort of inland San Ysidro. And just one or two Sunset Boulevard bends before arriving at the office, I noted another, less distinct, border as the density of Spanish figures on the cluttered signage gradually yielded to glyphs of Chinese and Thai. My mind took that quick step from the word “border” to the idea “margin.” I would soon be entering a van which would transport me and a small company from this border within a border along this asphalt artery into the very heart of the city and—paradoxically—to the very margins of society in the selfsame journey.

At 4:45, I pulled into a parking slot behind the office, walked around to a gap in the tightly drawn accordion of metal grille where I read “Suite E,” and pushed open the door. Clumsily, I rolled my first r as I introduced myself to José and Edgar and lurched into Spanish chitchat. Ralph arrived moments later.

Ralph S—, my friend from church, has been working at AIDS prevention in the Latino community for about ten years now. Through his associations with Latinos in his 33-year career as adult education teacher, ESL instructor, and advisor in the L.A. County school system, he recognized early on that the epidemic was poised to explode in this population that did not have access even to such paltry or inconsistent information as was afforded other affected or threatened populations. He began giving AIDS prevention talks wherever he could find or gather a group of listeners.

Soon he realized that he needed to associate with an organization for credibility. He volunteered with several agencies, the most recent of which, Juventud, Inc., eventually landed some grant monies and has been able to pay him. He retired from teaching and now works as “outreach specialist”. On the spot, I created and assumed the title “outreach novitiate”.

“I have a calling to the marginal; I would never have searched for this job.” When it presented itself, however, he accepted. Ralph is a third order Franciscan friar who, while on the job, determinedly allows only tacit expression of his personal mode of spirituality, given his decidedly secular funding sources and job description: to seek out and approach isolated pockets of homeless persons in order to disseminate AIDS prevention information and condoms. Besides, in Ralph’s estimation, tacit expression is expression enough, given his conviction that his work is as much about his being deeply and broadly present and about offering unconditional and non-judgmental love as it is about meeting grant application quotas concerning distribution of brochures and condoms.

Job description notwithstanding, “you can’t give only rubbers to hungry people. They can’t eat rubbers,” he declares. So the first task of the evening was to load the van with a cooler of sugary punch, sacks filled with sack lunches, a large bag of prophylactics, and a carton of flyers, taking stock of the provisions and charting a course based on how many persons we were likely to encounter at each possible site. Ralph made a quick call and confirmed that the phlebotomist would not be joining us: test results on blood drawn during last weeks’ rounds were not in yet. We left the office at about 5:15, the four of us in a clunky, off-gray van, each window of which bore a coarse, off-ochre photocopy of the blocky logo.

[For HIV/AIDS Outreach: Part Two, please see my entry at Los Angeles River.]

The Lotus Festival was fun, although there seems more people and things going on saturday then sunday. I was in a dragon boat (canoe) race, i liked doing it and plan to again next year.

Actually, it’s not safe in some parts of it, though….so, as always, be careful and don’t go alone…not after dark anyway!