Jessica had been on hobo detail plenty of times as a patrol cop. Things had been different back then. Most of the ragged, windswept men she herded out from behind dumpsters or off the sides of busy, dusty highways had been crazy somehow. She’d heard every possible rendition of the world’s coming demise from the alcohol-reeking street-dwellers – tales of asteroids approaching from galaxies far away or electromagnetic pulse bombs from North Korea soaring across the Pacific.
These days there were both men and women in the camps on the rugged hillsides beside the highway, and their tents were equipped for long hauls, sometimes concreted or hammered into place and sometimes equipped with large pieces of furniture. Tents and shacks were fed power from nearby warehouses and some were lit by television sets or battered laptops. The people who lived here weren’t crazy, but were mothers and fathers who had been thrown out of foreclosed McMansions, and young people who turned to crack in college to try to stay awake and ended up on ice because it was cheaper and they were hooked. They were protesters, activists, children of the earth, the awakened, the oppressed, the misunderstood. Sometimes they rented space to travellers in their tiny, misshapen hovels, and some Christmases they hung them with lights. The homeless people Jessica saw now as she walked up the shoulder of the I-10 could afford guns, had a code of conduct and knew their rights when it came to territory and police intervention.
But if there was one thing that hadn’t changed in all the time Jessica had been a member of the LAPD, it was the way homeless men pissed. For all the sophistication that came with being homeless these days, running water was not included, so men from the camps still pissed in soft-drink bottles, and threw those bottles down into the tree-lined ditches separating the highway from the businesses alongside it. They did this to keep the smell away from the camps. Urine stink was the silent enemy of the panhandler. One whiff and the businessmen trapped in their cars on the way into the city rolled up their windows and looked straight ahead.
She crossed the top of the embankment, pulling nitrile gloves onto her hands. She headed towards a camp made from colourful slabs of a ruined billboard, stained bedsheets and blue tarpaulins. Through a doorway made in what she was sure was a slice of Matthew McConaughey’s nose, she could see an old man sleeping on a thin, green mattress. It was early, but haze lingered permanently over the city beyond, a rusty gauze speared by the buildings of Downtown.
A man was standing by a tree, shirtless, the backs of his jeans brown from hours of sitting and ragged at the ends. Jessica stopped a few feet away from him. He turned as he was screwing the cap on a Gatorade bottle filled with foamy yellow liquid.
‘I’ll pay you a buck for that,’ Jessica said.
The guy stared at her.
‘For this?’ He held up the bottle of piss. Jessica nodded, took the garbage bag from her back pocket and shook it out, held it open. The man dropped the bottle into the bag, his face twisted in confusion.
‘Know where I can find any others?’ she asked.
The man pointed down the hill, and as expected Jessica saw dozens of bottles lying scattered or grouped together in the shade, like oil barrels spilled across the surface of the sea.
‘Help me collect them all,’ she told the man. ‘A buck for each one that goes in the bag.’
The man nodded and made his way down the hill. Jessica followed him carefully, stepping over a pile of broken glass and rotting food.