Chapter 4
The Secret Garden
2004
Downtown Los Angeles
THERE WERE EASILY A HUNDRED PLACES WHERE THE UNhoused gathered in and around downtown, and Lori and Richard tried to hit them all. “Mission: noon!” Lori would call out, tapping her watch, and at lunchtime, the two of them, and for a while Lezle Stein as well, piled into the Modernica van. Richard drove wildly as Lori shouted, “Slow down!” and Lezle howled with laughter. They sped over bridges, along the train tracks and the river, past freeway overpasses and ramps and into dark side streets and alleys, looking for dogs, people, people with dogs. They jumped out, crunched over garbage and broken glass, called hellos to people locked away in their own worlds. Lori’s gift was the ability to join them there, her soft, even voice offering a hum of affirmation:
“I’m having trouble—”
“—Uh, huh, trouble . . .”
“—because I know they’re watching me!—”
“—Oh, they’re watching? . . .”
The girl whose radar once tuned her in to her parents’ shifting moods could adapt to any situation, shape-shifting and code-switching so seamlessly it were as if someone else inhabited her body.
Hi, don’t worry, we’re not the dog police! Can I give your dog a treat? She’s so beautiful! . . . I see you take really good care of her. Can she still have puppies? Yes? Suddenly she was a kindly aunt or school librarian, regretfully sharing the facts of life. Okay. Let me help you see what that means . . .
The filth didn’t make her flinch. The visibly disturbed didn’t throw her. “I’m so sorry, but we have to go,” she told a mentally ill woman she was visiting one day with Lezle Stein, who had made it forcefully clear she did not want them to leave. Lezle later laughed when she told me that somehow Lori had come up with the one wild story that cut off the argument. She patted Lezle’s shoulder then whispered to the client, “I have to get her back to the sanitarium.”
The downtown streets were dirty and dangerous, but they had a powerful pull. Every morning she woke filled with dread-tinged excitement. There was no telling what might happen. It was like being a war correspondent in the midst of the action, alert and alive and learning things a “civilian” never could. No one had a cell phone camera back then; there was no YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok. Nobody saw what she did. This world was hers alone.
After a while, everyone knew who she was, though not necessarily her name. She was . . . Lady. Dog Lady. Ragged people arrived at Modernica to pound on the door. “Dog Lady! I need you!”
She began getting calls from social workers who’d finally found some homeless person a place to live, but . . . no animals allowed. He won’t go if he has to leave the dog on the street. Can you help? Calls came from animal control officers at the North Central shelter, which served the downtown area: There’s a guy on the street near you with a mother dog and nine puppies. He’s not technically breaking any rules, but it’s a bad situation. Can you talk to him?
She’d buy a sandwich and cookies, look for the tent, crouch down. “Would you like some lunch? Wow, look at all those puppies!” Then came that gentle, regretful voice: “I know you think this is all good, but it’s not. LAPD and animal control will be all over you, and if you’ve already got an outstanding warrant or two—you do? How about we clean everything up? We’ll get mama spayed and legal and find homes for those puppies, okay?” Watching the reaction. “Good. You’re doing the right thing. You’ll give nine people a lot of happiness. And if you need help with your dog, I’ll always be here for you.”
There’s a homeless man here, yelling that we’ve got his dog . . . He’s a Vietnam vet, so we’re trying to help, but we’re gonna have to call the cops . . . Is there any chance you could talk to him?
That call, from North Central, was how Lori met Ray. His pit bull, Petey, had bitten someone. The context was murky—Ray later claimed he’d been provoked by a drug dealer—but animal control had swooped in, and the dog’s future looked bleak. No one would ever adopt a pit with a bite history, and to reclaim him, Ray would need to pay fines and a redemption fee made particularly hefty because Petey was unlicensed. Hefty, in this case, meant impossible; Ray had nothing. When Lori arrived at the shelter, she found him pacing the small lobby, a pale, bony white man in his fifties, reeking of weed and beer.
“I won’t leave without my dog!” he bellowed, and even after Lori made it clear that she was there to help, he couldn’t calm down. “I can’t—I’ll pay you back—it’s just till—I’m getting it together—”
“I’ll take care of it,” she said, pulling the redemption cash from her wallet. The burly dog, a brown-and-white pit bull with an endearing patch over one eye, raced into Ray’s arms.
“I’ll give you a ride home,” she said.
Ray lived with Petey in East Hollywood, in a faded yellow Econoline van. The neighborhood was a grimy stretch of graffiti-covered strip malls and auto repair shops. On Berendo Street, where Ray parked, a line of scraggly fan palms swayed above long-ago subdivided Craftsman homes and faded stucco apartments. Sullen teens smoked on stoops, kids roamed the sidewalks, no adults in sight, and dealers sold everything from weed to crack and heroin. The van sat in front of a condemned house that the city had never torn down and whose cracked-out squatters let Ray bootleg electricity and use the bathroom. Soon Lori was coming by to see him regularly, bringing food, company, a sympathetic ear.
Ray and Petey had been together for six years, ever since he’d been a puppy, and Ray had grabbed him away from someone who was beating him. At the time, in the late 1990s, the country had been deep in the era of the “demon” pit bull. A 1987 Sports Illustrated cover story featuring a snarling pit and the headline “Beware of This Dog” had spread the alarming news that something had “happened” to pits. They’d been transformed from the genial Our Gang companion to “the closest thing to a wild animal there is in a domesticated dog” and “the dog of choice for drug dealers and street punks around the country.”1 In the years to come, wrote journalist Bronwen Dickey in her 2017 history of the pit bull, coverage of the breed became a stew of “bad science, media sensationalism, political brinksmanship, moral panic, racial venom [and] class prejudice.” The dogs, “inexorably connected to the black urban underclass,” became a metaphor for all white, middle-class America feared.2 In one breathless first-person account, writer Brian C. Anderson described how he and his family had been driven from the Bronx by “a gauntlet of thugs flaunting spike-collared pit bulls, bespeaking a world of anarchy and dread.”3
The result was breed bans and restrictions across more than two hundred municipalities.4 Owning a pit, Ray told Lori, was why he’d become homeless: landlords took one look at Petey and shook their heads. It was likely that there were other issues involved, since whenever Lori saw Ray, he was wasted on something, and he was an angry man who never backed off from a street fight.
But he cared for Petey. The inside of the yellow van usually looked like a post-party dorm room, but he’d set up a proper dog bed with blankets. Petey was well fed and pretty clean, and when it got cold, Ray carefully bundled him in a sweater. He also was gentle and protective of Lori, introducing her proudly to his neighborhood and warning any man who came too close that it was “best you walk away.” He and Petey were always glad to see her.
“Petey boyyyy!” was Ray’s special call, and once Lori learned it, the dog would race to her and cover her with kisses. While she and Ray talked, Petey would roam the block, never going too far and always returning the second Ray wanted him. The connection between them was almost physical, and Lori never second-guessed her decision to redeem and return Petey. Man and dog kept each other alive.
Across the LA River’s 7th Street Bridge and under the nearby freeway was a couple who spent their days doing heroin and speedballs. The man was threatening, but Lori found she could talk to the woman, who gave the okay to spay their dog. In an encampment in Boyle Heights, she met Maria, who’d lost custody of multiple children and now lived with her husband in a scrap-wood house. Lori spayed her dogs, too, and when Maria produced five sick puppies that she’d rescued from the road, Lori drove them to Dr. Simon. (All of them died of parvovirus.) Nearby was Charles Ray Walker, the son of Texas cotton pickers, who for years had lived with his dogs on a plot he’d turned into a fantasyland of bamboo, fruit trees, and art made from cast-off toys. “Bamboo Charlie” became a local legend, and when he died in 2012, the Los Angeles Times ran an obituary.5
Dean, a strikingly handsome blond Brad Pitt look-alike, shared a downtown sidewalk “house” with his Black partner Anthony. Dean wanted to adopt every stray dog he saw, but Anthony knew that his lover had schizophrenia, exacerbated by his drinking and meth use. He quietly passed the animals to Lori.
“Take it. I’ll make up a story.”
Lori took dog food to an aged and toothless heroin addict who lived with his bulldog near the river in a shack whose floor was scattered with used needles. He was always polite, though Richard wasn’t allowed to come along, since neither dog nor owner would tolerate men.
She was hunting a stray on an industrial street near the produce mart the day she met Ronald, a young, bearded Black man who lived under a staircase and cared for a near-feral red dog. Ronald seemed almost feral himself, silent and wary, his face half-hidden by a knit cap and hoodie. Lori began bringing the dog food, then added a plate for Ronald, which she left next to the stairs. He said nothing for months, then one day, from the darkness, she heard “Thank you.” (One day Ronald disappeared, and a year later, he turned up at Modernica, clean and neatly dressed. He’d been through a drug program and was on his way back to his hometown. “I just wanted to say thank you,” he told Lori. “You were the only one who saw me.”)
Through a woman named Jo Barker, Lori came to spend time at Dome Village, a failing utopian experiment in self-sufficiency alongside the Santa Monica Freeway, where the formerly unhoused lived in white fiberglass domes. Jo, an educated and very outspoken woman of forty-three, had found housing there but was told she could bring only two of her four dogs. Lori ended up boarding the others and a friendship grew. With Jo’s introduction, she provided food and flea treatments to the other dogs and many cats that lived in the domes; she also stole two puppies from an abusive owner in a nearby, more lawless encampment. A local rescuer who knew and genuinely liked Lori once criticized her to me as being “too forgiving of some of her people.” But there were times she filed complaints with animal services, though that never seemed to accomplish much. She had lines she wouldn’t cross. I don’t care if you go to church or get sober or get a job—treat your animal right, and I’m here for you, was how she laid it out to me. But if you don’t, if you keep your dog tied up or hit her, she’s mine. If you’re so high and disoriented I watch your dog go in the street and get hit twice, it’s mine—and I’ll lie and tell you it got lost. If you’re wasted in your tent with your cracked-out boyfriend who’s already killed an animal and I find that dog on the street, you’ll never see her again. She’s mine. She found homes for the two encampment puppies she’d stolen; one with a little boy who desperately wanted a pet but whose single mother didn’t have the money for it. Downtown Dog Rescue paid for its care for the rest of its life.
Lori even took a protective interest in Sheba, a German shepherd mix who’d lived her whole life near the Catholic Worker soup kitchen on Skid Row. Her first person had been Georgia, who’d fled domestic violence only to end up addicted to crack on Skid Row, and who found the dog chained to a parking sign pole. After Georgia went into rehab, Gleason took over; he was another addict, and not a nice one. He forcibly mated Sheba and sold her puppies. When Lori first saw Sheba, she was lying on the sidewalk nursing her latest litter. The situation was not acceptable, and she moved in.
“I don’t want to get into your business, but I imagine it’s hard to care for all those puppies and a mama,” she said to Gleason. She gave him her name and offered to pay for Sheba’s spay. “Ask around about me.”
After the dog’s surgery, Gleason got busted, and Sheba ended up at the pound. Lori redeemed and delivered her to Laquisha, who lived in a shed in the parking lot of a fish distributor; when Laquisha got picked up by police, Tawanna stepped in. She was a prostitute and addict whose kids had been taken away—“Sheba’s my chance to get it right,” she said. She and the dog, whom she dressed in jammies, slept cuddled together at night. When Gleason got out of jail he wanted Sheba back, and so fierce a custody battle erupted that Lori and a police officer got called in to mediate: Gleason would take the dog with him on his daily recycling rounds but return her to Tawanna at sunset. The arrangement lasted close to a year, though Sheba ended up in the pound multiple times, and Lori always came to bail her out. Whenever the two returned to Skid Row, Lori opened the car door and the dog leaped out, like a bird sprung from a cage. The people on the sidewalk cheered and embraced her.
Sheba didn’t suffer fools gladly, and you weren’t anyone on the Row until she had bitten you. After a while, she didn’t really belong to anyone. Gleason died, then so did Tawanna, who turned down Lori’s offer to send her back to her mother in Las Vegas and eventually overdosed. But Sheba, her coat perennially matted with dirt and motor oil, her diet gutter water and soup kitchen table scraps, held court and held on.
In 2004, Benny got yet another new dog, Freeway, a female who belonged to a guy he knew, who’d found her tied to a freeway call box. The brown-and-white pit mix was a wild little girl who adored Benny—“She my baby,” he crooned.
Of course she was unfixed. “I can’t let you do Freeway, she don’t belong to me,” Benny said.
But Lori went to the alcove when Benny wasn’t around, took the dog, and got her the surgery. It wasn’t the first time she’d disobeyed him. Benny was always furious, and sometimes swore “I’m never talkin’ to you again!” but when she appeared, penitent and bearing German chocolate cake, he always shook his head and relented.
“You need to find a good man, Miss Lori,” he said. “What’s gonna happen to you?”
After the 2002 Los Angeles Times story about DDR, acquaintances sometimes asked Lori if they could come along when she made her rounds; she felt like a safari guide offering a glimpse of the wild. People would shake their heads and call her “fearless.” It wasn’t true; she was often afraid. At the beginning, she’d also been stupid.
A man named Tony Sperl had saved her butt more than a few times. She’d seen him around for months, a big white man in his early forties with a long graying beard, usually dressed in overalls and a knit cap, with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He had a flat “don’t fuck with me” look in his eyes, and Lori had thought he was homeless. As it turned out, he was an ex-cop now working security downtown and the scion of an old LA family of actors who owned the nineteenth-century Little Tokyo building in which he lived.
Tony was loud and in-your-face, the kind of man who bragged of knowing mafiosi and motorcycle gang leaders and called women “chicks,” but he was a lifelong animal lover and feeder of feral cats. He’d won his street cred by saving a Skid Row husky who’d been hit by a car—had paid a private vet $600 to treat him, gotten the dog neutered, and then returned him to the Row. Homeless people sometimes passed him their real names and hometown addresses, muttering, “If I die, let my mama know.”
Tony was clear-eyed about life downtown. He’d found bodies on the street. One day, from his apartment window, he’d seen a naked man lying flat on the ground in a nearby parking lot. The man had suffered a heart attack, said the paramedics that Tony called; apparently someone had seen him collapse and stolen his clothes. And yet Tony had formed a close bond with Mike, the burglar who owned the dog Bullet, and he kept a supply of shoes and socks in his car that he freely handed out to other homeless people he met.
“What size are you?” he’d call out. “I’ve got some Nikes.”
“Don’t you care that they’re on drugs?” Lori had asked him.
“Are you a rehab counselor?” he answered. “All you can hope is that over time the kindness you give rubs off and they’ll want to believe in the world again.”
It was Tony who warned Lori that wherever else she went in the course of her work, she should not go into the tunnel under the river’s 6th Street Bridge. And it was Tony who rescued her the day she did.
The second she’d gone in, chasing a dog, she knew it was a mistake. She didn’t see the dog anywhere, just specters huddled in the shadows. And a young girl with blond hair sprawled out, her face puffy and chalk white. She wasn’t moving. In a panic, she called Tony. “There’s a dead girl!”
“Where are you?”
She sighed. “I went into the tunnel.” Tony arrived in minutes. He shook his head, then prodded the blond with his foot.
“She’s not dead. She OD’d.” He raised his voice. “Does anyone here have orange juice? She’ll need it when I wake her up.” Amazingly, someone did.
Tony shook the girl roughly until her eyes opened, then pushed the juice at her. “Thank you,” she managed. “You saved my life.” She began to moan. “I need help . . . my man was pimping me out . . . I want to go home. Please . . . I just need $20 to get out of here . . .”
Lori took out her wallet and passed the girl some cash and Tony shot her a disgusted look. “This is not worth our time.” He led Lori out of the tunnel and sat her in his truck.
“I can’t believe you went down there,” he barked. “Do you know how fucking stupid that was? You could’ve gotten killed. Now, listen to me: This girl has done what she did ten times since I’ve known her. She’ll be back with her guy tomorrow, he’ll beat her, she’ll OD again, and eventually she will die. But you’re gonna die first if you keep trying to save her! Do you get that? Promise me you’ll never do that again! Raise your hand and promise.”
Lori struggled to contain her outrage even as she raised her hand. What a heartless asshole. And so wrong. She’s just a girl, she doesn’t belong here, it’s not who she really is.
Not a week passed before she saw the blond girl staggering down Mateo Street stoned and laughing, her arms around a pimp.
“Don’t take it so personally,” said Tony when she told him. “Just stop believing everything people here tell you.”
She’d learned. For a while, she’d given Destiny, queen of the 6th Street encampment, bags of dog food, not understanding why the woman kept asking for more. “What y’all gave me got stolen,” she said one week, and “Rats got it,” the next. Then one day she and Richard had gone into a downtown liquor store to buy ice cream, and there were all the sacks of food—Destiny had sold them for cash.
So: Don’t give an addict things she can sell. Don’t give $20 to a junkie with a sad story after she OD’s in a tunnel. Don’t open your wallet when someone begs $5 “for a bus ticket home.” He’ll almost surely never go home, but he will be back tomorrow asking for more money.
Realize that when street shit goes down, it’s not your shit. When you go to visit Clay and his new dog and stumble into a fight he’s having with his girlfriend and he goes for her throat and she falls and hits her head, walk away. By evening, they’ll be back together, getting high.
Don’t romanticize homelessness—it’s not pretty. Don’t do people “favors.” Remember the night you agreed to carry a foil-covered pan of “lasagna” in the car and later realized it was a batch of drugs.
Watch your back. On the street, people tested each other the same way dogs did. Are you friend or foe? Predator or victim? Dewayne had played that game the night he called her to his trailer. His dog Buster was sick, he said. “You gotta go in and look at him.” It was late, she was alone, and she’d made a rule for herself: never go inside.
Her instincts had told her to get away. It could be a double cross involving some other innocent victim, or a setup.
“What’s wrong?” Dewayne asked when she hesitated. “Are you scared?” The question had a mocking edge. “Don’t you trust me? You’ve been here a million times. I see you, Lori. If you don’t go in, everything you say is bullshit.”
Of course that got to her. It was sickeningly hot in the trailer, close with the smell of crack. Women were there, crowded together and laughing.
“Here,” said one, thrusting a bundle at her. It was Buster, wrapped in a blanket, hacking with kennel cough. When Lori went back out, cradling the animal, Dewayne was laughing, too. He’d won. She’d showed weakness, and they both knew he could have made her pay.
Don’t do favors, don’t do what you’re told, but don’t outright refuse someone who might hurt you. Answer with what Benny called a “story”—something that “in your heart you tell yourself could be true.” Like “Not right now, but I’ll try to get you what you want.”
Don’t disrespect anyone. Know who you can trust and who you can’t. Know who to keep at a distance—who might grab your wrist, pull you down, and game over.
Always keep the car doors locked and windows up when you drive through the Row. Know where you’re going and how to get out. Don’t park too far away, don’t walk too far off the street, think about where you’d go if you had to run. Know when a situation is turning and you need to leave.
Watch how you dress and wear your hair—long and loose says available. Jeans, T-shirt, no makeup, and braids tucked into a plain bandanna make you invisible.
Almost invisible. You’re still a young woman. When you meet strangers, don’t smile.
It was old news that sterilizing pets cut down on the number that were unwanted and likely to die in shelters. The persistent problem was access to the procedure and price—private veterinarians could charge hundreds of dollars. Los Angeles had opened the country’s first low-cost spay and neuter clinic in 1969 (enraging local vets who saw it as unfair competition) but closed it in the 1990s for lack of funds.6 Beginning in the 1970s, Marvin Mackie, a Southern California veterinarian who’d developed a pioneering “quick spay” technique, operated four high-volume low-cost clinics, but they were in neighborhoods far from the central city, which meant anyone who rode a bus (or walked with a shopping cart) had no way of reaching them.7 One answer to getting service to the communities that needed it came from an unlikely source.
Erika Brunson, a dark-haired beauty born and orphaned in Nazi Germany, had immigrated to the United States in 1957. She worked in the automatic coin laundry business, real estate, Hollywood, and as a successful high-end decorator and furniture maker before a late-life embrace of animal advocacy. In 2000, the Coalition for Pets and Public Safety, a group she helped found, raised the money to try something new in the sterilization effort: outfitting vans with operating tables and anesthesia equipment to create mobile clinics where vets could do multiple surgeries. By 2002, the program, with help from the city, was ready to offer no- or low-cost service to needy communities five days a week.8
Lori, outraged to learn that a lack of advertising meant that these vans often weren’t at capacity, arranged to bring one to Modernica. Since the downtown dog owners who needed this help weren’t going to find out about it via newspaper, mail, or email, she paid some of her homeless clients to pass out flyers on the street. She also promised that anyone who showed up would be fed and talked a pizza chain into a thirty-pie donation.
Dr. Robert Goldman, a Boston-born and Tufts-educated veterinarian who’d been working with the spay/neuter van, was stunned when he got to Modernica on the appointed day and saw a line stretching around the block. “She brought people from everywhere,” he remembered. “She got them rides, she got everything taken care of, their cats had carriers, their dogs had leashes.”
Goldman, a social justice advocate, had spent time downtown and seen other rescuers treating the homeless as less important than their animals. “Squadrons of young white women” would approach a homeless man with a dog, he said. “They’d sweet-talk him, offer $20, and walk away with the dog. And that animal that was bonded to someone is suddenly in a cage, paraded for another group of wealthy white people. It was sickening.”
Lori was helping those same people hold on to and do right by their pets. She was someone who got it.
Out on her rounds, Lori found a client dead, a puppy lying on his chest, patiently waiting for him to wake up. Another, who lived with her boyfriend and a crew of hard-core gangbangers and who’d nursed a hurt dog back to health, simply disappeared.
“She OD’d on crack,” the boyfriend told Lori. “Her heart blew up. They took her.”
“Who took her?”
“The police, the coroner, you know. Hey, why you upset, Dog Lady? You never seen nobody die before?”
“How do you deal with crazy people like me?” her people sometimes asked.
She’d laugh at that. “I grew up with crazy. Y’all are family!”
After the death of Papa, the handsome shepherd that had patrolled the truck repair lot, a prostitute named Julina moved in there. Conditions were rough. She slept in an empty shipping container, peed in a port-a-potty. Most of the women working the downtown streets had a hard, brittle edge that wasn’t just from drugs. The word trafficked wasn’t used at the time, but could have been. Some women walked around barefoot; pimps took their shoes because with cut-up feet, it was hard for them to run away. Julina, blond, blue-eyed, and young, with a Spanish accent that wasn’t Mexican, had a softness to her. When Lori bought the other women lunch, most grabbed at the food, but Julina said thank you. She seemed drug-addled in her own way, talked to herself, saw things that weren’t there. But she loved dogs, and they loved her back, following her wherever she went. Even evil Santanás, who tried to bite everyone, slept next to her, docile as a baby.
One day, Lori risked asking her a question: “What are you doing here?”
It was an old story. Julina was a trained pianist who’d come to LA from Argentina with dreams of rock stardom. When they failed and she overstayed her visa, she took a job bikini dancing at a Hollywood club. For a while she lived with a wealthy surgeon who bought her breast implants—she lifted her blouse to show them—and when he dumped her, it was nude dancing, then the street.
Julina wasn’t an addict, it turned out, but schizophrenic without access to stabilizing meds. After she slit her wrists in the twenty-four-hour gas station bathroom, she wound up at County General, then a grim rehab hospital half an hour away. Lori felt sorry for her and brought her back to the truck lot; she and Richard upgraded the shipping container into a kind of dorm room, with a bed, refrigerator, and fluffy towels. For almost a year, amid her day job, her dog work, and her outreach around downtown, she took care of Julina, filling her prescriptions, doling out pills, and driving her to doctor appointments. With help, she thought, this girl might make it.
Then the truck yard “business manager” began paying Julina late-night visits. She started smoking crack, tried to kill herself again. She said she wanted to go home, but her mind was so muddled she couldn’t even remember how to reach her mother.
Lori enlisted a kindhearted Modernica worker who had children Julina’s age to drive her to Hollywood, and he went with her into club after club asking, “Do you recognize this girl?” Amazingly someone did, and even produced a home number. Lori called Buenos Aires and strong-armed the truck yard business manager into buying a plane ticket.
The note that came from Julina’s mother said simply, “You saved my daughter’s life.”
“That,” Richard later said, “was the best rescue you ever did.”
In 2004, DDR published a black-and-white photo calendar featuring portraits of its homeless clients and their dogs. Shot by Douglas Hill, a professional photographer working pro bono, it would become a full-color yearly tradition, introducing Angelenos to people they normally refused to see. Benny, Dewayne, Clay, Ray, and others looked directly at the camera, sometimes grinning as they embraced their dogs. The images, shot on bridges and near trash piles and chain-link fences, weren’t airbrushed or pretty but they were full of love and humanity.
We’re not that different from you, they said to viewers.
I’m somebody, they told rousting cops.
In one photo, a man named Mason knelt beside the white pit bull that Lori had hired him to train and with whom he’d bonded. He was a soft-spoken Black man in his forties who’d spent a hard childhood in the cotton fields of the South—“I never had parents,” he told Lori, “they just used me as a worker”—only to end up on the Row. One night, high and in despair, he lay down on the railroad tracks, waiting to die, but the train never came.
“If I were a pit bull, Redemption would be my name,” he wrote in an essay that ran with his photo. “Like most of the pack of dogs that live at Downtown Dog Rescue’s kennel, my life has been filled with pain, misery, and fear . . . Much of my time was spent living in cardboard boxes and eating out of trash dumpsters, without a bath for months . . . Working with the dog pack has given me a purpose and instilled confidence and self-esteem with a sense of responsibility . . . I love the dogs. The dog pack saved my life because they gave me a chance to redeem myself.” In the coming years, Mason, who stayed in touch with Lori, would get clean, then relapse multiple times in multiple cities. By 2016, he had turned his life around; he was working for the department of public works and as a homeless veterans’ advocate in a Northern California city when he suddenly died. The city’s flags flew at half-mast in his honor.
Lori passed out stacks of calendars to men and women living on the street, who could sell them and keep the money. Downtown lawyers, merchants, and members of city government hung them above their desks. That same year, Family Circle magazine, which had a circulation of over 20 million, ran a glowing feature about Lori in its series “Women Who Make a Difference.” The TV channel Animal Planet tried to put together a Downtown Dog episode.
That went less well. Lori and Lezle took a camera-toting reporter with them to the 6th Street Bridge encampment. “You need to watch us and listen to us,” they warned her. “If we say ‘It’s time to go,’ GO.”
The reporter didn’t listen. In the middle of an interview with the owner of a German shepherd named Killer, the man abruptly declared that he was done talking.
“Stop filming!” he said. The reporter didn’t. “Stop! I’m gonna turn my dog on you!” Nothing. “Gimme the film in that camera!”
Suddenly the big dog was loose and coming straight at them.
“Go!” shouted Lori, and all three ran for their lives.
The episode was never made, and Animal Planet never called again. Everyone wanted to hear about the poor animals living on the wild downtown streets and sample an exciting taste of grunge. Most didn’t want to get quite that close.
Petey, the pit bull that belonged to Ray, the Vietnam vet who lived in his van in East Hollywood, got picked up again, this time for being off leash. Ray called Lori in a panic. She drove to the North Central shelter to bail the dog out again. Weeks later, she did it a third time. Then a fourth.
That’s when Larry Hill, the shelter clerk in charge of paperwork, looked hard at her. Hill was a Black man in his early fifties, a Louisiana native and professional dog trainer, stern and a stickler for rules. Lori was a little afraid of him. As she forked over the cash that sprang Petey, he leaned forward across the counter.
“Can I ask you something? Why are you doing this?”
She hesitated before offering the simple truth: “Because Ray loves his dog and takes good care of him.”
That stopped him for a minute. He had another question. Petey’s redemption fee was insanely high because after all this time, he still wasn’t licensed. Why not?
“Animal services says that to get a license, you have to give them a physical address. He doesn’t have one. I offered to let him use mine, but they said that wasn’t allowed.”
Hill snorted. He routinely saw members of rescue groups at the shelter. These white women often exuded a sense of entitlement. Could they pull twenty dogs at a time? Why not? They were there to save them. They cooed over the animals and treated “the help,” like him, with disdain. This woman was something else.
“Let’s get that dog licensed,” he said quietly, and entered Petey’s name along with Lori’s business address and phone number into the system.
Afterward, that’s how it went down. Thanks to Larry Hill, three hundred downtown dogs would be licensed to Lori’s address. (Eventually, the address rule got changed.) And because almost all these dogs would end up in the pound after their human companions were busted for something or other, the license meant that Lori would get called, redeem them, and get them back home. None of “her” dogs died in the shelter and broke their people’s hearts. Larry Hill, a man who knew common sense when he saw it, would work with Downtown Dog Rescue for the next ten years.
With no Ken waiting at home, the hours that Lori spent downtown stretched. She came to work at 5:00 a.m., left after 7:00 p.m., on Saturdays, Sundays. Richard, it turned out, wasn’t up for something so intense. He would always be part of DDR and work on its behalf, but he had a partner. He also wanted a life.
For Lori, exhaustion was salvation because it meant she couldn’t think. None of her old questions had been answered. What exactly was her place in the world? Who was she? Her rise at Modernica felt random, the product of her bosses’ whimsy more than reward for competence. As a rescuer, she was working way outside the norm. Even the praise she garnered seemed misguided. The Los Angeles Times and Family Circle stories had been a big deal. She’d hoped they would put a spotlight on her clients but instead brought her variations of “you’re a living angel for what you do.” She could never live up to that kind of praise. If admirers knew how deeply flawed she really was, they’d turn away.
Sometimes she resented the people she served, but she thought she also understood them. You didn’t have to be homeless to see how someone could fall into that abyss, didn’t have to be an addict to appreciate the lure of heroin’s soft blanket. Some people had never had anyone on their side. They’d never been loved or valued and perhaps were too wounded to be “normal” again. A piece of them was gone; they were set apart, their lives governed by a central, isolating sorrow.
Maybe that was also true of her. She knew better than to compare her own pain to that of people on the street—her mother hadn’t pimped her out; she’d had a roof over her head and the world’s best playhouse. But their despair wasn’t alien to her; she found it almost impossible to imagine waking up each day to feel ordinary happiness. It was hard to acknowledge, but spending Sunday downtown seeing the dogs and delivering food was the highlight of her week. It was quiet with the office buildings closed and locked, the semis and delivery vans idled, the weekday hordes of professionals, factory workers, and clerical workers at home in their suburbs. She could stand on a corner and see the sky reflected in banks of glittering empty windows and scattered figures on the sidewalk, muttering behind their carts.
Benny was happy to greet her and get his hot dinner. Lizzy, Teri, and Freeway wagged their hellos. Their time together was easy. Benny never judged Lori or asked about her plans, just fiddled with his cross, talked about dogs, and made bad jokes. She would laugh. She didn’t think about herself. About tomorrow. She understood it was . . . strange. She looked forward to sitting outside a metal shed in a dirty alley with a man she’d sometimes find passed out in an alcoholic stupor. But somehow being there reminded her of being a kid on Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland, a refuge from the daily world and one that she sometimes didn’t want to leave. For years, she’d tortured herself worrying about the future, and now she spent time with people who weren’t sure they even had a future. She knew that some would find that sad. To her, it felt like freedom.