Boy, 7, Meets a NIMBY World
The kid's got a healthy appetite. In the span of just a few hours on Wednesday, he devoured helpings of lasagna, chicken, pizza and barbecued pork. When he had wolfed down the shredded pork, he took a straw and drank the pool of grease it had been sitting in.
Tyrese is 7, and his energy and spirit are as big as his appetite, which is all the more amazing when you consider that the Union Rescue Mission on skid row in downtown Los Angeles is his 10th place of residence in a short life.
"Tyrese, don't be trying to kiss the girls," Union president Andy Bales instructed the young dynamo, who was greeting a friend he liked almost as much as dinner. "Especially not with rice on your lips."
Tyrese and little brother Tyrell, 5, were chowing down in the Union cafeteria with their mother, Elizabeth Brown, and many of the nearly 100 children who live at the mission for a night, a month or a year.
Time and again, you hear the same story from mothers of the several hundred children living on skid row, mothers who carry physical and emotional scars. More often than not a deadbeat Dad moved on, if he was ever around at all, and Mom couldn't afford the most modest of shacks in the insane L.A. real estate market. And so the families took to the road, with stopovers at the homes of relatives, fleabag motels and, when the purse was empty, the human catch basin called skid row.
"I explained to them the money was gone and we had to go find another place to stay," said Brown, who gathered up the kids from their one-room airport motel six months ago and loaded them onto a bus with their bagged belongings. "The only place I knew to go was here. Tyrese said, 'Mommy, people are sleeping on the sidewalk.' "
Sleeping, hustling, using drugs, screaming, dying. It's no place for a child to be, and there's a code among skid row adults -- an unwritten contract to shield youngsters from the worst of the street activities. When a child is approaching, the first adult on the street to notice will often warn the others to clean things up, yelling, "Kid walking."
Tyrese, rather than wait for an adult to step up, has taken it upon himself to call out the warning.
"Kids walking!" he bellows, and the crack pipes that light skid row like Christmas lights are doused, if only for a moment.
"People are doing drugs and things they're not supposed to do," Tyrese explained. "I do it for my mother and my little brother."
