In my homeless adventures in Los Angeles, I saw a lot of strange things. One of them was the mad crack squirrel of Building 212.
Building 212 was a shabby old World War Two building on the psychiatric / industrial side of the West Los Angeles Veterans Administration complex in Westwood, California. The L.A. VA was divided by Wilshire Boulevard in to two physically separated sections. On the south was the main hospital: kidneys and cancer and UCLA medical students. That sort of stuff. The north section housed all the deitrus the VA wanted to keep away from public view, like the psychiatric buildings, maintenance, animal experimentation, drug rehab and the homeless outreach buildings.
The only way to get to the northern section of the VA complex was to drive or be shuttled under a heavily graffitied bridge which was the Wishire Boulevard feeder artery from the la dee da city of O.J. Simpson's Brentwood to UCLA-dominated Westwood and Interstate 405. It was a low, narrow underpass that often gave me the feeling of a River Styx crossing. True to the feeling, I often met monsters and demons on the other side.
Building 212 was the homeless outreach building at the time. It has since been moved to Building 206 where the homeless outreach activities can be shared with the psychiatric intake activities of Building 207, but back when I first met The Mad Crack Squirrel, veteran homelessness was served in the converted barracks of 212.
I have written other descriptions of my comings and goings at Building 212: "The Magic Cane", "For Whom The Inner Bell Tolls", "The Mystery of the Gray Meat Lunch Sacks", so I won't go into too much description of what goes on there, but this is where I met The Mad Crack Squirrel.
The entrance to Building 212 is a set of 12-foot-wide concrete steps. The top landing looks as if it is missing a collegiate balustrade. Square concrete planter columns on either side appear as if they are missing statues or giant Chinese pots. It was on one of these bases that I first met The Mad Crack Squirrel. He was perched there as I approached, fur matted mangy and bug eyed but perfectly still . . . so motionless that I double checked my perception of reality. Why in God's name would the V.A. put a little squirrel statue at the entrance of a paint-peeled homeless outreach building?
I moved towards the furry statue and it suddenly jumped up at me, chattering and hissing like a feral alley cat. I twisted sideways and The Mad Crack Squirrel missed my crotch by inches.
"LEAVE THAT SQUIRREL ALONE!" boomed a voice from inside the building. I was happy to and rushed inside.
On all my subsequent visits to Building 212, I kept a wary eye out for The Mad Crack Squirrel. Across the street from 212 was one of the general unreserved parking lots where veterans parked and abandoned the exhausted and unkempt RVs, vans and compact cars they had lived in. The Mad Squirrel could've been hiding under any of them, I reasoned, resting in the shade until he made his next kamikaze run at some careless veteran's knees . . . or worse.
I asked the counsellors about the squirrel, but all they'd tell me was "Leave him alone. He's crazy." I had tried to appease the squirrel with food a couple of times, but he was never hungry, preferring some bizarre ground digging ritual that I didn't understand until now. The poor little addict must have been 'crumbing'.
The clientele of Building 212 was a procession of madmen. The for-whatever-reason crazed vets stumbled up and down those concrete steps every day at noon to reapply (daily applications had to be filled out no matter how many times one visited) for their mystery meat sack lunches. The vets hung around the bus stop afterwords in nonsensical conversation cliques. The air around Building 212 was pungent with madness. I just assumed that the squirrel had caught the madness, like some sort of osmosis or virulent vets-to-tree-rat virus.
But NOW I get it. I learned that the back end of Building 212 was a 'temporary' homeless shelter for drug addicts. I could never qualify for a bed myself, but I did learn enough about The Haven from my many attempts to get three hots and a cot out of the bloodshot-eyed caseworkers of 212 to learn that on-premises possession of crack cocaine was grounds for immediate eviction. Pffft. Like that ever stopped an addict.
So that's what was going on. The addicts were hiding their crack somewhere on the grounds before entering the shelter and The Mad Crack Squirrel had been finding it. I have been thinking about cobbling together a Homelessness Tour Package where, for a modest fee, I will escort middle class tourists on a journey through Los Angeles homeless shelters, free clinics, food banks and church missions. If I get this thing organized, you can be sure I'll put crack squirrels on the itinerary.
