Turtle

Manny Sanchez, aka Turtle, 38, was born in LA, but grew up in foster care in San Diego. He ran away a lot until he became a street kid here, which “became my indoctrination into the global homeless life.” He still feels bitter about how police regarded street kids as hoodlums, thugs, and wonders how they all might have turned out differently if the police had treated them otherwise. “When they treat you like a criminal long enough, you start acting like a criminal. Cause and effect. It’s almost like a scarlet letter; it wasn’t deserved,” he said.

The palms of Turtle’s hands are the color of metal. He has spent the morning weaving copper wire around a crystal he found in the mud, fashioning it into one of the many creative pieces of jewelry he likes to wear and give as gifts. He made most of the rings he wears. He cleaned the mud off the crystal by putting it in a glass of water under a full moon. He uses copper wire because it is healing, good for rheumatoid arthritis, he said, so he likes to give these pieces to his older friends on the street as a protective talisman. He doesn’t let people be aggressive or rude to them. “They’re my family,” he explained.

On the first day of the pandemic lockdown, he and some friends were relaxing in Balboa Park when, about 6 pm, they heard four shots. A bullet whizzed right by his head, a slug lodging in the tree about 30’ from where he’d been sitting. “There were people either taking shots at the homeless or people trying out their guns,” he surmised. Since they weren’t supposed to be in the park, nobody called the police, so they realized they were on their own. “The pandemic caused a lot of fear. When people have fear, they do fearful things.” Even the police were hesitant to come into the park then, so Turtle and his friends were on their own.

The homeless who weren’t in the convention center became more entrenched and hidden, tribal, he said. Whereas the park was always regarded as neutral territory, all of a sudden street gangs were fighting over territory in the park and there were too many drugs on the Black Market. “So you’ve got a powder keg, and it kind of erupted. You had people who, some were mentally ill, others might have been up for days.” And, he added, you have veterans. “We have war-trained soldiers who are now civilians, who feel like they have to fight for their lives, they go into combat mode, and they don't differentiate between good guys bad guys.” COVID didn’t come with an instruction manual, he added, so early on, the park and downtown became a “very Wild, Wild West.”

The closure of public restrooms made things worse. Mental health deteriorates when you don't have any access to like hygiene, he said. Meanwhile, the city wasn't doing trash pickups. Turtle assumed it was because they didn't want to transport what they deemed to be possibly hazardous materials. “So now the trash isn’t being picked up, we can’t wash our hands or take showers, the restaurants are closed, fast food restaurants are closed, and the ones that are open are not going to let you in because you're homeless. So now we're starved, and you know, starvation, drug use, and paranoia: that’s like a perfect storm for really, really bad stuff to happen. Yeah, and even if you did call the police, they're not gonna show up.”

He said two people died from situations where someone didn’t know how to handle firearms, and they caught a stray bullet. There were another seven deaths that the police marked as unsolved crimes, yet he knows they were homicides. In another situation, someone died under the freeway at B Street with a needle in his arm. It took 16 hours for the police to respond, and for someone to come take the body away. Someone even took out his crack pipe when a cop was driving by and waved it, thinking for sure the police would stop. Ambulances just drove by and honked at them when they tried to flag one down. The message they were receiving, Turtle said, was ‘hey, you can do whatever you want and no one is going to stop you.’

Ironically, when the protests were really heating up downtown over the summer, and a CVS drug store was being looted, the homeless were just leaning against a wall, staying out of the fray, watching. If a protestor came towards them, they would chase the protestor away, saying they didn’t want to be blamed for looting or theft. He was really proud of the homeless folks for just letting it all go by and not getting involved. We told them “don’t make us the victims, don’t blame the homeless for everything! You’re out here protesting about your life’s conditions? Dude, we’re over here starving. That’s our life condition.”

The shut down also meant people who get monthly checks or who needed to go to social security to straighten something out with their benefits, those offices were closed. People couldn’t pay their bills, and that made things far worse. Churches who used to come and give us food or blankets, they stopped coming. So it was everyone for yourself.

He didn’t go to the convention center because he said it felt like an internment camp. “and not to sound too, like a little paranoid, but what's to stop them from chaining the doors and filling it up with gas and saying it's an accident? You know, it's not the first time that it's happened.” He wonders why they couldn’t do something like that before this crisis. Wasn’t the level of homelessness before COVID a crisis? He said staying at the convention center was like checking yourself into jail every night. He’d rather take his chances out on the street. The people who were in the convention center are having a hard time adjusting back outside now. “There is a stigma on the streets where, if you went to the convention center, you're almost shunned from the community. It's like a scarlet letter. You were marked kind of as a sellout…” He added that he people in the convention center are having a hard time reintegrating when they come back out to the streets. “They wonder why their stuff is getting stolen at every turn.”

He said people tend to think homeless are carriers of COVID, however he doesn’t know one person on the street who has contracted COVID, only the people who went to the convention center contracted the virus. Additionally, because of the economy, he thinks that soon there will be more homeless, and while he feels for the people who are kind and who say hello and bring them food, as for the people who are condescending, he said, “they’re fish, and we’re sharks and we smell blood in the water…. I hate to be cruel but, I tried to be polite to them, and they show me nothing but disrespect. And I'm at my wit's end with that. So now it's the end of the world, dude.” There’s an atmosphere of madness in the world right now, he added, and he no longer feels he needs to be polite and look the other way when people are rude to him. He said the homeless also have a resentment towards mayor Faulkner, that his policies are noticeably anti-homeless. However Faulkner would not be able to enact his strict anti-homeless regulations without the votes of the people, he acknowledged.

So while Turtle feels bad for those that have been kind and who end up on the street themselves, “it's almost like a certain fraternal instinct to take care of these people. We’re like, I remember, I got you. I got you taken care of. We’re kind of shielding them from the ugliness of the streets. But other people, we’re like, Hey, remember that condescending comment you made three weeks ago? Come on. I hear you dude. …Okay, man. And oh, where'd your wallet go? Where's your wallet go? And they're like, welcome to the streets, bro. Guard your shit; lesson number one. … It’s No Country for Old Men around here, dude. So it's almost like a spiteful retribution with the sense of comical cynicism.”