On skid row, helping the most needy of the 99%

The hard-core Occupy L.A. crowd is still at it, even though its encampment is gone. Protesters marched through downtown this weekend and rallied Monday at City Hall.

But the hard-luck Occupy L.A. contingent is back to life as it was before — sleeping on cardboard pallets on filthy streets and crowding skid row shelters for meals.

It’s impossible to know how many Occupy L.A. protesters came from the ranks of skid row homeless.

The skid row folks were considered a management issue in the tent-city enclave, running off more genteel protesters with rough language and raucous behavior. They were considered a security problem by some cops, who complained that they were only there to “co-opt food” and deal drugs.

What might have seemed like roughing it — bedding down for months on hard ground — was a step up for those at the very bottom of the “We Are The 99%.”

One of those is Samantha, who moved to the encampment outside City Hall — “joined the movement,” she called it — because she was on the street with a 3-month-old. She’d lost her job as a pharmacy tech at a Walgreens and left an abusive boyfriend behind.

“I was following the movement online since it started in New York,” she told me. “I wanted to be an activist. I learned a lot … about why things are so hard.”

She knows “lots of people from skid row who joined the protest,” she said last week, as she lined up for dinner at the Union Rescue Mission, whose counselors retrieved her from the tent city before officials shut it down.

When police moved in, the skid row activists scattered — arrest was not on the agenda.

“Most of the other people who left, they went home,” she said. “Most of them had some place to call their own.

“We ended up coming back here, because we had no place to go.”

At the Los Angeles Mission in skid row on Sunday, the “Free Thanksgiving Dinner” banner hadn’t yet come down. A man with a cane, leaning on the locked gate, nodded a greeting as I walked past.

I stopped and asked about Occupy L.A.: Had he been? Did he know anyone who had? He stared back, tugged his sleeve, checked his watch. “I’m just waiting to eat,” he said. He didn’t know what I was talking about.

Across the street, at San Julian Park, the domino players waved me off. Down the block, I got hard stares when I tried to talk to a clutch of women huddled around battered suitcases on the sidewalk.

I hailed a young man, scruffy and blond with a bulging backpack, because he looked like the Occupy type. He gave me a blank look when I asked if he’d been there and explained what the protest was about.

“Naw,” he muttered, shaking his head and rushing off. “I got too many things to worry about.”

No one I talked with had even heard about the protests, which commandeered the city’s attention and took place almost in their backyard.

What did I even come down here for, I wondered, as I picked my way along sidewalks spattered with urine and covered with trash.

I passed street preachers and drug peddlers, a boombox blaring rap music next to a radio broadcast of a football game, two women pummeling each other while a crowd of cheering men watched, a shoeless woman wrapped in a blanket with a Christmas-wrapped package peeking from her plastic purse and a sleeping toddler on her lap.

It was beyond dispiriting.

Then I spotted Natalina DePina striding through the human chaos in her sunshine yellow pantsuit, passing out homemade sandwiches from a giant plastic bucket — a crusade as idealistic as Occupy L.A., and as private as that movement was public.

DePina is not part of the 1%, but she’s certainly closer to that demographic than to the people in Sunday’s skid row crowd. A graduate of Boston College, she was an analyst for Morgan Stanley and owned a tony Boston boutique when she moved to Los Angeles. Now she works at a Brentwood law firm.

She still helps stock the boutique and was shopping for items for it last year when she made a wrong turn looking for the Fashion District and wound up driving skid row streets.

She couldn’t get her mind around what she saw: It looked like a Third World country, an impoverished shantytown.

“I broke down,” she said. “I had never seen anything like this in my life. It was hard to imagine this existed a few blocks from where I shop for things to sell at my boutique.”

She couldn’t shake the image, and not long after that, she had a dream; “a revelation from God,” she called it. “‘You need to feed 5,000 people.’ That was the message. I don’t believe in coincidence. I’d come to skid row for a reason.”

Since then, once every month, DePina, her friend Monet Ravenell and whatever allies they can enlist spend all night making sandwiches in the kitchen of DePina’s West Los Angeles home — 500 to 800 each month, depending on how much help they have and what DePina can afford.

This weekend it was peanut butter and jelly on whole wheat bread, wrapped in little plastic bags, handed out to anyone who asked. One man asked for seconds; it had been a long time, he said, since he’d had “PB and J like this” — made by hand in someone’s kitchen, fresh and freely given.

Sunday was her final trip to skid row; she met her Project 5K goal.

DePina couldn’t tell me how much her effort has cost. “A lot,” she says. “But that doesn’t matter.”

There’s something precious and humbling “when somebody says, ‘God bless you,’ and you know they have so little, and God has blessed me with so much.”

She got in her car and drove off, and I headed back to my office, past a man vomiting in a doorway, an emaciated woman drawing on a crack pipe, a man seated on a duffel bag reading a dog-eared Bible.

Maybe I should have asked myself then if her one-woman sandwich crusade will be any more effective solving skid row’s problems than Occupy L.A. will be remedying our financial mess.

But both are rooted in common ground: Somebody seeing something so wrong, they can’t help but try to do something about it.

sandy.banks@latimes.com