LOS ANGELES _ Summer was a season to dread, and during the first heat wave in early July last year, the residents of the encampment on Broadway Place had no place to hide.
The sun blazed upon them. The air hardly moved. The sidewalks baked. It would be one of the hottest days in the recorded history of Los Angeles.
An older man complained of dizziness, and his neighbors sat him down. They put a towel on his head and poured water over him.
By midafternoon, temperatures had soared to 108 degrees, and the encampment had its first fatality: Caesar, the pit bull.
He was a familiar presence but had been neglected ever since his owner was stabbed in the neck during a fight and had moved away.
Tied to a jacaranda tree, Caesar had clawed his way into the shadows of a tent, where it was even hotter. The heat killed him. Someone carried his body across the street, and four days later the city's Department of Sanitation claimed him.
The trauma of his death lingered for days. Weariness was in the air, along with the smell of sweat, urine and moldering trash. Crushed cockroaches dotted the sidewalk.
"This going to be a crazy summer, like all the summers," Big Mama said. "Tragedy happens on this block. It never fails. It never fails."
Big Mama, 51, tried to keep everyone in line on the street, but it was getting more difficult.
Even as she kept her appointments for getting housed _ sorting out her identification, income and a background check _ she had watched smoke rise from a nearby tent fire, felt the glare of business owners and scrambled to stay clear of the Sanitation Bureau as crews swept through the encampment with military efficiency.
She had been told that she and her neighbors would be off the street by the end of June and living in their own apartments in a building a couple of miles away.
Except they were still here. Outreach workers said nothing had changed, that the delay was normal, but Big Mama wasn't so sure.
One evening, in the waning light, she retreated to her tent. Her friend and next-door neighbor, Top Shelf, was playing music on her phone.
The rap "Stranger to the Pain" came up in the queue, with its haunting refrain:
No drugs in the world could heal the pain that I'm feeling ...
You a stranger to the pain that a nigga feels ...
The repeating beat and words provided a doleful soundtrack for the encampment, where pain came from a life marked by trauma and disregard. This was the status quo.
One afternoon, Wendy, who lived with Horace Lackey on the far end of the block, was cooking chicken on a camp stove inside their tent. The warm scent of onions, teriyaki, garlic and adobo filled the air.
A vocational nurse, she never shared her personal life with her patients and requested that her last name be withheld. "I've come to see that black people are _ for the rest of the world _ like old broken toys that no one wants to buy," she said.
Nothing, she believed, would change that.
