“What are you doing way down here?”
Our routine around feeding the cats settled into an early morning schedule so that we could get to it before the big trucks occupied the streets starting about 5AM. We were the only ones on the street except for the scavengers trolling for good junk to cash in over at the recycling yards down Alameda a few miles. We’d do our rounds in my Tacoma with the big pot of food in the back along with the pre-torn squares of butcher paper we used as plates. By this point we had it down to a system. The cats loved a routine. We found it really helped. They’d show up knowing what to expect. It made for a more loyal following.
Occasionally, we’d get a visit from the police. Our actions could look suspicious from a distance. Furtive, even. Crouching down next to the fence outside the Grainger’s warehouse or poking around at the parking lot gate of the place where they made Mochi. Usually the patrol car would speed up as they approached us and skid to a stop. We later decided this was meant to get us to run if we were doing something illegal exposing our guilty intent. We would just stand up and look right at them and wave.hello.
“What are you doing way down here?” one officer asked us. This line became an oft-repeated tag line between Kathy and me as we did our rounds. He apparently did not realize that there were residential buildings in the neighborhood and thought we were far from home at an odd hour of the morning. We explained what we were doing and that we lived only a few blocks away. He was cool after that and asked us about the cats.
There were other times we were interrupted by people looking to buy drugs. One time the guy didn’t believe us when we said we had nothing to sell. So the police weren’t that far out of line suspecting us of breaking the law. It was that kind of neighborhood. Literally marginal. Adjacent to both Skid Row and Little Tokyo. Active in the daytime bit mostly dark and quiet at night. It was mostly uneventful and safe. Once in a while it was, yeah, sketchy.
