Darren was dressed in a green camouflage coat over long blue jean shorts. On his head was a brown camouflage baseball cap that said “US Army Veteran” under a seal of a bald eagle that looked to Aria like it had been flattened like a pancake. His now graying hair had been strawberry blond once. It came down to his collarbones. His mustache met his beard in a perfect open-ended frown of a triangle, making his already dispirited poise seem all the more somber. His right leg was lacerated with a network of purple scars and his left leg was missing. In its place was a dirty prosthetic. The stump of his leg was capped with a gray sock and suctioned into the socket. A steel pole the size of a shinbone fed into a black tennis shoe.

Aria guessed that the three men were friends and that they had probably relocated here together. Contrary to Aria’s assumptions, as she later found out, they hadn’t known each other at the start. Robert had come to the abandoned car lot first, and nobody knew how he found it. He had invited Darren to stay here with him after the two met at a holiday meal program just over three years ago. Robert was 68 years old. He had worked all his life as a mechanic to retire. Like so many seniors on the street, he relied on social security checks, but they put him in a position where he had to choose between eating or paying rent. He did everything he could to keep his apartment in Santa Monica until the relative who was living with him, and who he depended upon to keep the place, died five and a half years ago. He had been living out of a backpack, with his bicycle and one-man tent, ever since.

Darren had invited Mike to the camp one year later. Mike had served four years in the army, which granted him immediate rapport with Darren, who, unlike Mike, had made a career of the army. That is, until the last time he was deployed to Iraq, where he crossed paths with an IED that made mincemeat out of his legs. He had been referred to a mental health program as part of his recovery but had ended up on the street when their attempts to alleviate his paranoia, flashbacks, night terrors and chronic pain had failed when compared to alcohol. Still trying to make it through the day with PTSD, and now alcoholic, Darren had turned the inside of the abandoned RV he now occupied into a vault of trash. Darren had become a hoarder.