Book excerpt: "When I first came on the Portland PD," says Officer Loren Christensen, "skid row was a Wild West show nearly as insane as Saigon, where I had just spent a year. Its wine-soaked streets were teeming with drunks, dopers, jackrollers, pimps, crazies, fighters and killers, all crammed into a filthy 12-square-block area where violence was an hourly event and death loomed nearly every bloody night." With honesty and flair, Christensen offers a rare curbside glimpse into the gritty urban world of skid row. In this colorful tribute to the cops who have worked skid row, as well as the characters who have lived there, Christensen preserves for all time that place where, for decades, man's inhumanity to man revealed itself in a million sordid stories.