Fred Wilson stood on Race Street at Findlay Market, holding a guitar case and a sad story. I gave him $2 for smokes, and he told me a biography that could fit on the cover of a matchbook.

"I started sticking myself when I was 16,'' he said. He's a steady customer of the Department of Corrections. This week, he's clean. He drinks his methadone every day. But the drug boys are singing that old song to him.

"They want to use me. They ask me to test some stuff for them.''

If he does it, he could overdose and never wake up, and the drug boys will have to find another human "lab rat.'' At best, he will be married again to Witch Heroin, who has already sold his hopes and dreams for a fix of peace in a needle.

A few blocks away in the "war zone'' of Cincinnati, where even beat cops seldom walk, Moneek Presswood spends her days under the grinding heel of nothing. No job. No future. No yesterday. No tomorrow. She had a job. But the city took it away. She and her two kids live in a grim apartment - the same one where her cracked-out mother murdered her 1-year-old daughter. "I need me a job,'' she says, standing in a hot brick alley in bare feet and a thin cotton dress.

These are the people of Hell Town, the crumbling Over-the-Rhine sidewalks where most of Cincinnati never sets foot. We talk about them as abstractions or convenient stereotypes.

But they are just residents of another world, where hope is scarce and dreams only reach as far as the "bling-bling'' NBA jerseys in the windows of Smitty's, lit like a carnival midway that fell out of the sky.

On these streets, the human soul is laid bare like rooms in an old building after a wall has collapsed.

Antoinette Williamson had a job picking up litter for $7.50 an hour. But then one day it ended. She has two kids. "I can't afford to be homeless,'' she said. "I know a couple of guys who are doing drugs now, and one of the girls is doing drugs and selling her body,'' she says of her former co-workers at CICA, the Cincinnati Institute for Career Alternatives.

A sign in a dark window at the CICA building on Elder sends people to Western Hills or Losantiville Road. It might as well say Tokyo.

Councilman David Pepper said CICA was spending millions without accountability. So the city took bids and hired someone else. A replacement job center may open on Monday in Over-the-Rhine.

And that is "by far a better use of city dollars,'' Pepper said. I believe it.

But Moneek and Antoinette only know that their jobs are gone.

Charles Seals, 69, was a janitor for CICA, making $10 an hour. Now he's walking the streets, looking for work.

Andino Powell, 39, was taking computer training and working on his GED. Now he sells CDs on a corner. "The city is completely off the hook,'' he says. "I don't say it's a racist city. I just say it's a stubborn city. It doesn't want to change.''

It made me wonder: How long would I last on these streets, starving for hope, before I started dancing to the music of drugs and crime?

You can see a lot on a walk. Now I can see why the song of the drug boys is the anthem of Hell Town.

E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.