Needle Park Part 2 and 3
The South End has always been a refuge for us scofflaws and scalawags, con-men and con-artists, ne’er-do-wells and downright losers. I admit it. I even prefer it to the manicured fescue estates behind remote controlled gates further north. Until they start figuring it’s easier to steal from fellow denizens. Which is exactly why I removed myself from the ghetto I found myself in before coming here 37 years ago.
Taking a walk up to a little park I tend on the east side of the island, a neighbor asked if I’d had any break-ins lately. No, I said, you? Three, he said. Know who it is? I asked and he said yeah, the twenty-something heroin addict staying two doors down at John B.’s. John B. won’t talk to my neighbor and the kid in question ran off into the woods when he tried talking to him. I said I guess you know who your culprit is. Fat good it’ll do him….
An hour ago, after chainsawing up a few downed trees in my park, I stopped in to see my old pard Guitar Bob just down the road. He was hauling wood in from a huge cedar that fell in the storm, but we took a break to catch up on news. His news concerned the neighbor woman who kept stopping by to use his phone. She doesn’t have one herself. What she has is a hard luck story for G.B., no car, needs a ride to get meds in Seattle, has cancer, undergoes dialysis, kid is in a halfway house, can’t work, doesn’t have any money. Bob, a hardened urban character, street-wise before they made cobblestones, also has a soft heart. He takes in stray cats and unwanted dogs—he took my junkie neighbor’s hound – and he gives to about 42 and half charities what little he can afford to give.
So he ends up taking her clear to Seattle one night to get a prescription filled for meds she desperately needs. Two hour drive one way. They go, not to a hospital 24 hour pharmacy, but downtown to some seedy apartment in Belltown. He waits in his jalopy and she goes up to get her ‘meds’. I know, you’d think the lights would come on for a streetsmart character like Bob, but … he felt bad for her, you know, dying of cancer and needing dialysis and well, at least she wasn’t selling a bridge.
Long story a lot shorter, she gets lots more rides, stops in frequently to use his phone, wants to borrow money. You might even say they’re developing a rapport, if not a relationship. He does think it odd that the calls she makes are from his bathroom rather than the livingroom, but hey, maybe she needs some privacy. A week ago she takes the phone into the privy and he notices his wallet is missing from the counter where he always keeps it. So when she comes back he asks her for his wallet back. She says she didn’t take it.
There is something broken in a junkie’s head. I’m not a counselor and I don’t play one on TV, but … I know this: somehow they think the rest of us are way stupider than they are. And they are seriously intellectually challenged folks. That, or desperation just takes over and they will try anything, no matter how ridiculous. Guitar Bob can see her holding his wallet inside her jacket and he says you can give me my wallet or I’ll call the cops and we’ll sit here together until they come. She reluctantly hands him his wallet. Of course the money is gone. She probably figured he wouldn’t notice.
Okay, he sez, I’m calling the sheriff. If you don’t call the cops, she sez, I’ll give you a blowjob. Now, I’m no expert on these things having lived too long down in the desolate wilds of the South End, but maybe this actually works on some guys. Bob had 3 dollars in that wallet. Don’t ask me what fellatio goes for in the city, but I’m betting more than 3 bucks. Bob, being Bob, takes Total Offense, this isn’t, after all, the plot to a porno movie. He tells her he’s not calling the police, but that money is going back in his wallet and she’s going back to her hellhole house and she can never darken his doorway, he doesn’t care if her blood is toxifying to sludge or her meds are waiting at the local pharmacy.
If you think this is where the story ends, like Bob does, I suspect you’ve never been around addicts. I wish to hell I hadn’t either, but apparently, they’re living in the neighborhood thick as the deer that eat our apples. At least the deer are cute little buggers….
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