As Emmler and I left the store yesterday, one of the corner
girls approached us--one of the drug-blasted girls who wander the block selling their
services--you see them emerging from bushes in Slob Knob alley, getting in and out of
cars, doing tricks for the price of "something for the pipe".
They buy their drugs from the nest of vipers across the street from the store. I haven't mentioned our dear neighbors for a while, but they are still very much there--all of us together in the armpit of Lake Street.
Are they ever there. A week ago Sunday, one of them shot another dead, and there was another shooting on Monday evening across the street. [News report: "7 shootings in Minneapolis in 24 hours".]
"It happened at 5:40," a coworker told me. "We'd just closed--Big Boss was about to unlock the door to let me out."
"Did you hear it? What did you do?" I said.
"Oh, yeah!" he said. "I just waited five minutes, and then I left."
I tell ya. There are so many shootings, we barely register them anymore. Though it must be affecting us, we at work in the center of it remain remarkably intact, or most of us do... Perhaps partly through our ability to joke with one another about it. I suppose like MASH. Also, for anxiety, a lot (most?) of my coworkers smoke a lot of weed. Dolls and bears are my anti-anxiety meds (not that I wouldn't be with them anyway).
This girl who approached Em and me was like the others: so blasted, with opaque eyes, robotic speech, and open wounds on ashy skin, they are like zombies.
You get to recognize them, like the feral cats in the alley. Like the cats, you don't see them for more than a season or two.
"You know that nice girl who always used to steal from us?" Manageress will say. "She got stabbed."
Mostly you don't hear what happened to them though, you just notice you haven't seen them.
Once in a while, they get clean. One will come in with clear eyes, happy to shop for furniture for their first apartment in years--a crummy thrift store couch!
"How'd you get off the street?" I asked one.
"I don't know..." she said, genuinely puzzled. "God, I guess."
Anyway, this latest waif asks for money, always saying the exact same thing to everyone. It's as if she's a programmed AI:
"There are ten of us living in a house, with a lot of kids. None of us have eaten in two weeks... I'm in middle school." [She looks like she's thirty, but who knows.]
Em, who knows the scene, looked at her.
"There's too many extenuating circumstances in that story," she said to the waif. "I'd give you some cash, but I just spent it all on thrift. There's free bread inside, and there a lot of food shelves around.
Or just go steal some shit from a grocery store.
That's what I do when I don't have food."
Lol, I remain such a middle-class white lady: I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT, stealing food! When mattdamon ran out of food one weekend, I scrounged up some cans and gave him $20, but it simply did not occur to me to suggest he go steal some. Not like he couldn't have thought of it himself. But somehow, I don't think he did.
(Sadly, he has since gone away and not come back. I'd lent him money another time for rent too, but I don't care one whit about that––I just wish he'd given me back the copy of Murderbot I'd altered. Also, I liked him.)
Anyway, of course it's not food the waif is after. I'd told her the store would give her free clothes too, but she's barely wearing anything warm in the cold.
She doesn't seem to register anything incoming except cash, doesn't seem to speak except for her script, and she simply wandered away without a response.
Walking down the next alley, Em and I stopped to read aloud this graffiti poem on a garage across from a non-denom church [transcript below]:
Making a Mockery out
a soulful, intact, God oriented being
for the intertaiment (a shallow, unsubstancial, and a disease
of the mind), So as to get a praise theft––)
that is unworthy in the eyes of God, and any fair, and rational person.
Luckly, this soul is held intact, by the mere things that make us
Human (–blood, flesh, bones and eys), which are made of 100%
DNA of the most high.
P.S. The vintage wood-handled fishing net sold yesterday.
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