A Gaggle of Bums

I just came from McDonald's where the usual gaggle of street people were hanging out for morning coffee.  William B. Clay (hereinafter "Clay") was there with his great booming voice and a database of stories going back to the Pleistocene of his life.  Or the Paleolithic.  Take yer pick.

He's an alcoholic of the hopeless variety, a veteran.  The VA has been trying to get him into a 90-day detox program.  He sez, "I know it would do me some good."  Pause, big grin.  "But I don't WANT good."  Booming laughter.

He has a black eye all puffed up, swollen, and of course a story goes with it.  He was coming out of this place where he'd just bought a beer, minding his own bidness, when these two rednecks accosted him and of course he just had to beat the living crap out of both of them and then one of them hit him upside the head with some kind of club or something and that was all she wrote.

(And Smiley just now walked up.)

There were half a dozen of them, once Elwin rode up.  Elwin of the two broken wrists from hitting a curb at high speed on his bicycle with no brakes.  His forearms are wrapped in ace bandages up to his elbows, but his injuries don't seem to have slowed him down all that much.  Yes, in answer to my query, he does have tobacco.  I roll.  Light?

He says, Need a lighter?

Yup.

A lighter materializes, blue, to replace the one which gave up the ghost just last night.  The Universe provides again.

Elwin has a strong resemblance to the political operative in the tv series The West Wing. But shorter.

Next door is the Peter Pan Mini-golf place with the steps where the bums hang out until chased off.  Lost boys, every one, grown now, but as lost as ever.  And who am I to talk?

When they sense they're wearing out their McDonald's welcome, they arise en masse and head out for the steps.  Stack has gone for a beer, and their day is off and staggering.  I watch them go.  Clay's calves, I suddenly notice, are swollen, distorted, distended, looking like Popeye's forearms grafted to knees and ankles.  Poor sick fuck.  He's dying, knows it, and doesn't much care.

You know where I'm going when I die? he sez.  Chicago. The morgue.

And that great booming laugh.

An image of a toe tag attached to that swollen deformed limb takes up residence in my mind, and I shoo it away like a nagging, persistent fly.

This he said earlier:  Wishing don't work.  Whenever I wish not to see such and such a person, goddamn if he don't show up.  And when I wish to actually see such and such, goddamn if they cain't be found.

Laughing.  Booming.  Barking at these lowering clouds.

The sky is threatening rain, and I have to be up at St. David's in about an hour.  It'll take me half an hour or so to get there, so I have half an hour to sit here and tweak my head in order.

Smiley gone.  I gave him a few papers, he laid some snipes on me.  The little transactions of the street, one bum helping another.

Okay, okay.  Halleleujah, I'm a bum.  A Dharma Bum, if you will.

But a bum nonetheless.

This I begin my day on the 8th anniversary of 9/11.