The Things Addicts Go Through

Yesterday morning, Bobby returned from the methadone clinic, upset that they had cut him down to thirty milligrams of the stuff "because I missed a couple days."
He was very upset about that, but, through the serendipity of the addict, had run into a guy named Bongo on the way back from the clinic.

Bongo used to live at Sacred Heart in a small apartment that was so crammed with stuff that he had horded, that, the one time I visited him there, most likely to smoke a joint with him because he seems to be a pot addict, I had to move stuff around in order to create a place to sit.

When he was evicted from Sacred Heart, the stuff that had been cleaned out of his apartment ran about six feet wide and fifty feet long, along the sidewalk in front of the building. It had been packed almost to the ceiling of his place over the course of about a year, during which he never paid rent. It looked like a yard sale, and Bongo hung out nearby the pile for a while selling off as much of it as he could, before abandoning the rest to the trash collectors, then moving himself to the steps of the Sacred Heart church.

He hadn't paid rent, choosing to spend his money on stuff to horde instead, it seems. 

This is because he is a transvestite type gay guy who always had his hair dyed yellow or orange and who wore flashy women's clothing. He was a huge fan of Liza Minelli, and he was actually the guy who had commandeered one particular meeting of the short lived Sacred Heart Choir, which was an attempt by some volunteering organization to bring culture to the residents by sending in a choir director to train the half dozen or so of us, who had signed up, to sing choral music.

Bongo arrived at the meeting, carrying a Bluetooth speaker and some kind of device, and immediately hijacked the attention of the nice woman of color who was the director of all of us, talking her ear off and brooking no resistance from anyone else who might have wanted to get a word in; a word like: "Can we get started on rehearsal?"

But, we didn't get started on rehearsal, instead we sat there for the next ten minutes listening to LIza Minelli, from a live Broadway show recording of some kind, bringing the house down, and Bongo to tears, with the closing number from some show.

He also didn't pay because he thought that Sacred Heart should have paid him to stay there, because he was "the real deal," a guy who dressed in woman's clothing, worked as a hairdresser -to "the stars," to include the owner of the New England Patriots wife, if he is to be believed. 

And he was a flamboyant and fabulous ray of light, sight to behold, and representative of the LGBQ community, and as such, had been duly beleaguered by a homophobic society his whole life, so he thought Sacred Heart should have been honored to have him as a resident and not charged him. It is a little bit of the attitude that some women have that think the gentleman should hold open the doors and foot the bill for everything, and should feel honored to be able to do so, type of thing...

When he was tossed out, and resorted to sleeping on the steps of the church next door -until he had horded so much stuff that it looked like someone had just been evicted from the same church and the cops moved him on. It was perceived as a slight against the LGBQ community. In Bongo's esteem, you just don't treat a lady like that.

This was about the time when I was playing my guitar and harmonica on the corner a block away from the building, and was approached by an effeminate looking skinny young black guy/girl who was wielding something like a broomstick.

He walked up the sidewalk towards me, staring at me the whole time and swinging the stick from side to side "threateningly." He was a young man of color who was not only smaller than me, but had the daintiness of a female. You would think that he wouldn't be swinging a cudgel out of fear of breaking on of his fingernails.

But he was fresh from encountering the scene of the police kicking Bongo off the church steps and was outraged over an action that he deemed clearly a homophobic hate crime against Bongo. Forget about the heap of garbage that he slept somewhere in the middle of, to the point where he eventually couldn't even be seen from the road, this was clearly gay bashing by those same police who go out hunting for young men of color every day -even though the cops that kicked Bongo out were cops of color.

So, he had come across the street and stuck the end of his stick in my tip basket, overturning it, and then asked me: "Do you know how many trans men are murdered every year?!" followed by "Do you know how many Bob Dylan imitators there are?!"

As I prepared to sacrifice my guitar, if I had to, by using the neck of it like a baseball bat against his face "Do you know what lipstick mixed with blood looks like on brown skin? Do you know how hard it is to find teeth mixed in with gravel?!" type of thing; he began walking off. When I turned to see him doing so, still considering whether or not I owed him a beating, I noticed that another cop had parked about a block away, and seemed to be tracking the guy. He must have made some kind of vague threat against "the next straight person I see" after he had left the site of Bongo's eviction, and the cops were probably going to follow him in order to be in position to arrest him as soon as he stepped out of line; which they probably wanted to do after what he had probably said to them back at the church steps.

I'm not sure whose side they would have taken had I pummeled him, though; the busker, or the freak of nature that will not ever be fruitful, nor multiply, in direct opposition to the commandments of God.

But, now Bongo just sleeps on the sidewalk nearby the apartment of Bobby, who encountered him there, after having found the methadone clinic to be closed for Labor Day, and who was already feeling the encroaching sickness of withdrawal.

This is a state in which the addict can become pretty resourceful and it wasn't long before Bobby had a hundred dollars of Bongo's money after promising him a sack of weed.

Bongo's sack of weed would have to wait, as would the answering of any of his phone calls because Bobby had to get right first before he could help anyone else.

Pretty soon he was back in the apartment after having made a run somewhere, and had a forty something slightly built man of color with him, along with an even skinnier young white lady who was of the type that starts out as a pretty teenager, as her face was pretty, albeit with something wrong with it that was hard to place, and then ages at about three times the normal speed of a normal girl.

Her body had the skinny as a rail, but still flabby in a way, body that comes when women "diet" by going days at a time on crack without eating. Or nod for whole days on heroin after having spent all their food money on that.

I know all this about her body because, after the three of them had gone into the bathroom to fix up their spoons of heroin and tie tourniquets around their arms, then shoot them up, and not long after the two of them had left, there was a knock at the door.

Bobby answered it, and it was them returning.

The skinny girl with the pretty face was beside herself with shock and outrage.

She had had more heroin in the pocket of one of her shirts or somewhere, and it was missing.

Bobby's was the only place they had been, and so the missing heroin must be there somewhere. When she was in the bathroom doing her spoon with the rest, someone must have gone into Bobby's room and stolen the stuff out of the pocket of her shirt; and I guess that meant me; who was just kind of staying out of the way and praying for them to leave, and for Bobby to be normal for at least that day.

The girls was almost in -fake?- tears as she recounted how she had almost fifty dollars of the stuff in the pocket of the shirt she had strewn on Bobby's bed. The guy was up in arms, too, because half of that had been his.

Then the girl began to strip out of her clothes to prove that she didn't have it on her, even going so far as to bend over and spread her butt cheeks in the bathroom for the edification of anyone who cared to look. "I don't have nothing on me, I swear to God!"

And then it was the guy's turn to attest that he really didn't know Bobby that well, nor the girl, and he didn't know who to believe.

The way I interpreted things was; the girl had loaded the whole fifty dollars worth into herself, probably by snorting the rest covertly, after having shot up her spoon, and she knew she was guilty and was offering her body up for sex in exchange. She was so doped up, she would probably be barely aware that she was engaged in it -a small price to pay for getting a lot of heroin in her. Either that, or she thought her little peep show, displaying the flesh of a seventy year old adorning a body barely out of its teens -although, if you just saw her face, you might think her beautiful- was reasonable payment in exchange of fifty dollars worth of drugs. Maybe ten years ago she would have an argument there, but time plays tricks on the heroin addicts.

She was swearing to God that she had just seen the extra stuff in her pocket, and that now it was gone. Bobby was swearing to the same God that all he had done was his spoon and he hadn't gone into the bedroom.

This left me to stare at them with a "Don't even try me," look on my face.

This made sense of the fact that the girl had opened the bathroom door and asked me, basically, if I messed with the stuff, and did I want any. This probably would have led to her realizing, once I got in there, that she didn't have as much as she thought, or she might have given me a half a spoon -I don't know how that works- but that would have established me as a suspect in the heist; a heroin user certainly would hurriedly scour shirt pockets, just in case there might be something in there.

But, Bobby had affirmed to them that no, "He doesn't f#@ with it." 

Darn, now they couldn't play Bobby and I against each other. And now they couldn't show up with a couple goon addicts, demanding my guitar and my laptop to pay for what was "stolen."

And, so, that was yesterday. 

Today the clinic was open and Bobby stood in line for 2 hours and got forty milligrams.

I left on foot and headed for the Chase Bank, seeing Bongo asleep on the sidewalk in front of The Saenger Theater -Liza had sung there, afterall- and I took pity upon him. I said a little prayer for him, knowing that he had been screwed over for a hundred dollars at that point and resolving to try to do something for him.

I got the to the bank, which still had the "temporarily closed" sign, but was informed that WalMart will cash the "economic impact" check for 14 hundred dollars that I had stuffed in a Perl Programming book back in March when I got it, which I was just now getting around to cashing.

Better WalMart cashing it for a fee of eight dollars than me depositing it in Bobby's account and then relying upon him to hand me over the cash the next morning when it appeared on his balance, taking that balance up to 14 hundred dollars and ten cents, perhaps.

If he was dope sick; how would I be able to take the cash from him and then sit in his apartment on this laptop with it in my pocket while he writhed and suffered on the bed? It would have cost me perhaps more than eight dollars to cash the thing that way. I had seen how Bongo had been treated, whose last couple calls to Bobby have gone to voice mail, while Bongo writhes and suffers in front of the theater where Liza sang..

Then, I took my food stamp card into Walgreen's where I saw an older white gentleman of slight figure grabbing two large bags of cat food, along with a couple racks of Gatorade. I offered to pay for his Gatorade in exchange for him paying for one can of food for Harold.

"Why don't I just give you a couple dollars for the food?" he asked.

"Because that would make me a beggar."

I haven't begged anyone for anything since two thousand and five, when I had just gotten out of jail in Culpeper, Virginia, released in November on a 24 degree day, wearing the shorts and tank top that I had been arrested in, in Florida back in April. They had extradited me to Virginia, because the Virginia license with a different name that I had only constituted a misdemeanor in Florida, like a college kid using a fake ID to get into a bar. But, in Virginia it was a crime against the state and a felony and they could get me for a lot more there than they could in Florida. 

So, they had spent about 3 thousand dollars to fly 2 FBI guy's to Jacksonville to fly me back there, stopping over in Charlotte, N.C., where I was allowed to order anything I wanted off the menu of one of the restaurants in the rotunda area.

$3 thousand, only to have me get up in front of a judge on Thanksgiving morning as snow fell outside, and explain to his satisfaction that I had only gotten alternative ID's in order to work and be a productive citizen; there were no other instances of "fraud" in my file. With an alternative ID one could open a checking account and then write hundreds of checks in order to buy anything he ever dreamed of, before tossing the checkbook and burning the ID and keeping the stuff. Plus, one could be receiving welfare under one name while working a good job as another guy, open an insurance policy as one guy with the other guy as the beneficiary, and then have that guy fall into the ocean on a deep sea fishing trip, his body never recovered -admittedly that last one would be very hard to pull off because insurance investigators are some of the sharpest tools in the toolbox; I've thought of becoming one before, actually.

The thing that tempted me most was becoming a Mexican citizen under one name and owning a fabulous ranch with a gardener and a cook, and paying for it all by driving across the border into the U.S. and working a good job as an American citizen and being paid in U.S. currency that's value would quadruple during my ride home from San Diego to Enseñada, Mexico. I seriously thought about that. I love Latinas...and gardens.

But, none of that showed up under that ID and so the judge believed me, probably low-key admiring my ingenuity. I imagine that most of the criminals in that redneck jurisdiction in Virginia are candidates for that America's Stupidest Criminals show.

But, once out of jail, I asked a guy if he would buy me a cup of coffee -and ruined my record of never panhandling in my whole life. He had made me promise that it would be for coffee, and not beer, after asking me why I was dressed in summer clothes when it was 24 degrees and snowing off and on out. It was. 

Then, I started walking towards where there might be a payphone that I could call my mother on, and found a dollar bill on the ground on my way there. They still had payphones in Culpeper in two thousand and five...

I will have to tell that story on this blog; now that I think of it; it involved all kinds of stuff, like me borrowing a truck, and being chased by, but evading, the police in Raleigh, N.C. then managing to physically disguise myself in order to hop on a Greyhound even though cops had been posted at the station, as well as at the Amtrack, looking for me. The truck ran out of gas on an incline, so I let it coast backwards into a parking lot, which happened to be the prison parking lot, where there were a few news trucks with their satellite dishes aimed skyward, and large groups of people gathered holding various signs. It happened that upon that evening, at midnight, the thousandth invocation of the death penalty was to take place, and it had been the occasion of much protest and attention by the media. And, here I come, backing a pickup truck loaded with debris into the same parking lot, getting out, and informing a concerned looking Lieutenant who resembled Gavin McCleod -the captain of the Love Boat, that I had merely run out of gas going up the hill, and was going to grab an empty milk jug out of the back and go fetch some.

"I just think it highly interesting that, on the night of the most publicized execution in recent history, you just happen to run out of gas right here," he said, while no doubt imagining which item of debris in the bed of the truck might be the shrapnel that was going to kill him after my bomb-of-protest-against-the-death-penalty detonated.

"You're sure you're not one of these protesters that came down from (whatever state the 999th one was, I forget)?"

"No, I just ran out of gas..."

I had known enough to run out of there, as soon as I was out of his sight, and stay one step ahead of the cops and a team of sniffing and barking dogs that were dispatched after me, involving my walking through a little creek a hundred feet upstream before emerging onto the opposite bank. I learned that trick from watching some movie as a kid.

 

But, I had at least changed the oil in the thing, and had left the receipt on the passenger seat, I wish I could remember the name I gave the Jiffy Lube type place, it was something humorous, I recall...the name of the Judge that had released me? I forget...darn...it will come to me hopefully by the time I render that story, before fitting it into the 2005 section of the blog...now that the statute of limitations is up on the "unauthorized use of a vehicle" charge that some blog reader might turn me in on...

I strove to get back to Florida, where I had a drivers license under a different name that I just had to go to the DMV to replace because they had my picture on file. This is a way to facilitate getting an ID without having to produce ID to get it, avoiding the Catch-22 that exists. "If I had ID, I wouldn't be here trying to get ID!" Just another example of the common sense that Florida government exhibits, even to this day.

That way, I was able to crumble and toss any paperwork telling me that I had to report to a probation officer in Culpeper and/or pay fines, or anything linking me to a truck that disappeared from Culpeper the day I was released from their jail; or an attempted terrorist attack upon the Raleigh prison a week or so later.

I had been left to fend for myself in a tank top and running shorts in the middle of winter, and had gone off into some woods that turned out to be a snow covered golf course, where I had built a fire and was cooking food that I had bought with some money that my mom had wired, and sipping wine. Soon, I was craving a cigarette, as more snow began to fall upon and sizzle in my cooking fire. I remembered passing by the pickup, which had been left idle, probably for the whole winter, by the greens keeper.

I wondered if there might not be a bunch of sniped cigarettes in the ashtray, and was bolstered by the fact that the door was open. By the dim yellow-orange dome light I slid the ashtray open. Darn, not one cigarette! It was a clean ashtray, with the only thing in it being the key to the ignition...darn!

And, in an adventure like the one I was on; of course there had to be just enough juice in the battery to start the thing, after the dome light pulsed with every sluggish turn of the crank. "They'll have their truck back in time for the opening of the course in March, or whenever," I reasoned. I would pick up cigarettes in Charlottesville, at the gas station that I worked at for about a year in 2001, before I was found living in an underground dwelling that I had built by the nearby reservoir and arrested for "suspicion" merely because in the opinion of the sergeant "Nobody lives like this unless they're on the run from something.." But that is another story that I believe is already in the 2001 section.

 

So, that was the only time I ever panhandled anyone. It was somewhat a reaction to the treatment of being kicked out of the jail -told that I couldn't hang out in the lobby, "You need to leave!" And that, no, they didn't have any winter jackets that were left behind by someone who was incarcerated in the winter, then released the next summer when it was a hundred degrees outside- and the attitude I had fomented that had me ready to break some rules to counter the ones that had been broken against me.

The guy gave me a couple bucks for the cat food, which left me enough change to take a bus to the WalMart, which is where a security guard at the Chase Bank told me I could go to cash the economic stimulus check that I have been sitting on since March. This, after I had just uttered a prayer for Bongo as I walked past him -the Liza Minelli thing notwithstanding- and decided that I was going to try to do something for him; probably give him some weed so he will not have been totally screwed out of his hundred bucks. Do you know how many trans men get scammed out of money every year? Do you know how many Bob Dylan imitators there are?

 

So, now I go to ring my keys at the gate of Sacred Heart to hopefully produce Harold and give him a couple cans of food. I'm going to spend the bus fare on an additional can, and then just pay for it by riding my bike to the WalMart. There might be an open spot on the bike rack of a returning bus, should I succeed there in cashing the stimulus check. I'm almost out of kratom, so the time to act is now...

 

Bobby ran into Tim the guard who works at Sacred Heart and who apparently is on methadone treatment himself. Tim told him that S.H. apartments are going to be closed "indefinitely." Darn. I might have to capture Harold and bring him here.