(no subject)
He drove in his late model Subaru, scouring enclaves of halfway houses and rehab centers for newcomers to cart to a dead meeting. I sat shotgun noticing things, and we darted around a loop of the past ten years or so. Hovels I had lived in, old time places haunted now only by memories personal and distant.
Powerless Patty got punted from her place: some godaweful flophouse in Northside with a big yawning porch donned in meticulous gingerbread paint. She said it was a conspiracy. The other tenants chief crackpipes regularly, and they hate her. This was told in an intermittent sine wave of laughter and sobs, and he, driving, in a twisting, fingerpointing lurch told her to shut the fuck up, or he was going to have her committed as non compos mentis, and for tonight she was to stay at the apartment of Taser Brian, which he had arranged by proffering him two packs of cigarettes and bus fare.
These fucking twits in Clifton and Hyde Park wont have anything to do with this chick, he told me, and I nodded and he spat a slow brown spittle of tobacco shards into the empty of a coffee mug from the center console.
Taser Brian was waiting for our arrival; this motley carnival, in the parkinglot of his apartment building at the foothills of Mt. Airy. Brian’s hair was sculpted into a frizzy bouffant, and against the gaunt of his body, it appeared huge and wizened. He greeted us affably, and accepted the cigarettes and bus fare, and welcomed Patty as his guest. Myself and a millwright named Wade who had been quiet in the backseat unloaded Patty’s sparse trappings of bags and a laundry basket filled with clothes and papers, and Patty and Brian climbed the stairs and switchbacks to the building, and we all waved bye.
Billy Comparetto
© 2009