Sitting on the edge of the stone wall where the girls and I sometimes congregated to meet up with regular customers, the group of guys walking by us were doing their cat calls and general teasing. "Hey, girls, slippery yet?"
But his eyes were staring at me with more of a look of "what in the hell are you doing here?" I stared back in answer "you're stoned and have no right to judge me. You don't know me or my reasons." He rolled his eyes at me. I'd never seen him before, but somehow our vision-only conversation was enraging me. He looked about my age, and had the same walk I had, I noticed. Confident but not sure about what, focussed yet searching, busy and intent but with no real destination or goal in mind. Just living the life we were in and not really concerned with what it was all about anymore.
A few hours later, after a driver dropped me back off at the wall, I noticed him, the eye-conversationalist, drive by in a car, staring at me from the back seat, which was filled with pot smoke, all the windows closed in the summer time, air conditioned coldness blowing through vents swirling the marajuana smoke around the batch of them. "Stoners." I thought, and then laughed at myself for judging them so abruptly, as if it were a bad thing to be when it clearly wasn't doing anybody any harm. I watched as he leaned over and said something to the driver and the car slowed down and pulled up near me. "Want to get high?" he asked as he rolled down the window facing me. "No." I said.
He smiled at me in such a way that seemed to suggest he knew all about me, everything I'd ever done, everywhere I'd been. I took a few steps back, my senses were getting confused and he made me nervous. I couldn't distinguish his motives.
Later that night, as a client was driving down the avenue, I saw him again, sitting on a porch with one of the stoners from the car he was in, in front of one of the rare few apartment buildings that lined this business zoned area, with all of its convenience stores, bakeries, fine restauraunts, diners, hot dog stands, bars and churches. He didn't see me, but I looked through the windows of the car as long as I could to watch him. The customer turned to me and said "Do you know him?" I replied "No, but he knows me, I think."
When I went back to Joe's that night, I fell asleep alone as Joe wasn't home. He must have been out talking with his police buddies, or working on some local drug sting. As I lay there right before drifting off, I stared at the ceiling as I pet the cat on its neck and head, and wondered why I couldn't shake this get-high guy out of my mind.
Posted by nft at July 31, 2005 10:28 AM