5. “Smoking’s Bad For You!”

5.  “Smoking’s Bad For You!”

               I was standing at the bus terminal with my copy of The Old Man and the Sea in hand.  I still had no money other than the quarters I had dug out of my car.  There wasn’t enough gas in the tank for me to get to work.

Some poor, homeless fuck passed in front of me and began digging in the gutter for cigarette butts.  I turned away.  I faced the wall and remembered I knew exactly where the motherfucker was coming from.  Been there, done that.

               Some other man, this one much older, was lying up against the wall.  He was probably drunk and had finally found some peace in his slumber.  I looked to my left and saw a woman in her forties (no doubt there because of a DUI) standing twenty or thirty feet away.  I turned to my right and saw some kids skateboarding down the street.  Some more kids were smoking pot.

               What I thought was a young woman circled around from behind me and got up in my face.

               “Do you have a lighter?” she asked in a high-pitched, dorky voice.

               One look at her thick, blue eye-shadow and I knew she was underage.  Her voice made sense now – it was typical of a fourteen year-old white girl.

               “No!” I said, immediately angry.  “No, I don’t have a lighter!  Smoking’s bad for you!”

               She gave me her best bitch face and walked away.  Incidentally, I looked at her ass.  Turning around and seeing me at that exact moment, she gave me an evil, cunning smile.

               “Oh my God!” she exclaimed, pretending to be appalled.

               I looked up and straight into her eyes before I shook my head to declare my blamelessness.

               I said, “I was making sure you really were a minor trying to solicit illegal activity out of an innocent man.”

               “I have a woman’s ass,” she said in her valley girl, teeny-bopper timbre.

               “You get your jail bait butt and you walk it over toward someone who’ll believe your bullshit,” I said.

               She went away.  I stared at the drunk all pressed up against the wall, his face black with soot, his beard wild like a lion’s mane.  Twenty seconds or so passed.  I couldn’t take it anymore and turned back around.

               There she was – the little teenage girl’s joint was lit and she was sending me a victory glance from the middle of the street, gloating at me with her nose up in the air.

               “Good job,” I mouthed in a whisper.

The homeless motherfucker was still scrounging for cigarettes when the bus pulled up.