We drove the
bus to our regular
early morning wait station, a rundown old
service station out by the
highway. The pumps were removed ages ago, but the overhead
platform remains to keep us out of the early morning
drizzle. We sit in silence and will the
radio to ignore us. I sip the fifth
coffee of the night and think about
strange things, letting my head run away from
reality. Sometimes you feel the
dead lingering in the back. They breathe on your neck when you try to
nap.
I got to thinking about food, as the sun started fuzzing the
early morning sky pink. I have a craving for
street meat. I've heard three definitions of that
term during my life, and each one tells you a lot about me at the time
heard it.
Noun, phonetically 'strEt 'mEt, from the Middle English words strete and mete.
Definition A:
a highly seasoned minced meat usually stuffed in casings of prepared animal intestine, served by a street vendor operating a barbecue.
There are four noisy old
Arabic men selling those big greasy
Italian sausages and foot long
hot dogs to the
drunks that are spilling from the trendy
bars downtown. They are the happiest men in the
world. They yell up the street to each
other,
cursing each other's mothers and flipping each other off
colorfully, like some kind of modern
black-face show. Come on down and watch the
camel jockeys fight! The trick to it all is that they are giving both
dinner and a show to the crowds between the bars. A little
razzle dazzle with your greasy meat on a
bun. They are
shrewd business men and they
rake in the cash.
I was there to pick up a
guy who got his face messed up in a stupid
fight when I saw the
kid. He was about fourteen or so, and
dusky skinned. He could have passed for the son of any of the
grill men. I was sitting on a
curb taking five and I was hungry, but I had to stay by the ambulance while
Debby, the
born again bull dyke I was riding with, finished
sewing up the fratboy's face. It was a
catch and release. We patch him and the cops take him down to the
drunk tank to sleep it off. I caught the kid's attention and called him over.
"Do me a favor kid?"
"Sure, sure" he agreed, watching my
twenty dollar bill.
"Get me a sausage, no onions" I said, and I began to hand him the bill. Then I stopped.
"Which one of these guys makes the best ones?" I asked.
The kid smiled and leaned in close, taking me into his
confidence.
"They all come out of the same pot. They are brothers, all of them. My father and his 3 brothers." he said with a smile. "They do it for a show, a distraction. It is all the same on the bun."
I let the kid
keep the change.
Definition B:
a derogatory term for a woman who engages in promiscuous sexual intercourse especially for money.
We drove through the
slums for what seemed like the hundredth time that winter night, picking up bleeding
gang-bangers. It was like the city was going
mad with the cold. Each and every time we passed this one corner, I saw this little girl trying to
sell herself. Every time. She was either standing with her girls, or smoking her long
cigarettes, or leaning on a john's car. Logic told me that she would
freeze to death in that outfit, but each time I saw her, she looked more
alive, like a light on a
dimmer switch being turned up. I was going to
wave at her on the next trip past, but she was
gone.
Definition C:
Slang for the victim of a motor vehicle accident that is ejected from a wreck during said accident.
George, the
Sadist, can take the silence no longer.
"You OK, Twitch?" he asks.
"Remember that motorbike kid George?" I ask him,
evading the question.
"Yah man, that was right here." he answers.
We always sit here in the
morning. It was gray and raining that day, and we had been sitting on our
asses with nothing to do all night, getting
cranky. A fine mist was falling on the road, helping the
spring thaw. Just a wet miserable boring night. Then we heard the siren.
Police.
The
service station sits on a hill, looking down on a long straight stretch of
blacktop. The
red cherries blinked in the thin fog, a few miles off. The yellow headlight in front of it was traveling at an
impossible speed. A street bike
hauling ass down the strip.
We always get to the
mess after the fact, so we never see the how and the when of the things we clean up, until then. Just as bike got to the little
patch of road right in front of us, it all came
apart. They just lay the
screaming engine down on the road in front of us in a smooth graceful
motion, a
brushstroke in water. The riders, dressed in
leather,
skipped away like
flat stones on a still pond. The
rooster tail of bright yellow sparks was a giant sparkler, the disintegrating bike a
roman candle of flame and noise.
"Fuck me." I said, back in the here and now, despite myself.
"Yah." said George.
"You remember the girl?" he asks.
"Yah."
"What was she singing?"
"
Jingle Bells." When we sat and waited for the
Medivac chopper to land, I sat with the two riders. She was fine, road rash and a broken finger. He has a broken skull that was being held together by his
helmet. She was singing to him to keep him conscious. The
prop wash was stealing her harmony, but he was smiling.
"Yah. Jingle Bells." said George.
My
watch alarm goes off. Quitting time. We drive away in silence. I try to remember if the guy
made it.
concluded in Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar
In which the mountains are old and I am the ghost on the battlements - Kid Eternity - Do svidanya, Rodina! -
Standin' in a pool of cop blood with a shotgun you can't stop - Street Meat -
Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar