Nobody Knows

Nobody knows how cold it really gets out there just before dark. He keeps saying that over and over as he stands near the hot air vent below the picture window, the air flow ruffling his pants. Nobody knows, nobody knows.

Over by the window Slick points down at a multicultural display of desperate people, “a bunch of hypes,” he says, who are standing around a smoking trash barrel. They are warming their hands, keeping an eye out for cops or marks or whatever might come along. “It ain’t easy getting along in the park when it’s this cold,” Slick says. “You see, you probably think it’ll be dark in an hour and the shelter will open for the night. But that’s fucked. That hour is gonna take five hours. More.“

sleepin’ in the park (1)

He used to be a television writer until the booze and cocaine got him. So he knows. Now he deals good rock to middle class cowboys or better yet, jackasses, like me, as he likes to tell me. And he fuckin’ delivers, Used to be prime-time funny and free delivery. I’m certainly doing something right.

Down below everyone keeps movin’, shiftin’, constant, quietly frantic. Dealers show up, packages are passed, money changes hands. The hypes shuffle into the public bathroom.

The last of the dog walkers hurries out of the park. Slick tells me there are a lot of guys like this guy. That one always makes it a point to talk to Slick, he says. “These guys think that a couple bucks and some hipster shit make them part of the scene. They don’t have a fuckin’ clue. What they got is central heating, the assholes. What the fuck, it’s worth five bucks, maybe ten and that’s a hit.”

He points to the kid standing off to the side. He is a regular, but not part of it anymore, Slick says, a “tiny dancer” who, it seems to Slick when he gets up close to him, is hearing his final notes on his way to the junkie park in the sky, you know, over the rainbow and turn left. Kid’s been running it up since he was twelve and now all that’s left is his hopeless prayer that heaven’s gate won’t close before he gets there.

“The old men can’t help him. He’s too far gone, it’s too fuckin’ cold,” Slick says. “He’s too reckless, takes too many chances, he’ll fuck us all, the little punk.” Slick looks over at him a minute longer and then he turns back to me:

“You said that you wanted to write a piece about the life in the park. Write it yet?” “No,” I say. “Write this,” he says. “Write that tonight another rock and roll dream got real when all the smoke was gone in the fuckin’ cold and the music stopped. You got that?”

“I’ll do that. Now get the fuck out,” I say to him. “I got work to do.” Like hell I do.

sleepin’ in the park (2)

Next time I looked out at the park, I was high and Slick was putting a blanket around the kid. Maybe he hadn’t lost all sense of humanity, like he claimed. “Sure I deal this shit, but I ain’t a total prick,” he would say when I would push him to front me some dope and he would tell me that it wasn’t good for me to do all this shit that I do. That one day it would kill me, asshole.

The police pulled up to the curb a few minutes later.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

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