So, I beat it on back into VA, retreating to reclaim my roots which proved to be a waste (boohoo) then round and about through many turns and people and back again to Hotlanta, this time winding up stuck on the street, around '82 I suppose it had become. It would be at that point I'd have my first encounter with Key Road. When I would first experience it for myself, not merely by reputation. Caught in the web of Chief Lee Brown and Chamber of Commerce shill Dan Sweat's "Operation Clean Sweep." A model for the nation, and I was there to help make it flesh.
I was part of the army of suddenly homeless traipsing Ponce De Leon and Peachtree, North Highland and North Avenue, Georgia and Fulton; we were oozing out of everywhere. All of a sudden. The worm had turned for America, and nowhere more vividly than in Hotlanta.
One morning, I was sitting by the RR trax. Up a rise from the package store, in a bald pate surrounded by tall ragweeds, sitting on a pile of old railroad ties. I was into my third little half-pint of 100-proof Vodka. They sold booze by the half-pint in Georgia, convenient for the less affluent. Bumming, $1.19 per purchase. Getting the glow. And the blessed sun was out as well. I was bundled up with the winter layers I'd accumulated but not washed over the months as the temperature had dropped.
Atlanta wasn't Savannah; it was in the Piedmont of Appalachia and it got cold in winter. I had a friend who, with another street comrade, a passing tovarich on Ponce, passed out behind a laundromat beneath the heat vent one late winter afternoon. They were still passed out when the place closed and the vent was turned off. My friend's old tovarich died from hypothermia; my friend lost both his feet.
I was leaning cross-legged against the brick wall of the vacated Sears building, an immense monumental affair, once thriving, now defunct. Across the trax was its alter ego, a new mega-mall, another emblem of the Reagan era, the fast growing proliferation of great strip malls, but with this one the package store was conveniently located; within spitting distance of where I would sit, taking the sun in the weedpatch, assuming I was invisible, and enjoying my company. I was well into my head, into my dream state, lost in the solitude. Indifferent and buoyed by the booze.
Free, in the momentary available sense. Worshipping the sun's solitude.
Suddenly, around the corner came two cops who grabbed me. End of dream.
It was on Ponce De Leon I got busted, and I had no ID. Two suspect multiple vitamins were my undoing. I'd picked them up at the Open Door Community's midday feed, and saw Key Road for the first time for the price of them. They would hold me till the vitamins could be tested for contraband. They probably were not acquainted with vitamins; the police academy or the back pages of the comic book where they obtained their training no doubt had no nutrition section. I didn't have the money to bail out, of course. Didn't know a soul who did.
I had been getting the money together to get the juice to forget the place I was in. That was it: not even a full dollar in my pocket when those two grabbed me. "Pay as you go." And I had next to none to forgo for them. So they busted me in full. Busted for the crime of having no dough.