There was nothing to do last night & I had no money & not even any beer, so I got in the car in the campsite behind the strip club near the McDonald’s & moved the car over to the corner of the lot for a change. There’s a fence there & a complex that houses people with disabilities & old people. I see nurses & social workers coming & going all the time. There’s a fir tree over there so I parked under it & got all wrapped up & fell asleep about 8:30 p.m. A little while later I heard footsteps and a man cursing. He was coming toward the car. I could hear his voice & his footsteps getting closer. And I was wide-awake this time, not dreaming. I wondered if he was alone. He kept saying “muthafucka, m’erfucker, mofuka, muthafucka” until he was right outside my car. I still had my covers over my head to block out the overhead lights from the nursing home. Then it sounded like he was right outside my window, so I braced myself & pulled the covers down off my face. He was standing there stomping his feet, chanting “muthafucka muthafucka” but he didn’t see me behind the tinted windows & I didn’t raise up. He was facing out into the parking lot, but he was right beside my car, & he wouldn’t go away. I kept thinking that if I raised up he was going to see me, so I put the covers back over my head & hoped he’d go away. But he just stood there stomping his feet in place, angrily saying over & over & over “m’erfucker, muthafucka, fuckinmuthafucka.” So I decided I was going to have to do something. I kicked my feet from the drape wrapped around them & got my legs untangled without raising up in the seat. Then I knew I was going to have to sit up quickly & push the blankets down, dig the key into the ignition & hit reverse & fly.
The guy was cracked-up or coked-out or something, he was out of his mind, I didn’t know what he might do. One thing I knew: if he ran at the car & started hitting the windows I was going to commit vehicular homicide. I’d run his ass over & be done with it & go somewhere else to camp, I wasn’t going to fuck around with a coked-out nutcase attacking me or my home on wheels. I steeled myself & sat up & grabbed the keys from the door handle where I leave them most nights. The guy didn’t see my movement inside the car, so I had plenty of time. I even sat there & watched him do his war dance for a minute & he never turned his head toward me. I turned the key and hit the lights at the same time & the car went vrooom because I stomped the gas & the nutcase SHRIEKED & jumped out of his skin, it scared the holy shit out of him, he turned toward the car & yelled “MO-THERE FUCKAAAAHHH!” but he didn’t charge the car or come at me. I hit reverse & started backing up & he came walking toward the car, he didn’t make a run at me, he just walked almost casually with the movement of the car trying to see in through the tinted glass. The whole time he was cursing me, he now actually had a subject to curse, but I realized he was just out of his mind. I turned the car toward the exit & moved on out of the parking lot, went down the street half a block to an apartment complex & parked in a visitor space, re-wrapped myself against the cold, it wasn’t going to be as cold tonight as last night, I could tell, & went back to sleep.
Thinking about the guy outside the car last night. It was a disturbing incident, but now that I think about it, I wonder if he was stomping his feet muttering curses because he was simply freezing? It was pretty cold out after all.
On the train I realized that being in this circumstance — homeless, broke, hungry, no future that is showing itself as rosy — makes one think desperate thoughts. Like today, when I was riding on the train, the car I was on was almost empty because it’s a Sunday & the time of day was right for the cars to be usually empty, there was just me & a couple kids & some Japanese-looking guy way at the back of the car by himself, & a plump black man got on with a laptop computer, which he sat down with & opened on his lap & he plugged something into his ears & he was listening & reading or something. It occurred to me that since he’d put himself right by one of the middle doors of the car it would be easy for me to dash past him at the next stop when the doors opened & just snatch the thing off his lap & run with it. Sell it, sell it for 10 bucks even to anyone on the street who would buy it. That kind of thought crosses your mind every so often. I resist it, but I admit I had the thought.
