Ferret came peddling up to the front of the grocery store precariously balancing a cardboard box of his clothes upon the handlebars. Somehow, he has managed to get a bicycle. I had just finished my shift at work and was sitting outside on the bench next to Big S. Big S was unusually quiet today. He wasn’t even pestering me for a cigarette.
It is common knowledge within the gang that I was homeless for six months. I made the mistake of one time telling Sherman. Sherman is the grapevine down at the grocery store and anything and everything gossip worthy gets spread by him. The gang looks at my stint at homelessness as some kind of strange badge of courage and honor. It garners me respect from them for some reason.
The first few weeks of homelessness are the hardest. You think your life is over. My first two weeks of homelessness were a drunken pity party. It is hard to describe with words the kind of despair you feel and that is all encompassing. I think ferret went through this same process and has now grown more resigned and comfortable with his fate as I did. He was in an inquisitive and more lucid frame of mind today. He was more of his old self.
“Where did you get showers?” He asked me.
“I showered down at the truck stop once or twice a week,” I replied. “At the time, I think it cost $5 dollars.”
“Do you have to have your own towel?” He asked.
“They give you a small bar of soap, a towel, and a washcloth,” I replied.
“I washed off in the river yesterday and liked to have froze my ass off,” He said. “The water is still cold as shit.”
“How did your tent fare in that hail storm yesterday?” I asked him.
“The tent was fine when I got back there,” He said. “I sat out the storm in Sunday Ann’s drinking a coke and eating a chili dog.”
“Are you going to wash those clothes?” I asked him referring to the cardboard box of clothes he had sat on the ground next to us.
“Yeah,” He said.
“You know that Laundromat over on cherry drive?” I asked him.
He nodded yes.
“Those dryers run twice as long on fifty cents as the ones downtown,” I said. “You can usually dry your clothes without having to put in more coins.”
Ferret thanked me for the tip and went peddling back across the parking lot headed towards the Laundromat. I almost envied Ferret of what he is going through. I never felt more alive during my homeless days. The rawness of the situation taught me so many things about life that I had never learning during my thirty something years of conventional life.
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