Mom and the Geezer

On my way to the Newtown gym two weeks ago I passed a glassy-eyed trio hunkered down in a doorway with a bottle of port.  I didn’t give it much thought, but then when I was leaving the area an hour or so later I got a closer look at them. The men had moved off from the doorway, a couple of toothless harry-high pants the wrong side of fifty, staggering nose to nose, yelling and jabbing their fingers into each others’ emaciated breastbones.

‘You,’ one of them slurred, ‘you got all the fucken women in the world and what I got to know why is how you still want more.’

Slur, sob, bastard, cock, smellsock, blub.

I was wading in pain, raw and unstoppable, and its object, or subject, was a stout woman in sensible shoes sitting in a doorway, between a half-empty plastic bag and a bottle of port. But what I noticed about her were her eyes, red wet slits filled with tears.  I thought about how booze and drugs elevate our terrible human dramas to the cataclysmic and how, half a world away, a tornado in Joplin, Mo, had torn a hundred or more lives apart and I wondered how many of them had been people just like this, this lady who looked like she could be somebody’s mom, possibly was, the kind of mom who likes to sit in doorways sucking on a bottle of port and looking out at the world through crimson slits, and if a tornado ripped through Newtown this minute, how would she meet her end? Would she see it coming? Maybe it already had.

I’d be high all the time if I could get away with it. Who wouldn’t? It makes the sex good and the words flow and you can manage to kill a decade or so, but then you get a glimpse of those red wet eyes, waiting for you at the bottom of the stairs or in a doorway, or reflected from a window, just to remind you of what you can’t see coming. Who knew what tornadoes she’d lived through? So there I was in my gym gear and there she was on the steps in her sensible shoes and dirty blond hair and a rip in her shopping bag, and two old cocks fighting over what was left of her.

Whatever it was, it seemed good enough for the next guy that came around the corner. Maybe he had a few more teeth or longer hair, pants down a bit lower maybe, because she reached around and passed him the bottle, and he took a hit and passed it back and they watched the show for a while like that, mom and her geezer, never exchanging a glance, until until the boys’ finger jabs turned to throat-grabbing and something passed between mom and the guy then because she got to her feet and the geezer grabbed the bottle and they wandered off, still not a word between them, in the opposite direction to the sirens.

It was like they knew what was coming.