Lost in the Options

Lost in the options, hanging out back of a Taco Bell, a stained and worn strip of cardboard sitting on the concrete next to us, blasting some Reggie Watts off of a smartphone, shaking a can of spray paint that’s half out, and Sammy’s rendering a Renaissance mural on the wall, a bloodmapped mattress off at the end of the alley, from some old motel, a seedy place next to the exact replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the only tourist trap and place of note in this small Illinois town, small relative to the size of Chicago, though infested by denizens of same, with driveby shootings in the middle of Touhy Avenue, civilians caught in the crossfire, never able to react to the light as it turns green, and we passed by the art park on our bike ride over here, the one with anything and everything on display, modern art, experimental, abstract, the homeless people on the side of the street, next to the canal, shooting heroin in between bouts of panhandling, the software designer from Florida among them, the guy I talked to, the guy I walked past on my way home from MMA one night, soaking wet with sweat, asking him about his life, finding out the details, offering to draft up an interview, maybe a series, online, hashing out the social media details, getting his story out to an audience so the world could understand what it’s like, what the experience of homelessness is, always seeing it through the lens of passive news viewer or vaguely worried passerby, not knowing when to make eye contact if at all, all of us wanting to ignore the fact that we can all be at this place at any time, are always one paycheck, one decision away from having nothing, and I knew this from the time I was a boy, before even my mom became homeless, when I could see it firsthand, could see the way that life had melted her, shaped her into someone she wasn’t, always a respectable member of society until you aren’t, until people have a reason and excuse to cast you aside, and I’m thinking about these things while Sammy is doing his work on the Taco Bell wall, an ethereal representation of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities quickly turning to ash, burning, eating themselves, with a figure of the Madonna in the foreground, with the baby Messiah suckling at her breast, looking content, peaceful, maybe with no idea what’s going on behind her, just pausing in this moment to have her likeness captured, and we’re talking about childhood books that were read to us when we were little, Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, thinking back to a time when things weren’t fucked up, or not quite as fucked up as they are now, a time before responsibility and accountability, and there are sirens in the distance, Skokie cops, and Sammy has to get the last details right before we go, has to get it just right, because there’s no way we can come back here again, not even once, because once we’ve tagged a place we’re gone from there for good, so he finishes, and we take our last swigs of the wine we bought and brought, and we run away to the next street where we can ride off in peace.