soup kitchen blues

Saturday afternoon and I’m serving up bowls of hot soup at the homeless shelter with a buddy of mine… Heath. He asked me to help him out cause he’s got a deal going on with the guy who runs the kitchen that any hours his friend's wind up working will be added to his community service log. Heath got popped with two back-to-back dui’s and he’s damned lucky he didn’t have to serve jail time. Instead, he got strapped with hefty fines, ‘alcoholics anonymous’ classes, a revoked license, random drug testing, and a shit-load of community service hours. So Heath struck up a deal with me that for every hour I work with him he would pay me ten bucks cash so he can knock out the community service hours as quickly as possible. I’m pretty hard up for funds right now so I agreed. I figure: ten bucks per hour untaxed, three hot meals, and the chance to meet some interesting characters… hell, why not? Plus, I don’t have much else to do on Saturday besides get high and lay around my shit-hole apartment thinking about how hungry I am. So here I am resplendent in a hair net, gray dickies, and a mechanic's shirt I bought at the thrift store with a name patch that ironically reads: “ Jesus.”

Heath’s been working the soup kitchen now for several weeks and he’s in good with the transients, bums, and junkie regulars. I met a few of them while on break standing around the front entrance smoking Pall Malls. I’m pretty bad with names and the ones I actually can recall all have zany nicknames. For instance there’s the crazy tweaker named “Arkansas Dave.” He has a 3 ft long scraggly ZZ Top beard. He seems normal enough in conversation, as normal as a tweaked-out meth addict will be, but when he’s alone the guy will completely fly off the handle shouting at the top of his lungs at the imaginary demons of his past. There’s “Jim Crow,” a 300 lb former member of the Aryan Brotherhood. Very scary dude at first but once you get to know him he’s a really down to earth guy - a stand-up guy who’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. There’s “Betty Boop,” a former stripper heroin addict who has most of her upper front teeth rotted away and a lazy eye. There was a time she’d get by on looks alone, bouncing from man to man, from sugar-daddy to sugar-daddy. Time ran out for Betty Boop. Her looks faded. She became a junkie. Her kids were confiscated by the state. And the rest, as they say, is history. She still spreads her legs, bounces from man to man from cot to cot, but now it’s because she’s sickeningly lonely or needs to get a fix. In fact, she even tried to come on to me by the back storage room and I graciously declined her offer.

There were a few more but these were the ones that stuck out in my mind. I promised Heath I’d do a couple more Saturday’s with him so I hope to sit down with some of these guys and collect some stories to share.