A tap on our soles
I keep walking up thinking I’m in a supermarket because the first things I see are the automatic doors leading to the street.
Only LA would have a Greyhound bus station with those kind of doors.
Then the cop leans over me and I remember where I am.
We’re all losers here, walking wounded up come in to keep warm in a city the movies claim is always warm.
Some of us can’t even walk, standing from one wooden bench to another, and not only because we’re drunk.
You can’t get decent shoes from what you collect panhandling and Salvation Army shoes are always either too loose or two night, not to mention much too much out of fashion.
The cops think we’re all drunks and tap our already sore soles with the tip of their night sticks the moment they see us nod.
“Keep moving,” they tell us and we rise like stiff corpses to stagger to another pew in this church reserved for travelers.
For some of us, a trip twenty feet is as much a chore as 3,000 miles, old gray haired and toothless women collecting shopping bags full of possessions the way tourists clutch luggage.
Some – particularly the older men – even has a suitcase or two, props they hope will let the cops mistake them for passengers.
The stench always gives us away, a small that comes from too many sponge baths in too many public restrooms.
Frayed shirt sleeves, and pants cuffs also betrays us, and the cops hit these feet harder because they hate being taken for fools.
Younger and less road weary, I move more quickly than the rest, settling sooner in a new seat, colleting a few more winks before the cops notice me again.
I carry only an old newspaper that I hold up before my face so that the cops don’t see my nodding.
Sleep always me because the top of the paper slips and the cops come, tap my feet and tell me to move on.
None of us talk about how we come here. None of us talk except to ask tourists for change or to be police for another moment before we have to move on.
We know better than to ask each other for anything such as cigarettes since we have nothing more than what we happen to be smoking at the moment, and if we do, we horde it for later because we know we won’t get more.
The less kind travelers tell me to get a job, as if that is still possible with the way I smell and dress, as if I have an address other than the Greyhound Bus Station to put on a job application.
Maybe early on I could have worked, setting into some rotten job, working for some petty tyrant who is glad he is a bit better off than the bums he has working for him.
The longer I waited the less possible a job became until my job became surviving each day, hoping to avoid being trampled by the hordes of workers hurrying to jobs they hate but jobs that keep them from joining us here on the bus station benches.
I don’t remember where I eat except for the soup kitchen where we get food so spicy hot we think we’ve already fallen into the damnation the preacher there warns us against, our held rising up from inside us to consume us in our own personal fires.
During most days, I walk, panhandling the downtown streets until I get enough for a real meal, but I never wander too far from these supermarket doors and the hard surface of these wooden benches, we all know what it means to get caught outside after dark. The ER is filled with our kind beaten up by drunken cowboys and street gangs.
So is the morgue.
Better here sleep starved than eternal sleep no tap of the police baton can wake us up from.
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