Needle Park
I’m parked right now in a heroin den. Don’t be alarmed, don’t call Nine One One — I haven’t succumbed to the siren call of narcotics. Yet. We had a couple of neighbors renting the low rent house next door for quite a few years and if I’d been more alert, I might’ve realized the discarded syringes I occasionally found by our property line weren’t from diabetics littering from passing cars. Call me naïve, but I’ve never tuned into the ‘needle culture’. Turns out our boyz were what their counselor — a friend of ours — refers to as Heavy Users. And here all the time I just thought they were Hopeless Losers.
When I moved to the South End, I was figuring I’d be leaving the city and my ghetto neighborhood behind. Course I realized I’d substitute urban gangsterism for redneck reality, but … there were way fewer rednecks than pimps, prostitutes, gun runners, thieves, drug dealers and white slavers that populated my street in Seattle and Gomorrah. Give me a few NRA anti-government racist whackos in exchange for all the capitalist creeps next door to me in the Big City and I was happy to decamp on Camano Island.
Little did I know these urban lowlifes were going to follow me out to Nirvana, no doubt assuming our sleepy island deputies were related to Barney Fife. Even Mayberry is pockmarked now with meth dealers, crackheads and smack addicts. And for certain they’re here on the South End. Although … we’re rid of two. The renters next door moved on. One to the afterlife and the other to Oklahoma. You won’t hear me say HELL. I suspect the survivor will do real well in Oklahoma, a gay junkie in a Red State. Couldn’t do much worse than here. The last month he was sequestered in this house, no power, no lights, no heat, the curtains pulled, no visitors, no sign of life. I thought he’d moved away … until the day he was hitting the electrical panel box with a hammer, hoping, I guess, PUD was joshing about non-payment disconnections and a few hard blows would do the trick to restore juice, probably a fairly common mistake among urban refugees.
His landlady, good hearted soul that she was, gave him an extra month free of charge to find a new lair. In the end she even helped him pack, rented him a storage unit, moved his stuff and gave him a ride to the airport. I think it was the straw that ruined her dream of renting the place anymore.
So … we ended up buying the place. I’m not too hot to rent it just yet. Maybe clean up the discarded syringes, fumigate the joint and let the little house breathe for awhile. I think it deserves a rest. And … so do we.