the street kids flock in the summer. they're gross and loud. they smell and ask you for change and in this particular case you're positive it's going to go to alcohol, a 3 dollar forty of malt liquor probably. you say no because they're you're age and already so fucked up that there's no room for another forty.
they wear green and deep earthy colors, and their skin is sort of the same. they use bandanas for belts and have face tattoos. they're mostly always white and some of them have dogs and some of them have bigger habbits than malt liquor. you wonder if they have the dogs to entice more money from people who wear Lands End or for genuine companionship. you wonder who has more fleas.
sometimes they're coupled up. holding hands, fingernails caked in city grime. their bookbags are patched with duct tape and pins. they sleep on stoops and pick up cigarettes from the ground. they're hardly ever older than 25. your sympathy wanes as they get older. there's this one dude who's always causing a scene, pissing, yelling, he's probably 45, sometimes he has a cast on or his face is bloodied up, but he's always around why bother picking him up for that public drinking ticket.
once I saw one of them with a pet rat perched on her shoulder. she was buying a bag of cheetoes in the east village. there was this woman in the store who saw it. she was my age maybe, pretty, dressed to go out, heels. she turned toward me and on her face was that 'i'm about to vomit' look.
where do they come from? once i saw a girl probably 18, sexually satisfying herself with a public pay phone. lucky no one uses those anymore.
where do they go when the summer ends? reminds me of Holden's question about them central park ducks. are they all rounded up or do they fly off on their own accord?
are they runaways or are they romantics? I call them traveling kids but I don't really get the sense they're in it for the travel. mostly, it seems like they're in it for the commradery. they sit in circles and play guitar, some of them knit, and others heckle passersby. Me for instance. What did I do to you? I expect they resent me for being too much like them only clean, but more likely it's that they sense my resentment towards them, how i instincitively treat them differently than I would a homeless older black man.
once i saw a gruop of them sitting in a circle with a pair of innocent looking girls from the upper east side, or maybe the west. the two transplants were wearing hot topic gothesque clothes and had obviously showered in the last 36 hours. they were doing 'punk' on their parent's dime. punk for the consumer age, pre-made patches and fresh bought all black converse to match pink make up and nail polish. slumming it alright, I wonder what they thought about the smell of their counterparts and the plastic bottle of whiskey making its rounds around the circle. if they take a swig are they initiated? they're parents are expecting them home real soon.
i imagine the traveling kids imagine themselves punks living in a capitalist international regime. making it in the faces of we who have been vaccinated by consumerism. but still, they sleep outside at night and are occassionally bloody. they lie in their own piss and if you cleaned them up and unknotted their hair they'd look almost exactly like me. what is summer to them?
