1810 Grove

It was early my second day at 1810 that we had issues with the port-o-let. Howie, who had been running most of the demolition at the place had already run homeless guys out of it twice, and they had come back and smeared feces all over the walls. I was toting a steel can full of plaster debris when the man came from S.B.Cox to clean the thing. Over many months I would come to despise this man, his infrequency in cleaning, his complaints, most especially his face. He claimed not to have enough hose on his truck to reach inside the fence to clean the port-o-let, yet if we left it in the alley it was sure to draw certain individuals who had nowhere else to go and probably didn’t care that neither did we. The heat of summer broke into fall which faded into winter and my contempt for this man matured and blossomed. When the Mexican sheet-rock crew arrived the S.B. Cox man didn’t show up for a month.

I had the can slung over my back, carrying it like I African diamond miners I once saw hauling burlap sacks out of a mud pit, the bottom perched on the base of my spine, when he called to me,

“Somebody done got robbed,” he yelled over the noise of the truck and pulling his hose out of the blue box slung down a purse that someone had dumped in the john. It was small and leather, shaped like a pear with little pouches along the sides. The port-o-let had provided the thief good cover to rifle the bag. The only reason I could come up with for him dumping it there afterwards was simply out of sheer mean-ness. The red-face shitsucker by my side made a half-effort at empathy and then drove his truck on down the alley leaving it with me.

I kicked it into the yard under the oppressive shade of the great mulberry that was to later come down and left the purse there for a while. Howie didn’t know what to do with the poisoned, wretched thing either. Mosquitoes swarmed around us. I lumbered past with the can twice before I hunkered down on the back porch and emptied it out.

She was blonde and not entirely pretty, her blue eyes just slightly too close together. She was from Georgia or so I reckoned from three different college I.D.’s Howie hovered over my shoulder and wondered if she were dead, or merely in the hospital. I was wondering about my hands. Standard items, lipstick & make-up, no phone. I finished just in time for lunch.

I called the precinct from my place as I was spreading peanut butter over bread. By the time I got back the cop had already come and retrieved the items. No-one was there to warn him about where it had been found, nor was there anyone to inquire about the girl herself.

I wrote the Georgia girls name down somewhere but of course now, months later, her name is gone from me. I thought about calling around, I thought about posting a letter here, with her name, so that if she did a search for herself she might find some apology for what happened. Months later, this is the best I can do.

I am truly very sorry.