Junkie Radar

Mom came back from vacation Thursday.



My mother, if I haven't mentioned this, is 75 years old and looks about 60, tops. And all through her post-Dad life--almost eighteen years now--she's every couple of years or so taken a whim to go somewhere unusual, entirely by herself. When I was in college, she took me along to Europe, which was cool except it's hard to have any REAL fun--especially any meet-a-hot-Italian-guy, get-obliterated, bring-him-back-to-the-room-and-have-blistering-non-English-speaking-sex fun--when you're travelling with Mom. Anyway--One year she went to Russia--in fact, she blames herself for my affair with JP because I had her car while she was on vacation. (Yeah, I know.) Then one year it was California, and this year she decided to go out West on her own--driving, no less--to see my aunt. She was gone for three weeks, so it was absolutely assumed that I'd go out to her house this weekend. Now, there was NO WAY I was going on Sunday--I mean, I love my mom and all, but she doesn't have cable and tomorrow's race is Talladega, only on TNT--no WAY I'm gonna miss that!! So I told her I'd come out today.



I take the Pulaski bus to Mom's. More accurately--the Pulaski buses; the 53 only goes to 31st Street, and 53A takes over from there all the way out south. The 53 is fairly reliable; the 53A is reliable only in the fact that it is NEVER THERE and will not appear for 30 minutes.



As I'm riding along on the 53, a guy gets on and I actually think to myself "Hm, he's kinda cute...in a dangerous kind of way..." We get to 31st, and as I'm going out the back door, he lets me go ahead of him.



So we're standing on the corner of 31st, with the other 20-odd people waiting for the bus, and I decide to call Mom to tell her to pick me up at 95th, instead of where she usually waits, because I need to stop at Home Depot. I get off the phone and Cute Dangerous Guy says "Do you get good reception on that phone?"



Now, I am not the sort of person who gets into conversations with strangers; particularly with strange men, even CUTE strange men. A few pleasantries, perhaps, but rarely an actual conversation. But we started talking--I could tell he was trying to sound me out to see if I was single, so I threw in a gratuitous "we" into the conversation, just to keep things honest--and the conversation continued til he got off the bus.



But here's the interesting bit. We were talking about car accidents--apparently he was only on the bus because his car got rear-ended last week--and I told him "Pretty much all the accidents I ever had were my fault--I had this nasty habit of falling asleep at the wheel..."



"Oh...yeah, were you partyin' a little, too?" he asked, with a sly smile.

"Yeah, sorta, at the time," I admitted.

"Yeah," he said. "I used to have a habit...I used to do heroin and all.."

"Oh, really? Welllll......"



We spent the rest of the ride trading stories from our junkie days. He knew some of the same spots JP and I used to know; of course, we both had stories about assorted run-ins with the cops, different people we used to know, things like that. His girlfriend had been in the same methadone program I'm in, and his clinic is a couple of blocks from where I'm living now...



Back when JP and I were together, he was always amazed by how instinctively I could find anything having to do with heroin. I could randomly pick up a book on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, and it would be someone else's heroin story. I could be switching channels on TV, stop at something neither of us had ever seen before, and it would end up having some connection to heroin. It was uncanny, actually.



Now I ask you--what, exactly, are the odds that in a bus full of people, the one I would gravitate to would be a fellow junkie?



He didn't ask for my phone number or anything; when he found out where I lived, after he got past his amazement, he asked the question EVERYONE asks when they find out where I live: "Do you live there ALONE??" "Nah," I told him, "my guy stays there too..."



But it was actually kinda cool to have a guy flirt with me, for a change, even if he was exactly the one person I should have been most afraid of. Then again, I suppose that could be said of MOST of my various guys.