TWO
Drugs
It is 108 degrees outside, and the McDonald’s in Bakersfield, California, is filled with people escaping the streets and the heat, some for only a few minutes, others for the entire day.
While many tables are occupied by families sharing a meal, workers taking a break, and regulars who come to sip coffee and chat, for much of the day, the McDonald’s is given over to people on the margins—addicts and the homeless, mentally ill, and destitute.
A large man in a greasy, full-length, zipped-up winter work suit sits at a booth. He stares down at the table, his eyes hidden beneath a wide floppy hat. He gets up now and then to refill his cup with ice, the laces of his untied work boots hitting against the floor as he goes. During his five hours inside, he doesn’t say a word to anyone.
There is a man who calls himself “Black Jesus” who sits and stares straight ahead, only a cup of coffee in front of him. Every fifteen minutes, he raises his left fist in the air, holding it for fifteen seconds in a silent salute to something or other. Despite the heat, he is wearing a dirty winter jacket. Before each sip of coffee, he cleans the rim of the cup with a napkin. Almost everyone from the streets who passes comes and shakes his hand or gives him a fist bump. He doesn’t say a word to them or anyone else.
Next to him is an older white woman with swept-back gray hair parted in the middle, holding a cup of ice. On her left wrist is a torn and dirtied hospital wristband. She is silent with a blank look on her face, either staring ahead out the window or at a Christmas card with the words “Joy to the World” on it laying on the table. A few times she flips the card over, looks at the back, flips it again, and then sighs. She has been doing this for almost ten hours. When I ask her if I can get her anything, she looks down at the card, then tells me, while staring straight ahead, “My wife just died, and I am trying to keep an eye on her.” The card is dirty and smudged but still sparkles with glitter.
In the parking lot, a woman is wearing a sparkling pink backpack, bikini, faux-fur vest, one faux-fur knee-high boot, and one sandal. She carries an oversize white bag. She walks into the street paying no mind to oncoming traffic. She stops in the middle to adjust the contents of the bag, then grabs her breast and blows a kiss at passing cars before joining a group hanging beneath the awning of a gas station. Nobody pays her much attention.
At one of the entrances a woman in a tube top and jean shorts stands outside the door and pushes it open for everyone. She smiles each time I pass by, but I keep my head down. Eventually she calls out to me, asking for a few dollars for a meal.
“Maybe one of them fives?” she asks, as she sees cash when I look in my wallet.
I give her one and ask her if she’s homeless.
“No,” she says. “I live down the street in that shitbag motel they put us in.”
I ask her if she takes drugs, and she says yes.
“Crystal meth?”
“Yep. This is the place. McMeth.”
This McDonald’s is reflective of the surrounding neighborhood, one filled with other fast-food franchises, empty lots, and a few dilapidated hotels used to house the homeless. Groups cluster under bridges or in camps along either side of a creek that cuts through the town. Women walk the streets selling themselves. Men looking to buy sex cruise slowly down the wide streets, tinted windows rolled down despite the stunning heat. The police come through now and then. Sometimes they arrive in force to arrest somebody, four patrol cars trapping a target, spilling their backpack on the ground to find packets of drugs.
The neighborhood, like all of Bakersfield, is diverse, and those living on the streets reflect that. There is an equal number of African Americans, Latinos, and whites, and nobody seems to pay attention to who is what color or who speaks what language. What they all have in common is a lack of education.
Bakersfield, which among larger US cities has the highest percentage of residents without a college degree, is, at least statistically, the most back row city in the country. Far behind the rest of the country educationally and suffering from all the economic woes hitting the back row, many in this town have taken refuge not just in McDonald’s but in drugs.
Drugs really are a refuge for many in the back row (and the front, for that matter, though for different reasons). All across America I found similar neighborhoods, where people who felt rejected and stigmatized, either by the world at large or by their neighbors in particular, found relief in drugs. Some used them to numb the pain, others as a possible way to the more permanent relief of death and others as a way to bond, since drug users have their own tight-knit communities.
In this Bakersfield neighborhood, those using drugs are very much a community, with the McDonald’s one of their clubhouses. They almost all know one another, almost all help one another out, almost all swap info on housing, drugs, and the police. They bond over shared experiences of trauma, pain, and isolation.
They also bond over a belief that life is bleak. So bleak that the ultimate downside of their situation—death—isn’t terrifying.
Nobody in Bakersfield comes right out and says, “I want to die,” but it is the subtext behind statements like “What do I got to lose, because I have already lost so much,” or “I served eighteen months for vehicular manslaughter when I killed my nine-year-old daughter driving drunk. How do you get over that?”
Their belief that life isn’t worth living has turned into recklessness, their addiction into a form of suicide.
This isn’t the first time I’ve observed this. During my years close to street addicts who lived in abandoned buildings, under bridges, and in old cars scattered around Hunts Point, I saw people who felt left behind, unable to maintain a life even in the back row, turn to drugs in the hopes that it would not only dull but end the pain.
Bernice was like that. I met her while she was standing on a Hunts Point street corner as I was heading into a bodega to get soda. She waved to me, and I went over to talk. She was dope sick, something I could tell immediately by her pale, sweating face, her desperate sadness, and the blue corrupted veins on her arms.
She was selling herself, something I could also tell immediately. It wasn’t that she looked like the TV version of a sex worker—almost no sex workers do. Rather, she was dressed for comfort—a red halter top, jeans, and flip-flops—in whatever she could put together with no money, lingering on a street corner while sick.
She told me she was looking for a twenty so she could buy a hit of crack and a hit of heroin: one to get her straight, the other to lift her up.
She was thirty-six and had been doing some form of this since she was nineteen, with breaks here and there for prison, rehab, and a few longer stretches when she “got right and got clean.” She counted forty-two charges in her life for sex work.
She was matter-of-fact about her childhood trauma, about a life spent hunting for a fix and running from abuse. It was a story I had heard many times before and many times since—an ugly version of an already ugly theme of poverty, dysfunction, and abuse. Before she headed off to a car waiting beyond the corner liquor store, she ended with an explanation: “I am out here trying to kill myself. I want to get a gun and do it faster, but I am too scared to blow my head off.”
Bernice isn’t alone. Every addict on the streets knows death isn’t far away. They can tell you of someone whose life ended because of a potent bag of especially good bad shit. Everybody has a story about their own close call, waking up in an ER after forty-eight hours of bingeing, or passing out on the railroad tracks and having a train crush their hand, or getting sliced with a knife by a man who “liked to slice women,” or fighting an infection that was denied and denied until the “police, yes, the police, those dirty-ass, no-good-for-nothing bastards, couldn’t stand to see me sweating, breathing, and smelling like rotting flesh and called an ambulance instead of locking me up.” Death is close enough that they prepare for it. Sometimes it even entices them. When someone ODs, the second question asked after who, is “On what?” What brand, what red label was the bag stamped with? Was it “Total Control,” or “Obama Care,” or “Ice Cream”? Then they search for it, because it is especially good shit, potent, and they can do enough to push themselves right to the limit. Maybe they write their momma’s phone number on their stomach in red marker. Or their husband’s, or wife’s, or sister’s, because if they find you dead, you want a proper burial. You don’t want to end up buried in a trench on a tiny island in the Long Island Sound with a million other unclaimed bodies.
That is where you end up buried in New York City if you die without anyone to identify or claim your body. That is what happened to Millie, a street sister to the users in Hunts Point, when her infection went to her heart and she died on the ninth floor of Lincoln Hospital as a Jane Doe, or, to be more exact, BX97—case #97 of the Bronx Medical Examiner. Cause of death: bacterial endocarditis of tricuspid valve due to intravenous drug abuse.
Or Jackie, another woman who died of an overdose, although others say she mixed pills and heroin with her asthma medicine, and while nobody should do that, she liked to do it because she said it gave her a special boost. She also died in Lincoln, tagged as BX-something, although someone said her body wasn’t claimed because her man was holding on to her info to keep collecting her disability benefits. You can’t get those if she is dead. “Come on. Don’t you see? Nobody gives out checks to the dead.”
Like suicide, addiction is often a desperate reaction to rejection, often rejection experienced in childhood trauma like Bernice’s. Many of the hard-core drug users I met had been beaten, or yelled at, or ignored, or passed from relative to relative or to whoever had their house in order or had a house at all. God forbid they got passed into a home with men who liked to do awful things to kids.
When Takeesha told me about her past abuse, her friend Carmela, sitting on a milk crate a few feet away, commented without emotion, “You lucky you only had one family to fuck you over. I was in foster care and got to be fucked over by a bunch of different families.”
Being abused by the people who were supposed to rescue them was the ultimate destruction of trust, so they fled, running away either literally or mentally. Therapists call this “dissociation.” On the street they call it being fucked over, and one solution to being fucked over is taking drugs, mostly heroin.
That feeling of rejection can also come from larger social forces, something minorities know all too well. Racism is multifaceted in its ugliness, and the sense of rejection by a mostly white “successful” society is one of those ugly faces. Growing up black or Latino in Hunts Point, East New York, or the Bronx; or Buffalo’s East Side; or Milwaukee’s North Side; or Selma, Alabama, means being confined. It means being forced to live in a certain neighborhood, one with fewer legal opportunities—fewer jobs, fewer schools, less money, less everything. It can be isolating and depressing.
It isn’t just about money. These entire communities are stigmatized socially and culturally. The feeling of being excluded, of being different, is more than about what things you own; it is also about what you know, what you learn, how you approach issues. The tools you have available to solve those issues are all different, and they can be isolating.
It is about the big things and the small. It is about the type of music that surrounds you, the clothes available to you, the food your friends like, how you cut your hair, how you wear your pants. It is about how you see yourself in the world. It is about being physically strong when everyone now values being smart. It is about caring about place and family when everyone now values caring more about career. It is about caring about faith when everyone now values science or liking McDonald’s when everyone says it is bad. It can be everything and anything, and the sum of it all can be overwhelming.
It is about being on the outside while not knowing how to operate on the inside. Not knowing how to dress, talk, or walk how they say you’re supposed to. Things you need to know because the insiders make the rules and you need to know the rules if you have to navigate this game of life: “If you gonna make money in this tricky world, you need to know them tricky rules.”
While trauma and racism have long been sources of rejection, a lack of education is becoming a larger source as those at the bottom of our school system are falling further behind economically and socially. To get a steady job that you can be proud of and build a life around, you need more than high school; you need a college degree, and not just from any college, but from one of the better schools. This has made a lack of education all the more isolating.
It is also a stigma that is considered your fault. We claim our educational system is a meritocracy that anyone can excel in with enough dedication and smarts. We loudly celebrate those who rise above their surroundings, study hard, get a scholarship, get the big job, and move to the nice neighborhood.
See, we say, anyone can do it if they are smart and apply themselves. The moral being, if you fail, it is your fault, because you are lazy, or dumb, or slow.
Rarely mentioned is the vast difference in the quality of our schools, the vast difference in how much help students get, and the vast differences in how many personal problems students face.
It is a stigma that can lead to drugs. Go into any crack house, any detox center, any homeless camp, and you will hear story after story of someone who will say outright, “I am dumb.” Or, “They said I was dumb.” The drugs don’t just provide a temporary mental escape from an ugly reality. They also provide a sense of belonging, a real community. The world of drugs is accepting as long as you continue to use drugs. The street corner at 2:00 a.m., the back room in a friend’s house, the empty room with candles and crack pipes in an otherwise abandoned buildings, are communities. They might be filled with “fucked-up people, but they are my fucked-up people.” The other users and the dealers are also running from something. A drug trap, or a drug corner, is a place to hang and fit in. A place that welcomes you regardless of your past.
If you live in one of these neighborhoods, drug dealers are not evil strangers resembling the drug lords you see on TV. They are people you know. There is a chance someone related to you has dealt drugs, a cousin or a half brother or an uncle. The dealer might be your friend or a friend from back in elementary school or a friend of your sister’s. You have to interact with them, one way or another. You have to walk past them to get to school, maneuver around them inside the bodega to get milk, or joke with them in the lobby of the building you live in. They are everywhere, and you cannot ignore them, and you certainly cannot dismiss them as pure evil. Other than dealing drugs, they might be just like you. They dress like you, and they understand you.
The dealers, the kids smoking weed across the street or at the bar, those shooting up in the empty buildings, they don’t question your past, your future, or your dress or hair, or how you speak. They get you, because they get your pain, which is often theirs. That others tell you they are all bad might even add to their appeal, since almost everything you do, or think, or how you behave is said to be wrong. Why not add one more thing?
Not everyone in these neighborhoods is drawn to drugs. The vast majority stay away from them, but those who do use end up further stigmatizing the neighborhood. The in-group now has another reason to stereotype the neighborhood, turning it into a cartoonish landscape of drugs, violence, and sin—giving them another reason to ignore and diminish the residents.
The self-perpetuating cycle of rejection, isolation, and drugs increasingly wears away at the fabric of the community, isolating it further and taking over more lives. With enough time even those who try to stay away from drugs start being pulled in by expectations.
Beauty has seen this cycle both in the heartland and in a coastal city. She came to Hunts Point from Oklahoma City when she was twenty-one, brought by a pimp, although she saw him as a boyfriend she hoped to marry. Her dream was to make it in the big city, to escape her small-town, backward life, and she was coming the only way she knew how.
She was born in a prison hospital in Oklahoma to a mother doing time for drugs. Her mother stayed in prison for most of her life. “I looked forward to visiting on Sundays. She would braid my hair out in the visitors’ yard,” she tells me. Beauty was passed among relatives, depending on who was out and free. They all lived in the same poor section of Oklahoma City, filled with a grid of wide, flat roads holding fast-food chains, gas stations, and corner liquor stores.
Her schools were filled with kids like Beauty: poor and black. She struggled in them, though she isn’t slow or dumb. She is smart and quick, especially with words. Like many smart people, she doesn’t suffer fools and pointless rules, although unlike them the only outlet she knew was rage. School was a maze of rules that didn’t fully make sense, ones that you just had to follow, and she wanted to understand each of them and the rationale for them. Nobody ever explained things to her the way she felt they needed to be explained. They just told her that this is how it is and this is what you have to do. Sometimes it worked for her, and sometimes it made her mad and she said so. Then she was scolded, which set her off into even more of a rage. By the time she calmed down, she had been banished to another room, or punished, or sent home, which only made her more certain it was all unjust.
In middle school she was labeled as ADHD and put in special-education class. That worked for a while and she tried her best, tried to join in, but with everything else going on, it all got to be too much.
“In high school I was a cheerleader. For real I was. One big game my mom was supposed to come see me since she was out of prison. I was like, ‘Cool, Mom is home.’ She never showed. So I sat after the game on the curb figuring she was late and would eventually come. But she never came to pick me up. So I walked home along the side of the road, having to listen to all these broke-ass men shouting nasty things at me. When I got to the house it was locked. I kept banging on the door. Finally I busted through a window. The house smelled mad like crack. Nasty-ass smell. She was all out on the floor. Some weird-ass folks were also there. I cried my eyes out. When I was finished, I was like, ‘Enough of this. I am out of here.’”
She dropped out at sixteen and started using a fake ID to strip at the XXX-tasy Ranch. She went home with a few customers who offered her money for sex, then turned to street sex work a few months later. She didn’t hide this from anyone; many had done something similar when an addiction flared and cash was tight.
She didn’t like drugs, not the ones she saw her mother use. She didn’t start using heroin (pronounced as hair-on) or crack. Didn’t fool around with either and didn’t respect them. “I ain’t got that crack or needle habit. I saw my mom mess with that shit. I saw her picking her arms. When my mom found crack, that’s when the walls started coming in on me. I can’t stand that peppermint burning smell.”
Instead she smoked blunts sprinkled with K2, a mix of herbs sprayed with chemicals, with names like “strawberry smack,” which is marketed as synthetic marijuana and sold in almost every corner store. When she was on K2, her aggression, intensity, and rage were gone, replaced by a vacant calm.
To her, these were not drugs, although they messed her up, gave her seizures, and sometimes knocked her out. They were sold in corner stores, and they were legal, and so they weren’t drugs, and many around her—customers, boyfriends, and others on the streets—were smoking them.
In Hunts Point, she joined the street family, with Takeesha as her street mother. Everyone helped her navigate their world, giving her advice on who to watch out for, which johns were “cheap ass,” which wanted to buy drugs, which wanted to hurt her.
She left her first pimp, the one who brought her. He didn’t treat her right, beat her badly, and started cheating on her. Over the following years she kept falling in love and kept being disappointed. All of her boyfriends did drugs, and all, like her, were homeless. They all also pimped her and some beat her, but that didn’t stop her; she kept hoping and dreaming that eventually one would work out.
Beauty wanted nothing more than to be in love. She wanted her version of the white picket fence, the only version she really knew, the only version that she felt was available to her.
“Heavy and I are tight. He used to be just my friend, and now it’s all intimate and he wants to get married. That shit is tempting. I mean, he got disability. I don’t know if I should marry Heavy. I mean, he has been good to me. He gave me my own cell phone, he took me to Coney Island; none of my men ever took me to Coney Island. But marriage is a huge step. That is serious shit, taking a name. Maybe we should enter a domestic partnership first. I mean, every girl wants to live in a house with a decent man and have kids.”
It didn’t matter that the house was a homeless shelter or under a bridge. What mattered was that they were together. “My friends Livy and Will are in a shelter at 125th . . . . They have a tarp space under the Bruckner they willing to share. They invited me to join, but I don’t want to go disrupting their situation. Livy got it good, because Will is an upright man; he ain’t pimping her. That nigger gets up and hustles.”
She kept getting arrested, and when she did, she ended up spending months in Rikers. She quickly took to it, falling into the structure it provided and taking pride in the work they gave her, and then falling in love with another inmate.
One charge got her locked up for five months, and she became tight with her boss in the cafeteria. She smiled over the perks of getting extra food on chicken Thursday and talked of running away with her to the boss’s place in Harlem. “My boo treat me right; she keeps me calm. I can’t hit anyone in here. I don’t want to be orange in court.” When she was finally released from jail (with all charges dropped), she went back to her street family and back to falling in love with men and back to getting hurt.
When she wasn’t working, she hung out with her street family, current boyfriend, or whomever on a low wall running along a park across from a homeless shelter, sitting and gossiping and smoking K2. This was her community, her people, her world, and the minute she got out of Rikers, or detox, or rehab, or whatever facility she had been assigned to, she walked back to that wall to sit on it and hang out.
Being out on the streets prostituting, being homeless, having boyfriends who sold drugs, this wasn’t abnormal or weird for Beauty, and she didn’t feel sorry for herself. It was the world she came from and the world she knew and the world she saw, and she had made it in the big city.
She wasn’t embarrassed about her life, rather she was proud of what she had accomplished in the big city, although she grew more and more frustrated that she hadn’t found a man who would work his ass off and build a family. She sat at my computer and checked on Facebook on her family and friends back home and thought about going back. “My momma has been clean for a minute, about to get her three-year chip. She has a room for me. I got plenty of people back there, but they all doing things, got things, have families, and kids, and people who love them. I got nothing to offer them. What am I gonna be? A social security check that everyone wants. I got nothing else. Nothing. They all got people. I got nothing. I will be a drag on all of them. I am scared. You hear? Scared.”
Inside the Bakersfield McDonald’s, the fear, the trauma, and the lack of education are all present—as are the drugs. But in the context of McDonald’s, the fear isn’t palpable, expressed instead as a resignation to being on the outside.
In the McDonald’s, there is a battle over the ice and soda machine. There are always people in McDonald’s who come in, maybe with an old cup, or grab a cup from the garbage, and fill it up for free. Most McDonald’s employees ignore it as the cost of doing business. Now with the heat spiking higher, with this McDonald’s being a social services clinic and a restaurant, there is an open battle between the shift manager and the people trying to get free ice and soda. It also seems to be a particular concern of the afternoon manager.
There is a switch behind the counter that turns the soda fountains on and off, and the afternoon manager is quick to use it, frustrating the various people who run in, fill up a container, and then run out. As the day goes on, the game gets more involved, with people trying different strategies, different methods of deception, and the manager becoming more frustrated. Some people come in and claim they’ve always been there; others use it in stealth and sit quietly until a moment opens up. Others use speed. Others are blunter. One guy, shirtless and riding a stripped-down ten-speed, waits outside until he sees the machine turned on for a large family, then runs quickly inside with a massive dirty container that looks as though it is from a construction site and starts filling it, the ice loudly hitting the metal bottom. The manager comes running out from the back, waving his hand, threatening to call the police. The shirtless man just looks at him, finishes filling up the container, a process that takes about five minutes, and then walks out. While the game goes on, families sit and chat, paying no mind to any of it.
At another table a man sits quietly staring at a newspaper, sipping his soda. He is here pretty much every day, all day. He comes early, buys a soda or coffee, grabs a paper from another table, or from the garbage, and sits with it opened in front of him. We exchange glances at the battle for ice. Sometimes we both start laughing at the same time when someone pulls off a particularly audacious move that angers the manager, and eventually we start talking.
In response to my question about whether he’s homeless, he says, “You could say that. I have the auto shop I work in. I also sleep in it at night, after it is closed up. So I guess so.”
I ask how that happened, and he says he had some trouble, was in and out of jobs and in and out of prison for DWIs. He has three of them.
He then tells a long story about getting hit with a pole, cracking open his head, and losing his memory and his ability to read and write. “A buddy was messing around, on drugs, and swinging a pole, and whack. My head was split open and I was a different person.”
I ask him why he comes to McDonald’s, and he says he comes to relax. “It is amusing to watch everyone and talk to them. I like to keep up with the gossip and news and sports.”
Sitting next to us is an older black man sipping coffee and reading the paper. He is always here as well, with his paper and his metal cigarette case with an engraved wolf. He introduces himself as Sage.
He goes over to Black Jesus and talks to him. When he comes back, I tell him I am surprised to see him talk, since he hasn’t said a word to anyone else. “Oh. That is Black Jesus’s style. He don’t harm anybody, keeps to himself.” We talk for a while, and after he tells me about his life (time in jail, robbery, receiving stolen property, the passing of his mother), he asks me about mine. I give him a rundown, and when I get to the working-on-Wall-Street part, he stops me and smiles. “I hope you got damn rich from that. If you gonna sell out like that, better sell out like that good.”
I tell him I did OK, and he nods and gets up to smoke. Before he leaves, he starts a long speech, delivered not so much with passion but with a sense of exasperation, as if this is something he has been thinking over and over and he is sure is important but nobody else really cares about.
“White-collar crime is the biggest crime, but nobody gets thrown in jail for that. Nobody gets prosecuted. Not only don’t they get any of that, they get a big check from the president. Barack Obama tells us he is one of us, says, ‘Look at my skin; I am one of you,’ but he doesn’t help anybody when they down except you bankers. Nobody helps us out here. We get thrown in jail. This here is a crooked society, and they wonder why we run from police. We ain’t blind. People we have in office are criminals and protect their big friends who are also criminals. We out on the streets, voters, we suffer. Nobody has a heart in this country. Step into a homeless shelter and see how the system doesn’t care about anybody hurting. Reality hurts. Nobody likes to face reality.”
I nod my head, agreeing, and all I can think to say is, “Well, Bakersfield is a tough town.”
He looks at me before going outside. “When you can’t beat them, you join them. You ain’t given opportunities here. You got to make them. Sometimes that means doing bad things.”
A younger woman sits quietly eating her meal, ignoring everyone. I have seen her walking past a few times, down the street where others walk to “catch dates.” I ask if I can join her, and she smiles. She introduces herself as Smurf, saying, “That is my street name. My real name is A, but everyone calls me Smurf. I prefer it.”
She tells me that she hates Bakersfield but stays because she has no other options. That she had a good childhood but got hooked on crystal meth when she was seventeen, dropped out of high school, and is now a sex worker and deals drugs.
“I have no choice but to prostitute,” she says. “To be a working girl. I sell drugs also. Sell crystal meth. Once you hooked on it, you have no choice but to be a working girl. I walk up and down Nineteenth. I get about three dates a night. That is all I need. If I do more than that, they might rob me of my cash. Sometimes I get a client I connect with and it is OK. Regulars. We go out and don’t have sex. We just talk and go out. Like friends.”
“You OK with me writing this?” I ask.
“Sure. Accept me or you don’t. I am me.”
“You religious?”
“I am very religious. Very religious.”
“How much you use?”
“Smoke a dime a day, used to use eight balls, but I quit for my twins.”
She begins to cry and tells me she has eight children, all taken away, though she sees them from time to time. She’s been in jail once and hopes not to go back.
I ask her where she lives.
“Here and there. I don’t do abandoned buildings. I stay with my boyfriend or my husband. I refuse to stay in an abandoned place. I don’t need a charge like that. I stay with friends or others. I stay here and there now.”
She stays in Bakersfield for her kids, who live with her sister. She gets out her phone to show me pictures of two babies—her youngest. It is an addict’s phone, the front face a web of cracks and breaks. Her hands and arms are dirty from the streets, tattooed with names and dates of friends and family that have passed, her fingernails spotted with bits of purple nail polish. The largest tattoo proclaims, “100% Fabulous Puerto Rican.”
She starts crying again, and an older man comes by and hands her a napkin and a religious flyer. She smiles at him and then tells me about her babies, making sure I understand she visits them often and how much she loves them.
While we talk, the controlled chaos of the McDonald’s swirls around us. The fight over the ice machine continues. Black Jesus throws his hand up every ten minutes in his salute. The woman with the swept-back gray hair continues to stare at her “Joy to the World” Christmas card. Outside, a cluster of homeless—most of whom I now recognize—pester each person entering for money.
When she is composed again, I ask her another question, even though I know the answer: “Why so many kids?”
“I didn’t mean to have so many, but sometimes I get pregnant.”
“People gonna read that and think you need to stop having babies,” I tell her.
“Them people need to walk a mile in my shoes. I got nothing but my family. That is all I got. That and my habit.”