December is my favorite month. That’s what I’m thinking when I look out my hotel room window and see a flurry of motion at the halfway house next door. A consumer—one of the house’s residents—dances alone on the sidewalk with her arms held high, her costume jewelry bracelets a riot in the sunlight, an empty weightless plastic bag swirling on the pavement by her dirty, bare feet.
Sugar Child is the finest poetry I’ve seen in a long while.
I met Sugar Child earlier this morning while I was taking out the trash. Perching on the halfway house steps in a green spandex pantsuit, she’s a revelation of reedy shoulders and bird-thin legs. A quality platinum wig frames her sharp grill. Her blood-rimmed brown eyes, ringed by artfully applied layers of blue mascara, examine me with x-ray intensity.
“Hey, daddy, you have a cigarette? No? Well, shit. You know I just got out of county jail. I did a year because I had no permits. I’m going to be here for ten days, then I got to find me a treatment program. But right now I want to party. Uh, you want a date? I don’t do young guys. I do older men like you. Easier to handle. You interested?”
I’m in my underwear, too shy to flirt. “No, baby, I have to go to work in a little bit. Maybe some other time.”
“Okay, daddy. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Quicker than a hummingbird, she lunges at me, planting a hard, cough-syrupy kiss on my mouth. An anvil of a kiss. Then she whirls away into the house.
I’m still looking out the window, reliving this memory, getting lost in its creaminess, when it’s interrupted by a social worker rocketing out of the halfway house. He scuttles partway down the steps, stabbing the air with his clipboard. “Sugar Child! You need to stop dancing! What the hell is wrong with you! Get inside and take your meds! You’re hours behind schedule!”
Ignoring him, Sugar Child does a fandango, the plastic bag at her side a perfect dancing companion, matching her athleticism with its own elegance. The social worker turns around and climbs the stairs, shaking his head and whooping: “Damn it! You’re in trouble! I’m calling SWAT!”
He understands nothing about poetry.
Sugar Child knows even less about halfway house rules. She pirouettes in a counterclockwise circle with her eyes squeezed shut, kicking her grimy feet to an imaginary music’s beat.
Four minutes later, a black SWAT van eases to the curb by the halfway house. Three uniformed cops sally from the vehicle, two Mexican women and a pink-faced white cat. The cops saunter toward Sugar Child feigning nonchalance, the way law enforcement officials usually do when they’re tense and don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.
Without any preamble, Sugar Child challenges the first officer. “Get the fuck away from me, man. I haven’t done shit to nobody. I’m just doing my thing here.” The second cop unholsters her taser. The last cop whips out his baton and wallops Sugar Child in the ribs.
The three officers shove Sugar Child onto the ground—she greets the pavement chin first. The women cops kick her in the head, then roughly handcuff her hands and feet. The white cop jogs to the van and comes back with a long chain. He attaches the chain to Sugar Child’s ankles, connecting the remaining length to her manacled hands.
Sugar Child is hogtied.
Trussed like an animal in a stockyard.
She lies in the street, unable to move a muscle. Mascara runs down her cheeks, the wig bereft and friendless on the sidewalk beside her. Next, she’s loaded into the SWAT van.
I pull the curtains shut, blotting out what I’ve just seen. I can’t deal with it now. Christ only knows. I limp to the mirror on the other side of the room. I stare into the cracked glass. A bald ex-con with lines of disappointment around his mouth and sorrow in his eyes stares back at me. A middle-aged man in a priest’s black robe adorned with cigarette burns. An ill-fitting polyester cleric’s collar imprisons his neck. A .25 pistol nestles in his purple sacramental cummerbund.
I draw the .25. I point it at the mirror and smile. The mirror smiles at me, satisfied with the image I present. I restuff the gun in my cummerbund. I pat my pockets, checking to see if I’ve got my travel permit card and enough change for the bus.
It’s time to start my shift.
I’m an ordained priest and professional donations solicitor. I work downtown, where I bang a tambourine and beg for money in the mellifluous, singsong voice beloved by children worldwide: help the needy, give to the poor, amen.