Trust No One, Disbelieve Everything You See

     When a duster runs out of stuff and starts jonesing for more, he or she can often be seen induging in a little game known in this particula a packet of dust could have been dropped and might still be extant. The guy who coined the term "dumpster diving" has a way with words and a keen insight into the duster mind because when a duster is really jonesing, that duster is shameless in pursuit of the hallowed prize. If the situation's really bad, reality and fantasy start to merge, and the duster starts seeing dust everywhere. A jonesing duster walked into my kitchen last week and went directly to the washing machine on the lid of which someone had scattered some powdered laundry detergent. He got really excited.

    "Man, there's a lot of dust here," he said.

    He sounded like a kid walking into the Manhattan Toys R Us for the very first time. I almost hated to tell him it was just Arm & Hammer laundry detergent. I don't know if he'll ever be that excited about anything ever again.




   I could have asked him. The dusters who come here tell me a  lot of things about themselves. They do it for a couple of reasons. They know that I'm not going to turn them in or judge them, and they know that I'm interested in what makes them do what they do.

    Not that I don't get pissed off a lot. I lost my car because a duster drove it without permission last week, and I'm still so upset about it, that I can't even give time to the situation in this blog because it will destroy my ability to focus on anything else. But most of the time the things I get pissed off about are things like discovering money or other semi-valuables missing from my space   (a jonesing duster is just like any other junkie, so hide anything you can't do without) and excessive tweaking. Allow me to explain.

      Saturday night, there were a few people here, several of them on dust, all of them known to me. But one of them was a little less known to me than the others and seemed a little more like the kind of people with whom I used to associate. He was closer to my age, too, and we shared a few more reference points. So we spent some time talking, seemingly in a normal fashion, until he started doing the "window thing"---rising up suddenly from his chair and stalking slowly over to the window and pushing aside the curtain to get  a clear view of the darkened street.

    "I don't believe it," he said. "There's a fuckin' cop right across the street."

    "Well, it's a good thing you're not on anything," I said. "Good job."

     "Are you kidding? I'm fucking rolling," he said. "I booted up about half an hour ago."

 "Here in this flat?" I half-screamed at him. "Goddamn it, I don't allow that. (My son) knows that. No one boots up in this flat."

   He wasn't listening. All he cared about was the cop he thought was watching him from across the street.

    "Oh, this is great. There's a DEA right across from the cop on the corner. Man, I don't believe this!"

    Before I could say anything, he ran into my son's room and told the other dusters that they were being staked out by cops and DEAs. Then he ran outside to get a closer look at the situation. He returned a good five minutes later, wild-eyed, as he explained that cops and DEAs had planted themselves at strategic points all up and down the street. It started with the cop and the DEA at the corner. But then there was a guy who had been standing outside a house three doors down from us for a really long time. Yeah, he had a dog with him, but the dog was just standing there, too. And there was a black Subaru that kept going by (there are how many black Subarus in any given city?), and another man who looked hard at the living room window of our flat as he walked past it.

      "Why would they be staking this place out?" I asked. "Wouldn't they be going after the big people? The distributors?"

     "Shit's illegal now," a helpful duster explained. "Cops want to make examples of people."

     That freaked me out. I told everyone they had to leave, and if they had any of their stupid shit with them, they had better make sure it left, too. But the dusters were too scared to leave. They started looking out the window, three of them at once, staring and pointing, and debating whether the shadow next to a streetlamp was the shadow of the streetlamp, or the shadow of someone they couldn't see. Then someone noticed that the guy with the dog was no longer there. That seemed ominous, too.  But the worst thing was that a kid they all knew, who seemed like he could  be a narc, had come by earlier and asked if anyone had seen his bike. That was clearly suspicious.  After all, he could have asked anyone about his bike, but he chose them.

    "Look, just go. I want you all to go," I said. "I have to work. I have to write."

    My son said that it was his flat and not up to me to tell people they had to go. Instead, they all went back into his room and locked the door so that I couldn't come in. A few seconds later, there was a knock on the kitchen door. I froze. The police? The DEA? What should I tell them? Should I--

   "Hey, Ma, it's me! Let me in!"

   It was the dust bunny who had been hanging around our house since July 4th, but who had drifted into other spheres of late. She had come to ask if I could lend her some shoes. Again. I asked her what had happened to the flip flops I had given her a dollar to buy at the Dollar Tree. She told me that she'd been with some people and they'd done some dust and they thought a cop was chasing them. So they ran.

   "But it was a taxi," she explained.

   That hadn't kept her flip flops from falling off. And now it was up to me to replace them. But I wasn't feeling like Mary Poppins at the moment. I told her that I was out of shoes that I could give away. But she was welcome to ask my son if he had anything. She declined, saying that the two of them weren't getting along because he had sided with someone who had called her a rat.

      "What did you rat about?" I asked.

      "I didn't rat about anything," she replied, a little peevishly. "This guy who saw me and your son walking to L-- Street told him I was a rat. But there was no reason for him to say that. I don't know what his problem is, Everybody is just fucking tweaking these days."

      "Yeah, I noticed that," I said. "Maybe they should all just stop doing that crap. What a thought, huh?"

       "Well, I haven't done it for a while," she said.

  She showed me her arms, The bruises were almost gone. Just as I was about to praise her, she shrugged.

    "Last time I did it was last night at (a friend's) house," she said. "But then someone called and said they'd seen a cop circling the street in an unmarked so we got scared and  flushed everything."

    I went into my bedroom and dug out a pair of old sneakers I never wear. She didn't think they were "pretty enough", but I told her that beggars were not permitted to be choosers and bade her good-night. Then I sat down to write, hoping that the sneakers would buy me at least a few solid hours of writing time before another cab driver went monkey on the dust bunny again.