The Three Stooges
by Phil Canalin
Sausal Creek
Tonight the three guys felt good. All of them had scored some schwag and were about to blaze big in a minute. But they sat, stalling and shooting the shit for a little bit, knowing that the first hit was always the best hit, and waiting for it could be almost as good.
They were hanging out in the forgotten back end of Austen Square, near East 22nd Street. Not far from them, a mural had been gloriously painted on the old concrete retaining wall along that portion of Sausal Creek. The mural, about thirty feet long, depicted a woman’s face with a series of scared and startled expressions, ending, or perhaps beginning, with Pinocchio’s cartoon face, also startled, even horrified. Meaning what, exactly? That someone cannot tell a lie? Or that someone’s about to tell a lie? It depended on the direction in which the observer viewed the painted mural, maybe. Either way, a lie about what?
The three of them were all but hidden by tall, grassy weeds and wild shrubs, broad-leafed, hollow-limbed, and ignored for years. None of the boys cared one bit about the artwork or its intended meaning. The boys — really, they were men in stature — sat sprawled atop a portion of the low wall of cheap, crumbling concrete. The city had probably saved a few cents on the dollar using inferior product back when they first put the wall up ages ago, maybe saving a few more cents by hiring inferior city workers.
What was supposed to be a wall to stop Sausal Creek from eroding the land was now a crumbling, unkempt eyesore, like the rest of the creek trail most of the way down to the Oakland Estuary. Hell, a lot people lived in Oakland all their lives and didn’t even know Sausal Creek existed, let alone that it ran from the northeast hills up near Mountain Boulevard down to the estuary and San Leandro Bay. It didn’t help that city forefathers had installed metal culvert pipes to direct much of the creek underground, causing a lot of it to dry up. Even in the winter months many parts of Sausal Creek were thin, filthy beds of jumbled rocks embedded in flat sections of gray, smelly clay. All this was why the three of them could hole up there forever most nights, rarely bothered. Of course, their ragged, dirty clothes and overall grossness kept folks at a distance too.
On one end Maurice was holding up a cheap plastic sandwich baggie, shaking it and gleefully bragging in front of the others. Maurice was eighteen, originally from LA. He’d dropped out of high school after the very first day of freshman year, just never went back. No one cared. His mother and father were already long gone and his sister was a whore. She worked in West LA, making just enough cash to sustain her meth stash and keep a room in a cockroach-infested motel where Maurice crashed. She was so out of it she rarely knew that Maurice was there, sleeping in the bathroom tub, eating stolen food or fast food he bought using money pinched from her. After finally taking off, Maurice never saw or heard from her again. Hell, she may not have realized he was ever there and gone. If she was still alive. Sometimes, in his dreams, Maurice still heard her (fake) and her johns’ (scary) moans and groans, bleeding through the bathroom walls from the living room. Maurice used to cover his ears and pretend to sleep through it. He was better off alone.
“Got me two good ol’ blunts here, you know. Took them right off that crazy white mo’fo at the 26th Avenue bus stop,” Maurice said. “Dude was soft, man, couldn’t do a thing, you know what I mean? I just took his backpack, took it right from him. Snatch. He thought I was sleepin’.”
Maurice was one of those big, really fat homeless guys. Huge. Gross. He had to weigh at least three and a half bills and he was only five foot five. Maurice rarely had a lot to eat, so keeping all that weight on must have been some biological DNA thing. It didn’t help his girth that he spent so much time lying around sleeping, wherever and whenever he could find some quiet place, alone. Hell, it was all he could do, dragging his humongous body around was exhausting. He had on the usual three pairs of sweatpants, old now, the top one black, soiled and ragged, torn at both knees, a dirty gray one showing through. Maurice also wore a giant navy-blue hoodie beneath a 5XL cotton shirt, fading green and orange plaid, ripped at both elbows and a foot too long for his squat body. When Maurice found something that fit over his huge frame, he held onto it, never sure when the next load of Bigandbigger clothing would come. Covering his fashion ensemble was a simply made poncho, a hole cut out for his head, his arms sticking out of the corners on either side. That poncho was big enough to be a kid’s tent, made of some dark indoor/outdoor material that was soft and pliable, but waterproof and tough. It looked like something a giant cowboy would have worn to survive long cattle drives through harsh winters atop beautiful Wyoming mountain ranges. It was Maurice’s prized possession, cinched at the waist now with a piece of rope, but big and long enough to curl his large body into later, keeping him warm and dry at night, right here atop the ugly, dirty Oakland city streets.
Lawrence Booker, in the middle, spoke: “Lessee what you got, Maurice... hhssssp... make sure it’s real stuff, not dried-up nickel ragweed. Hhssssp. Don’t want you burning out a lung or anything... hhssssp.”
Lawrence sat there on his cold perch, both hands pulled up into the sleeves of his green army coat. The coat was stained and had a nasty stench from years of use and limited washings. His messy, gnarled Afro was stuffed into an equally gnarled black knit hat that more than suggested he needed a larger one. Puffs of Lawrence’s dry ratty hair stuck out randomly along the edge of the hat; it wasn’t easy to tell what was hair and what was unraveling hat yarn. “Come on, Mo, first spark up a little of your stuff... hhssssp. I’m a little light right now. Get it? A little light? Hhssssp. That’s what we need.”
As he talked, Lawrence had this habit of sucking air into his mouth through a gap made by two missing teeth. Not his two front teeth, but the first two immediately off-center on the top right side. About two years ago, Lawrence “found” a pretty fat wallet in a coat hanging in a coffee shop down on International. Later that night he bonged a boatload of kick-ass hashish while guzzling a quart of cheap tequila — eventually he passed out and keeled over, smashing his face on some steps. Those two teeth had taken the brunt of his fall. When Lawrence awoke, sleeping in a small pool of his own congealed blood, he had his own permanent mouth instrument to keep him amused.
Lawrence had been living on the streets longer than either of the other two. An orphan, he had never known his mother or father, living in a multitude of foster homes in the East Bay as a child, a vagabond in a woebegone government system that neither budgeted enough money to monitor what was really happening out there in Foster Kid World, or cared enough to even give a rat’s ass. Maybe government folks figured as long as you were in a home and had a place to eat and sleep, well then, you damn well must be happy. After his millionth beating from the last of a series of foster parents who used his stipend money to buy booze and drugs, Lawrence had simply said, Screw this, run off, and permanently escaped. He was eleven years old then, and no one was going to know what Lawrence had had to do sometimes to survive all this time. He’d take that crap to his grave. No one. Hhssssp.
The last guy on the other end, that was Champ, who chimed in, “Yeah, Mo, you know that dirty old dude coulda been rollin’ anything, man, you know like he had no cash to get nothing rich either, right, know what I’m sayin’?”