Living in New York City, bums are a given sight; some of them, neighborhood regulars. We live on Central Park West, but, we live across a project conglomerate. There is a skuzzy Rite Aid, a few questionable bodegas, several musty supermarket delis, and a weird hole-in-the-wall art gallery, all of which sprinkled with vagrants. Contrarily, there is a chi-chi Whole Foods going up across the street and there are several (vacant) gazillion dollar apartments going up all around us. This is New York.
My favorite neighborhood bum looks like a cowboy who only has muddy stream access for hygiene and she sleeps, begs and eats right outside of the skuzzy Rite Aid. Cigarettes always dangle from her brown, rotting teeth and she faintly smells in the hot summer heat. She is over six feet tall with a crooked mullet, speaks with an indistinguishable impediment and I think she may be lesbian: she patrols the grounds of our apartment building as she regularly and admiringly yells up to a female neighbor on the north side of our building, unknown, several floors up. I have seen her for four years in the shadows, peering up and up. I don't know her name, and it's sort of creepy to see her patrolling around in the darkness, but she has some rather impeccable bum manners. Despite her hoarse-tomcat-screeching to parked-at-light vehicles, "Spare chaaaaaage?", she never asks any of us in the neighborhood for a dime, regardless if we have or have not given; cowboy/girl bum has better manners than any telemarketer or collegiate Green Peace street peddler that I have ever come across. I have guiltily handed her embarrassing Rite Aid impulse purchases: caramel Nibs for her already-rotting no-teeth, half-full bottles of water, but I have mostly given her my dollar bills and the contents of my change purse: it's all I can do and it's never enough and she doesn't discriminate; the Nibs were as appreciated as the five dollar bill. Others around here see her appeal: I've seen her holding neighborhood dogs (while their owners are inside, buying her lunch), she smiles benevolently and hideously at our children. Cowboy is a bum. Cowboy is a person; I might even say, a good person.
The exact opposite of her, is a disabled, African-American lady who wears a filthy, once-khaki Obama hat. She hates all races, except of course, her own. I call her, Oh-Bomb-Oh. She is a Turret's Syndrome, racist, horrid bitch-bum who has slurred indecipherable hate at my daughters since they were two years old; I see her not-as-regularly as Cowboy, but she is always lurking, fearless, and maniacal, as she accosts people at eye-level with her racial slurs and angry rants in the middle of the cross-walk, in the middle of traffic. Oh-Bomb-Oh has a thing against Asian and Caucasian women, or perhaps, those are the ones that she is not afraid to violently pick on. Anyway, most people recognize that she is obviously impaired and incoherent, but they do not know what I do: Oh-Bomb-Oh is entirely in control of her faculties. Like Cowboy, Oh-Bomb-Oh is a person, a bad person. Sooner or later, bad things happen to bad people. This is called, karma.
I was leaving Rite Aid, sans kids and Oh-Bomb-Oh was entering in, gingerly, with her disability and with the rain. She paused as she saw me and a somewhat-lucid, ironic smile spread across her face; she recognized me. But instead of calling me a "chink", "gook", "Philippino-bitch", or "Chinese-slut-bitch", she was silent; she needed my help with the door and possessed enough manipulative skills to know that calling me those names wasn't going to get her lumbering, fat, handicapped ass into Rite Aid. I smiled back - I really did. And then, I did the the right thing to do:
I slammed the door shut in her face and walked out to the street, quickly. I could hear her screaming behind me. The rain began to pour. Justice was thrilling.
