The change

Bars and night clubs, sluty sexy college girls, my kind of town, last time I was here ten years ago, nothings changed everything has changed, its all different, its all the same. I searched for the coffee shop, by the fountain where all the bums and street musicians hang out, carefully avoided by people with class or even an idea of what class would look like. Funny that it was on State Street. I knew that something was wrong when I didn’t see any bums walking around, maybe it was just too cold and windy this time of year, they would probably have gone down south, those new native American’s, true hunter gatherers, and nomads, tents replaced by guitars and drums hats on the ground instead of bows and arrows, you don’t see too many homeless people up north. But the smell was different, not the usual urine old alcohol, cigarettes and the rogue whiff of pot. It was clean and orderly with the stench of class and capitalism. I knew that it had become chic to be a dirty hippy but this was going too far. Then I saw it, Café Romas, a hole in the wall two stories to maximize space and a few tables for outside street watching. Chairs on the tables mopes on the floors I realized that the place was closing. The usual renegades hanging outside well fed on the fat that had become America. Where were the homeless though, this place used to be open all night, catering to the lonely the tired, those without a home and those who didn’t want one. It was the fat eyes, that complacency in the girls behind the counter that spelled it out for me. There’s a hunger in the homeless, not of the body but of the soul, hunger and desperation, needing and yet giving up, a nowhere to go but I'm here kind of attitude, that clothes lack of washing and general rebellion could never approximate, in contrast these girls had something, they may not have wanted what they had but they had something. I began to feel like a spotted owl returning home only to find that a mall had been built in my living room. Sickened I walked away knowing that I would not find what I came looking for, the apathy of the homeless and the comradery of the broken souls, the salve for my spirits, the home for my homeless heart. Finding an all night coffee shop I wandered in hoping that they may have migrated here no such luck, no such communion. Than he showed up. I watched him, escorted by some good Samaritan, hoping to gain favor with the gods of anarchy buying him a sandwich and a cup of coffee, that hunched over look warm clothes beyond the current temperature demands, not really dirty but not really clean, smiling at the warmth of his coffee, pawing at the saran wrap of his sandwich like a sixteen year old trying to get a bra off. I watched him until I began to feel like a pervert in a night club. How dare I get my pleasure out of this? But I missed it, I missed the simplicity of hopelessness, the feeling that there was nowhere left to go, where things had perspective, survive, just survive. Then I realized what a charlatan I had become. Whearing new clothes, wondering what my next career move would be. Trying to get a vicarious pleasure off of these people like an old man fucking a 20 year old in the hopes that he can be young again, except I was feeling homeless people so that I could remember desperation again.