Visit Jim Reed’s Red Clay Diary on youtube: https://youtu.be/JmymRx2Kr4k
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Life, actually…
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(A note from my Red Clay Diary: Many years ago when things were different but always the same, this happened right in front of me. I often wonder whatever happened to this frantic, disoriented soul and her baby.)
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JUNKER JUNKIE
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She’s struggling to get that big junker of a belching-fume car into a parallel parking space in front of Tony’s Terrific Hotdogs up on Second Avenue North in the tattered remains of downtown and the kid beside her is screaming its head off and she’s trying to shut it up and at the same time keep the lit cigarette from falling off the hand she’s using to guide the big, power-steeringless vehicle into some crooked semblance of a resting position and it’s hot and muggy and steamy already and it’s only 9:30 on a Saturday morning, for God’s sake, and the car’s air conditioning system died about ten years ago and was never resuscitated and her bangs are beginning to mat to her forehead and she’s hoping that the drugstore across the street from Tony’s is open on Saturdays because she has to get some Preparation H for her invalid mother and her absentee husband is three years behind on child-support payments and her sleazeball lawyer keeps sending bills to get her to pay for the work he’s done to try and get the guy to make his child-support payments and the lawyer sure managed to generate a lot of paperwork that never quite caused the fictitious payments to start appearing in the mailbox but he expects to get his attorney’s fees anyhow which means that she is basically supposed to start paying the child support fees she isn’t getting from her estranged husband to this attorney so that even if the support money started coming in it wouldn’t do her any good because she’d have to turn around and pay it to the lawyer and how did she get herself into this mess in the first place?
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Well, she guessed it had all started one adolescent evening at Roebuck Park when she decided that intimacy and marriage would have to be better than living with broken parents in a broken home within a broken neighborhood in a broken city so she stopped saying no after the hundredth time and said yes just one time and that about wrapped up her date with fate and determined the course of the next fifty-odd years of her life unless some miracle occurred to change all that and since being a Baptist hadn’t seemed to help much about all she could hope for now was a UFO abduction or the lottery or a good horoscope to change her life and she could not imagine what else might change her life except maybe if she stopped worrying about her no-good husband and no-good lawyer and decided to say yes just one time to that good-looking beeraholic neighbor with the relatively new pickup truck who kept asking her out just maybe if she said yes to him he might save her and change her life and help her get this damned junker fixed and sweaty screaming kid made happy and her invalid mother the correct kind of medical care and then life would be just about complete, wouldn’t it
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© Jim Reed 2022 A.D.
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