Hanging With The Homeless Folks On Central Avenue

Many of the homeless people on Central Avenue seem to have variants of the same story. They were traveling through town, not intending to stay at all, when some incident or accident forced them to reconsider their plans.

On Monday night, July 21st, I went to see "Tammy" at the downtown cinema. It was the late show and I was the only person in the theater (which seemed strange). I drank my diet soda and ate half my popcorn all alone in the dark.

I emerged from the cinema about 12:30 a.m., and was approached by a prostitute - perhaps the homeliest woman I have seen in years. Still, she had a fun personality, so I gave her a dollar and half a bag of popcorn. She said she was traveling through Albuquerque on her way to California when a car breakdown forced her onto the street until she could get her check at the beginning of the month.

Presumably the cast of homeless people changes every month. Once these July folks move on, a different crew of August folks will roll on in.

I was watching the Albuquerque Cruise on Sunday night July 20th from a Central Avenue sidewalk. I listened to a homeless woman named Juliette tell stories. Juliette described an automobile accident when she was child driven by a military man at 127 mph in Pahrump, NV, that put a dagger of glass into her skull, and caused problems one way or the other the rest of her life. She was from Las Cruces, but stranded in Albuquerque until the first of the month, when her disability check would arrive. She described herself as being of the "Jewish persuasion", which basically meant she wasn't Jewish by birth, but found herself in close agreement with its tenets. She reminded me of the crypto-Jews I knew in Salt Lake City: lapsed Mormons of Russian inheritance who sensed that they had to be Jews at some level, whatever the real circumstances of their births.

Juliette told an amusing story about her sleeping spot in the alley directly behind the hotel where I was staying. A couple of mornings before, she was awakened by a light tapping on her shoulder. "Who is this person touching me in such an inappropriate manner?" she thought. Prepared to do battle, she peered out from under her blanket and found herself face-to-face with a curious bird. She described it as a tweeting sugarbird - probably a sparrow. Curiosity satisfied, the bird hopped upon her shoulder and flew away.