I'm sitting at my favorite bench,
the one at the end but
still close to the flow,
reading and smoking.

A guy comes up and asks for a light.
Sure.
He sits down and we talk. His boyfriend
just left him for a woman. He feels humiliated
and ashamed. But as he talks, the nicotine and
the negative ions kick in and he starts to calm down.
Negative ions and human contact.

A British divorcee sits down when he leaves.
Popular bench today it seems.
She asks me for a light.
Sure.
She starts talking about how her ex always hated her smoking.
Then how her ex just got custody of their 8 year old son.
Canadian in clean air is how he will be raised now.
She starts to cry and coughs on her cigarette smoke.
Then the nicotine and the negative ions kick in and she calms
down a little---embarrassed at having revealed so much.

A whore from Philadelphia swishes by about 10 minutes later.
Wearing entirely too many clothes for the heat or her profession.
As is the way of beach hooking, she sits down to get friendly and
ask if I need any oil rubbed on anywhere.
I decline, but offer her a smoke and a light.
The strip is slow this time of day so she says yeah and sits down.
She says, eventually, that even though she's a runaway, she eats
ok and has a good room when she isn't in lock-up. I look closer
at her face and discover that under the sunburn and the grime
she looks about 16. She ran away from a father who used her and a
mother who let him. She is proud of herself because she can make
enough hooking to eat ok. Negative ions seeped into her brain
and she can take anything now, except the lack of nicotine.

I was out on bail 2 hours later. Maybe the judge will believe
we were just talking. I wonder how that book turns out?