Midnight at the crack motel. My roommate Creepy is asleep and he's stopped breathing again. All is quiet except for that guy in 218. His light hammering and muffled sawing goes on day and night. day and night.
All is quiet. No shuffling of streetwalker Marie's snow shoes up and down the stairs. No clackety clack of hooker Margo rushing a client to the back parking lot. The other two regular prostitutes, 'Killer' and 'Cabbage Patch', are napping across the street in the recessed entrance of The Giving Faith Fellowship Church.
Except for that guy in 218, all is quiet. No one is cursing the one-armed pay phone bandit in the motel courtyard. Monty closed the office two hours ago and a makeshift sign says 'Go to the Camino (motel) if you want a room this time a night.'
I can hear the gentle hum of my kitchenette Kelvinator, the insectine buzz of the 40 watt ceiling light and the high pitched chip chip chip of a coyote howling.
Wait a minute. A coyote howling? That can't be right. Not here in Gardena, 10 blocks from the Compton city limits.
I pull on ancient bluejeans I found in a dumpster 15 years ago and trudge outside. Killer and Cabbage Patch have gone. Only people outside are the two Momo's Korean bouncers across the street, making sure no white, black or brown people try to enter the bar. They don't like white, black or brown people.
No streetwalkers on the sidewalk. Too chilly tonight. The howling seems to be coming from the BHS Hale Childress Recovery Center next door. Ah, Behavioral Health Science. I know it well. It's a giant, white, gymnasium-sized warehouse for the marginally insane. I used to drop off Kathy's husband there last year when he was complying with mandatory alcohol and drug rehab treatment for a DUI he snagged. I used to laugh at the hideousness of the place. Now I live in its shadow.
I suspect the BHS CRC is the source of our intermittent teenage hooker traffic. I see hundreds of teenagers and young adults there in the daytime and the police cruise the CRC's back parking area ten times more often than the Motel Marquis' lot, so a little midnight howling coming from there is not out of the realm of possibility.
But it's not coming from the CRC. The howling is just echoing off the CRC's high concrete block walls. The howling is coming from the vacant acre on the other side of the motel, coming from the high weeds where the Vietnamese Satanists have their quarterly pagan rites and cat barbecues, and where the bretheren of the glass dick congregate to suck their translucent weenies.
Only an acre of tall weeds and the burnt-out, abandoned 40-foot steel 'Cafe El Camino 24 Hour Restaurant' sign lie between my motel and the Arco gas station where there is the safety of halogen lighting, but I never cut across the voodoo lot to get my Arco coffee. I ain't going in there. Let the coyotes howl and the cat carcasses rest in peace. The industrious hermit in 218 does.
Tags: homeless, crack motel, music video, Tom Waits, what's he building, coyote howl, satanic pagan rites, cat barbeque, crack pipe, creepy, streetwalker, hooker, cabbage patch, Giving Faith Fellowship church, pay phone, one armed bandit, motel courtyard, weekly rate motel, flophouse, kitchenette, insectine, Gardena, Compton, Momo's, BHS Hale Childress Recovery Center, rehab, behavioral health science, marginally insane, DUI, teenage hooker, satanists, bretheren of the glass dick, translucent weenie, glass dick, Arco, vlog, vlogging, video blog, viral video, video arcade, urban tales
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