Lips of A Strange Woman

The simple heart that freely asks in love, obtains.---John Greenleaf Whittier

For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, And her mouth is smoother than oil, But her end is bitter as wormwood . . . Her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.----Proverbs 5:3-6

My homeless attorney, Don the RV-dwelling, dog poop-smelling, 73 year-old Jewish hippie I adopted last year when we were both living in RVs on the street, spends a lot of time here at the veterans shelter.

In the mornings, he brings me fresh dumpster sushi to store in my little dorm refrigerator (which itself was salvaged from a Culver City dumpster). We usually spend about half an hour in that little fridge, changing out the old dumpster sushi for the new.

Then he usually watches TV in the mess hall or movie room downstairs until I wake up in the afternoon. Then we have a couple of hours of bible study, sometimes three or four, until the chow hall opens at 5:30 for dinner.

I try to get Don to take a shower at my place as much as I can, but Don forgets. He forgets a lot of things, like where he left his keys to the RV or where he left his RV. I keep a spare set of keys to everything he has in my dorm room. I also keep the number of the prepaid cell phone I gave him and the combination to his storage.

Don's soul in in God's hands alone, but his possessions are surely in mine.

Today we had to change a flat tire on Don's RV. What a pain in the butt that was. Those big 16 and a half inch tires aren't all that easy to toss around and have you ever tried to jack up an RV? That's no walk in the park, either. And we had to do it in the rain.

I bitched and griped and complained for about ten minutes, as I guess I do with all of my family, but gave it up as soon as I looked in the old man's grateful eyes.

Some 38 year-old woman, a speed freak drug addict in the full bloom of her addiction, is trying to get Don to move in with her at her guest house apartment behind her mother's house in lower Inglewood.

She wants to set up housekeeping with the old fart. She met him on the street yesterday when he was trying to grunt off the flat tire on the RV and already has him buying groceries for her mom.

The old man lives on a tight, fixed Social Security pension income which is heavily drained already by his addict daughter. Don says this woman, Stilleta, will cook and clean for him . . . even do his laundry and sleep with him and hinted already at marriage.

Don asked me what I thought of the whirlwind arrangement.

"Wormwood," I said.

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