Homeless (13 page)

Sunday night had been a long one. Now that it was Monday morning and the sun was shining, Lonnie was ready to climb into the bed, but he had things to do. Time had become of no matter to him. His days and nights were mixed up. Lonnie popped damn near one of every pill in the sandwich bag Kevin left. The stash and the 1800 were both faithful companions to him all night long. He spent the night pacing his apartment, jacking his dick until it was sore, and comparing Trina to his mom. As odd as it sounds, he was more attracted to the girl because she reminded him of the one woman who'd ever been unconditionally loving, kind, and compassionate to him. Lonnie hadn't said it, but that's why he was so compelled to help her. He'd helped his mother till her dying day as well. Since they hadn't spoken but for a minute over the weekend, he was hoping to run into her at the shelter. Just in case, he'd planned on taking the plate of food he'd set aside for her the other night.

Washing his face with cold water, he dressed, and then picked an Adderall pill out of the sandwich bag to help wake him up even more. The master pill, popular for helping even the laziest person rise and shine, would keep him up and give him the extra boost he needed to get his day going the right way. With the pill in his system, Lonnie didn't need a cup of coffee or even a Mountain Dew for caffeine.

* * *

Mr. Reynolds gave Lonnie an old disconnected cell phone with a wide variety of music already loaded on it, along with a pair headphones when he arrived for his second day of community service. He had gotten the 411 on the boy's record and recognized the pain in Lonnie's eyes as the same that once beamed through his own. He was also impressed with Lonnie's drive, being that the young boy was smart and enrolled in college even while dealing with the brutally harsh reality that is his life. Mr. Reynolds genuinely wanted to help Lonnie, and at least make his days working at his shelter as pleasant as possible.

Lonnie was in the zone listening to music and completing his list of tasks. Unlike the first two days where he had to move furniture and do a lot of muscular jobs that made him sweat, his third day was more tedious and involved less hard labor. He appreciated the simple tasks of cleaning the men's bathrooms, mopping the stairwells, and repainting the wall he'd repatched holes in from a fight between two men over a rock that wasn't supposed to be in the building anyhow. Brenda was gossiping on the phone about the event when he walked in.

Off an Adderall pill that he and Kevin nicknamed A-Pluses because they kept them on their A-Game, Lonnie bounced around the room needing a Ritalin to calm down. Every move he made and thing he did was quick and sudden. He found himself going beyond the call of duty while cleaning because he had so much energy.

He wondered what it would be like to pop A-Plus and an Abilify at the same time. Two seconds later, he answered himself by saying he wouldn't have the problem he had with Megan for sure. He'd been having strange thoughts about her lately and didn't know why. The only thing he paid attention to was how hard his dick got when he did think of her. Which was another strange thing to him. If only it would've done that the night they were alone and it mattered.

The worst thing ever was for Kevin to get a connect that worked at the clinic. Initially, Lonnie had been able to fight the side effects and not succumb to his pill-popping addiction. Yet, as he couldn't stop thinking about his mother, having anxiety about what he was going to do once he was kicked out of his apartment, and nausea spells brought about from not taking the pills, he'd called Kevin up with the last of his gifted fifty.

On that particular dreary day, he decided to no longer care about dropping a dirty piss test. Lonnie was tired of trying to live by the rules, only to be punished for doing so. Basing his future on his past and the current state of his present days, the troubled eighteen-year-old Lonnie didn't have hope that he'd be cleared by the judge even if he did stay clean. Bullshit always followed him. The day he called Kevin was the day he got tired of wondering why karma was kicking his ass so viciously.

With rap blasting in his ear, Lonnie had mopped three whole flights of stairs twice and was still pumping with energy. He couldn't wait to finish up with his list of work so he could run out of there to grab a beer. The mixture of the pill and liquor was Lonnie's trick to mellow out. Since he wasn't partying with Kevin, there wasn't any reason he needed to be bouncing off the walls drunk.

Lonnie bopped his head to the beats coming through the headphones all the way up the hallway to the janitor's room. So happy and content with the gift from Mr. Reynolds, he wasn't paying attention to anything else. He dumped the dirty water, cleaned out the mop, and then put everything in its place. Although he wanted to get out of the building and find some beer, he couldn't stop himself from overworking. He decided to clean the janitor's room up and arrange everything so he'd be able to access it quickly.

At the speed the pillhead was moving at, he'd gathered an entire bag of trash filled with empty cleaning solution bottles, organized the remaining bottles of solution by what they were or were needed for, and even swept and mopped the room's floor. He was sweating like he needed a break, but the A-Plus pill was his strength. He couldn't calm his adrenaline down if he wanted to.

Lonnie wasn't having a bad day until that damn Al Green song came on. It sent him into a pit of depression almost instantly. Needing to hit the next button so the song would skip to the subsequent one, Lonnie tortured himself by listening to each word Al Green sang. The thought of his mother always made him sad. She'd gone from the woman he'd loved and looked up to, to a symbol for the day his life went straight to hell. The melancholy teen wished his mother wasn't tied to such ugliness, and that tore him apart even more.

Feeling like he was rushing into a sinkhole of pity, Lonnie dug into his pocket fishing for the lonely pill he'd snatched from his stash this morning. Pulling it out like it was a rare gold coin, he reveled in its beauty like a true addict, then finally put it in his mouth. Washing it down with a handful of water from the workman's sink, he then leaned down on the sink in an effort to regain his composure. Popping pills had become his method of coping.

Lonnie didn't want to finish the few things he had left to do around the shelter extra sweaty. Deciding to wipe himself down, he took his shirt off, then shook it out, laying it flat on the floor. He wasn't worried about it getting dirty since it was already dirty, plus he'd just cleaned the floor. The only thing Lonnie was concerned about was freshening up the best way he could. Using some paper towels, he wet it and put a few dabs of the industrial soap the shelter had stocked on it. He figured a little bit wouldn't hurt or burn his skin, especially since he wasn't about to wash his pee hole with it.

After running the paper towel over his chest and underarms, he then used a fresh piece of paper towel he'd drenched with water to wipe his face, neck, his torso, and arms. The still-high Lonnie felt better and even a little calmer. He also got the bright idea to use the janitor's closet to wash up instead of the common showers if he had to move back into the shelter. At least in here he could be alone.

Right when he was getting ready to put his shirt back on, the doorknob jiggled, then the door opened. In walked the woman who'd let him into the shelter the other day. No matter where he was at, she kept seeming to pop up. For a slight second, he thought she was watching him per the request of Mr. Reynolds or the secretary; but then he recognized the flirtatious look in her eye like the slutty hood rat Megan had back when his dick couldn't get up. In comparison to Megan, there was absolutely nothing about the rag-wearing homeless woman that was sexy or eye catching to Lonnie except the humongous titties attached to her chest.

“Oh, I didn't know you were in here,” the woman lied to Lonnie.

Standing in the doorway with her eyes fixated on his young chiseled chest, the woman had been watching him and knew he'd come in here. She just didn't want Lonnie to know about her stalkerlike ways. She knew she was older and had fallen from the graces of beauty she once ranked high in; yet, her body still craved attention. Her woman parts in particular.

Unbeknownst to Lonnie, because he was too consumed with his chores and the pills flowing through his bloodstream, he hadn't realized or felt the homeless woman's eyes watching him from the time he entered the shelter for work. Lonnie was too caught up in trying not to tell on himself by appearing out to space high.

After watching him through the small window of the doors on each floor level, the homeless woman saw him come from the stairwell and enter the janitor's closet alone. She even put her ear to the door to listen, and was pleased not to find out a destitute peer of hers had gotten to him first. The homeless woman didn't consider herself a stalker or mentally crazy, just fixated on getting the young man to notice her.

“Yeah, I was just about to leave from cleaning up in here,” a caught off guard Lonnie responded, hurrying to slide his moist-from-sweat shirt over his head.

“Oh, wow.” The woman looked around, marveling at how clean and organized the once junky room was. She'd been in here getting supplies to clean several times a day and knew what a mess things were. “You did a helluva job in here.”

“Thanks.” Lonnie kept it short and sweet, not interested in having small talk. Unlike several of the women he's come in contact with, this homeless lady wasn't getting smart with him or attacking his character. Yet and still, he wasn't trying to be around her. In his mind, befriending people from a homeless shelter meant he was accepting homelessness as his fate.

Digging the folded up sheet of paper from out of his pocket, he wanted to see what the next task was for him to complete so he could push on. Lonnie saw the flirtatious look in the woman's eyes as well as her attempt to fix her low-grade appearance. Nevertheless, just like he wasn't interested in the swish in her wide hips yesterday, he wasn't taking a second glance at her today.

“All right, stay up, and I'll see ya around,” Lonnie told her, then got ready to dismiss himself.

The desperate-for-attention woman, not wanting the conversation to end, quickly moved into Lonnie's path so he couldn't walk out of the tiny closet. “Um, so, do you work here, volunteer here, or what?” She'd ask him anything to get him talking.

The furthest thought from the homeless woman's mind was the old adage “be careful what you wish for.” She never thought she was barking up a slightly deranged boy's tree. From the outside, Lonnie looked like a normal young man who'd suffered a hardship, yet still was easy on the eye. The homeless woman was even more attracted because while on the streets, she hadn't seen a man on her level worth approaching. That's why a few days after seeing Lonnie, she'd gone out and stolen some clothes from the Salvation Army; and today, finger combed her hair into a Vaseline-slick ponytail. A smile spread across her face when she got young Lonnie to freeze in his tracks. That was the last time the homeless woman smiled.

A pill-infested Lonnie's eyes bucked wide, his breathing deepened, and his mind started playing tricks on him. The homeless woman continued to smile, thinking she'd locked him in with some interest, but was completely and utterly wrong. The perfume she'd managed to borrow off a paid shelter employee's desk and spray over her subtle funk might've been more of a risk than she'd anticipated. When she'd jumped in Lonnie's pathway, he'd managed to catch a whiff of how she smelled, suddenly taking his mind into a dark place of anger.

Had he not swallowed a handful of pills with a swig of beer when the sun rose this morning, or maybe if destiny would've lined his cards up differently and not crossed paths with Kevin in the first place, he wouldn't have snapped on the seemingly innocent woman.

Caught up in the silence instead of the devilish look in wannabe lover's eyes, the woman started to tingle with Lonnie being so close to her. Stepping in two steps closer, she felt his body heat radiating from him and mistook it for horniness building up . . . when it was really pure rage. She couldn't stop making moves when she was so close to getting what she wanted. The woman thought Lonnie wasn't moving because he was open and accepting her gestures. Never once did she think he was listening to the voices in his head.

“Don't be scared,” the woman said her final words.

“I ain't fucking scared of you, bitch,” Lonnie whispered coldly in a raspy voice at the woman.

Had Lonnie not been doped up on pills and experiencing side effects that required him to be locked away in a psychiatric ward, he would've separated the two women. He would've been checked into reality realizing the ruined woman before him wasn't like the women he'd hated and grew a passion of resentment for; but instead, was someone that was interested in him.

With his rough hands wrapped around her tiny neck, he could feel the dirt sliding off as he gripped it tighter and tighter. Slinging her arms in an effort to break free, the homeless woman began losing momentum each split second she was being choked.

“Why in the fuck did you bring your nasty-looking ass in here fucking with me? Huh? Is
this
what you wanted?”

Trying to shake her head no, the woman couldn't move because Lonnie's grip was too tight. She felt her face flushing, about to explode. She tried getting the words “let go” and “please stop” out of her mouth, but she couldn't. In spite of her landing punches to Lonnie's back, head, and even face, she was no competitor to his strength. The womanly parts she was looking to get nurtured were indeed wet, but with warm urine from her pissing on herself. The pungent smell began filling up their small space, but Lonnie's senses were honed in on the fragrance that reminded him of Megan.