Last night at the Office Bar, although the karaoke was loud and fun, there was a muted quality to the party, a sense that we were all out past our bedtimes.
Around one a.m. the wife and I left the bar. Keite was in the parking lot, shuffling nervously in her pink leather tube top. She held a plastic bottle of water out to the guy sprawled on the sidewalk.
“Come on, Joe,” she said. “Drink some water.”
Joe made a sound and turned his head. His face rasped on the sidewalk.
“Your friend?” I asked.
“Not really,” she said. A runnel of something dark — spit? blood? urine? — drifted from Joe into the gutter.
“He’s had booze and something else,” said Keite. “Maybe pot, maybe something else. Joe?”
Joe said, “Yshsgs.”
“Joe, I want you to drink this water.” Keite placed the bottle of water squarely on the sidewalk. Joe made no move for the water.
“The guy I came with,” said Keite to us, “left without me. I invited him here tonight, and I think he got tired of waiting for me. I’ll find a ride home,” she said. And her tired eyes brimmed with tears.
I thought of Gilman Street and gutter punks and three-chord rock and I idly wondered how many times Keite had practiced this scene. Random assholes and the women who take pity on them.
“Let’s give you a ride,” my wife said.
“No,” Keite said. “I’ll find a ride.”
We left without her. There are two kinds of people: people who pass out on the sidewalk, and people who take care of them.
I’m neither kind.
