Tales of the City 08 - Mary Ann in Autumn

summer he worked as a knight at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, but she preferred to believe it had sprung, freshly minted, from his uncorrupted heart.
    She decided not to press him further about the blog. He didn’t read it anyway, and they weren’t on record as being a couple. She could call him her boo or something similarly vague and still do the kind of writing she wanted to do. He was right about the potential for self-consciousness in such an enterprise. It was better just to let the words flow, as she always had, and let Otto be Otto. The less he knew the better, really.
    O N THE WAY HOME TO the Mission, they were stopped at a light under the freeway overpass when a homeless woman in a dirty red tracksuit approached the car with a ragged cardboard sign that read YOUR MAMA WOULD GIVE A DAMN . Shawna wondered how well that actually worked, if most people saw their mothers as pillars of generosity and therefore felt inspired to give. It was original, anyway, and it made her smile.
    She dug around in her bag for a loose bill, with no success. Otto saw what she was doing and pulled out his wallet. “Is five enough?”
    “Make it twenty,” she said. “I’ll pay you back.”
    “She’s a junkie. See those sores on her neck.”
    “And your point is?”
    “I’m just sayin’.”
    Shawna rolled down the window and held out the twenty. The woman took it without a word, then pulled up the leg of her sweatpants so she could stash the offering in her sock. Shawna caught a glimpse of putrid gray flesh, a constellation of sores. The woman’s face, by contrast, was a fiery red-brown, sun-ravaged and grimy. She looked to be anywhere between thirty and sixty. The awful agelessness of the streets.
    “The world is fucked,” the woman announced.
    “You got that right, sister.”
    The woman cackled, showing broken teeth and rotten gums. “You got you a man in there?”
    “I do,” said Shawna, casting her eyes toward Otto. “I got me a man in here.”
    The woman leaned down and spoke through the window. “You be nice to her, ya hear?”
    Otto looked flustered, so Shawna jumped in: “He is. He’s very nice to me.”
    “I had me one for a while.”
    “A man, you mean?” Shawna couldn’t help grinning. The woman might as well have been talking about a parakeet.
    “Yep,” said the woman. “When I was about your age.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “I was prettier’n you, too.”
    “I’m sure you were” was all Shawna could think to say.
    “A whole lot prettier.”
    “Hey, watch it,” Shawna said jovially, “or I’ll take my money back.”
    “You do, bitch, and I’ll cut you.”
    Otto was obviously aghast, but Shawna caught the twinkle lurking deep in the woman’s red-rimmed eyes. “Not if I smack the shit out of you first,” she said.
    This elicited another cackle. “You’re all right, kid.”
    “I don’t know about that .”
    “Nah. You’re my kinda lady. Nothin’ scares you, does it?”
    It was an interesting question. “Not the usual things, I guess.”
    “Good for you. Us girls gotta be brave.”
    “I guess we do, yeah.”
    The woman raised her grimy fist in a show of solidarity with Shawna before trudging farther down the traffic island in search of another handout.
    “How does it get that bad?” Shawna asked Otto.
    He just shrugged. “Heroin.”
    “That can’t be all of it.”
    “You’d have to ask her.”
    The light changed and Shawna drove away. She felt a shameful rush of relief as the woman grew ever smaller in the rearview mirror. That’s why the homeless beg at stoplights, she thought. It’s as much for us as it is for them. We’re shielded from the horror by glass and steel, and we can make a clean break as soon as the light changes.
    “She was nice,” Shawna offered.
    “It’s her routine. It’s part of signing.”
    “Signing?”
    “That’s what they call it. When they hold out those signs.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because I work the streets, too.”
    She snorted. “The mean streets of Pier 39.”
    “She’s living for the next fix, so she does what she has to do.”
    And we drive on, thought Shawna. We drive on and do nothing .
    “What’s the matter?” asked Otto.
    “Nothing. Everything. She said it herself: the world is fucked.”
    “You wanna go back? Offer her a hot shower and a place to sleep?”
    Otto knew the answer to that already.
    “I could write about her,” Shawna said feebly.
    Otto gave her a sly sideways smile. “And who would