2:30 A.M. somewhere in Midtown........................

About once or twice a week I just cant seem to get to sleep. I could smoke xanax through a bong filled with warm milk, and still I probably couldn't get to sleep. Tonight was different, I just felt restless, not content to sit and watch TV until I got tired. So I did something I haven't done in a while, I took a ride.



So , while it's all fresh in my mind, I'm going to take you for a ride through midtown at 2 O'clock on a Wednesday morning. I drove south down main from Armour. The usual suspects were loitering outside the Shell station where a guy was shot and killed last week. Three black guys and a white woman, all painfully thin, huddled in a circle deep in conversation. A conversation that no doubt revolved around procuring some more crack.



I kept going south on main, cutting over to Wornall. I got as far as the stoplight on the south end of loose park. That's when I saw act 2 of this late night variety show. I was sitting at the light waiting to turn left, when I see him. He walks out of Loose park and crosses the road. A middle aged white guy in a normal brooksider uniform, khakis and Polo shirt. Whats odd is that he has walked out of the middle of the park, in the middle of the night, he stands in the middle of the street and looks around like he doesn't know how the fuck he got here, or where here is. He makes me ten times more nervous than the 4 crack heads.



I turn around and head back through the plaza. I turn up Broadway heading for home, and it's like all of the late night street dwellers have converged along Broadway. A bus stop shelter to my left is a makeshift motel room for some homeless person. I cant tell if it is a man or a woman, just a lump of clothes and what look like trash bags, poor mans Samsonite luggage. Two middle aged black guys are sitting in the bus stop shelter directly across from the lump of clothes person. They are laughing and bullshitting, it's almost like looking in to someones living room, and in a way I guess it is exactly that.



A block or two before turning off of Broadway for home, near the Uptown Theater, I see the last player in the final act of this story. A black guy in a wheelchair is flying down the sidewalk. His wheelchair is really hauling ass for a wheelchair. And it's not one of those fancy racing type wheelchairs. This guy is in a shitty old wheelchair, one front wheel is flapping back and forth like a bad grocery cart wheel. The guy has long arms, and he is pumping away at full sped. he has a do rag on and the long material on the back is lifting a little from the wind. I see him in the rear view mirror as I turn for home, still flailing away at his wheels.



That's it, I don't know how all of this translates, maybe you just had to be there. As strange as it sounds , it's a little comforting to take a late night ride, find that you aren't the only person who cant sleep, and take guilty solace in knowing they are a whole lot worse off than you are.