Fast Eddie Friday... Is that a spider on your head or are ya just glad to see me?

So last night I'm making the last stop on a new route I'm running. The route starts out in Midtown, runs up into North Central Missouri, and ends back in Midtown. Seven to eight hours of monotony. Towns like Jamesport, Chillicothe, Trenton, and several others too small and forgettable to bother mentioning.  Don't get me wrong, there are moments, little shit that keeps things interesting. My first day on the route I almost head on with some no button having Amish dude in a runaway buggy, for realz. I crest a hill out in the middle of cow country and hear comes fuckin Jedediah up the center of the 2 lane highway in a black buggy being pulled by some plow horse who has seemingly decided to go bat shit crazy and act like he is Secretariat. The rest of the trip that day was uneventful, a series of small towns, bleached out fields, old men in old pickup trucks who think the speed limit is 40 rather than 55 or 60. Fun it ain't. but it pays the bills.

I get back to Midtown and my final stop, night starting to fall. The city is lit up, a beacon welcoming me back to familiar territory. The familiar in Midtown is a long looooooong way from the Amish buggy guys familiar ground. I'm reminded of the vast difference a couple hundred miles can make as I exit my car at my final stop.

I notice her making a beeline for me, walking fast but not particularly straight. She looks like she is doing a slalom run, weaving in and out of those orange cones, except she is the only one who can see them. Stocking cap pulled low over a weave that has seen better days. The fake hair looks like flat dreads. The brown stocking cap and ragged hair extensions look like a giant spider  perched atop her head. As she approaches it dawns on me that she is running the same pattern as the Amish guys out of control horse. It also dawns on me that those hair extensions probably came from a horse. Horse hair, a fine thread that connects two people who could not possibly be more different from one another.

I'm unloading my car while keeping one eye on Crackzilla. Crack  heads really  do remind me of Velociraptors, those medium size carnivores from Jurassic Park. When she gets  about 30 feet away I can hear her repeating something, at first it sounds like she is saying something totally nonsensical. It sounds like she is saying, "Please feed the mice", but as she gets closer I realize she is talking to me, and she is actually saying, "Please be nice".  I give her my best scowl, the one that makes babies cry. The one that says "Fat fuckin chance" to whatever shpeel she is about to run on me. Normally my trademark scowl is enough to squash whatever ploy/plea for money from all but the most determined or high panhandler. It doesn't even faze her.

Like any veteran crack head the eyes are her tell, the thing that gives her away. Bright and a little manic. She looks like  Chris Rocks girlfriend from New Jack City, the one he put his shoe on over a turkey leg. If you've seen the movie you know the scene.  She starts her sales pitch, the one about how she got left behind, stranded by friends or some shit, and I'm already cutting her off as I walk away. I can't say where I was, mainly because I don't want to lose this shitty little job. Ambiguity aside, let me just say that the place is crawling with security guards. So here I am, a load of stuff on a dolly, with a 90 pound boofer trailing me like a cat following a fish monger. (Kudos to me for using the terms  Boofer and Fish Monger in the same sentence) .

I've got no idea what she is saying, she is throwing up words, machine gun fast mumbling, another tell that this whack job is in love with the glass pipe. When she realizes that the "Please be nice" mantra isn't cutting it, she starts screaming. She isn't saying shit at this point, just screaming at the top of her lungs. A cross between pure D fucking crazy and a "I'm being raped" scream. I pick up the pace, walking fast like my feet are on fire and my ass is catching. But you cannot out fast walk a crack head. I don't care if you are one of those Middle age power walker women from JoCo, little pink dumbbell in each hand, swinging your arms like an Indy Avenue hooker, you can't out walk a crack head.

As luck would have it the screams from the Velocicrackster, heh, brings 3 security guards out of their little trailer. They are looking at me like I must have done something fucked up to elicit such a high pitched sustained scream from the woman with the horse hair spider on her head. I give them a look that says, "drop the fuckin donut and get this bitch in check". I'm 20 feet from the entrance of the building, a big pair of automatic glass doors that will separate this crazy dope fiend from my heels, but the security douches block my path to freedom. "Whats going on" asks one of the 3 stooges. It's important that you readers understand, this woman is screaming at the top of her lungs, maybe 2 feet behind me.She is wearing clothes that look like she lifted them from the Nick Nolte character in Down and Out in Beverly Hills. Bag lady chic, finished off with that giant spider arrangement on her head. She is screaming like a stuck pig, my hands are full, dolly in one, big black bag in the other, and this douche bag is going all mall Cop on ME. I resist the urge to ask him if he is an idiot or just mildly retarded. I just look at the guy like he has 3 heads, turn to look at her, then back to him. The wordless exchange lasts maybe a minute and she never stops screaming. The bitch should hook up with the homeless golden voice guy. Get her some singing lessons, teach her a couple of Opera songs, she definitely  has the pipes for opera. They could do a show together, then pop some rocks back at the hotel after the show.

I guess all the screaming finally convinced the stooges that the bitch was nuttier than a payday bar. Stooge one gives me a head nod to go through the glass doors.  I leave the screaming crack head to deal with the three meat heads. when I come back about 20 minutes later they are still surrounding her, she is still screaming albeit not nearly as loud at this point. I already know that this thing will end with her in the back of a paddy wagon headed for the fruit factory.

On my way home it strikes me that the Amish dude would have probably reacted differently if the crack head found her way out to the sticks and approached him for a ride. He probably would have loaded her up in his buggy and taken her back to his farm. The missus would have served her some pie, because the Amish make hella pies. They would have made her a spot to sleep and awoken the next morning to find their butter churn missing along with the horse and buggy.

The moral of this story, if there is one, " You can take the crack head out of the city, but you cant take the".............never mind. There isn't any moral or message, just another typical evening in Midtown.