No. 18
For breakfast I rustled up two cups of coffee, brewed over a spoonful of instant, and two bowls of assorted dry cereal, poured out from the bottom of a bunch of almost empty cartons. Okay. The cereal was a little stale, but who cares if you've got milk. Right? Sometimes I can sound like a fucking commercial. So Granny stuffed her sleeping bag back into some expandable netting and then spent the rest of the morning in my bathroom cleaning herself up while I danced around waiting to take a piss.

"Come on in," she said. "I don't care."

"Don't look."

"Are you out of your mind? I'm behind a shower curtain."

I pissed, brushed my teeth, and washed up. By the time I got dressed, the water had stopped running, but she was still futzing around in the bathroom.

I decided to sit down at the computer balanced on a snack table outside the kitchen.

"You ready?" she asked after I had almost finished checking my email.

"Huh?" I couldn't believe it. Cleaning up had done things for Granny that I couldn't have imagined. While before she had been some indiscriminate age, a raunchy gnarly thing curled in upon itself, now she appeared radiant, a woman in her late thirties, and her light brown hair; well, it almost had sheen. I was glad to see she was no longer wearing several layers of multi-colored shorts, now dressed in a black shirt with a stained red top, clearly rescued from some Goodwill sale pile.

"Stop looking at me," she said, throwing her bag over her shoulder. "Let's get going. I'm not use to being in one place."

So we walked up the side of the house, past the recyling bins. I saw a man going through my bottles. He looked familiar. "Say, don't I know you from somewhere?" I asked. He was this black guy. All I knew was that he was built like a line-backer.

"I've never seen you before in my life," he said, holding up an aluminum orange soda can.

"Yes, now I know where I saw you. You were the ticket taker at the movies up the street the other night."

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Nothing much. I remember you bumped in to me."

"Hi, Clyde."

"Hi Granny."

"You two know each other?"

Granny nodded. "I know a lot of people."

"So you got yourself a place to stay last night," winked Clyde.

"You can think whatever you want to think."

"Say, you look good cleaned up," he laughed.

"Clyde and I have done street time together," she explained to me. "But right now he's holding down more jobs than you can count on two fingers."

"Three right now," he said. "Going through the recyling bins is a sideline. I work at the theater in the evening, the laundromat across the street in the afternoon, then I haul off the glass whenever I can, and get five cents a bottle."

"I'll probably see you in the theater lobby real soon," she said. "selling newspapers. But in the meantime, I'm going with a couple of these bums to build a mass movement."

"Anything I can make money at?" he asked. " I need time off from one of my jobs."