Going Down to the River by Doug Seegers

Author:Doug Seegers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2018-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

’Course, my reason for being in that mission didn’t change. While I didn’t mind homelessness, and felt right comfortable sleeping wherever nightfall landed me, I’d gotten there because drugs and alcohol controlled my life. Whenever I got a little money, either by playing on the street or flying a cardboard flag at an exit ramp, my priority was a couple of crackers (street slang for crack) or a juice joint (a marijuana joint sprinkled with crack). Food, shelter, and clothing all came later. The mission wouldn’t let you in if you carried contraband, so if I’d scored a hit or two, I’d roam between what you’d call crack houses. They were my friends’ places that happened to be where drugs were sold and used, and where addicts sometimes crashed.

By that time, I’d learned a whole new language. P-funk was crack and PCP smoked together; base, gum, candy, and balls all referred to crack; sheetrock was a mix of crack and LSD; and snowcaps were prime stuff—cocaine sprinkled over marijuana bong hits. Ludes, crank, tar, O, and ex hadn’t changed in decades. Neither had the word junkie, which is what I’d become.

One day I dove in a dumpster and, after sifting through some soggy cardboard, rotten cantaloupe, and black lettuce, I found an old tent, which was like striking gold. There’s some woods off Fifty-Fourth Street near Sylvan Park down by Richland Creek. They got a golf course nearby. But just north of that are some lowlands. I put that tent up and lived there a good long while until the cops ran me in for vagrancy. Then I lived in jail, eating county food, making new friends, and getting sober. Most of the people in local lockup were there on drug charges, so we had a lot in common. The clang of a cell door no longer jarred me. I found it soothing. It was an opportunity to meet new people, clear my head, get some hot food, and maybe make another contact or two for drugs when we got out.

When I was released from that stint, the tent was gone. So I wandered to the other side of the highway and found a dry culvert behind a Walmart near the Cumberland River. That made for a great house. Walmart threw out a king’s load of stuff. I found an old mattress behind an apartment complex, along with a blanket and some hardware, which was perfect. I hauled all of that into that culvert. Cool and quiet, its only problems were the smells mixing out of the river and restaurants and the fact that you got washed out every time it rained. Snakes wriggled down there in the summertime, and any food I brought was bound to attract rats. But the cops left you alone down there. That became home for quite a few months until the weather turned and I had to haul it back to the mission to keep from freezing to death.

Between the culvert and the nearest library stood a woodshop called Cliff’s Cabinet Company.

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