15.
Pulling into the parking lot of the
South Philadelphia Sheraton, a person is usually struck by the unlikely
combination of the landscapes comprising the neighborhood. The hotel sits close to a 4-lane highway that
parallels the Delaware River, across which you can see the murky land of New
Jersey. There is an empty derelict
button factory across the highway, spooky to pass by on foot because it is full
of howling ghosts. But right next door
to this abandoned building is Penn's Landing, a festive combination of
fairgrounds, shops and restaurants intended for tourists. People seldom walked on the sidewalks in this
stretch of the city -- the parking structures fed directly into the shops and
fairgrounds, but if one were to stroll alongside the highway, one would come to
an area of gas stations and discount stores with their signs written in
Spanish, eventually bleeding into a recently gentrified neighborhood, to the
east, and to the west, a little park nobody but homeless men and women sat in,
a larger-than-life sized bronze statue of a group of bedraggled Irish
immigrants prominent in the park's center.
The view from the window of the
hotel suite they shared was, they agreed, different from anything you'd see in
L.A. Both men were incredibly tired, but
Molly felt restless. Because Richard was wary of seeming too authoritarian, he
didn't tell her how uncomfortable it made him to imagine her walking around by herself
or going to the event occurring at the Landing, so she put her shoes back on
and went out, and all he said was, “Be careful, honey.”
The
event was a carnival, a beautiful and melancholy sensory overload; she wished
she were walking through all the brightly colored lights and youthful shouts
with a boyfriend, and she also sorely wanted to find someone safe-looking to
buy weed from.
She found this person sitting alone on a bench
near the portable restrooms, smoking a joint and whistling an old song Molly'd
always loved about being lonesome enough to cry.
"Hey, hi.
Are you selling any of that?"
Molly gestured at the joint with a nod.
"Uh, yeah, I could be, I guess. You're not from around here, are
you?"
"Nope, why? Do I stick out like a sore thumb?"
"No.
It just seems like I'd know you already if you were from here. Plus, I forget my address right now, I'm so
bombed I can hardly make my hands open and close. If you were from around here, I could just describe
my neighborhood to you and you'd probably know how to find me. See, all the pot is at home but I'm not going
home for awhile. I'm meeting up with
people here in a little while. I'm not
much or a drug dealer, huh? My boyfriend
and I just broke up and he grows pot,
and he owes me a lot of money, but he said all he could do right now is give me
some of his weed, if I wanted it " -- while Molly listened, she watched
the young woman's lips, which were painted into the shape called
"bee-sting" lips," the way silent film actresses used to have
their makeup painted on -- "and really, I didn't want it, but I had to
take something from him, you know?"
"Oh.
Yeah. So, I don't know what it's
like here, like the price for pot. Where
I'm from it's usually $40 an eighth. Is
that, uh....?"
"Sure, sounds good to me. I mean, I could give it to you free,
really. But you just have to wait for me
to get home, it'll be a few hours. Here,
give me your phone number."
