You Know We Got Nothing Extra - Camilla Basham

My card box is wet. My cart is minus a wheel. Sometimes it's cool watching the sparks fly when the bare metal hits the pavement, but for the most part, I think I'd rather have that forth wheel. But beggars can't be choosers my Grandma use to say. This morning as I was tending to business on the corner of Divisidero and Haight some asshole stops at a red light and rolls down his window, Instead of giving me something I could use, like a sandwich, cash, or a pack of smokes, the bastard hands me a new piece of cardboard he had ripped off of his new Mac book box and one of those sharpies, you know the kind you tend to pop the lid off of and hold to your nose, desperate to breath in some kind of happiness. As if to say, “Hey dude, I have to see your pathetic face everyday at this fucking traffic light on my way to work, the least you can do is present your case a little more professionally.” Instead of my usual status of "my religion is kindness" scrolled almost invisibly in pencil on an old poster I tore from a store window, making it read, “My religion is kindness, no shirt, no shoes, no service.” I would rather write, “Fucking help me, you asshole, can't you see I am dying here.” Mind you I think my Starbucks cup would get awfully lonely with those words, not that it is overflowing with my current prose.

So why am I telling you all this. Well, this documentary making college kid, Mike, walks up to me this morning while I was procuring the produce bin on the corner of Sansome and Sutter hands me ten bucks and a box of half eaten Chicken Chow Mein in one of those little cardboard boxes with the handle and tells me he'll come back and pay me if I tell him my story, then he hands me a spiral notebook and a pen, the cool kind, not the kind where you have to take the lid off and on, but the kind you click, I love those kind. So here I am. I've got nothing better to do so you can listen or not. It's up to you. I'm use to being ignored.

Just so you know the way my mind works, I look at every inanimate object to decide if it is a) big enough and waterproof enough to live in or b) big enough and porous enough to write on. The take out box was neither, so my next hope was that there was actually food in it, and not some two day old crap that's been rotting in the back of a car when some wise ass thinks, hey, I'll just give it to that bum as they're on their way to get their BMW cleaned. That stuff makes you sick, and taste even worse on the way up.

So this kid Mike says to me, “I need to know how you got here and what you want out of life. Write down some notes whenever you have time.” I almost laughed until I coughed up blood, which these days wouldn't be that hard to do. So while I'm pushing my three wheeled closet containing my most prized possessions, I figured I'd stop now and then and kill the time telling you my story, as long as I make it to Glide in time for dinner. I got there late last night and the women in the hair net told me, "You know we got nothing extra." And let me tell you, those six words kick you the gut worse than any hostile boot.