Joan

 

She’s fed black junkies their dope for years, ever since her father died, working two jobs sometimes three to meet the demand, as haunted by the power company as the pushers, both of whom threaten to cut her off if she didn’t pay.

She was the only white woman within 20 blocks of a church that called her a whore because she took black men as lovers.

She minded the church goers no more than she did the pigeons, perhaps caring for the pigeons more since she – taking Biblical verse to heart – spread bread crumbs in the park for them to feed.

The junkies and pigeons need her, she told me during one of my jogs up the riverside. She said she wants to help cure their pain, though more than once she’d told me how much she hates the junk the junkies shove into their veins and how it ruins the men she professed to love.

“Better a bus run over them than they get started on that stuff,” she said.

And yet each time one of them begged for her to give them the junk they craved, she reached under the mattress for the money to buy it for them, working her three jobs to pay the junk man, marrying some of the men when they get ready to die, she sitting at their bed side holding their hand until – like the pigeons in the park – they fly away.