Another good part.
“I’m never doing that again,” Clark said, staring at the thirteen dollars he held in his hand.
“It’s not for everybody,” Charlie admitted. “Personally I hate panhandling. It offends my pride in ways that digging through a dumpster doesn’t.”
“Then why did you make me…?” Clark asked. It had been humiliating asking people for money and in five hours he’d only gathered thirteen dollars. That was less than minimum wage.
Panhandling is a tough way to make money. I have a friend who tried panhandling to make money for gas so she could get to job interviews, and it isn't an experience she wanted to repeat. People can be rude and judgmental (and even violent), and panhandlers get hassled by the cops a lot.
Dinner apparently consisted of slightly stale bread and donuts.
“They just throw this out?” Clark asked.
“Bakeries are great places to get food,” Charlie said. “They have to have everything fresh or people won’t buy it.”
I don't know if it was the case everywhere, but there were bakeries in the 80's that, instead of throwing out the slightly stale baked goods, would sell them at a "day-old bread store" for considerably less (my mom bought our bread at such a store for years; I never could tell the difference between day-old and fresh). After that, it went in the dumpster (though it was still edible; bread could sit in bags in my family's kitchen for a week or more before it would get moldy).
“A lot of the crazy guys see things and hear voices,” Charlie said. “Schizophrenia. They can get pretty paranoid. There’s medications now, but sometimes they aren’t pretty.”
The side effects of psychiatric drugs can be unpleasant. There are better drugs now than there were 30-some-odd years ago, but they can still have side effects that can make a person stop taking them (plus some of the newer ones are very expensive, so if you don't have insurance or your insurance doesn't cover them, they can be unaffordable).
Clark nodded. School had at least been a shelter for him; he’d enjoyed learning and even when things weren’t good at home, teachers appreciated and encouraged bright students. At times those strokes to his ego had been the only affection he’d had.
Sad but true. There was a kid who used to hang out in the school library who never wanted to leave because, he said, I was one of the only people who was nice to him.
Charlie wheezed and said, “There’s a Mexican street gang that rides around in trucks grabbing the easy pickings and pushing the rest of us around.”
They reached the next intersection and Charlie said, “Turn!”
It was too late. As Clark turned the corner, the lights of the vehicle were already all around them.
The truck behind them accelerated, its engine roaring to life as the men in the vehicle tried to run them down.
What a cliffhanger!
