mystery bag

Tommy's biking up Sunset back to his van when he sees it: just north of 3rd, a blue gym bag is sitting on the sidewalk outside the Gold's parking lot, attended only by the water bottle beside it.

He slows down, coasting by it, taking a real good look. A guy in a white pickup is idling in the spot next to it. He stops at the corner of 4th, sits on the curb, and rolls himself a cigarette, watching.

Eventually, the pickup pulls out of the spot. Tommy finishes his cigarette. He stands up off the curb, stomps it out on the cement. He gets back on his bike, pedals over, and real casual, like it was his that he just forgot there, hoists it onto his shoulder.

Around the corner, back at his van, he undoes the single zipper down the middle of the bag. It's a beach bag, he can see that now, not a gym bag. A couple towels and a blue and white Coleman cooler. The cooler is huge for Tommy--he uses them to keep his henna oils cool down on the beach. His insulin too.

He pushes the button on the side and slides back the lid of the cooler. An ounce of weed inside.

This is really huge. Not because Tommy smokes. He does. But it's huge because it's something people want.

People in Tommy's community live incredibly symbiotic lives. They rely on each other for company, for shelter, for meals, for transportation, for a place in the shade to sit and rest, for entertainment, for help carting the henna stand to the beach, for work, and for little pleasures like coffee and cigarettes and a couple hits from a pipe.

Since Tommy's van stopped running--eight months ago--he's been in need of a lot more help than he can give back. Every Monday morning, he has to recruit at least four people to help him push his van across the street and back. Every time he wants to work, he has to find someone to help him wheel all the supplies for his henna stand six blocks down to the boardwalk. Every time he wants to sit and kill some time in the lot at Rose, he has to find someone who will let him sit in their van.

So he goes down to the lot at Rose. Fine, first he smokes a little himself. Bu tthen he goes down to the lot at Rose. He smokes out Mario, who's been helping him push for five months. He smokes out Happy, whose bus he often sits and watches movies in. He smokes out Tony, who helps him get all the supplies from his stand down to the beach.

Before, when his van worked, Tommy used to have his own hangers-on. He'd buy Roger coffees and let him sit in the shade of his van, throw him a couple bucks for helping cart his start to and from the van. Bust for the last eight months, he's had nothing to offer. He's been the hanger-on. And it's cost him.

Just the other day, he was sitting on the steps of Mario's van, not even all the way inside it. Mario stepped over Tommy, trying to get some air. He caught the edge of Tommy's foot, which threw him off balance, and he stumbled down the stairs, almost slamming his broken arm against the car in the next spot.

"Tom, you're in the fuckin' way," he said. So Tommy slinked off to smoke a cigarette at a bench on the edge of the sand, by the dumpsters.

So an ounce of weed is huge for Tommy.

I ask him why he thinks it was just sitting there. He shrugs. No idea.

To me, this is the most interesting part of the story--why someone would have left a bag with an ounce of weed in it sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Was someone carrying it and saw a cop and feaked out and dropped it? Was it the worst handoff ever?

Tommy doesn't seem to care why. For him, it's a gift form god, fallen from the sky, offering him a kind of currency that, in his situation, is more valuable than a week's income would have been.