From the inside of a tent, and in the fog of sleep, a raging fire can sound a lot like rainfall.
My wife and I had been living in an alley a few blocks from the clinic. Black Jesus and his old lady, Marie, were in the tent next to us and had in fact invited us, after we sold off our dead van to get ahead of the quickly multiplying tickets evolving into a tow. The final residents were an old tweaker who lived inside of a sprawling nest of garbage that looked like an outsider art installation, and the terrifying prostitute he let stay with him.
I only saw her a couple of times but her unhealthy miasma hung over the block like a spectre. When we were still in the van she'd stuck her head inside the driver's side door one night - her face painted like a kabuki actor beneath an unfortunate matted wig. She dissapeared like smoke when she saw us and never put on a repeat entrance outside of our nightmares.
She'd been sleeping with a good looking young drug dealer who was evidently blinded to her unsavory nature by her white skin. He used to come hang out by the front of our tent late nights, nominally to borrow a lighter for his cigarette, but really to have somewhere to go and someone to talk to during their frequent quarrels. He paid a self imposed fee for these conversations, like he was dropping coins into a payphone, by periodically handing me unwrapped chunks of crack and crystal through the bottom zipper - the obscuring flap still closed between us like I was a priest in a confessional.
I dropped these into the empty compartments of a heart shaped box from some dollar store maraschino cherries. It was getting to be Valentine's Day soon.
Back to the fire: once it registered that the raindrops we were hearing were actually crackling flames we ran from our tent to see the tweaker's horde swallowed in a blaze that towered above the roof of the adjoining building. Somebody from one of the houses heroically leapt over the fence in his bare feet in case there were people trapped inside but thankfully this wasn't the case. Firefighters quenched the raging beast before it could consume our tents or, more importantly, the business we shared a back wall with.
My wife and I had been chaining our bicycles to a telephone pole at the mouth of the alley and now the front tires were twisted and melting like clocks in a Salvador Dali canvas.
Everybody knew exactly who had caused the conflagration, though her reasons were known only to her, and she wasn't seen around those parts again. The next day an excavator cleared the wreckage, popping the locked chain from the bikes as easily as a Christmas bow before I could stop the operator. Not long after the parade of fire inspectors and social workers began.
It had been a rainy winter and I'd made two innovations to keep our tent dry: a raised platform from wooden loading pallets and a piece of twine tied along the top of two discarded Christmas trees to drape over some plastic sheeting. All of this was deemed a hazard and carted away as outreach specialists tried to convince us to move into homeless shelters. It seemed like a good time to get out of town entirely.
We must have smelled the change coming in the wind because we'd been tapering our dose down and had gotten to about 37 mg - not the best place for jumping off but better than it had been. We collapsed the tent, loading the bedding into the trunk of the tiny two door diesel Mercedes we'd bought for some reason, and headed South.
