Keystone Homeless

“I pulled into Nazareth feeling ’bout half past dead…
Hey mister can you tell me where a man might find a bed…?”
— The Weight by The Band

Out I stumble late afternoon one sunny and officially unemployed early February afternoon, on my way to my late afternoon walk, leaving my PC and the stale apartment space behind.

I reached the bottom of the stairs from our third-story apartment and began the short trek across the striped asphalt of the apartment complex parking lot to toss the trash. Then I see two guys carrying a pretty nice looking, mostly pale blue, mattress out of the dumpster area.

They were holding it lengthwise and moving at a pretty good clip.

A minute or so later some other guy comes running out from behind the trees and comes streaking across the parking lot at an equally good clip, missing me by a few yards.

The first two and the mattress had disappeared from my sight but the
scraggly bearded dude who’d just missed me was still on their tail,
yelling:

“Hey, that’s my mattress.”

I dropped my sunglass case I’d been carrying as I tried to follow
the emerging scene. In some kind of smartass move apparently designed to show my middle-aged street hip quickness and adeptness at speaking cleverly I parodied, before I could restrain myself:

“Hey, that’s my sunglasses case.”

The scraggly dude cast an angry, unappreciative and uncomprehending backward glance at me as he pursued his bed and the two who’d made away with it.

I don’t know if he himself had spotted it in the dumpster and had planned on absconding with it, or as seems likelier, had already been sleeping on it back there for a few nights before the other two decided to make a grab for it.

In any case I didn’t think it wise, and lacked the energy, to try to catch up with them and never found out any more about it though I remain curious as to the outcome.

Imagine chasing your bed from one dumpster to another. Outnumbered, hungry, and hungry for a bed too.