Crib Notes
-Street kids in Tempe are almost all white, aged 14 to 26. A few grew up in the Valley, the rest are from points across America. Most drink and smoke pot, and roughly half are junkies who picked up the needle once they were on the streets, not before. They call modern society "Babylon." A lot of them carry knives or bludgeons, and a few are dangerously violent. The more innocuous majority are merely walking image problems for downtown Tempe.
-"Pat," she says when he returns, "Pat, I dropped the dope."
"What?"
"I dropped the dope when we ran away! I'm sorry."
Pat blows her off.
"It was just some pot. Don't worry about it."
"No, I had a piece in there, too."
Now she has Pat's full attention.
"You had more heroin?"
"Yeah, I broke some off earlier. I was saving it for us."
"Like a surprise?" Pat reaches out and strokes her hair. "Oh, baby, that's so sweet."
-While they were gone, Zach flew off on a tangent about how it's possible to time-travel if you inject enough crystal meth, and how he knows because he used to have a sugar daddy in San Francisco who kicked him down a gram of speed a day. "All I had to do was let him suck me off."
-""What happened at Salvation Army?" Cisco asks.
"Some tweaker asshole," Smokey says. "He came up on Marcia right after she took her pants down to pee, and he wouldn't go away, so I was like, 'Whap, whap, whap.'" Smokey punches air: right jab, left jab, right cross. "The guy's sunglasses were all broken and sticking in his face. It was funny."
-Spam takes a hardy schwill, then sniffs an armpit and says he needs a shower, bad. "It's not the funk," he says. "I don't mind the way I smell. It's that my arms are black." Spam pulls one sleeve of his hoodie up to reveal a forearm caked with dirt. "Man, I hate it when I get this dirty. I'm gonna have to soap that shit up three times to get it off."
-Now he's a street junkie, and likes it that way.
"I could be in college right now if I wanted. But I've played that game, and I realized that this Babylonian, societal paradigm of a sorry excuse for what we call civilization is a bunch of bullshit." Chris spreads his arms and circles them in the air. "These are the last days of Rome, man. The fiddle player's warming up, you know what I'm saying? And when all this shit comes crashing down, it's the street kids who will build a new world. We're the cockroaches."
-Spam warns everyone he's about to take off his shoes, and then he does. Phinius recoils from the stench.
"Hey," Spam says, "sneaker rot is bad, but at least I don't have bugs." Cherokee and Phinius agree bugs are the worst. "It's getting so you have to check somebody's dreds before you give them a hug," Spam says. "Body parasites freak me out."
-"My crack sometimes gets lined with feces", says Milkbread, "yea, it gets a little uncomfortable, but I'm not a dude who's looking to give anal."