Spit
I got spit on while I was walking down the street, going home after a bad date with the son of a guy who wrote a book that got turned into a movie that was way more popular than the book. And a homeless guy spit on me. It landed on my shoulder. It was red and it stank so badly that I gagged.
What the fuck, I said.
Bitch, he shouted. Then he turned the corner and was gone. And I hadn’t even done anything! Except I might’ve clutched my purse a little tighter when I saw he was walking towards me. But he’d spit on me, so if I was in the wrong, he was too.
I stopped at a stupid microbrewery on the street and called the unknown writer’s son. I pretended to cry so that he would come buy me a beer. The date had been bad, but suddenly seemed less bad in retrospect, in the way that you miss bad things because you forget just how bad they really were. The writer’s son showed up in two minutes and while he was paying, he asked me what happened. His breath smelled like mint when he bent down towards me, like he’d just popped some gum.
I don’t know, I cried. I didn’t tell him about the purse clutching part. If he could tell there weren’t actual tears coming out of my eyes, he didn’t say anything and he still slept with me that night, kissing exactly where the homeless guy’s red spit had been.
The next day, when we walked to go get breakfast, I saw the same homeless man busking on the corner and finally got a good look at him. Blonde, young, tan, skinny: all things that would make a desirable woman, except for the unbrushed tangle of hair and the dirt-packed skin. I could see that really, he was just a boy, and that his fingers trembled while they picked at his skin. I pointed the boy out to the writer’s son. He put his arm around my shoulders, like his skinny ass was going to do anything. I pushed him off.
And when I told this story to my roommate, she held up one hand when I said “homeless” and said, do you mean a member of the unhoused community? Her eyes were red because she’d been smoking from her weed pen, sucking on it like it was a smokey popsicle, so I knew that soon she’d been incoherent and laying on the floor and I’d wake up in the morning and she’d be pissed that I hadn’t dragged her into bed.
What’s the difference? I asked. I didn’t care what the difference was, really, but I could see the effects of the weed as she mumbled. Her mouth, her thin lips, opened and closed like a black hole and the words she was saying weren’t real words, but regurgitated words from her therapist’s Twitter account. She ended with: Don’t they deserve our respect?
Okay, I said. I respect the member of the unhoused community that spit on my shoulder yesterday.
I called the writer’s son and asked him, “is homeless a slur?” and we laughed at my roommate for being such a pussy. But when we hung up, I realized that maybe I didn’t want to have the same opinions as the writer’s son, so maybe my roommate was right. When I went to the kitchen, she was sulking at the counter. I knew what she was going to say. She was going to say, you couldn’t have helped me into bed last night? I wasn’t going to start the conversation so I opened the fridge and took out some of her vegan sausage and wondered which issue she’d bring up first.
You couldn’t have helped me get to bed last night? she asked. She never said anything about the vegan sausage.
I saw the homeless guy, the unhoused guy, the skinny blonde boy, one more time. We passed each other on the sidewalk again right in front of a big mural with two Gatsbian eyes staring over us. I clutched my bag to my side again and put a hand up to block my shoulder. My gaze flickered at him just for a second, only to see if he was looking at me. We passed each other, and I released my bag. When I breathed in, I could smell sweat and piss, but also the scent of something earthy and mint gum and my roommate’s vegan sausage.
ELENA NEGRÓN is an emerging writer with an MFA from the University of California, Davis. She has been previously published in Glass Mountain and The Trinity Review. She lives in Puerto Rico and is completing her first novel.