"I Just Got Out"

I left the Downtown L.A. Men's Central Jail release tank, holding cell, or whatever they call it, and walked the short distance to a tiny nook around the corner, I guess it was, and just about near to getting toward the final locked door out. We were instructed by the deputies to keep our mouths shut and just keep going so we could rush it. Even so, some idiots still had to muck it up with their childish foolishness.
When I finally reached the outside air, sometime after 1 AM, it was cold. I was only wearing a t-shirt, because I was arrested in the middle of spring, and now, it was the end of winter. I shivered. My feet were numb in rubber flip flops.
I felt like I wished I could smoke a stick of medicinal marijuana. Some might think of women; i.e. sex, or food. I thought of my health first...
I homed in to North Broadway, and noticed it always held the same feeling for me, each time I experienced this in the past. Only now, I wasn't getting the same feeling in the same way I had done at other times. I made a concerted effort to force the feeling to come and overwhelm me, but the sensation eluded and resisted me.
I walked to the Gold Line Light Rail station in Cypress Park and fell asleep in the grass behind the Lacy Street Animal Shelter. In the morning I sat behind the Home Depot, at the "Day Labor" center, looking for a meal because I was so hungry, and had not eaten anything wholesome in a very long while. The Italian Church on North Broadway, St. Joseph, serves the hungry at the Home Depot Day Labor Center. I ate cold chicken, rice and beans. It was good, and that was enough.
I didn't have any plans to look anyone up, or go and visit anyone in particular. I only wanted get to a place where I hoped I could lay down and sleep a day or two, in relative peace and security. My chosen place are the empty hillsides above Highland Park, Hermon, Eagle Rock, El Sereno. Off the beaten track places. And retreat to the lonely places, like the bible says our good Lord used to do.
I decided to go to the local catholic parish for free paper bag "sack lunch." It consist of a small can of Vienna sausages, an apple, a children's juice container, a tiny box of raisins, and small plastic bottle of OJ. I can snack on this later, when I need to eat again.
Well, I just got out.
No where to go, really. No place.
Tomorrow the catholic church in Eagle Rock will serve a really great meal for the poor. Hope Dinner...
I can ride the DASH Bus for a quarter.
I don't wish to talk to any of my so called friends just yet. Most of all because I really couldn't count on them much when I needed them more than ever. So, consequently I am not very eager to take up any past associations, just yet.
Besides my real friends make themselves known in very concrete, and unmistakable gestures, and in so many ways, I do not feel friendless at all. To the contrary, I know I have friends all along then way, in many different, far apart places. I know people who are in opposite sides of the country. People I have shared the road with. People I will never forget.
When I die I am sure I will see a lot of those friends again in the after world. I hope so. I miss them a heck of a lot. We are what we call Family, after all. That means more on the street than anywhere else. Only God knows how much we love each other out here.
We eat, sleep, fight, survive, together, in a common existence of shared destitution that flings us tightly against one another, in a  topsy turvy world only the put down can relate too.
The so-called good people never have had to, so they have never been there, and don't know. The church people are too busy doing the work of God to understand. The regular people know, because they live along side us during the day. They see us around at the same places they go too.
A guy I know called out to me from across the street, "Hey Rev! Salvation is free. Aint it?"
"Yes it is," I told him.
"But the cost is so great. Because each day everyone of us has to take up his own particular cross, and that is a heavy and hard thing."
"Yeah," he says. "That's true MOG, but Jesus pays."
"I guess, but oh! Jesus paid a high price!"
At the end of the day, I could feel the cold come in again, very positively. I shivered, rattled and hummed. That's because my Native American friend, Cowboy hooked me up and now I don't have to worry about my yerba medicina.