Reasons why crackheads are not in parades.

If you're not familiar with the town I'm from let it be sufficient to say that like many other towns  it possesses good parts and not-so-good parts. Imagine that your humble narrator and protagonist sometimes used to drive through the lesser parts to get to her abode, which was humble by obvious extrapolation.

Imagine one Friday evening your narrator, that being me, is driving home from work from her second job that was in the ghetto. It's the certifiable ghetto; pizza places will not deliver there. I'm driving home down highway 52 (Which I may interject is still a death trap. Seriously, I have no doubts that my untimely demise occur on 52. The greatest likelihood would be that I was trying to exit Bus-40 onto 52 and some dumb asshole who doesn't understand the concept of merging will be poking along in the right lane and the idiotic asshole in front of me can't immediately get off the exit ramp so they'll just stop, because they're the kind of people that use their brakes on the highway, and I will have to figure out what Dumb and Idiot are doing and die in the process.) and get off onto my exit in the not nice parts of town and while turning onto the 3rd worst possible street in town, I blow a tire at 9:30 on a Friday night.

I'm talking to my mother on my cellular who proceeds to freak that I've blown a tire in the actual ghetto and instead of letting me off the phone immediately to call AAA she does her 'I'm-a-mom-therefore-I-cannot-get-off-the-phone-in-no-less-than-2-minutes' thing and finally hangs up. I call AAA and the fun begins.

Enter crackhead #1.

This crackhead was relatively mild-mannered and may not have been a crackhead at all but this story would be much less dramatic if he wasn't so we're going to assume that he was. The point was that he had a GIANT stick. Seriously this stick was more of a branch and was about 6 feet long. He stops at my car window and asks me if I require assistance and when I say no he moves on along. I was extremely relieved. IT was a significant stick.

Enter crackhead #2.

This crackhead was the annoying one and was an actual crackhead. He smelled like crack. (I know what crack smells like because we went to this bar this one time and my friend turns and looks at me and says 'This bar smells like crack.') By this point I'm currently talking to the AAA operator and explaining that I need someone to come and change my tire. This crackhead just beats on my window to get my attention and I crack the window to speak to him, because I may be a lot of things but rude is not one of them. Well at least not on purpose. Most of the time.

Now I'm currently having 2 different conversations. One, explaining what is going on and what I need done, with the AAA lady and one where I'm fending off the crackhead outside of my car who is telling me that I don't even need to get out of my car. If I'll just pop the trunk he'll get the spare out and change it for me. The AAA operator hears this and says 'Are you in a safe place?' Before I can answer her I say to the crackhead 'No, I'm not going to do that. You're just going to get the tire iron out and beat me to death with it.' The AAA operator then says: 'I'll tell them to hurry.'

Here is where it gets interesting.

I figure I can't just sit in my car and not inform someone that I'm about 3 minutes from death so I make a decision: 'I know, I'll call my dad! He'll come and sit with me until the AAA people come.' This is a brilliant plan.

Except, I'm me and my father is my father. I call him and he answers the phone and I explain to him the situation, mention where I am and that I am literally less than 10 minutes away from him, all the while STILL yelling at the crackhead outside of my window. By this point the crackhead has just lost all shame and has decided to just ask me for money outright. He seems to think that he is entitled to some sort of monetary compensation for staying with me and scaring off the other crackheads. Yes he actually said 'other crackheads,' I'm not making that part up. My father retorts with this jewel: 'Anna, you mean to tell me that you're 26 years old and cannot change a tire?'

I believe I may have said 'Excuse me?' to my father before I said 'Fuck you' and hung up on him. Nothing can deter that man from a blow job, nothing. Most definitely not his child, his ONLY CHILD, the only genetic evidence that he has on this earth, being threatened by a crackhead. I'm sure that the gem of a woman he selected to give him head that evening would have waited on him to go rescue his child. I highly doubt that her mouth was going to fall off in the 45 minutes he would have been gone. But then again he may have been paying her by the hour and he is cheap.

So here I am, with a crackhead, waiting on the AAA people to come and change my tire. By this point we've kind of come to terms with one another and I honestly feel that if we had been given the full 30 minutes that it was going to take AAA to get to my location we really could have become friends. But alas the police showed up and honestly I have never been more grateful to see the cops ever in my life. Up to this point in time this may have been the only interaction with the police where I wasn't arrested or ticketed.

I have a certain irreverence for the local law enforcement and apparently it shows.

The cop gets out of his car and actually has to tell the crackhead to leave me alone. Talk about brazen! Sargeant-major-police man then asks me if I'm alright and informs me that he is going to have one of his rookies come and sit with me until the AAA people come. It seems that the AAA operator called the cops. So they actually are worth at least half of the exorbitant price they charge you every year. Who knew?

Unfortunately the rookie cop wasn't that cute but I was glad to have to have company that wasn't trying to bludgeon me to death with a small tree or a tire iron.

'This is a nice story, but what does all of this have to with a parade?' you say.

I'll tell you what it has to do with a parade. In a parade you have to keep moving and crackheads have the attention span of magpies and stop to see every distraction on the way.

That ladies and gentlemen is why you will never see a parade of crackheads. It wouldn't go anywhere.