Decency on Albert Street

I was sitting at the bus stop at 2am reading a book about Kurt Cobain and I was sad, not because he’d died but because no matter how much we’d like to we can’t force our life to overlap with someone else’s.
My feet hurt from an eight hour shift at the bar.
Out of the impersonal city night a woman appeared.
She was what people meant when they said raving lunatic.
Her hair was crazy and her eyes looked in two different directions.
She was in my face.
She gibbered about being beaten and how she needed to get to Grey Lynn.
I thought:
Schizophrenic?
Battered woman?
P addict?
All three?
She snarled and her teeth were a mess but I was drained not scared.
Because I’m stupid sometimes I opened my wallet and flagged down a passing taxi.
I offered the driver all my under the table pay to take the madwoman to Grey Lynn but he said no and drove off.
Fuck I was tired.
A yawn swelled in my throat.
Where was the decency?
In me?
In the people who weren’t at a scummy bus stop with a woman who smelled of vomit?
In Grey Lynn?
Or nowhere?
The city was so big and the taxi was speeding away and there was nothing I could do to help that woman.
She babbled at me and shouted “fuck you” and rushed off rounded a corner.
Then I was alone.
On the bus home to the Shore I reopened my book but was interrupted by a guy who kept looking at me and finally shifted from sitting with his friends to sitting next to me.
He asked was he making me nervous and I said no, which was true.
He told me his name was Manny and that we’d been in the same class when I was Form One and he was Form Two.
I remembered him and we small talked for a bit and then he moved back to his friends.
Kurt’s suicide note read “peace, love, and empathy.”
That night I managed edgy tolerance and ambivalence at best.
I quit that job soon after.
The hours were exhausting and I ended up with a bad kidney infection.
It just wasn’t worth it.