Half a
dozen street kids worked in the front of his place, in a cleared-out
space with a makeshift workbench made from bowed plywood and scratched
IKEA table-legs. It made Alan feel better to watch them making sense of
it all, made him feel a little like he felt when he was working on The
Inventory. The kids worked from noon, when Kurt got back from breakfast,
until 9 or 10, when he went out to dive.
The kids were smart, but screwed up: half by teenaged hormones and half
by bad parents or bad drugs or just bad brain chemistry. Alan understood
their type, trying to carve some atom of individual identity away from
family and background, putting pins through their bodies and affecting
unconvincing tough mannerisms. They were often bright -- the used
bookstore had been full of their type, buying good, beat-up books off
the sale rack for 50 cents, trading them back for 20 cents' credit the
next day, and buying more.
Natalie and Link were in that morning, along with some newcomers,
Montreal street punks trying their hand at something other than squeegee
bumming. The punks and his neighbors gave each other uneasy looks, but
Alan had deliberately put the sugar for the coffee at the punks' end of
the table and the cream in front of Natalie and the stirs by the
bathroom door with the baklava and the napkins, so a rudimentary social
intercourse was begun.
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