The Midwest Girl hooked up with another Heroin Kid, whose main distinction was he usually wore a dress.

There is an Ave Casualty that is on her second round on the street. Years ago she would frequent the bar, play pool, socialize. A very pretty young woman, she was outgoing, with a quick smile. Drama did not seem to circle her, like it does some young women. Drama chases some women; some invite it. For her it seemed to keep a respectable distance.

Then she stopped coming inside the bar as much, but you would still see her on the street, outside, passing by. She had fallen in love with a Heroin Kid. Maybe she thought she could save him, I don't know. But of course it went the other way, like it usually does: she began to get thin, her eyes became dull, distant. Soon the quickest way to see her was to wander by the Heroin Kids in front of the Sporting Goods store, hoping for spare change from the random pedestrians who hadn't seen all of this before.

Then she disappeared. Which often meant an overdose. However, the word was she left to go back home to the Midwest, to family. Not many happy endings for the Heroin Kids, but this seemed like it might be one of them.

A few years later she returned to Seattle. And was eventually seen on the Ave. She seemed clean, healthy; she had a job at one of the local coffee shops that catered more to the would-be artists than the University students. The woman who ran the coffee shop fell in love with her; maybe she loved her back. Some people said they were a couple, some said the Midwest Girl just spent the night with the woman who ran the coffee shop on occasion.

Then came the Drama. Like Neil Young's Rust, it never seems to sleep. The Midwest Girl hooked up with another Heroin Kid, whose main distinction was he usually wore a dress. With his big boots and scraggly beard. Again, thin; again, eyes dull, distant. When she wore short sleeves you could see infections along her inner arm.

I was having a cigarette outside the bar when she passed by, then stopped. We exchanged pleasantries; she asked for a smoke, and I gave her one. Oh: and she had a nasty black eye.

She explained that she made money sometimes at a private sex club near downtown. She would dominate men, tease them; she would get paid. It was generally safe, she said: there were rules. One of the men broke the rules, and now she had a black eye.

She talked of the sex club as if it were a shift at the coffee shop. This was now normal in her world. Good money. And men broke rules everywhere, really; it happens.

She said Good-Bye, thanked me again for the cigarette, then walked down the street, toward the Heroin Kids. She made it out, once; it was probably too much to think she would make it out again.

- james james