Muni Mind Reader: The Tweaker

The latest installment in Tiffany Maleshefski’s Muni Mind Reader series peers inside the mental machinations of the so-called tweaker. This is someone we’ve all seen on the bus or on the street and probably tried to ignore. But hey, they’re people too.

Hellloooo fellow bus passengers! Hello! Hi. Hi there. Is that a baby? Is this your baby? HI BABY!!! You like coffee, huh? I HATE YOU. Why is everyone looking at me? HEY DRIVER! IS THIS MY STOP? What is Gavin Newsom doing anyway? DRIVER! Give me my transfer. Yes, I paid you. OKAY FINE! I don’t know why everyone picks on me. Sigh.

Yes! I am the tweaker!

I go from low to high

And I’ll be tweakin’ till the day I die

I was just singing The Who. You know, The Who? Never mind.

There’s a lot that goes through this broken down little brain of mine, and it gets really hard to filter it all. Yeah, most of what I’ve got to say comes out in erratic spurts. So what? Inside, it all sounds different. I wish I could explain to you the jumble of thoughts and feelings that just tear through my body, but I’ve forgotten how. And heroin man, lots of heroin and meth. Dangerous shit, man.

I know I am not nice to look at. My hair once used to be pretty like yours though. Can you imagine? HA! I used to have all my teeth too, and I think I went to school for a little while. That was a nice time. Yeah, school. It’s weird, you think you could tell anyone the story of your life, but sometimes, life takes such a hard turn, it’s impossible, and I mean IMPOSSIBLE, to remember when casual heroin use led to this shit.

Now that you ask, I am not sure why I sit up at the very front of the bus. Sometimes it’s because I like the attention. Believe it or not, when you got as many problems as I do, people want to stay as far away from you as possible. Sometimes that gets me down because I feel like if someone would just pay a little more attention, maybe I could kick this thing. It can be lonely being this fucked up. How many people do you run into in the course of your day that ask, “How are you today?” No one has asked me how I am in years!!

But whatever, that is entirely my problem and not yours. I know sometimes I do weird things like scream, or twitch, or fall asleep across three seats. I know it looks like I am a loser, and really, I kind of am. But MAN you should be impressed I was even able to get on the bus period AND actually remember my route. Come to think of it, I’m in even better shape than those tourists over there who are clearly headed toward the Navy Shipyard and not the Marina. I tried o tell them, but they didn’t listen to me.

Well, it’s time for me to get off now. It’s a relief I know. Not sure where I’ll be going from here or where I’ll wind up. HA! You might never see me again!! Crazy, huh?

Check back next Friday for the next episode of Muni Mind Reader.

Photo by Flickr user Thomas Hawk.