Shocking Berkeley
by Steed Dropout
Aug. 1, 2013
She mooned a fire-truck racing up Durant.
The truck swerved almost hitting a nearby pedestrian.
She stopped me entering 7-11 to ask for a smoke. Then,”would you buy me a cigar on the way out?”
She was perched on the hood of a Berkeley Police car.
She copulated outside a Berkeley business on lower Telegraph.
She will expose herself for a smoke, or small change.
I recently took her pic as she sprawled on the walk.
But she topped all that with blood streaming from face-scares last week. She couldn’t stop picking at her face.
Our brown-shirt Teley ambassador, who patrols the avenue offering assistance, has seen every misery known to life on the street and he was upset about her.
“Can’t something be done?” he implored.
If he couldn’t take it, neither could I.
A press-photographer I know said he had a shot of her martyred face.
One look and I called 911.
After a knock-down drag-out argument with a police dispatcher, I posted a burst of hurt, (our street girl’s and mine).
My pictorial diatribe was just another ship-wreck note lost at sea on Facebook, which should call itself “spit in a bucket.”
I sent the photo and the shipwreck note to our police chief, who responded that he’d “review our records.”
I reviewed my own records only to learn that the dispatcher’s argument was meant to keep me on the phone long enough to provide info for the officer she contacted (off-line) while she was playing me.
This led me to call off my save-our-bleeding street-girl campaign.
I saw her two days later, after she got back from treatment on what she called “the psyche ward.” A police officer had driven her there.
The photographer who took the bloody shot asked me to take down the bloody shot. “I’m uncomfortable seeing the shot” splattered all over Face Book.
Little does he know how little it was seen. My Facebook friends are bots.
I took down the bloody shot.
Then my critics climbed on.
We are shocked, shocked went their beefs—to know you are practicing media exploitation.
You mean like Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Mike Royko, Herb Caen…Steven Crane (“Maggie: Girl of the Streets”)?
How is a poor Berkeley hack like me to survive in an age of Huff?
Excuuuuuuuse me!