Santa Maria, Santa Muerte

I walked through the desert in the cloudy dawn. on the early bus I met a woman whose brother had beaten their mother to death with a statue of the Virgin Mary in south tucson last October. She also told me her son had been shot in the head with a 45 and survived. the bullet had passed through his head in one temple and out the other and the son is now blind. she has five kids and the father is in prison. he had been very abusive. he wouldn't let the kids go to school because he knew they showed evidence of constant violent abuse. the woman was on methadone. she'd been able to get clean since the baby dad got put away. he'd been keeping her strung out as a means to control which is an old school pimp move. not in the manner of cool pimps depicted in popular culture. like a real pimp. her new boyfriend is jealous and possessive and also very needy and immature. her sister lives in a house above an old burial ground and she thinks it is haunted. we talked for about an hour on the bus, she was taking her daughter to the doctor, she was working on taking care of her kids now and she had child protective services checking in because one of her children had a tooth abscess. she doesnt let the new boyfriend around the children. she has trust issues for some reason.

after I talked to her I went into south tucson for breakfast. there were a lot of police cruising around and police and public work trucks and heavy equipment were involved in clearing out homeless encampments. the guy at the catholic worker house where I went for breakfast thinks the police need to repent. at about 29th and 4th I saw two cop cruisers and a cop suv in an old vacant lot with a public works truck and a piece of heavy equipment. I cant always remember the names of heavy equipment. this was like a bucket loader I think. there were some cops standing around a dumpster interacting with a guy who was in the dumpster trying to sort through some stuff that the public works guy had put in there with the bucket loader. I stood and watched and ate my sandwich while listening to my audiobook, absalom absalom by William Faulkner, one of my favorite novels. It has aspects of attic tragedy. the kind of stories where men beat their own mothers to death with statues of the Virgin Mary. I thought about the woman I'd talked to. she'd told me many other things. sometimes people just give you everything they have. not in the material sense, but in the sense of real possessions of value. feelings, memories, the stories of their lives. she'd been abused growing up. I know who she is now, and I looked up the story in the news about her brother and her mom. I believe her about the other things which I wont share here. im used to talking about things like this with a lot of people and have in some sense become a walking encyclopedia of other people's traumas. it is different when someone says it when looking in your eyes or taking you by the hand. it isnt like watching tv or reading a post online. I dont know. flesh is flesh is flesh. her boyfriend had called her on the phone and said he'd overslept and was mad at her for not being his mother. he seemed terrible.

the cops were all over south tucson, cruising every block and establishing a presence. most of the time you cannot get them to show up without a two hour wait even if you have been stabbed in the parking lot of the police station itself. this is an important holiday weekend. the catholic worker house I went to is named after the Virgin Mary, or as we call her, Guadalupe. the woman whose mother had been murdered told me that her brother had been praying to Santa Muerte. I told her I burn Santa Muerte votive candles but that I am not violent. the discourse I see online about trauma and homelessness tends to ring hollow to me and yet here I am posting about such things so maybe im a hypocrite. ive had to restart my huge writing project from scratch because the real shit takes time or something. I dont even know. anyway im thankful for the food. my stomach is full and I still live indoors when I want. I hope the weather cools down. it should. the sky wept a great deal today. and with good reason.