The Sweeps.

“I only want the winning ticket. Only sell me the winning ticket, you hear me?!”

Strange hearing my words so clearly—so exactly—echoed in the mouth of the filthy dirty crazy old man with the wild eyes shooting unopened switchblades at the poor clerk with every blink of his eyelashes punctuating his words so ferociously.

I watch the floor. I look for one of his eyes to pop out of its socket.

But that’s not why I’m watching the floor. I don’t even notice immediately I’m not looking straight ahead. How much of these things do you ever want to witness? It’s partly why I keep at least $3 in ones in my pocket. I hate seeing out loud the guilt of my own good fortune.

“Of course, Joe, you know I always do,” the clerk says back.

“Okay, okay, okay,” the old man spits back. Each of his words gets louder until the last one is a literal shout. (It’s just this very moment I’m remembering I even heard his name at all…)

The startling sound of the last “okay” forces a slight jerk upward of my eyes. More likely because what might come next is a need to run away myself. I see him lovingly unwrap several layers of thick plastic baggies and pull out a tiny little black notebook with not a speck of our dirt on it. He pulls out three crisp $1 bills and hands them over to the clerk who then hands him back what I know can’t possibly really be the winning ticket…

And then it’s my turn. I twirl on my toe a little bit.

“I’ll have what he’s having too…only give me the real winning ticket.”

You see I am worthy. I have merit. Today is the day that I win in the sweeps again.

When the clerk takes my $3 and gives me my winning ticket I know that today is the day for sure. Today is the day that the sweeps separate out those of us who truly deserve to win.

When the clerk glances at me with what looks like a glimmer of pity I turn and look around behind me. No one else is there.

“You know I heard they’re doing the sweeps again today…” the clerk tells me with an upturn in voice that makes me think everyone knows how lucky I am today. Today. Today!

“Yes,” I say, “I know…” and I wink. Today is my day. Today I win at the sweeps for sure!

On the way home I see the crazy old man sitting out on his stoop with the edge of his fake winning ticket poking out of his camo jacket pocket. I notice he’s holding the same little black notebook in his hand clasped securely on his left thigh.

I remember momentarily in my memory of those other days before my life really began how the left side of your body is metaphysically connected to your emotions. I wonder what emotions he’s holding onto so tightly on his thigh like that in that little black notebook where his money for his fake winning ticket came from.

I feel a little momentary guilt for knowing I’m so much better off than him.

The neighborhood is buzzing today. The sweeps are supposed to come as a surprise to all of us. See— that’s how they do it. It’s how they truly know who deserves to move ahead in life and who will be held back and lose everything.

I’ve been steadily winning through every sweep. Nothing holds me back.

I have an absolutely winning track record and so far I’ve advanced through two huge sweeps of the entire neighborhood. They say the third time’s a charm…

“What is wrong with you?” my neighbor says with obvious panic, not really asking a question. “Get your shit together. Get it all out of here. Haven’t you heard there’s a sweep supposed to be happening today?”

“Of course,” I reply as I look out and survey all the rising panic around me. Of course.

Winners with real winning tickets have no need to spread panic anywhere.

Ya gotta buy the ticket if ya wanna win the lottery…

The old lady comes by. She’s lost half her hair since they took her away and she came back to us in our neighborhood where they dumped her yet again.

“Didn’t they find you someplace else to go?” I ask her again for the millionth time. I care about her. I really do.

Old ladies should have safe homes to go to. They shouldn’t be dumped in with the rest of us. Old ladies never win on the streets like the rest of us…the winners of multiple sweeps like me.

“Naaahhh…I told them to take me right back where they found me, as a matter of fact,” then she winks at me. “Us winners gotta stick together, right?”

I’m not going anywhere. I will stand my ground today. I’m in this country full of winners and it’s my turn. It’s my turn you hear me?!

Instead of answering the old lady for real because I don’t want to encourage her false hope that she’s actually winning too, I just mumble back casually, “I guess…”

See…I’m young. I’m still younger than the old lady and the crazy old man. I’m young enough still and therefore still invincible. Winners don’t get pulled out easily in a sweep.

Then it starts. It’s sudden this time. So sudden the wind on the ground pushed up by combat-grade boots marching through our neighborhood on all sides actually serves to blow up the flaps of our very doors as they swiftly start sweeping through us throwing all those so-called “personal belongings” that only losers, not real winners like me, cling to into a violently-packed gleaming steel meatpacking dumpster.

They shove the old lady aside and onto the ground in the mud from the rain last night before she even has another chance to even process my answer…I guess…

It’s hard for me to see entirely everything going on around me. It’s also sudden chaos. Is what it is. What’s a little chaos to winners in the midst of a sweep?

There goes a bag of clothes flung out the flapping side window of the home down the block. The clothes hit the air like a nest of squawking seagulls or a pack of disorderly pigeons suddenly scattered into life-threatening disarray.

People all around us are scrambling like a pile of earthworms unearthed from the soil suddenly on the brink of a concrete sewer system. Chaos. But inner chaos can be controlled for winners. Just breathe…

I close my eyes and I sit. On the ground with my legs folded up under me and my arms across my chest. I am a round ball of defensive shielding. I am a protective bubble.

I don’t move no matter how often the mud spatters all around me and on me and even as I breathe in fragments of mud-infested dirty air. I sit still with my breath. I breathe.

When I open my eyes again everyone is gone. The neighborhood has been blasted and ripped and torn apart. Where we live now is flattened into the ground. Fabric foundations flap around loosely in the soft breeze now present after the sweep has swept completely through.

No one is left with me this time. So I hear no crying or wailing of all those losers when they continue to lose any semblance of all they might have left in any form of life as it is now.

Even the old lady looks like she’s finally gone for good this time as I walk through the rubble of makeshift tent stakes and ripped up sleeping bags of what used to be our neighborhood.

Even the filthy dirty crazy old man…but wait…

Covered and sunk into the inevitably uneven cavernous path of mud carved out by all those combat-grade boots ripping and tearing at every sense of any remaining beautiful normal day in your own neighborhood is a corner of a plastic zippered bag. I should just stay here and not touch anything but the irresistible urge to pull it up makes me think this must be my prize left behind. I am the only one left standing here now from the sweep. I am the winner after all.

“200 times I beat my head against the wall and I did not die.”

That’s what’s written— the only thing that’s written— in the anticipatory pages of what has to be the same little black notebook the dirty old crazy man pulled the dollar bills from when he paid the money for his fake winning ticket… Joe is what the clerk called him, right?

So much blank space for life to take up in writing in Joe’s beautiful little black notebook…

There’s also a paper matchbook like some of us collect to remember the places we go and where we’ve been in our lives that went before. I open it up. There’s only three matches left like some holy trinity of fire making ability when the zombie apocalypse finally hits. I laugh in momentary echoes around me. There’s an address.

I know this place. It’s actually down the street from us. Well— down the street from where we all used to live before this sweep swept it all into the earth like a violent angry mob of other people who think they have the power to just steamroll through our lives like that.

I stroll down the street— parade myself like royalty actually. I am the remaining winner in this bloody muddy violent mess of a sweep.

How is it that you can see all the contours of a crumbling place— all the concrete piled up all around with all the ferociously overtaking assorted weed allies— and miss what stands out at the same time? How is it that we let ourselves become so numb to the growing devastation in the wake of our own economic failings on the faces of abandoned buildings and no longer played on basketball courts that nothing stands out anymore?

I just shake it off. Not me. My grandma taught me how to move through life noticing things and loving people (even the desperately clinging losers…) so that I always find a penny, often a whole quarter on the ground, everywhere I go.

In the metaphysics of my life before, someone once told me it was spirits leaving money out for me to tell me there was a big pot of it in front of me. Telling my fortune for me…the spirits.

I’ve always known how lucky I am compared to others. What it means to be college-educated, to come from an otherwise middle class family in all the socially acceptable right shades of skin. So much more fortunate than folks like the old lady. I am always a winner.

There, underneath a pile among all the other lookalike piles of rubbled-up concrete in this crumbling place you never forget, but never consciously remember seeing, is the edge of a flap of what looks like a backpack strap.

There’s just enough of an old abandoned building wall remaining in front of this particular pile that I can imagine what the old man’s words in his notebook might mean to a loser facing just such a brick wall and I dig into the pile. I pull out a camo backpack.

200 $100 bills inside. No further explanation. No other warnings.

A winner like me would take those bills and hand them out in our new neighborhood not caring what you did with the money. Drugs, alcohol, I get it. I totally understand how all you want to do is stay drunk or high and forget about it all but not die at the same time.

You never actually want to die. The $100 bills are covered in dried blood.

The backpack fits me nicely.