Read Online The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich - Free Book Online

They could fold their bodies into impossible shapes to fit up into the crevices they’d staked out in a squat, where they lived on bags of chips they’d stapled to the wall, on soup made of pond water and lily pads. Others slept all folded around each other in a nest of ground-scored clothes and dreamed one collective dream. Morning came and I found them once again perching on low items of refuse, on a towel or a pizza box. Their hands in paper bags or dipping into a cupped palm a few sunflower seeds; sitting on their boots staring at the sun through a crack in the clouds — wondering if it was going to come out today. Sniffing at the air. Sweat smearing like a dark logo down the fronts of their shirts — the only logos in the camp… I surfaced at a senior center pancake breakfast where the server-to-guest ratio was wildly in my favor. It was basically five grandmas waiting on me, all poking at my plate, pressuring me into finishing the first pile of grilled dough so they could heap it on all over again. Meanwhile one played the piano in the corner and others circulated around with trays of Dixie cups filled with colorful old-people juices: tomato, grapefruit, pineapple… Looking outside chemical-smeared glass I peered out into the street at some vagrants. They didn’t see me watching them the whole time. The opposite is looking at old photographs. I always thought old pictures of pets are some of the strangest things. Long dead animals appear oddly tainted by time, maybe because they’re so set aside from it. It’s the unspeakable pull of those glassy eyes, that jolt between two worlds so familiar with the pin-prick of only half recognition. I wondered about old pets and their manners, how their dispositions had been shaped by the sensibilities of the day. My mind wrestled with the image of pioneers flogging their animals but I knew this couldn’t really be all there was to it, and tried to shake it clear.

     
     
    Down by the creek there’s a small town by the name of Irondale, a single lane of highway tacked down right in the middle of a lush forest wilderness the likes of which would do Marty Stouffer proud. I found the rest of my hobo buddies camped out among a few modest houses and sheds situated on a dozen acres littered with mobile home trailers and smelly Meth accoutrements , a display resplendent of the region’s claim to fame in the local papers: seedy clusters of mutant skinless stripped-bare mobile home trailers. This was one of the famous Meth squats of Irondale, a real mustache on the face of depravity. The Jefferson County Leader routinely sent out reporters to lurk behind some crap-filled bathtub, taking notes. More than one soul had been absorbed. Irondale stood as a living monument to Meth dudes who had casually reached a level of ingenuity whereby — after selling the metal siding off their trailers for scrap — they found themselves with nothing left to practice tagging on, so they put the word out, soliciting others to haul in something to fill the void. A yard full of wrecked shit fulfills many needs, doubling as shelter, jewelry, target practice, and…? Some neighbors were once baffled to see a Meth squatter hauling a boat filled with garbage on a trailer with no wheels. When the trailer couldn’t be coaxed into going any further it was unceremoniously abandoned out in the middle of the road, which even by Meth squat standards is pretty resourceful. The garbage that actually did make it onto the property was cast off behind some trees, or used to prop up one of the corners of the skinless trailer, or else dragged off by wild animals for use in their own squats. Very little could grow on Meth squat land and what did was burned down. Massive jamborees were held around giant cauldrons of altered medicine that bubbled delectably away at the fire. Fizzle … hisss … Sick with the indulgent atmosphere we hopped a train to Portland a few days later and in the middle of loitering here and