I went downtown with Kite in the morning to get her daily dose of methadone. She normally goes there alone, primarily because nobody else wants to get up as early as she does. The clinic actually opens at 4:30 a.m., for working addicts, and others who do not wish to be seen standing around outside a methadone clinic during regular daylight hours. I don’t have any first-hand knowledge of this, but there is supposed to be quite a collection of prominent citizenry, including members of the judicial and law enforcement divisions, who appear there anonymously during the early morning hours. I hung out on the sidewalk outside the clinic, sipping coffee and shivering and looking more or less like a junkie while Kite went inside to get her daily ration. She looked to be heavily sedated when she finally came outside again.

“They actually let you walk out of there in that kind of shape?” I asked her.

“Got a good dose this morning,” she said. Her eyes were partly closed, kind of sleepy-dreamy looking, and she spoke like somebody who was heavily medicated. “Got to finish the bottle,” she went on, “licked that sucker clean. Then she gave me another whole cup full.” She licked her lips and smacked them, rubbed her belly. “Mmm, swaz gooood.”

They give the methadone in small plastic measuring cups, and from what I gathered, her first cup was only a partial from the bottom of a bottle, while the second was the normal full dose. So she ended up getting almost twice as much as she normally does. It was too cold to go to the park and wait this out, so we got on the Broadway bus and rode it out to the end of the line. We took the Speedway bus back again, and by the time we’d made it back downtown, she was nearly normal again, albeit a tad bit goofy.

We had some food and coffee, smoked a joint, then went to the library to get some books. They have this thing there once each week called a “Farmer’s Market,” part of this ongoing downtown rejuvenation effort that has be taking place for more than a decade now. I expect that when it first started it was really a genuine Farmer’s Market, with bushel baskets of fresh corn and pyramids of red ripe tomatoes. Nowadays, however, it is nothing of the sort, having degraded to a handful of about six regular vendors who cater to fruitcakes and the like for lack of a market for real produce.

There is one gal who appears to have raided her grandparent’s attic and pulled down a collection of hippie clothes and a Tie-Dye for Dummies handbook. She sells these monstrous pink and magenta and purple dyed tee-shirts and wrap-around skirts. She incidentally wears her hair nappy and died similarly to her clothing creations, as if somebody told her that those colors were popular back in the days when real hippies roamed the earth. I think that if I were to wear anything so loud, I would have to complete the ensemble with sleigh bells strapped to my wrists and whoopee-cushions on the soles of my feet.

Another fellow there specializes in sterling silver tableware. Since I’d been smoking, I was in one of my human studies modes and accidentally prompted him to explaining his art to me, which he did at length, since Kite and I seemed to be the only people in town even remotely interested in what he was selling. In short, he had taken to bending and twisting these things so that they would stand up and look like, well, bent and twisted silverware. They served no useful purpose whatsoever. I’d pulled similar creations out of my garbage disposal in the past, but I refrained from telling him that.

Now there was a gal there who had something that I thought was unique. She had a collection of glass medallions, paper weights, and nick-knacks that she made by sandwiching brightly colored paints in between layers of different pieces of broken glass, then heating them inside a kiln until they melted and fused together. I had no particular use for a 10-ounce glass medallion, and have no desk for a paper weight, but I gave her an “E” for effort anyway.

There was one canopy up high on the lawn that didn’t appear to be selling anything, except the tenants were dressed like Buddhists or something similar, with clothes fashioned from bed sheets and hair-cuts by Hari, so if they were selling, it would have been keys to enlightenment. They had a couple of percussion instruments, which I gather is part of the basic kit to attract attention by making strange noises. I made a wide berth around their little pagoda. Kite, attracted by the strange metallic pinging of their bongo drums, tried to lead me over to them to see what they were up to.

“You don’t want to go over there,” I told her softly, gently guiding her by the arm in the other direction.

“But they have music,” she protested. If you can call it that, I thought.

“Trust me,” I insisted. She pooted out her bottom lip and reluctantly allowed me to lead her, looking over her shoulder like a child passing a candy store. We went to the library finally and checked out some reading material.