The weather is good today so that equals good recycling day. Earlier I saw a tweaker biking down the sidewalk pulling his shopping cart beside him with his arm. All of a sudden he hit a big bump and the shopping cart toppled taking him and his bike down with it. The cans spread out all over and he yelled, "Goddammit, FUCK." Slowly he re-collected his cans and bottles and got back onto his bike.

I love it when I am driving down Third Street, a really busy six-lane street, and a tweaker is taking up the whole right lane with his shopping cart. And I don't mean a small amount tidily bundled, it's an overflowing amount of cans, bottles and plastic piled in the cart and hanging in trash bags that are tied to the sides. The whole cart takes up the width of the lane. It makes me happy to see the recyclers taking up the whole lane; the semis and SUV's, the low loud Cutlasses and the death wish motorcyclists all have to veer, yield and wait for the slow heavy cart.

One time I was walking around the corner of our block with my neighbor Mindy. There was a balding tweaker yelling at a craggy dirty pasty tweaker with his cart.

"You just think that everything on this street is yours! You think every can, bike part, and piece of junk is yours, you fucking ass hole," he foamed, "Well, fuck you, I saw this bike and it's mine." It was just a rusty bike frame.

"Fuck you, asshole," the other one replied, "that's my fucking stuff! Fuck it, you can have it, you asshole."

Meanwhile Mindy and I were walking in between them and she says, "Those 'this is your brain on drugs' TV ads should show these guys. Nobody would ever do drugs." Good point Mindy.

For a little while there was a small round trailer on that opposite corner. Inside it resided a lovely female tweaker. For some reason all of the tweakers around here are white men, mostly Vietnam vets. There was constant traffic in and out of her trailer, I was sure that she had a meth lab in there and any day the trailer was going to blow leaving a twenty foot hole in the ground. She had a dirty wild dog that she tried to walk up and down the street. It would just drag her as hard as it could and I could hear her yelling at it all the way down the block. The lady often wore negligee but mostly I didn't see her, I just heard her. One night I was inside and I heard a tweaker yelling as loud as he could as he ran towards her trailer, "I GOT SOME MONEEEEEY!!!" Time to party. Her boyfriend was an asshole, I hated him, he was always yelling at her and walking around in circles outside of the trailer talking to himself. Tweaking. Pissing on the dirt and railroad tracks. Shitting too when nobody was looking. One night they got in a huge fight and she kicked him out. I could hear him yelling even after he had walked far away, "Nobody ever treated you so good, you've never had anybody and now you won't even have me." Yeah, poor thing, you're leaving, you asshole. Daily a tow truck would stop by for a few minutes…gotta work late. She just disappeared one night, I think she got someone to tow her elsewhere. I was glad because she attracted way too much action.

My boyfriend, Mikey, talks to a lot of the tweakers and street people on our block. There are two types, the total meth head tweakers and then the usual street people that like to have some whiskey to warm them up. The street people are easier to talk to; the tweakers look through you. All of them recycle cans, bottles, plastic and especially any aluminum scraps that the welders give them. One of Mikey's friends, Cowboy, just died. He was a Vietnam veteran, a Vietnam POW too. He had AIDS and then got pneumonia. Cowboy knew what each metal was worth and when he wasn't in St. Luke's hospital, he was out here pushing his cart and collecting everything. He would even pick up broken glass, I didn't know you could get broken glass credit. Cowboy would be out of the hospital or jail doing really well, keeping busy and then slowly spiral and start asking Mikey for money again. He would always pay back but Mikey just didn't want to lend him money when he was like that. A cigarette, phone-call or glass of water, but not money. Cowboy would recite a lot of his poetry to us; it was all heart breaking. He had been a POW until 1976, I think, and before that he had flown the little planes that would blanket the jungles with bombs and chemicals. The medics would shoot him with morphine and up he'd go. Somehow he made it out. Cowboy refused to go to the V.A. Hospitals; he was too mad at the government. Finally the pneumonia took over and he was too weak to walk. He wheeled around the block in a wheelchair but then he had to enter a hospice at Laguna Honda Hospital. Mikey visited him a few times; Cowboy was refusing to let go. Mikey barely recognized him because of all of the weight loss; he was Cowboy's only visitor. Finally Mikey got the call from the hospice, Cowboy had gotten to leave this earth, and his troubled soul was finally at rest.

If you look around this industrial neighborhood, you'll see that there are tweakers in every crack and corner. This is really the area in town for them. Some streets are lined with trailers, trucks and cars crammed full of garbage. Sometimes, when the weather is good, the tweakers get lively. I'll be driving by one of their areas and they'll all be out and about, digging through their piles, crushing cans, letting the dogs out, rolling around shopping carts. The vehicles are all dented and have bicycles, even motorcycles, attached to the tops. Some of the truck beds have plywood houses built on top. Some of the vehicles are a miracle of nature. Almost all of the tweakers have bicycles.

I live on the second floor of a warehouse, in the front of this warehouse is a scrap metal recycling business. We have a bird's eye view of one of the main tweaker highways. A lot of the tweakers I recognize but most are from other blocks. When I hear the shaking metal and glass sound of their shopping carts I think, "Hark, a tweaker!" I've seen a lot of tweakers eat it on that bump across the street. The problem is that the sidewalk ramps down to the street but then there is a soft spot of dirt before a big ledge of the street. It's terrible, I have been thinking of getting a bag of cement and filling it in because I see these guys ram that bump so hard that their cart flips and the bottles break all over the street. But you know, the tweakers are really self sufficient, they'll be fine when the world comes to an end.