Friday, March 2, 2007

a woman with everything wrong

eventful night. just went downtown with stephanie to see last king of scotland at e street. i've seen it, she hasn't. it was sold out, and there was nothing else that we were interested in seeing, so we decided to walk over to chinatown to grab some ice cream. that's where the fun began.

walking up 11th street, a woman asked if we could stop and answer a question. she seemed harmess enough.

big mistake

what followed was the most amazing, rapid-fire story i've ever heard. this woman (with some interestingly chipped teeth) told us that there was a crazy homeless guy who had accosted her, and that she was scared. then, in rapid succession, we heard:

- that she was diabetic
- about to have a seizure
- she was from pittsburgh
- she worked for a hospital in oakland (PA, i assume)
- she was in DC with her church
- had her bags stolen from the hotel harrington
- needed to get to new carrollton so she could catch a bus to annapolis
- had her insulin waiting for her at new carrollton
- had reported her stolen bags to the police (we could go verify if we wanted)
- had her husband and son in the marines in iraq
- was 3 months pregnant and in risk of losing her child
- she was horribly embarrassed to tell us all this (even though she said a lot of it 3 or 4 times)
- there were a few other ramblings that didn't really make sense

it was obvious this woman was disturbed, to put it gently. i tried to cut to the chase and offer to get her on the metro to new carrollton, if that was true. she started to get irritable and said she needed more money to get to annapolis, since she was broke. i told her that i didn't have enough to help her out any further than getting her a metro fare.

she got angry now, and told me that she could see, by looking into my eyes, that i didn't want to help. she said that i'd have to answer to saint peter (apparently when i die, he's not going to bother me until then). then she finally called me a 'white bitch' (she was white too, this was no racial confrontation) and starting walking off.

seemed like that was it. we went up to häagen-dazs to get ice cream, and we were eating our ice cream outside when the woman walked past. i was hoping she'd start talking to one of the zendiks who were selling their goofy t-shirts outside the verizon center. unfortunately, that didn't happen. would have been potentially exciting to watch...

3 comments:

Sean Hennessey said...

are you a crazy magnet too?

si said...

I got accosted by that same crackhead a few years ago on 5th street. Back then she was asking for cab fare to annapolis, came up with all sorts of reasons why it had to be a cab. Shes probably still using the same old hospital bracelet to "prove" her diabetes. Her crack pipe teeth were pretty bad.

IMGoph said...

si, that was the first sign for me that she was nuts. i was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt right up until i saw the semicircle pattern of missing tooth parts, and i knew then that she had a nice glass pipe in that space for more than a few times. by then, it was just how to find a way to gracefully bail out!