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By Athena Lyn Duff
Jaz sits on top of a dumpster in fern Alley near Polk street dying her hair while we talk. Today it's purple; last Saturday it changed from blue to green to red within four hours.
We're friends. Jaz and me, even though I have home and she doesn't. Maybe it's because we both like photography and writing, maybe it's just some weird act of fate. Sometimes I think we understand each other so well because I used to be homeless like her, and I haven't forgotten what it's like. who knows? What I do know is that I have this friend named Jaz and she's special to me and I probably even love her, and she got HIV.
Jaz is 17, and she's been living on and off the streets for years. Her family moved around a lot so she hasn't been to school since the sixth grade, but she's really smart and reads all the time. I think her parents just moved one day and left her behind. She says that she couldn't find them now even if she wanted to. But she really doesn't like to talk about it.
She does talk about how she's tired of being harassed by the police because she's homeless sick of bad drugs and a hard life. She says wants to leave San Francisco.
"I'd miss you if you left. Would you write?"
"Nah, I don't do that."
There's a whole list of things that Jaz "don't do." She don't do sneakers, she don't do group homes, she don't do showers, and don't do stay in one place for very long.
I think Jaz is really cool. She has innate ability to sense when people are,'t being strait up with her, and for a junkie, she's pretty damn honest, too. I want to feel close to Jaz, but it's hard, knowing that she's probably going to die a lot sooner than I am. I don't want to feel sorry for her and have that be the reason for our friendship.
Sometimes I worry that she doesn't take very good care of herself-doesn't see a doctor , doesn't eat right, sleeps outside. And she shoots drugs a lot. You could walk down Polk street and see her sitting on top of a garbage can spare changing and yelling at anybody who'll listen "I wanna hit! Goddamn it, I wanna hit."
When Jaz is sick, it's hard to be around her. She's moody, coughs a lot, and looks like she is about to keel over, and die. But when she's healthy we have a lot of fun together. We hang around at the Coffee Zone, or on the sidewalk, coloring in coloring books and talking. One time we were hanging out she mentioned that her eighteenth birthday was coming up. She said she was hoping to sleep through it. I asked her if it would be alright if I bought her a present. Maybe, she said-she hadn't gotten a present in a long time.
"What did you do for your last birthday last year?"
"I didn't notice it until it was over."
"The year before that?"
"I got really f-----d up"
" And what about when you turned fifteen?"
"they gave me a bottle of Jack Daniels."
I didn't ask who "they" were; Somehow I didn't want to hear that it was her parents.
Jaz is really weird about money. If she gets a hold of $40, she'll loan 20 to some junkie who'll never pay her back, $5 will go to the guest fee at a hotel for the night, then she'll buy you lunch, get her self a mango because she's never had one before, then blow the rest on cotton balls and hair dye at Walgreens because she "doesn't like to have money."
I could see Jaz doing really good things with her life. Her keen sense of justice, her creativity, make me think she's the kind of person that could change the world. But I could see her dying on the streets because nobody ever took care of her, so she never learned how to take care of herself.
This article ran in an issue of my newspaper flashpointAthena Lyn Duff was formerly homeless now works for YO ( Youth outlook ) a news paper by and about teenagers published by pacific News Service.
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