A young musician named Rich left his shabby, low-rent apartment at dusk with a beat up guitar case. He climbed into his rusty old Chevy van, and the tired engine sprung to life, making a racket and vibrating badly. Rich shook his head waiting for some of the noise to go away when the oil warmed up a bit. He knew the engine was running on borrowed time.
He drove from the neighborhood he lived in — made up of paint pealing duplexes mixed with a few boarded up crack-houses — to a hip, rejuvenated part of downtown, where the streets were lined with the latest restaurants, good bars, and trendy boutiques. The old van rattled and banged over pot-holes — an old blanket he had hung from the ceiling behind the seats to keep the heat in the cab in the winter did little to tone down the road noise echoing around the back cargo space.
He drove a van because he was the leader of a rock band that played bars on the weekends and a few weeknights. He and the boys needed it to haul their gear around to the gigs, but every time he drove it he dreamed of sitting behind the wheel of a sports car.
He turned a corner and crossed some ancient railroad tracks which always threatened to shake the old van to pieces, and parked the rusty white beast. It was a long walk to where he was headed, but paying for parking closer in was a non-starter on his budget. He grabbed the guitar case and walked, hoping to get a good corner to play on this warm summer night.
Rich was a busker when he had free time. He loved doing it — not only was he entertaining people and supplementing his meager income with the money people tossed in his guitar case, it was also great practice, a place to try out new songs and new techniques. He also met a lot of folks and made some connections for his regular band gig.
He was early enough on this particular evening to get a good corner — competition between buskers on warm summer nights could be fierce. He took out his old beat-up acoustic guitar, strapped it on, and settled in for a long night of playing and singing. He was a good entertainer — vital for making good money on the street — and as a small crowd gathered he told stories about the songs and some good jokes to keep everybody happy. This was a pretty good night for a Wednesday, and he made almost sixty dollars by nights end.
One of his regular audience members was a homeless woman known as Windy. She never told anyone her real name or where she was from.
Just about every time he busked, no matter where in the city, she seemed to appear, although sometimes just for a minute or two. Before he found out her name — from a soup kitchen volunteer he overheard talking to her one night — she seemed to him like a ghost... a spirit of the night. One night she was even dressed in a dirty old white wedding dress, which with her haunting tired eyes made her even more ghost-like. That night she just drifted down the street, glancing at him sideways, and disappeared around a corner.
Windy's real name is Katherine Jane Ross, and she's the daughter of a bank executive. She's thirty-six years old, and she's been homeless for five years, staying alive by instinct, with occasional help from the kindness of strangers, some friends in the homeless community, and even though she hates doing it, the local Rescue Mission when the temperature gets sub-arctic on certain winter nights. A relationship went bad when she was thirty-one, and she was left physically beaten, bruised and nearly penniless. Her man had disappeared with everything, and she couldn't face her family with the news because they had told her all along it would happen. So she left. She had just enough money for a bus ticket to New York City, and she found herself part of a large homeless community there. When some friends died in an ugly way she left the big city behind, hitchhiking her way back to the small rust-belt city she was born in, giving blow-jobs to disgusting men to get rides. When she got back here she swore she'd never touch a man again.
She lives, at least for now, in a ramshackle shelter made up of old pieces of plywood she stole from a construction site. It's held together with duct tape and old rotting rope. There are a few other homeless folks living near her — a little 'village' in the scrubby brush out behind an empty factory building, the same old building where Rich parked his van when he busked, which is how Windy first saw him. The members of her 'village' are very wary when a vehicle shows up at the derelict factory, and she had watched him when he first parked there, and followed him as he walked to his corner and pulled out his guitar and played. She had a crush on him immediately — Rich was a good looking musician after all, even if he was a little younger than her.
Windy's heart beat fast the night Rich first spoke to her. She had wanted to talk to him for a while, but the art of conversation had faded from her brain, and years of homelessness had left her a mostly silent person when she was wandering through the real world. She loved standing at the back of the crowd on a busy night, listening to his stories and his songs, and watching the way the crowd responded to him and laughed at his jokes, but getting up close was too much for her, and if it was a slow night with just a few people around she would just breeze by without stopping. She usually couldn't help herself and would do it two or three times a night, and one night she timed it wrong and he finished a song just as she was approaching. His little audience turned and walked away and it was just the two of them as she passed. She was looking at the ground and moving fast, hoping to escape, when Rich spoke up.
"Hi beautiful. How's it goin' tonight?"
She stopped dead in her tracks, looked him in the eye, and scurried off into the darkness. Around the corner she stopped and took a deep breath, surprised at how his simple words had affected her. Her heart was racing, and she was scolding herself for being an idiot, just like a teenaged girl would do.
The words 'hi beautiful' echoed in Windy's head for a week, and she kept a close eye on the trash filled parking lot where Rich parked his van. Finally, after she was sure he would never come back, the rusty white van rattled over the railroad tracks and parked. Rich got out with his guitar case and started walking toward downtown. Then he paused.
"You can walk with me you know, I won't bite," he said loudly toward the back of the parking lot.
Windy was shocked by his words. She didn't like it when people knew more about her than she wanted them to know, and a wave of anger washed over her. He walked away as she cooled down, but she didn't know quite how to handle the situation.
It was a busy weekend night. Rich didn't have a gig with his band due to a scheduling error, so he was looking forward to a good night to fill his wallet and keep gas in the van. The crowd was big and boisterous due to a big sports event that emptied onto the street, and it turned out to be the best night of busking Rich had ever had. Windy had gotten over her misplaced anger, and was enjoying herself buried deep in the back of the big group watching Rich perform when she was once again shocked by his words.
"I'd like to dedicate this next song to my biggest fan," Rich said in his loud busker voice. "She's here watching me most nights, and I just want to tell her how much I appreciate her and that I wish her all the best in life. Life's short, and we need to enjoy each others company. She's a pretty girl, so, this one's for her."
