It seems to be getting harder. Since moving in to the RV park on Boulder Highway, I have stepped into a part of society that is completely different from living up on Hyman place. This is a brutal picture of life. There are Budget Suites, RV parks, dive hotels, a bar that only opens on weekends and runs until 5 a.m., a Super WalMart, fast food slop shops, and a few casinos within walking distance of my place. Boulder Highway is always busy, teeming with life from all sides of the track and a lot of it isn’t very pretty.

Around 9 p.m. I decided it was time to go to the grocery store. The sun had gone down, the temperature had dropped to about 99°, and it’s a time of night that I can venture out and not feel like I’m going to dry up and blow away in the sun and heat. I drove down to a fairly new shopping center on the corner of Tropicana and Boulder Highway, to an Albertsons store that I usually frequent when I need things. When I parked and left the truck, I could see an older, heavy, black woman sitting in a motorized wheelchair at the entrance to the store She had a cup in her hand and obviously she was looking for some type of monetary help. As I approached she said, “could you spare a little change so I can buy groceries?”

I got my cart and walked past her into the store, as did other patrons coming in and going out and her query was the same to all of them. I had a lot of thoughts about the whole situation. One of them was that I could take her inside and help her grocery shop and pay for her groceries. Another one was that I could just hand her money. Another one was why was the store allowing her to sit right in the entrance and bum? instead of doing any of the above I simply picked up my purchases and left the store. She was still there when I left.

I stopped at a Rebel Station and filled the Steed with diesel. The heat was almost unbearable yet people came and went from all corners of the streets – milling like ants, and traffic kept screaming by.

I stopped at Walgreens to see if Cobra had taken over as my insurance. When I arrived, one woman was talking to the female pharmacist and decided she would leave and return for her prescription that would take over an hour to fill. After she left, I waited for over five minutes while the female and male pharmacist completely ignored me. The phone rang incessantly, they ignored it, and the woman tended to a drive-through customer. The man was busy typing something into a keyboard and even though he looked up at me several times, he did not acknowledge me, and continued with what he was doing. The phone stopped ringing and started ringing again, they ignored it again. They had a brief conversation where the woman (waiting on the drive-through customer) said she couldn’t find something and the man said he was typing it in right now.

A few minutes later, the woman finished with the drive-through customer, and turned around with an exasperated look on her face as she looked at the ceiling and then finally acknowledged me. By now another woman had walked up behind me.

The woman pharmacist asked if she could help me. I said yes and I asked her if Cobra had taken over to replace my previous insurance. I had paperwork in my hand from the prescription I had filled earlier in the week, and I handed it to her. She really was not very happy about anything and informed me that she would have no way of knowing unless I was ordering something. She was in front of the monitor and had the keyboard at her fingertips, and I told her I would like to order a prescription.

The phone rang. She immediately answered it and started helping the caller with a prescription refill, stating that time that the prescription would be ready, and appeared to be extremely nice to the caller. It took her about two to three minutes with the caller to finalize the prescription ordering

In the meantime I turned to the woman behind me and said it was pretty amazing that I had been waiting and the phone had been ringing but no one answered it and now that I was being waited on the phone was a top priority. The woman waiting in line with me totally agreed.

The woman pharmacist finished her conversation, and turned to me and said, “Sorry about that.”

I flatly said, “me too!”

She tried to stare a hole through me before she proceeded to inform me that when the phone rang they had to answer it within three rings. I told her that absolutely was not so, that the phone had been ringing continuously when she was waiting on a customer and she never stopped to answer the phone.

She defended herself by saying that she had been with the customer. DOH! What am I then? I told her that I was a customer and she stopped to answer the phone while she was waiting on me.

She gave me an exasperated, overly loud, “Ma’am!”

I was ready to flip out. I grabbed my paperwork from her hand and told her that I would come back when there were more people in the store and that I truly appreciated her courtesy and customer service. *acid dripping sarcasm*
She replied, “Thank you”

And I left the store. I have a lot of thoughts about that also but I won’t go into that right now. I have frequented this Walgreens every since I moved to this part of town, and I have never had anyone behave like that towards me or be that lax in their customer service.

So as I steamed out into the hot, sultry night and jumped into the Steed, as I pulled out of the parking lot, I saw a young man and woman and what appeared to be all of their worldly goods, stacked in the corner of the Budget Suites parking lot right behind the bus stop bench that borders Boulder Highway. There were a few suitcases and some plastic bags that looked like they held bedding and other goods and the guy was laying on the plastic bags as the woman sat next to him on one of the suitcases.

Obviously my little Walgreen’s experience just slipped off into nothing.

I thought of being totally stranded in the city and having nothing in your pocket and no place to go, and of course the woman at the Albertson’s store came to mind in the same picture. It’s pretty bleak. I know that Las Vegas is not the only place that has people on the street, with no home, and nowhere to go. It leaves me with a sick feeling. And I don’t believe my reaching in my pocket and handing out a $20 bill is going to solve the problem – or even if I had more to give that it would change anything in their lifestyle.

This is any typical evening, when I venture outside my little domain, and this isn’t the first time I’ve written about the homeless and the street corner beggars, and I don’t know what the answer is or how to even begin to find one.