By Crystal Lowery of Creepy Ginger Kid
SALEM, OR–Area toddler Sam Lee has been reunited with his mother, Whitney Lee, after spending 24 hours in a homeless camp beneath the Main Street Bridge.
Sam, who has never been to a barber because his mom is too fucking precious about cutting his hair, wandered away from Whitney Friday afternoon and was taken in by a throng of derelicts after they mistook him for a fellow hobo.
“At first I was star struck because I thought it was Willie Nelson,” says Salem vagabond, Chuck Maghan. “He was a lot shorter in person but smelled about as urine-soaked as you’d imagine. We invited him to join us in our cardboard box commune, and that’s when he stole my harmonica and started making a list of demands:
- ‘My turn harmonica.’
- ‘I no need jacket.’
- ‘I do it all myself.’
“Celebrities can be fussy, but this was rude even for Willie, so I concluded the little fellow was just a run-of-the-mill crack head.”
Fellow vagrant, Tom “Stinky” Purdy (known simply as “Stinky” because he wears used garbage bags as shoes and bears the odor of a three-week-old lamb gyro), had this to say about his encounter with Sam:
“I’ve seen some nasty things in my days on the streets, but that guy was the grossest. His hair was like Nick Nolte’s mug shot and he had crusty boogers on his sleeves. When I gave him a white plastic spoon instead of a black one, he threw himself on the ground in a fit of anger and rage-shat his pants. I assumed he had PTSD from his time in Vietnam or something.”
Mandy Johnson, a charity volunteer, also noticed Sam while she was delivering meals to the camp that evening.
“I wondered what Doc Brown from Back to the Future was doing in Oregon. Then I noticed he was stumbling around and speaking unintelligibly–he seemed drunk. After offering him a sandwich, he screamed at me because there was crust on the bread. He instead ate a cigarette butt from the pavement and started crying because his sock was too ‘sock-y.'”
Salem resident, Grant Hughes, was walking his dog that night and remembers giving Sam some money.
“The gentleman was like an electrocuted Harry from Dumb and Dumber crossed with a rabid llama. He seemed down on his luck, so I put a quarter in his beanie cap. He ate it. Then he ate four rocks, a discarded Whopper wrapper, and my dog’s feces. I guess he was hungry.”
Police finally apprehended Sam after another passerby, Holly R. Thanthou, reported him for panhandling.
“Everyone knows the homeless are lazy and just looking for a handout, so when this tiny, dirty Michael Bolton asked me for a snack, I knew he was trying to get drug money. I called the cops immediately. I mean, get a damn job. It’s that simple.”
Salem police matched Thanthou’s description of the boy: “Beetlejuice meets the uni-bomber meets Travis Tritt if he had a permanent Kool-Aid mustache” with the missing person alert put out by his mother, who was overjoyed he had been found.
“I was alphabetizing Sam’s keepsake catalogue (you know, special mementoes I had bronzed like his first meconium, first spit-up, first toenail clippings–the usual) when I got the call,” Whitney stated. “I know this mix-up is partially my fault because his hair looks like 1989 Andre Agassi got in a fight with 1985 Phil Collins, but I couldn’t bring myself to cut it. I’m a bit sentimental. After all, he’ll only be 93 weeks old once. He’s my baby and that’s also why I’m waiting until he is in kindergarten to stop breastfeeding. Anyway, he is home now—safe and sound. I’m saving the newspaper pages about this traumatic event in his seventeen-volume baby book.”
Incidentally, Whitney is pregnant with her second child but has forgotten how many weeks along she is, the sex of the baby, her due date, the name she has chosen, and the paternity of the biological father. Sources say child number two will not own a baby book or any photographic evidence of his/her existence and has already had his/her first haircut in utero.
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