wine and cheap perfume

Last night Annie and I were at Melissa's, watching her dog and the tv when at one in the morning the buzzer rang. Someone named Samantha said she was a friend of M's, and that she wanted to drop her laundry bag off. So I buzzed her in and who busts through the door but a St. Marks junkie who Annie sees everyday on her way to work with track marks all over her legs. Her shirt was completely torn open in the front so that her tits were just dangling out, and she flung her "bag of laundry" on the floor and started digging through it and smelling the crotch of each pair of underwear to determine which were clean. She was clearly strung out and I was thinking, weird how you think you know someone so well and then they do something that completely catches you off guard. Melissa is one of my best friends, and I had no idea that she occasionally hangs out with homeless drug addicts. I started thinking, am I being a judgemental asshole, or is this just weird? The girl starting plowing through Melissa's drawers looking for her "bracelet," and I had no idea what to do. She turned to me before she left (after an obvious trip to the bathroom) and said, "How do I look?" I looked at her scabbed legs, torn shirt, dirty hands, stained clothes, and bare tits and thought, how the hell do I answer this? I finally decided on: "Good, but you might want to cover up a little because you'll probably get bothered by guys on the street."
She said, "I don't care about that," and left. I felt like an asshole, because I realized that she's probably a prostitute who wants to get bothered by guys on the street, and suddenly everything felt so fucked up. One second I'm getting all worked up about job decisions (do I save an endangered lesbian bar from extinction, or do I continue whoring myself at a straight bar while picking up weird writing jobs along the way?), and the next I'm faced with a person who has no semblence of pride, inhibitions, or hygiene. Nothing makes sense to me. This entry is very "My So-Called Life." I'm just shaken up a bit.