Chapter Thirteen
If one found oneself in Vancouver after sundown, without much more than two well-worn pennies in their threadbare pocket or plastic purse, he or she would be wise to find an extraordinary agency that uses after hours space to help the pathologically jinxed; the offices of Emergency Welfare. When I first arrived in Vancouver, I put my coin in the slot and dialed them.
The office in which I would plead my case was an offshoot of the regular, Monday to Friday, nine-to-five branch of Social Services. This program was designed to help an array of individuals; those who were in the grip of a scowling addiction or one whose person was being crushed by mental illness. Similarly, if you were a destitute prostitute or one who found himself homeless and without the knowledge of exactly how you came to be that way, without a cent to your name or the self-respect you were born with, there was hope.
Anything that held one captive and was desirous of whispering in their ear, “You blew it”, was the enemy. Emergency welfare whenever possible, by supplying aid, warred against the enemy, yet, when one looked around the enemy was still alive and well.
The forces of evil saw to it that those on the skids always seemed to have just enough to live on, with a heavy emphasis on drugs and alcohol as essential fodder. Clearly, some black purpose was met by the destitute remaining so. Emergency Welfare couldn’t save everyone from everything, the cracks one can slip through get wider and deeper with each successive misstep, but they could help you regroup for two or three days at a time.
After I called them and was satisfied, having spoken to a social worker, that the office would be open for a while, I started out lackadaisically on my way towards rescue. After a few minutes I began walking with increased energy as paranoia and suspicion blotted out most thoughts except the one that said they were going to close early to spite me. Late night welfare I thought and shook my head, all the while making haste. I couldn’t help noticing as I scurried, that even beautiful downtown Vancouver had its share of bums.
“So, let me get this straight. You’re here from the province of Ontario; you have no money or source of income and are in need of shelter. Oh yes, and medication for, hmmm, let’s see here, schizophrenia. That sounds very serious. How is it that you were allowed to come all this way?”
I wanted to tell him that they no longer chained people like me to the wall of some dirty, musty old room, letting us out once in a while for the occasional ice bath or some insulin shock therapy, but I played along instead.
“Well, they really don’t know I’m here. I needed to get away and had always heard about the beauty of Vancouver, so, I came here. By the way, it is, indeed what everyone said.”
“What’s that?”
“Beautiful. Vancouver really is a beautiful city. It makes me feel very good. What I’m really starting to think I need though, would be my meds. I’m getting incredibly paranoid.”
While speaking about my ongoing problem with paranoia I grew hot and then cold. I shivered and thought that I had talked too much. Outside two kids were yelling to each other. It sounded like kid one said: “Big yap, big yap,” while kid two said: “Talk too much, big yap, talk too much.” Things were starting to go wrong. I closed my ears as best I could, without using my hands.
The worker was wearing a pair of yellow tinted glasses that partially hid his eyes. They painted him with the brush reserved for dubious people. His movements became furtive and mouse-like. I was in the middle of trying to decide what he’d done when he removed his eyewear and presented me with two very Christ-like eyes, blue circles filled with large black pupils and compassion. Shyly, I dropped my gaze. I was convicted and felt a little foolish.
I was in the presence of someone who cared about the castaways and cripples of this world and spent his time trying to help them. This man, I thought, is someone who has principles and acts upon them. I was, in a way, intimidated.
The Great One spoke: “I already know enough about your situation,” he informed me, “that I can assure you that you qualify for assistance.”
He asked for particulars. Particulars, particulars, Christ never asked for particulars. This guy, like everyone else, was some kind of poser. Part of me was still sane enough to supply him with the required information. As we went about recording the facts of my life, I grew bored and impatient. I was no longer awestruck
The paperwork was finished and he smiled at me in his caring way.
“Did they teach you that in school,” I asked, “do you practice that at home?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you practice that look, you know, the look that says I care. Did they teach you that in school?”
“Well,” he said quietly, “I’m not so sure I know what you mean. I don’t go home and pull faces in front of the mirror, if that’s what you’re suggesting. As for school, well,” he laughed, “I’ve pretty much forgotten what I learned there.”
As I left the office with enough vouchers for three days worth of food and shelter, I looked at him and said, “You know, you’re not so much different from me. You’re just on other side of the desk.”
“Goodnight,” he said.
I was then out the door, making my way to the Marble Arch Hotel where I would spend the weekend and Monday.
Unadorned need had me by the lapels. I had no options. It was my gloomy room or the hard pavement outside and the knowledge that anything could happen there. I decided I would spend a few days at the Marble Arch Hotel, Skid Row, Vancouver. Surely it would be better than walking the streets day and night.
A while after I had taken charge of my room I was pulled from reflecting on the unfairness of life by the sound of two men struggling, grunting and cursing and the sight of their flailing fists, as seen from my window. As they struck one another’s flesh, I decided that it would definitely be unwise to look a gift horse in the mouth. I had been given three free days shelter and I would use them up. I didn’t want to be the guy getting pummeled in the alleyway, particularly if it was just because I had nowhere better to go. I muttered a quick prayer to God; Please God, don’t let anyone beat me up in a back alley.
I was kept awake for a short while posing as eternity. I believed that the night would go on forever. Seconds stopped to smell the coffee, sulking minutes dragged their butts as though they would rather be elsewhere. Music that was born in the bloated belly of the bar, belched its way upstairs throughout the night and flowed in chaotic fits and spurts through the cracks in my door. It seemed that whenever I was on the verge of falling asleep, in spite of the racket, there would be an argument or loud laughter in the dim, diabolic hallway outside my room.
More than once I got up to check the security of the door’s lock. I didn’t trust it. I was developing painfully unreasonable notions in spite of it. I became convinced that anyone could break my door down. The lock would give and the door would splinter. Once the demons posing as humans had reduced my door to toothpicks, what would they do to me? I refused to think about it in blunt terms. At long last, I slept for three hours, maybe four.
When I woke the light of day greeted me and put a different slant on things. I wasn’t angry, indignant or frightened. I wasn’t troubled by my living conditions, knowing that they were transient by nature. No one can be housed indefinitely and at no personal cost in any hotel, whether it is a decrepit place starved for guests or not. I caught myself singing and stopped, wondering if anyone could have heard me. Somehow, something signaled me, perhaps someone yelling or a car’s horn, telling me that I’d had an audience. I laughed, shook my head in disbelief and then coughed the smoker’s cough I’d had for a few years.
Still, I had no options. It was the Marble Arch for me. It was there that I wished to find relief. I wanted to hide from whatever force of wickedness it was that that was turning me into a delusional man full of fear and suspicion
For some time in the back of my mind, I had been tossing around the sentiment that things had to get better because they certainly couldn’t get worse. Pretending, while I dressed, that I was someone dispensing unsolicited advice, I spoke out loud in a way that mocked anyone who had ever taken it upon themselves to sit atop a mountain and tell others what was wrong with them. “There’s many fish to fry, young man. You’re still very young and things will improve, life has just got to get better – it can’t get any worse. Don’t think it will always be like this, go get your pills, the bad stuff will go…”
Suddenly I thought, if it’s all that bad why not begin constructively navigating the course in the only direction available – up? My thoughts drifted. Maybe I had hit bottom of a sort. Perhaps I’d been otherwise occupied and hadn’t heard the dull thud that had announced my arrival.
I was getting ready to find a doctor to medicate me. I didn’t really care what he gave me as long as it helped me deal with a muddle-headedness that alternated with edgy clarity. After double, triple and quadruple checking, I felt fairly confident that my room key was in my pants pocket. Turning back, as I closed the door on my humble mess masquerading as a pile, I felt a prick of sadness. There lay most everything I owned on the globe, where I had little choice but to live out my days due to gravity; everything that was mine could be taken in at a glance. I locked the door and, with a sour taste in my mouth checked for my key again. I cursed myself for doing so and then made my way to the archaic elevator.
When I found a restaurant that would honour my meal ticket I bartered successfully with the old man working the counter. Food would have to wait – in exchange for a pack of cigarettes I gave him my voucher. The cigarettes were less than the price of the meal and I watched for a moment as he leaned back in his chair fanning himself with the voucher. He’s acting as if he’d just won the lottery, I thought and smiled vaguely.
As I was leaving, he called me back and said, “We can’t have you starving to death.” He gave me a chocolate donut.
“Thanks,” I said.
While looking at him, I began tearing it apart as though I were a suspicious animal made bold by starvation. Most of that morsel, a humble fraction of the world’s chocolate supply, was gone before I was even out the door and back on the sidewalk. I heard the old man yell, “Come again!”
I went in search of any hospital that my sugar–propelled legs would carry me to. I asked so many people for directions that even I was starting to look at myself as a public nuisance. I’m sure it wasn’t persistence that had me eventually going through the automatic doors of a hospital. I’d never been particularly good at following directions and was so confused by those I’d been given that there had to have been some other-worldly force or being that directed my path that day and eventually led me to where I could take a final desperate stab at helping myself.
Perhaps that which was unseen, whatever it was that crusaded on my behalf and kept me out of harm’s way, perhaps that force was doing me one last favour. While it had the stamina, while it still had a shred of belief in me, it was taking me to where I could have the benefit of a medicine man and his secrets. My world was collapsing. I saw it in the tilt of a stranger’s hat whose perfect slant hurt me inside my head, a fist on a bruise. I felt it in the air. Within a few days I would be moving fast on the little worn path to a much discussed place, madness - intriguing and frightening.