THEY HAD BEEN sitting in Oppenheimer Park in late July of that year. They had just returned from the Broughton Archipelago.
“Why are we sitting here?” Cole had said, his back hunched, his eyes narrow, watching suspiciously as the derelicts moved about the park, pushing shopping carts. He eyed the wrapping from several syringes and wondered where the needles were.
“You want to help me with the homeless problem, right?” asked Denman, his legs crossed at the ankle, his brown hands folded together Buddha-style in his lap.
“Yeah, but . . .”
“But nothing,” the lawyer said with conviction. “You can’t help fight homelessness if you don’t think of the problem from the perspective of these people here. Part of the reason why homelessness is so prevalent in our society is that we don’t see these people,” he said, motioning to the clusters of men and women around the park. “They are objects to us. Not living, breathing, loving human beings.”
“You’ve been hanging around the Dalai Lama again, haven’t you?” Cole quipped.
“Maybe,” said Denman, looking at Cole sideways from under his flat cap. “But the truth of the matter is that everybody here has a story to tell. Every one of these people has a reason for being here, now, today. You wouldn’t believe the stories I’ve heard.”
“I bet some of them are even true.” Cole started to laugh, then held his side.
Denman nodded. “Everybody has their own take on what reality is.” He looked at his friend. “Speaking of reality, ribs still bugging you?”
“If you could call having a knife stuck into your side every time you laugh, breathe hard, or try to sleep on your side bugging . . .”
“I’ve got just the thing.”
“You’re not going to try and align my chakras again, are you?”
“I’ve given up on that,” said Denman.
“What now, then?”
“Follow me.”
The two men stood and walked across the park, heading for Cordova. They walked slowly, Cole moving stiffly.
“You had a doc look at that?”
“Oh yeah, but not much they can do for cracked ribs.”
“You’d look good in a body cast.”
Cole suppressed a laugh. “Wouldn’t help,” he said.
“Make you easier to wheel around. We could just put you on a dolly. What about a Chinese doctor?”
“Yeah, I thought about that.”
“Thinking about it help much?”
“Look, Denny. I’m from Alberta, okay? We don’t lie around with needles in us if we can at all avoid it.”
“It would help.”
“So would a good stiff drink.”
“How’s that working for you?”
“Not so good, Dr. Phil,” said Cole.
They found their way to East Pender and walked west.
“Where are you taking me?” asked Cole.
“Live in the mystery, brother Blackwater.”
They walked another two blocks and stopped. Cole found himself in front of a small area of worn grass. It was nearly noon, and the spring sun felt good after a week of rain. They stood on the edge of the green, which was little more than an empty lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. They regarded the ancient building that rose beyond it.
“Did I read in one of Nancy’s articles that the Lucky Strike is on the chopping block?”
“You read right,” replied Denman. “The Lucky Strike is where the fight over the future of single-room occupancy facilities, or SROs, in this city hits the road. There is a tug-of-war happening right now between the west side of the city and the east. The west has all the money, all the power, all the glitz and glamor and political and media savvy. The east has the drugs, the pimps and hookers, the poverty, and the homelessness.”
“Sounds like a fair fight,” said Cole.
“But the west side is running out of room. The east is starting to look pretty good to the developers. Someone wants to tear this hundred-year-old landmark down and build a twenty-five-story condo and shopping mall. So that,” said Denman, pointing to the Lucky Strike building, “is where the fight will be won or lost.”
Cole turned his head sideways as he looked at the building.
“Thanks for showing me this, Denny.”
“No problem. There is talk of some low-income housing in it too,” said Denman, “to be fair.”
“So you’re showing me this because . . . ?” asked Cole.
“Because it’s not yet noon.”
Cole flipped open his cell phone. “It is now,” he said.
“Patience, grasshopper.”
They stood at the edge of the park, and before long a small group of people had gathered, coming from all directions of Chinatown. In a few minutes twenty or so people were clustered at the center of the park. They formed loose rows and began to move together, as waves would on the sea. Their arms flowed like the wind that whisked over the water, their bodies gently turning and twisting, bowing and bending in rhythmic form.
“That’s really something,” said Cole.
“It’s called tai chi.”
“Looks a lot like dancing.”
“Same idea. This is dancing with the flow of energy all around you.”
“No disrespect, Denny, but why are you showing me this?”
“You can’t box anymore. At least not right now, can you?”
“It’s going to be at least six months.”
“Time to exercise something else then,” said Denman, reaching over and tapping Cole on the chest, above his heart.
THREE
JULIET ROSE WOKE ON MONDAY morning haunted by the same thoughts she had fallen asleep with. She stepped out of bed and padded from her bedroom to the bathroom she shared with Becky, her only roommate in the ancient Eastside home.
She had been so lucky to find this place, a gem in the Grandview Woods area of the city. Just off Commercial Drive—“the Drive,” as Vancouverites called it—the home was among the oldest in the district. It had once belonged to a lumber baron, who, after Pearl Harbor, dug an air raid shelter beneath the home’s basement. In the sixties, he converted the refuge into a nuclear fallout shelter. The new owner had closed the shelter off when he converted the home into suites. Juliet had never been down the long, narrow stairs that led from the home’s tiny backyard to the shelter, two levels below the old Victorian house.
Juliet loved the old home not just for its character but because it was close enough that she could walk to work in the Downtown Eastside and still be just far enough away that she didn’t have to bring her work home with her. She had one rule: no work at home. She almost always adhered to it. It was what allowed her to continue working for the last eight years without burning out. She went downstairs and as she measured coffee into the steel stovetop espresso maker, she had to admit that her work had followed her home, if not physically, this time, then at least emotionally.
She cut a bagel and slipped it into the toaster and found some dill cream cheese in the fridge that didn’t appear to have gone off yet. The twin aromas of coffee brewing and the bagel toasting helped take her mind off the disturbing thoughts, but when she flipped on the radio to listen to the 7:00 AM news, she was brought back abruptly.
Vancouver Mayor Don West says there is no additional money for emergency shelter beds this fall, and that has advocates for the homeless up in arms. When asked to comment, Beatta Nowak of the Downtown Eastside Community Advocacy Society said, “What Mayor West and the provincial government don’t understand is that we can spend money on opening more emergency shelter beds to ensure people have a safe, dry place to sleep, or we can spend thousands of dollars a day treating them for pneumonia after they fall ill while sleeping in doorways. It’s a choice the city and the province have to make.”
But Mayor West says that the City is doing all it can until council approves a broad-scale plan to address homelessness, poverty, and the deteriorating relationship between law enforcement and the homeless in
the Downtown Eastside: “We’ve got to stop our piecemeal approach to these problems. You know, it’s all one big problem, and that’s why I’m working with other councilors to try and address this problem.”
Juliet’s bagel popped and she stared at it for a moment before she spread the cream cheese across it. She poured coffee and sat down, blowing the steam from the top of the mug.
Almost every single day Juliet thanked heaven that she worked for the Health Authority and not the City of Vancouver. Left to their own devices, the mayor and his hard-right-leaning council would study the problem, but very little would be accomplished.
But that didn’t keep her awake. What did was her suspicion that two people she knew well had disappeared.
Bobbie had gone missing almost three weeks ago. Bobbie had well-defined habits, spending his nights in a single room in a low-rent hotel called the Lucky Strike. When he didn’t have enough money to rent a room, Bobbie slept rough, choosing one of the area’s parks to sleep in rather than doorways or alleys. Most mornings he headed west, into the downtown area or the West End, where he sold umbrellas that he found on the street or discovered abandoned on the SkyTrain. Juliet had known Bobbie for the better part of three years, and in that time, he had never been absent from his routine for more than a few days. Now she hadn’t seen him in almost three weeks.
The second missing person was Peaches. Juliet had known Peaches since the woman’s first week in the Downtown Eastside six and a half years ago. Peaches had shown up on one of the area’s prowls, fresh off a Greyhound bus from Saskatchewan. Peaches started off on the wrong foot in Vancouver, falling in with a notoriously rough pimp, known as Johnnie “Hangover” because of his habit of beating the daylights out of his girls when he was hungover. When Juliet had met Peaches, she was black and blue and huddled under a blanket on a street corner across the street from the Carnegie Centre.
After only forty-eight hours in Vancouver, she’d been raped by a john, then beaten senseless by Hangover when she showed up without the money for the trick. Juliet had treated the cuts on her face, given her a giant box of condoms, and found her a room at the women’s shelter. Over the next few months, there would be many encounters between Peaches and Juliet. More stitches, a pregnancy, HIV tests, searches for housing, calls to the police to file charges against Hangover, and calls to crack down on abusive johns. Peaches’ second abortion in six months was the clincher, and Juliet was able to secure a bed for her at the Women’s Hospital Detox Centre where Peaches was put on a thirty-day program.
Juliet had personally overseen Peaches’ release from detox to ensure she didn’t fall prey to a common problem among addicts: the post-detox rush. Dry and clean, addicts would emerge from detox and immediately seek out their drug of choice—crack, heroine, speed, or crystal meth—and dope up again. The rush of shooting up or smoking crack after having been clean for a month was often too powerful an urge to resist. That was the first time Juliet had broken the cardinal rule of street nursing: do not bring your work home with you. Her roommate at the time had been suspicious when Juliet told her that Peaches was her cousin. Peaches’ stay lasted for three weeks, until Juliet found her a room at the Lucky Strike Hotel. Peaches had lived there, on and off, for more than six years now. Juliet saw Peaches nearly every day, but now the last time was two weeks ago.
Juliet contemplated the possibility that after six years of being clean, Peaches had succumbed to the ever-present temptation of a fix, and overdosed. She had been searching for the young woman everywhere, to no avail.
She finished her breakfast and went back upstairs to dress for work. She pulled on faded jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and gray zippered sweatshirt. Eight years ago, when she had first taken the job as street nurse, she had dressed more like a nurse. She quickly learned that blending in with her clients’ world was an important element in being able to approach them. Juliet donned her faded windbreaker and picked up her orange backpack, bought at the Army & Navy store on Hastings, and headed out the door.
The morning was bright but cool, September having settled into the Lower Mainland, eclipsing what had been one of the hottest summers on record. Since Peaches had gone missing, Juliet had been varying her route to work each morning, hoping to find her in a different part of town. It was nine o’clock before she reached the clinic at the Carnegie Centre. In daylight, the Carnegie Centre retained much of the magnificence it had possessed when it was built in 1903, when steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated funds to build Vancouver’s first public library. At the time, City Hall was located right next door, and the corner of Hastings and Main was the geographic center of the city. The area had been surrounded by multi-cultural neighborhoods: Little Japan to the north, Chinatown to the south, and to the east, rich ethnic blends of Italian, French, Spanish, and half a dozen other nationalities.
Now the Carnegie Centre was altogether a different place, Juliet thought, as she climbed the front steps and entered the historic building. For those unfamiliar with the face of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the hundreds of people milling around the Carnegie Centre each night could be intimidating, even frightening. Drug use, drug deals, and acts of violence in plain sight were not uncommon. But most of the people who found their way to the corner of Hastings and Main each night were there seeking community. The Carnegie Centre was often called the living room for the Downtown Eastside, and more than four hundred volunteers helped provide its services: a public reading room, weight room, art gallery, and kitchen serving three hot meals a day.
Juliet greeted people as she threaded her way to her tiny, cramped office at the back of the building. She poured a cup of coffee in the small staff lunchroom, then poked her head into the director’s office.
“Morning, Debbie,” she said. The director of the Centre was a woman in her late fifties who looked as though she was seventy. Once on the street herself, she had beaten an addiction to alcohol and cocaine twenty-five years ago, and begun a career in social work. Now she was back on the streets helping others get clean.
“Heyya, kiddo,” said Debbie French, then coughed. “What’s going on this morning?”
“I’m heading back to Oppenheimer for most of the day. There’s a new batch of kids I’ve been seeing around. I need to make contact with them, get them into the clinic for an HIV test.” Debbie was already looking back at her computer screen, her shoulders hunched forward, her gray hair falling in ribbons across her cheeks.
“And then I’m heading over to Priority Legal at lunch today. I’ve got a few questions from clients about their legal rights that I can’t answer . . .”
Debbie turned her head from her computer and looked at Juliet.
Juliet continued, “So I thought I’d put them to Denman Scott and see if he could give me an answer.”
“You know how City Hall feels about Priority Legal,” said Debbie, sitting back in her chair and pulling her gray cardigan sweater across her chest.
“I do.”
“Denman sure gets under the mayor’s skin. And the chief constable’s. And our local lad Andrews’.”
“John Andrews needs a good swift kick in the butt,” said Juliet, crossing her arms. “He’s treating the Downtown Eastside like a rung in his own personal career ladder. He’s heading for the chief constable’s office, and District 2 is just another ‘challenge’ that he has to ‘deal with’ on his way to the top. Since he’s taken over, harassment charges against the Vancouver Police Department have gone up twenty-five per cent in this neighborhood!”
Debbie had turned back and was tapping on her keyboard. Juliet figured it was time to hit the streets. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll be there at lunch.”
“Alright, hon. You be careful out there,” Debbie said, without looking at Juliet.
“You too,” said Juliet, smiling.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF a place fascinated Juliet, and as she ran down the steps to the corner of Hastings and Main, she felt relieved to be outside again. The western-most part of the Downtown Ea
stside was Gastown, historically the city’s center of industry. According to the city’s interpretation of its history, the turning point came for the area in 1958 when streetcars stopped running to the Carrall Street hub. The subsequent loss of pedestrian traffic, along with the rise in housing prices elsewhere that forced low-income people into the area, was the harbinger of doom for the Eastside.
The community had in many ways thrived with renewed diversity as the Strathcona, Oppenheimer, and Chinatown areas swelled with blue-collar workers looking for affordable accommodation. Post-war housing prices surged in newer, trendier parts of the city. To Juliet’s way of thinking, though, three things led to the Downtown Eastside becoming the troubled neighborhood it was today: in the 1970s, the loss of funding for provincial psychiatric patients who were released into the community; in the 1980s, the rise of cocaine; and the crime spree that accompanied it.
Juliet reached the new Community Outreach Centre at Oppenheimer Park just before ten. Already the park was buzzing with activity. She spotted a few of the young people she was looking for sitting on the grass. They had never met her, but her reputation preceded her.
“You checking to see if we’re junkies?” one of the young men asked. He was wearing a sweat-stained ball cap on his head covered by a dark brown hoodie.
Juliet crouched down so she was at eye level. “Just here to say hi,” she replied, smiling.
She chatted with the kids for another five or ten minutes, assessing health and addictions, handing out condoms, and making sure they all knew about the safe injection site. By noon she had talked with about thirty people around Oppenheimer, and it was time to head to Priority Legal’s office up the street. She walked to the two-story building with no street sign and nothing to indicate the goings-on inside. A man slept in the doorway of the office, his face pressed into his folded arms, his knees drawn up to his chest.
Juliet knelt down in front of him and quietly said, “It’s Juliet. I’m a street nurse. I’m just checking to make sure you’re okay.”
The Vanishing Track Page 3