As Long as the Rivers Flow

by James Bartleman

  When she saw through the street-level window of a restaurant a young couple holding hands and talking, she paused to look at them. They were so lucky to be in love and to be so happy. But she was embarrassed and moved on when they turned to stare back at her.

  In front of a construction site with a large illuminated billboard advertising luxury condominiums, panhandlers held up pieces of cardboard on which they had crudely scrawled messages telling the world that they were unemployed, they needed help to return home, they were sick or they were hungry—and asking for handouts. Others walked out into the stalled traffic to wash windshields, soliciting change. Teenagers with orange and purple hair, with rings piercing their eyebrows and lips, and dressed in ripped jeans and studded leather jackets stood in doorways begging for money.

  On sidewalk hot-air vents, the homeless were already settling down for the night, wrapped in old blankets, with their possessions in dirty plastic bags at their feet. Other unfortunates, the collars of their coats pulled up high against the cold, were lining up for hot meals and beds at hostels run by the Salvation Army and the Shepherds of Good Hope.

  As she crossed the downtown area, Martha felt ever more fearful and discouraged. The snowbanks were black and dirty, not pristine white like they were back home. The temperature on the reserve was much lower than what she was now experiencing, but the cold did not ooze through her parka and underclothing to penetrate deep into her bones like it did in the big city. Most unsettling of all, to someone used to the comforting silence and darkness of the northern night, was the relentless background rumble of street traffic: the noise and the harsh glare of streetlights and headlights that lit up the night sky accompanied her like an aching toothache no matter where she walked.

  From time to time, Martha saw people she thought were Native. Some wore their hair in braids and were dressed in buckskin jackets proclaiming pride in their heritage. Others, who seemed completely demoralized and adrift, were dressed in cast-off clothing and were trying to wheedle money from people walking past their refuges in doorways and alleys.

  Martha looked at them carefully, hoping she would see a well-dressed young aboriginal teenager with a birthmark in the form of a spider’s web. But if she did, what would she do? Perhaps she would go up to him? But what could she say?

  “Hello, my name is Martha and I used to have a baby boy with a birthmark on his forehead just like yours. The Children’s Aid Society took him away because I didn’t look after him properly. You wouldn’t happen to be that boy, would you? If you are, could we pick up where we left off so many years ago? I’ve missed you so much. I assure you I’ve changed! I’d be a good mother now.”

  A Native woman stepped out of a dark alley and brought Martha’s fantasy to an end.

  “Hey, I bet you’re Indian,” she said, slurring her words. “New in town? Wanna drink? I got plenty of wine.”

  Martha stopped to talk to her. After only a few hours in Toronto, she was already homesick and wondering if her decision to leave the reserve had been a good one. Overwhelming loneliness hit her. She had been lonely at residential school, and she had been lonely when she had returned home. She had succeeded in making a life for herself back on the reserve following Spider’s removal. But now, in her ambition to fulfil an old dream, it seemed she had come to the most desolate place on earth—the big impersonal city filled with people who ignored the misery in their midst and who seemed to care only for themselves.

  “C’mon sister, let’s be pals. I may be a drunk but I’m your kind of people.”

  The woman, who was holding a half-empty bottle of wine, grinned mirthlessly at Martha through broken teeth. Her thin face was dirty, and long, unkempt black hair dangled down in front of her empty black eyes.

  Behind her, someone wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the snow-covered ground among a pile of green garbage bags, muttered, “Wuz goin’ on? Is it the food van? Get me some hot soup, will ya?”

  Martha was tempted to join them. She would be living among bums and winos and would be looked down upon by everyone, but she would no longer be lonely. She could learn to beg. She could start drinking again. Perhaps it would even help her forget Father Antoine and her failures as a mother.

  What choice did she have anyway? She had hardly slept in two days and didn’t know the city. With few skills and without a high school diploma, her chances of getting a decent job were bleak. She sensed, however, that if she stepped into the alley, she would spend the rest of her life on the streets.

  7

  Spider

  THE CHILDREN’S AID SOCIETY put Spider up for adoption soon after he was taken away from his mother in 1974. In the same way that the Society for the Protection of Animals today advertises “cute puppies and kittens free to a good home,” the officials responsible for such matters in Ontario’s child welfare system placed an advertisement in a number of Toronto newspapers with a photograph of Spider lying on his back, smiling at the camera and attempting to suck his toes—with his birthmark conveniently obscured.

  New arrival from northern Ontario. Adorable baby boy, eleven months old, excellent health. Make an unfortunate Indian child a part of your family. Your reward will be a lifetime of love.

  Shortly thereafter, a middle-class couple in the suburbs of Toronto, who had been trying without success for years to have children, saw the notice, were enchanted by the child’s appearance and made an appointment to see him. When they saw the baby drooling and cooing and holding on to the side of his crib, they ignored his birthmark so certain were they that he was the answer to their pent-up longings to establish a family and to lavish love and attention on a child of their own.

  The adorable baby would grow up to be a noble, fully assimilated Native Canadian and a source of joy to them for the rest of their lives. The wife would bake cookies for him, just as her mother had done for her when she was a child, and her new son would help his new mother mix sugar, raisins, butter, eggs and oatmeal in a casserole, and lick the spoon when the preparations were done. The husband would take him fishing, and the son being Native, and thus instinctively understanding the ways of nature, would become the teacher and not the student of the father.

  The husband would show him how to skate, take him to hockey practice and look on with pride as his son displayed exceptional talent, rise through the ranks, play for the national team at the World Junior Hockey Championships and score the winning goal as Canada defeated the Soviet Union to take gold. The Toronto Maple Leafs would recruit him and he would become a National Hockey League star, like the great Native hockey player George Armstrong, captain of the Leafs when they won the Stanley Cup in 1967.

  He would excel in elementary and secondary school, win a scholarship to university, be a track star, editor of the university newspaper, president of the student council, graduate at the top of his class, become a schoolteacher like his parents, live close by, get married, spend the summers at the family cottage and come home with his wife and children for Sunday dinners. And when his parents became old, their son and his wife would be there for them, building an addition on to their house and insisting that they move in to spend their last days with them in peace, security and loving care.

  The young couple said of course they wanted to adopt him. In fact, they insisted on doing so as soon as possible so that their dream might begin and their lives be fulfilled. After the paperwork was submitted, the background checks completed and the obligatory domicile inspections made to ensure their house was fit for a baby to inhabit, the Children’s Aid handed him over.

  The new parents could not have been happier—at least for the first several years. They gave him a new name, Edward, which they shortened to Eddy, and undertook to raise him in their cultural tradition—white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant. When they took him to church, everyone seemed to know other families who had adopted Native children who had turned out well, and they praised the wisdom of their decision.

  “My. My. You are doing such a wonderful thing. Saving
a poor child from a life of deprivation.”

  “You are true Christians. Practising what others preach.”

  “I never could understand why so many people are trying to adopt babies from Bangladesh and China when there are plenty of Indian children right here who could use a good home. After all, we stole the land of their people and put them on reserves. By adopting their children, we can help put things right between our peoples.”

  Their happiness grew even greater when the wife became pregnant and gave birth to the cutest imaginable baby boy whom they named Robert. Two years later, a daughter, Amanda, came along. Naturally, the parents treated all three children the same. They became concerned, however, when Eddy became obsessively jealous of his younger brother and sister, going so far as to hit them in blind, uncontrollable rages. They became really worried when he did not talk until he was four.

  After he started school, his teachers reported that his “work habits left much to be desired” and that he had “difficulty paying attention in the classroom,” which was their way of saying that he was disruptive and lagging behind his peers. His parents’ suspicion that he had a deep-seated learning problem was confirmed when they took him for thorough physical, developmental and psychological testing. The diagnosis was fetal alcohol syndrome, acquired when Martha drank during pregnancy and alcohol penetrated the wall of the placenta to poison and damage her son’s brain.

  The years that followed were difficult for everyone. The younger brother and sister did their best to include Eddy in their lives, but they sensed he was different, not just in skin colour but in emotional stability. His parents lavished love and attention on him, and at times he was a dutiful, well-behaved son. More often, however, he was unpredictable, lashing out at his parents and reproaching them for taking him from his “real” mother. And as he grew older, he began to steal money from his mother’s purse, skip school and bully his brother and sister.

  At the age of fifteen, Eddy ran away from home for the first time. By the time he was sixteen, his heartbroken, deeply disappointed and secretly relieved parents had given him up to the streets. By the time he was seventeen, he had become a fixture of the Toronto punk scene.

  In contrast to Martha, who saw a hostile urban jungle as she walked the streets of Toronto in search of shelter that night in January 1991, her son felt secure in the big city. He may have been unwashed, he may have been wearing cast-off jeans with a big rip in the seat strategically situated to show off his purple underwear, he may have been coiffed with a Mohawk haircut dyed purple with spikes on top, and he may have had safety pins stuck through his ears, nose and lips, but that was his style: he was a punk and proud of it.

  His new friends accepted and respected Spider for what he was, warts and all. For the punks never asked personal questions. Most of them had been judged by others all their lives and found wanting, and were not about to do the same thing to their fellow punks. They didn’t care, for example, that Spider was of Native origin and was affected by fetal alcohol syndrome.

  Like him, they had been square pegs in round holes. Like him, they were angry, were full of unanswered questions, did not want anyone telling them what to do and were looked down upon by society and by the police. Like him, a number were Native kids taken from parents who had been residential school survivors and had been unsuccessfully adopted out to people who had never heard of fetal alcohol syndrome. Unlike him, some came from homes where they had been physically and sexually abused, and they felt safer on the streets than with their parents.

  The punks coexisted uneasily with the other species of the harmless marginalized—the bag men and bag women, muttering to themselves and pushing shopping carts filled with their possessions through the downtown crowds, the down-on-their-luck unemployed who spent their days looking for work and their nights sleeping in shelters, the older winos who panhandled and drank and gossiped together by day and slept rough by night, the mentally ill, off their meds, who wandered around in worlds of their own, and the hookers, male and female, old and young, who stood on street corners in the evenings, trying to make eye contact with prospective johns.

  Others who shared the margins of society, the ethnic gangs and the skinheads, were not so benign. The Jamaicans, Tamils, Vietnamese, Latinos and Russians, busy doing their thing extorting money from their own communities, selling drugs, feuding among themselves and occasionally carrying out some nasty piece of work for the bikers, usually paid no attention to the punks, so low were they in the pecking order.

  The skinheads, however, were a different matter. A Clockwork Orange was their cult movie of choice. They revelled in its celebration of violence and mindless aggression, and modelled themselves on its psychopathic anti-hero, Alex Delarge. Self-appointed guardians of racial purity, they behaved like jackals seeking defenceless animals to devour; they preyed on the weak, and the punks were their raw meat of choice. With their shaved heads, rolled-up pant legs, red suspenders, Nazi tattoos and steel-toed Doc Marten boots, they swaggered down Yonge Street at night in search of victims to attack with baseball bats, chains and brass knuckles. If punks were unavailable, holed up in their squats or attending concerts, the skinheads attacked the homeless asleep and helpless on their park benches. When from time to time, someone, ravaged by alcohol, weakened by poor nutrition and undermined by mental illness, died in the course of a beating, the skinheads considered they had rendered a service to society.

  Spider knew that life as a punk was for him when he first ran away from home one September day two years before. He had been in a special education class with children much younger than himself and felt humiliated. When his adoptive mother kept insisting that he needed an education to succeed in life, he walked out and took the subway to downtown Toronto.

  Emerging from the Yonge and College street exit, he saw a punk with long purple hair and a safety pin through his nose begging for spare change. He asked him where he could get something to eat, and the punk took him in hand, accompanying him to a drop-in centre for a meal and to meet other kids in situations like his.

  Life, they told him, was good, but you had to be organized.

  “When you get up in the morning, you gotta get out to pick a good spot to bum spare change. Subway stops and entrances to shopping centres and restaurants are good places. In front of Maple Leaf Gardens is always good. You sit on the ground with a cap in your hand and beg. Takes some getting used to. Some people shell out without saying anything. But there’s always some jerk saying ‘get a job,’ ‘get a haircut,’ or ‘go home.’ Stupid stuff like that.

  “We normally just try to get enough for breakfast at Burger King or McDo. Sometimes the staff won’t serve you, even when you have the money. But that’s no problem. You can always get a free meal at the Evergreen Drop-in Centre on Yonge. The staff there are cool. That’s where you meet up with the others and find out what’s going on, who got jumped by skinheads and who was given a hard time by the cops the night before. You then go out and bum some more change, share your take with the others to buy a case of barley sandwiches and go to a park to drink it.”

  The punks took Spider back to their squat in a derelict warehouse in Kensington Market. He was accepted without fuss and he loved it. A dozen or more young people were lounging around, sharing beer and dope on a floor littered with cigarette wrappers, empty food cans, old newspapers, soiled clothing, beer bottles, stained mattresses, used tissues and candy wrappers. No one seemed to mind the smell of feces and urine that wafted in from the hallway, one corner of which served as a makeshift communal toilet. On the walls, barely visible in the candlelight, were graffiti art depictions of their idols: the Sex Pistols, the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, Black Flag, the Ramones, DOA, Bad Brains and the Misfits.

  Spider drank his first beers and smoked his first pipe that night, and resolved never to return to life in suburbia. The next day, however, as he was leaving with the others from the warehouse, a policeman in a parked scout car got out and came over.

  “
Kid, you’re awfully young to be hanging out with these degenerates. You should be in school.”

  He took him back to his vehicle and punched in the data Spider gave him.

  “Just like I thought. You’re a runaway. Only fifteen. It says here your parents are worried. Let’s go.”

  Now, two years later, that first foray into the life of the streets and his embrace of his new punk identity seemed an eternity ago. He was already seventeen years old, and a tall, dark brown, heavily muscled teenager. His birthmark was as visible as ever, but he had long forgotten it was there, even though his nickname on the streets was Spider. He was happy because the past twenty-four hours had been good ones.

  It had all started the previous evening when Spider and his friends realized they were short of toilet paper, candles, Kraft Dinner and other essentials. They had long since blown on beer and dope the monthly welfare payments handed out by the city to the homeless, and it was out of the question that they would spend the money they had earned bumming change that day on such boring things when they needed it to buy beer and entrance tickets to a punk show that night.

  Thus the punks did what they usually did when they needed supplies: they went out to swarm a convenience store. With the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled over their heads to avoid identification by the security cameras, they gathered in the light snow outside the modest business establishment of a recent immigrant from South Asia. He kept his store open around the clock and was trying to make a living selling milk, newspapers, magazines, lottery tickets, “freshly brewed” coffee, cold cuts, shrivelled-up apples and other items to neighbourhood clients.