As Long as the Rivers Flow

by James Bartleman

  After checking to see that there were no customers inside and no police vehicles on the street, the punks rushed through the door a dozen strong and began stuffing cans of pop, loaves of bread, cold cuts, relish, margarine, toilet paper and tissues, porno and music industry magazines, flashlights and batteries under their clothes. They paid no attention to the owner, who yelled out from behind the counter.

  “What are you doing? Stop! Stop! I am calling the police. Please! Please! I work hard for my money. You are destroying me!”

  Like a flock of crows taking flight, the punks ran for the door, loaded down with their stolen goods. When the owner came around the counter and tried to stop them, they pushed him aside and fled into the night. Everyone, that is, except for a new member of the group, a skinny girl with a bad complexion who was being initiated into the fine art of shoplifting, punk-style. She was the last one out the door and the owner caught her on the sidewalk outside, seized her by the arms and began shaking her.

  “Why? Why? Why are you doing this to me? I work so hard. I work day and night. I have a family to support back home, and yet you come to steal! Have you no shame? Have your parents not taught you right from wrong?”

  Although he knew the police would be on their way, Spider returned to push the owner to one side, free the girl and run with her laughing to catch up with the others.

  Later on, she came to say thank you.

  “No one in my real family would’ve done what you did for me tonight.”

  After their raid, the punks sat around back at the squat, sleeping bags and blankets over their legs in an unheated room lit with stolen candles, eating cold Chef Boyardee spaghetti and Campbell’s soup from cans, drinking beer and rehashing the events of the evening.

  “Did you see the face of that sucker when we burst in. I thought he’d shit his pants.”

  “That capitalist bastard, squealing like a pig over a few cans of pop and spaghetti. He makes plenty overcharging the public and yet complains when we make him share a little of his profits with us. He’s lucky we didn’t trash his dump.”

  “Hey, Spider. You’re the man.”

  “To the rescue just like last summer.”

  “You showed him.”

  The previous summer, Spider had earned the group’s gratitude when a gang of skinheads had attacked them. It was after midnight on a hot July night in a poorly lit park. The punks were lying on the grass, enjoying the weather, talking about the events of the day, drinking beer from a case of twenty-four, smoking dope and, when the mood struck them, slipping away for a little quiet sex.

  A dozen skinheads emerged from the shadows to spoil their night.

  “Whatavwe here. A bunch of creeps! Shoulda known from the smell, you dirty rotten sponging bastards!”

  “Why dontcha take baths? Afraid a little water will wash off those fake tattoos!”

  “Why don’t you guys just bugger off?” replied one of the punks, who scrambled to his feet to confront the intruders.

  “Okay, okay, calm down. We’re not going to attack you,” the skinhead who appeared to be the leader said. “To show our good faith, let’s shake on it,” he added, extending his hand and smiling.

  But as the punk put out his hand in friendship, in one movement the skinhead withdrew his and kneed him in the groin, and as his victim bent over in pain, hit him with an uppercut to the head, knocking him to the ground. The others whipped out chains and moved in, indiscriminately beating and kicking the other punks, male and female, with their steel-toed boots. Spider, who had done nothing up to that point, pulled out a hunting knife with a ten-inch blade that he kept strapped to his calf under a pant leg. With a mad cry he went wild, slashing and stabbing the skinheads in such a frenzy that they turned and ran.

  A member of the group that had robbed the convenience store limped into the squat, his face bloody and bruised.

  “Cops picked me up and took me on the Cherry Beach Express,” was his explanation, and everyone understood what he meant.

  The police of 51 Division were responsible for one of Toronto’s poorest and toughest downtown neighbourhoods. Sometimes, to help keep order, rogue officers administered summary justice in the form of beatings to people not considered worth their while to take to jail—punks, skinheads and criminals caught in the act of committing petty crimes—at a desolate part of the waterfront, called Cherry Beach.

  The victims never complained. What judge would take the word of someone living on the margins of the law over that of a policeman? There were never any witnesses, for even in summer, few people frequented the area, filled as it was with abandoned warehouses and factories. In winter, it was even more deserted and sinister.

  “Was just heading back here with the goods when this cruiser pulls up and the cops tell me to come over.

  “ ‘Whatcha got under your coat, you green-haired little prick?’ one of them says.

  “ ‘Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?’ I says to him. ‘Go screw yourself.’

  “I didn’t like their attitude and told them they couldn’t stop and search me. I was minding my own business. I knew my rights. Didn’t they have something better to do? That was sure the wrong thing to say.

  “The two pigs got out, slapped me around, cuffed my hands behind my back and searched me. They threw the loot away and pushed me into the back.

  “They told me it was time for a little attitude adjustment. The sunsabitches took me on the Express. On the way down Yonge to Lakeshore, I told them what I thought of them. But once we turned down Cherry Street, they played their little game—speeding up and slamming on the brakes, pitching me headfirst against the wire cage in the backseat. They thought that was funny.

  “At Cherry Beach, they hauled me out, dragged me into the bushes and put the boots to me.

  “ ‘Let this teach you not to rob convenience stores and to give us lip in our part of town,’ they said. ‘If we have to take you down here again you won’t get off so easy.’ ”

  If the aggrieved punk was expecting sympathy from his friends, he was mistaken. They were at a stage in their drinking when almost anything would send them into peals of hysterical laughter. They were all used to being hassled by the police, and they knew the best thing to do when pulled aside was to say as little as possible. Their buddy had been asking for trouble.

  “You stupid jerk. Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?”

  “I woulda loved to have seen the face of that cop when you told him to screw off.”

  “At least you didn’t get arrested when they found the stuff from the store.”

  An hour later, the punks wandered off to attend a show being held at a club on the corner of Yonge and Dundas. It was only nine o’clock but raucous music could be heard a block away. An enormous, unsmiling bouncer looked them over, opened the steel door and motioned for them to enter. Inside, they quickly paid the three-dollar cover charge and joined hundreds of people slam dancing in the mosh pit in front of the stage.

  The musicians, bare to the chest and lathered in sweat, bobbed and weaved, downed beer, smoked weed, hammered drums and attacked guitars as they spit into the microphones the incoherent in-your-face slogans of the outsider—self-hatred and loathing, disgust and revolt, reckless abandon and delirium. Spider and his friends hurled themselves at each other and at the others on the floor, chest against chest, shoulder against shoulder, elbow against face and knee against groin, under flashing red, green and blue lights to the sound of pulsing, throbbing, off-key, jarring electric guitar music and frenetic drumming. Dancers, overcome with emotion or stupid drunk, climbed up onto the stage and dove recklessly into the churning mass below, blindly trusting members of the crowd to catch them before they hit the floor. A blue cloud of marijuana and cigarette smoke hung over the room.

  Spider could not have been happier. He was caught up in the hysteria and thrived on the physical contact, and each time he slammed someone or was smashed hard he was filled with physical and mental release. He loved the ch
aos and the crowd of tattooed, pierced, leather-jacketed, metal-studded bodies, and was at one with the anarchistic, broken lyrics of revolt. He sucked in with voluptuous pleasure the smell of raw sex, sweat, adrenaline, body odour, dope, smoke, blood and beer. He felt a profound sense of existential joy, was alive in the moment and would not have cared if he were to die the second the music stopped.

  And if he had known that Martha was at that time making her way to Toronto, he would not have cared. He loved the punks and they loved him. To Spider it was the punks, not his birth mother or his adoptive parents, who were his real family.

  8

  New Beginnings

  AT THE ENTRANCE TO THE ALLEY, Martha was replying in Anishinaabemowin to the offer made to her by the homeless woman.

  “I’m from way up north from a reserve called Cat Lake First Nation. It’s so small you’ve probably never heard of it. I just came out on the winter road and took the bus from Pickle Lake. I don’t know anyone here.”

  The woman, speaking hesitantly, replied in the same language.

  “I don’t speak Anishinaabemowin no good no more. Lost most of it when I was sent away to school but I still understand okay.

  “Never heard of your place,” she said, carrying on in English, “but that don’t mean nothing. My reserve is back in the bush near the Quebec border. We knew nothing about the people who lived to the west of us when I was a kid.”

  Happy to have a Native person to talk to, Martha told her how she had been raised on the land as a little girl, been sent off to residential school, had returned home, had a hard time fitting in, and had two children, and how her son had been taken from her. One of the main reasons she had come to the city was to find her son.

  “He has a big birthmark in the shape of a spider’s web on his forehead, and would be about seventeen now. You haven’t seen him, have you?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the woman said, after thinking about the question for a minute. “I’ve seen a lot of Indian kids on the streets, but they usually stick to themselves.

  “My story’s a bit like yours,” she said. “Raised in the bush. Taken away when I was ten and sent to residential school. But I guess I was lucky ’cause the nuns and priests were really good to me. None of those beatings and sexual things you hear about that happened at other schools. My family didn’t want me so I stayed at the school in the summers until I was sixteen. When I went back to the reserve to stay, my family still didn’t want me. I started running around. Got pregnant. Got pregnant again and again until I had half a dozen kids. I guess I wasn’t the greatest mom and the Children’s Aid stepped in and took them away. Don’t know where they are—never tried to find them. I got fed up and took the bus to Toronto. Just like you.

  “Been here about two years, all of them on the street. Met up with a guy from up north and we’ve been together ever since. So whadyasay? Gonna join us?”

  Martha did not reply.

  “Our life’s pretty good,” the woman said. “We get welfare just like back home. Some days we make good money bumming change. When we buy booze we can go into any liquor or beer store and pay the normal price. No big bootlegger prices here. And if you like Indians, there’s lots of us here.

  “Didya know Toronto’s Canada’s biggest reserve? There’s Indians around here from up north, from down south and from the States. Even some who call themselves Indians from Mexico. People who were once rich and important. Everyone’s got lots of stories to tell, even if most of it’s lies.”

  “But isn’t your life dangerous? Where do you sleep? What do you eat?” asked Martha.

  “I’m not gonna shit ya,” the woman replied after a pause. “It’s a hard life just the same. Sooner or later you go from booze to rubbing alcohol, to mouthwash, to aftershave, to shoe polish and eventually to Lysol. Didya know you could go blind if you’re not careful? Before ya know it you’re having the shakes, you know, the DTs—the seizures and craziness when you think you’re being chased by pink elephants and monsters—and that’s it for you. But it’s always the other guy who’s gonna get it. Won’t never happen to me ’cause I’m too smart.”

  “But it’s cold. Where do you sleep?” insisted Martha.

  “It’s a secret, but since we’re such good friends, I’m gonna tell ya.”

  In a theatrical whisper, the woman said, “Under the overpass at the bottom of Spadina Avenue. Right where it goes onto the Gardiner—not much of a secret, eh?” She laughed. “It’s actually not so bad. We gotta big pile of sleepin’ bags and blankets. We crawl into them and drink to our heart’s content. We don’t even hear the traffic no more. And do you know something? I actually like the smell of exhaust fumes—reminds me of nights back home when I came back from residential school and a bunch of us used to do a little sniffing. Not too fussy, though, about the water that drips on us when it rains.”

  “And your food?” Martha asked.

  “That’s easy,” she replied. “We get breakfast in bed. The Sally Ann comes by every morning with their Welcome Wagon and gives us hot coffee, soup and sandwiches. We don’t even have to get up—all we gotta do is pretend we’re interested when they ask us to pray with them.”

  “Sometimes we go to the Council Fire over on Dundas for a meal. That’s an outfit that’s run by Indians for people like us. Every night the Indian guys who run the Anishinabe Street Patrol bring more soup and sandwiches. Plus sleeping bags, socks, gloves and blankets if you need them. If you get sick, someone will call 911 for you. Everything’s all taken care of.”

  Martha hesitated.

  “Look,” the woman said, “I came to the city not so long ago just like you. It was a tough place. But I made real good friends with people just like me who liked drinking. We’re heading back now to finish off our booze and you’re welcome. And that’s an offer you won’t get around here every day. It seems to me,” she added, “that we gotta lot in common. I bet we’re even the same age. Come on, guess how old I am.”

  Martha thought that she looked to be in her fifties or sixties, but to be polite, told her she was about forty. The woman laughed and said she was only twenty-six.

  Martha shivered, this time not from the cold. She had been growing increasingly uneasy as the woman described her life. Why did this person assume that just because she was Native she would want to live on the streets? It was true that she was lonely and wanted friends but not at the cost of losing her self-respect and dignity. She would rather die than live under an overpass exposed to the elements like an animal and have to rely on the handouts of the Salvation Army and the Anishinabe Street Patrol to survive.

  Surely there was more to life than spending her days with people who appeared determined to drink themselves to death. What about her mother and Raven? She had to find a job to make money to support them. There was Spider to think about. Now, to her horror, she discovered that the woman she was talking to was actually eight years younger than she was. Looking at her more closely, she saw herself in two years if she opted for life on the streets—sick and woebegone and waiting to die. There had to be a better way.

  The woman cut in. “Well, what’s it to be? You coming or not?”

  But before Martha could reply, she saw a sign blinking out of the dark. “Kwawag Andwad, Native Women’s Shelter.”

  Martha knew that kwawag andwad meant “our home” in Anishinaabemowin. Perhaps the people there could help her.

  “Meegwetch,” said Martha, “but I think I’ll try that place down the street.”

  The woman shrugged her shoulders. And as Martha walked away, she called out, “No skin off my ass!”

  After Martha rang the doorbell, it did not take long before a Native woman in her mid-thirties, short, round-faced, with dark brown skin and alert, friendly black eyes, opened the door. Seeing Martha standing there silently in the dark with her pack on her back, she guessed she had just arrived in the city.

  “Looks like you’ve come a long way. My name’s Nora Simcoe and I won’t bite you. C�
�mon in and make yourself at home.”

  Martha entered saying in a low voice, “Mine’s Martha. I saw your sign.”

  Nora motioned to the closet and said, “Hang your coat up and stow your pack in there. Do you want to visit the washroom? It’s just down the hall. Then let’s get together in the kitchen.”

  The two women sat together around the kitchen table drinking instant coffee.

  “Looks like you’ve had a tough day,” Nora said.

  When Martha did not reply but fixed her eyes on the table, Nora did not press her. She was Anishinabe herself from Chippewas of Rama First Nation on Lake Couchiching, one hundred miles north of Toronto. Although the Anishinabe of southern and northwestern Ontario were separated geographically by great distances, their culture and language were similar and they had no problem understanding each other. In their tradition, long silences in conversations were the norm, and Nora did not interpret Martha’s lack of response as a sign of indifference or rudeness.

  Nora also had years of experience in dealing with women who came to the city with high hopes, but who had neither the life skills nor the training to survive in a tough urban environment. She had graduated from the University of Toronto as a social worker and had devoted her life to helping Native women who had left their reserves and were in a state of cultural shock.

  It was critical, she knew, to help them as soon as possible after they arrived in the city and before they drifted into a life on the streets, or before pimps in search of gullible girls to exploit as prostitutes took control of their lives. All too often, she knew, these women joined the ranks of the thousands of Native women who had simply “disappeared” over the years across Canada, murdered by their pimps or their johns and dumped like roadkill in places where they would never be found. Since they were street women, the police just went through the motions in looking for them and society did not seem to care.