Fighting for Space

  At the time of writing, Crosstown Clinic’s ninety-something patients remain the only people in North America for whom prescription heroin is available.

  When Kevin Thompson entered Vancouver’s first prescription-heroin study in 2006, he discovered it wasn’t only the drug he was addicted to, but also the lifestyle around it.

  “Some people are addicted to the needle; some people are addicted to the hustle,” he explains.

  Once Thompson was guaranteed three shots of heroin a day at Crosstown Clinic, he found he had so much free time on his hands that it was oddly unnerving. “I didn’t have to run or chase the dope,” he says. “It was overwhelming at first. Too much time. I started getting bored and going, ‘Well, what does everybody do?’”

  Thompson started going for walks. “I realized, ‘Hey, I live on the ocean. It’s a block away. And I haven’t been down to the ocean and paid attention to it in twenty, twenty-five years.’”

  He began visiting nearby Crab Park and then ventured farther from the Downtown Eastside to Stanley Park and the public swimming pool there. Soon enough, he felt it was time to go back to work. He was hired by the nonprofit Portland Hotel Society as a peer-support staffer. It was his first job in roughly two decades. Meanwhile, at Crosstown, Thompson slowly began to reduce his prescribed dose of diacetylmorphine.

  “I’m starting to wean myself,” he says. “I do want to quit one day. But it’s nice to know that this is here for me if I need it.”

  When BC’s overdose epidemic began to claim more lives over the course of the 2016–17 winter, Thompson took a new job at the overdose-prevention site attached to PHS’s Washington Hotel (renamed the Maple Hotel), where he still works today. Since then, he’s lost track of the number of overdoses he’s reversed there. He feels good about that, adding, “I love my job.” But Thompson says he also can’t help but feel guilty.

  “My friends that I’ve been with for years, they’re still playing the roulette game that I’m not.”

  79Travis Lupick, “Dodging Drug Laws, B.C. Unveils Plans to Immediately Offer Supervised-Injection Services in Vancouver and Other Cities,” Georgia Straight, December 8, 2016.

  Epilogue

  Before my meeting with Angel Gaeta-Hildebrandt, I spotted her across the street, standing at a crosswalk with her six-year-old son, Mikel. I was sitting outside a Starbucks, twenty minutes early for our interview. The little boy goes to school just a block away and so Gaeta-Hildebrandt, or Molly, as her friends call her, would drop him off there and then double back to meet me. Like a scene out of a movie, I watched her crouch down on one knee, lick her finger, and use it to clean a smudge of food from Mikel’s cheek. Then the traffic light changed and they continued on their walk to school.

  It was April 20, 2017, the first truly warm and sunny day that broke Vancouver’s endless winter of fentanyl deaths. It had rained the night before, and the sun reflected off puddles and places where the pavement was still wet.

  Fifteen minutes later, Molly sat down with me and told me it was Mikel’s birthday. She’d just bought him a Nintendo. It’s sort of a gift for both of them, she said with a smile. One of her favourite things in the world is a lazy weekend morning playing videogames with her son and his dad, who’s also named Mikel. The family’s favourite game is Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, she added. It sounded like a really nice life. Molly beamed with warmth as we talked about it.

  When BC’s provincial government released its 2014 financial review of the Portland Hotel Society, that was the end of Liz Evans’s and Mark Townsend’s work in Vancouver. But there are a thousand people who still live in their hotels in the Downtown Eastside today. Molly, for example, and her mother Mary Jack, who was one of the Portland’s very first tenants. “If it weren’t for Liz and Mark, we wouldn’t be here,” Mary told me over another coffee the following week. Tenants mourned the Portland founders’ departure. But, of course, their lives continued on without them.

  Mary Jack was only twenty years old when she had Molly in 1980. When Molly was still a young child, their roles essentially flipped, and Molly became the voice of responsibility in their little family.

  “These are the rules I’m supposed to follow,” she remembers telling her mom when she was just a girl. Molly enforced those rules and would actually give herself a short time-out whenever she misbehaved.

  They were homeless together, living on the streets of Vancouver for a time, though Molly didn’t realize it until she was older. “We’d just walk around singing,” she says. “And I had lots of babysitters.”

  Mary’s drug dealer, an older woman named Gail, took Molly into her home for a while. Gail had two boys of her own but no daughter, and she treated Molly like the baby girl she’d always wanted. Eventually a dispute developed between Mary and Gail, and Molly was sent to live with her aunt out in Chilliwack, a rural suburb about an hour’s drive from the Downtown Eastside. She hated being away from her mother.

  The deal was that when Mary quit heroin, they could be together again. In 1995, when Molly was fifteen years old, Mary did quit, at least for a while. So Molly left her aunt’s place and showed up at her mom’s door at the Portland Hotel. “She had said, ‘You can move in with me as soon as I can quit,’” Molly recounts. “So I was like, ‘So now I can stay then. I’m not going back.’”

  The old Portland Hotel was a sanctuary from the streets, but it was no place for a fifteen-year-old girl. So Liz Evans took Molly home to live with her and Townsend. “You can stay here for a bit,” Evans told her.

  Townsend remembers there was never any discussion about it. Evans brought Molly home one night, and that was that. “We couldn’t leave some fifteen-year-old in the old hotel,” he says.

  Their house was just a short walk from the Downtown Eastside, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to take in a stray. Molly remembers her first morning waking up there. It was Evans’s birthday and Townsend had prepared a big breakfast and poured champagne and orange juice for everyone.

  “This is kind of cool,” Molly remembers thinking. “There was always tea,” she continues. “I really liked that they had so many different types of music. They had a huge CD case, kind of a library … And the first time I ever had basil was with them. I was like, ‘What’s this in the salad? This tastes so good!’ I couldn’t get enough of it. And it was just basil, but I had never heard of it before.”

  Evans drove Molly to school most mornings and she became a member of the family. After a few months, Townsend found Mary and Molly an apartment just outside the Downtown Eastside where they could live together. But shortly after they moved in, Mary’s mother visited for a few days and passed away there. “It was hard for her to be in the same place where her mother died,” Molly says. “So she kinda ran away from home for a bit.”

  In 1998, Molly turned eighteen and Evans let her and her mom move together into the old Portland Hotel, into two rooms on the same floor, just down the hall from one another. “It was nice,” Molly says. “I had a room that was separate from everybody else that I could make my own.”

  Since she’d run away from her aunt’s house three years earlier, Molly had always shared a bedroom with her mom or a boyfriend. This was the first time that a space was totally hers. Molly remembers there were mice, but she figured out how to live with them. Each night, she put a few scraps of food out on the side of the room opposite from her bed. The mice were going to share the room with her no matter what, she remembers thinking, so this way, she could have her space and the mice could have theirs.

  Bud Osborn was hanging around the hotel a lot in those days, and Molly attended poetry workshops he held in the stairwell. “You could go there and write down your poem or whatever you were thinking or you could write about how your day was,” she says. “They used to do haircuts, too,” she adds. “This really awesome guy used to do my hair perfect all the time. They would always do little things like that.”

  Molly liked the hotel, but it was chaotic. There was always somebody
high on drugs wandering the hallways or struggling with a mental-health episode. The mice didn’t bother Molly much, but she didn’t like the cockroaches. A couple of the older male tenants creeped her out a bit. But Molly had a room there that was her own, and it was just down the hall from her mom’s.

  She spent hours in the hotel’s tiny lobby, chatting with Evans and Kerstin Stuerzbecher and whoever else was around. “The old staff, you could just sit there and talk with them forever,” she says. “I would talk about my boyfriends and that stuff.”

  Evans and Townsend had been looking out for Molly for a few years, but she’d already lived a complicated life. “When I was seventeen, that’s when I started doing more drugs and stuff,” Molly says. “My thing with drugs was, I wanted to try every one of them.”

  Molly did try them all, going through an acid phase for a while, eventually settling on cocaine, and then crack and methamphetamine. Through the 1990s, Vancouver had an underground rave scene. Teenagers and early twenty-somethings took ecstasy, acid, and crystal meth, and danced until the morning in vacant warehouses and abandoned retail stores. Molly loved it.

  “I liked being awake forever,” Molly continues. “I would draw and paint.” She didn’t realize it at the time, but she’d grown addicted to crack. She remembers how little fun it was even as she continued to smoke it. She spent night after night high on crack, in bed, hiding under the covers, convinced that any second the police were going to knock down her door. “That was my lost phase, I think, at the Old Portland.” That’s all she says about it.

  Molly didn’t like cocaine or crack anymore. They made her feel paranoid when she was high and guilty when she wasn’t. On August 6, 2000, she gave them both up. It was moving day. The new Portland Hotel felt like a place where she could do without the crack that she’d smoked through her nights at the old hotel. “Getting away from all that, that was awesome,” she says.

  Best of all, Evans had arranged for Molly and her mother to have rooms directly across the hall from one another. “So I quit coke when we moved,” Molly says. “I was like, ‘This is a fresh start.’ I was still doing crystal and stuff, but that was a big thing for me to do.”

  Molly took a job at the Interurban, a little art gallery that PHS owns on the corner just across from Pigeon Park. Then, one afternoon after a few years at the new Portland Hotel, Molly spotted a young man. She was doing her laundry when she noticed him. There weren’t too many tenants in the hotel under the age of thirty. “And he was super hot,” she says, laughing.

  The very next day, an older guy in a wheelchair knocked on her door. “My son just got out of jail and wants to hang out with you,” the man said to her. Molly was slightly nervous about the jail thing but agreed to the blind date. When she met him later that week, he turned out to be the guy from the laundry room.

  Mary remembers at first being a little unsure about Mikel. “But he fell in love with my daughter,” she says. “And he ended up being a good guy. He ended up being a really good guy.”

  A few more years passed. Mikel was hooked on heroin when he first met Molly, but together they managed to kick his habit. He started using meth and they made it into a couple’s thing.

  “I never really thought of it as an addiction because my cats were always fed, my responsibilities were always taken care of before I did anything else, and I would never front,” Molly says. She would sometimes show up late for her job at the Interurban Gallery, but not so often that they would think of firing her. At the same time, there were signs the addiction was gaining on her. Molly would seldom sleep and started having psychotic episodes. She would hear things. Worse, it began to feel like life wasn’t about much more than meth. Mikel played video games, and Molly sat beside him and filled her sketch books. “We were bored,” she says.

  In March 2010, it was time to move again.

  The story of the new Woodward’s complex is an entire book in itself. Mark Townsend, Jim Green, Bud Osborn, and a supporting cast of dozens fought for more than a decade to make it happen. Finally, the old Woodward’s Department Store was torn down. In 2010, two residential towers rose in its place. They opened with 536 market-rate units, 125 units for the Portland’s hard-to-house tenants, plus seventy-five subsidized apartments for families.

  The Woodward’s redevelopment occupies an entire square block on the western edge of the Downtown Eastside. It was one of the longest and most heated political sagas in Vancouver’s history. Today, the end result remains controversial. Townsend concedes that their ultimate goal—to save the Downtown Eastside from gentrification—will likely fail, and that the Woodward’s redevelopment will deserve a lot of the blame when the neighbourhood is eventually lost to higher-income condo dwellers. But for Molly and so many other PHS tenants, Woodward’s remains a dream come true.

  There, Molly and Mikel grew increasingly tired of drugs. For the first time in as long as either of them could remember, they felt like they could quit. It was a gradual thing. They went a few weeks without crystal, dipped back into it for a while, but then went another few weeks without using the drug. Each break lasted a little longer than the one before it.

  Molly remembers that Liz Evans remained quietly supportive. Molly had used the internet to track down her father, whom she hadn’t seen since she was six. He was living in Seattle, just over the border from Vancouver. So Evans bought Molly a ticket so that she could visit him. Sitting at a café waiting for the train, Evans asked Molly, “What are you doing these days?”

  “Crystal,” Molly replied. “Just crystal.”

  They continued to chat. “I think she was just making conversation, really,” Molly says. She remembers it was a subtle way of Evans letting her know that she was there for her.

  “She helped people help themselves,” Molly explains. “She helped people feel more confident to help themselves. She never judged us. When I was messed up on drugs, she never judged me. She never made me feel like I had to hide anything I was doing. It was all about acceptance.”

  About a year after they moved into the Woodward’s building, Molly found out she was pregnant. “And I was done,” she says. Her years on crystal meth were over. When Mikel was born, his father quit drugs, too. They were married at the Interurban in a cozy ceremony attended by family, friends, and quite a few long-serving PHS staffers.

  Sitting outside Starbucks, I ask Molly about their son and she begins going on about him, as mothers do.

  “He’s in kindergarten, right there,” she says, pointing to Mikel’s school just down the street. “He’s into video games. I got him a little Nintendo for his birthday so now he’s playing Yoshi a lot. He also likes reading. He’s learning how to read. It’s really cool. Each night we’re going through the Hop on Pop book and he’s getting way better at reading and that’s awesome. He loves animals. He knows everything about animals, animals you don’t even know about. He’s obsessed.”

  Later, I tell Townsend about what Molly’s mother said, about how she didn’t think that she or her daughter would be alive today if it weren’t for him and Evans.

  “What you are talking about with drug use, for many people, is a sense of disconnection,” he replies. Townsend says that he wishes he could have snapped his fingers and ended both Mary and Molly’s addictions to drugs years earlier. “But instead we just did the best we could,” he continues. “We gave them a place where they could be together and where they had someone in the world … Where they had a connection.”

  Liz Evans and Mikel Gaeta Hildebrandt, a third-generation tenant of the Portland Hotel Society, in June 2017.

  Photo: Angel Gaeta Hildebrandt

  They’re all friends on Facebook and, from New York, Townsend remarks how much he and Evans enjoy watching Molly continue to grow up and raise her boy.

  “I guess she dealt with some of her demons and she dealt with her pain,” he says. “We just gave her space, and then she had her life.”

  Acknowledgments

  There were a lot of people wh
o helped me find my way to this project and then stick with it to completion. I think the first person I ever mentioned it to was Mark Townsend, in May 2014. He told me he didn’t think anyone would read it but gave me his blessings just the same. So thank you to him. And to Liz Evans, Ann Livingston, and Dean Wilson. You all gave me so much of your time and shared with me so much of your lives. The trust you placed in me was incredible.

  Thank you to Susan Safyan and Brian Lam for your edits, to Jackie Wong for your early read, always so sensitive and insightful, to Robert Lecker for your enthusiasm and advice, and to Jen Croll for tutoring me through the proposal. Thank you to Frances Bula and Lori Culbert for your wisdom, to Nettie Wild for your Fix transcripts, and a big thank you to Johann Hari, who so graciously shared his tapes of the last extensive interviews that Bud Osborn gave before he passed away. Thank you to Dr Gabor Maté for your expertise I sought for chapters concerning science, and to Bruce Alexander and Mallory Lupick for your help there as well. To Joseph Arvay and Sally Yee for your help sourcing documents related to the Insite case, to Sam Fenn, Gordon Katic, and Alexander Kim, for your research that went into the prescription heroin chapter, to Andrew Bell for your assistance with the six chapters that cover the United States, and to Kevin Thompson for your years of help reporting from the Downtown Eastside. For graciously giving me permission to include their photographs, I give huge thank yous to Elaine Brière, Duncan Murdoch, Lincoln Clarkes, Tyson Fast, Colin Askey, and the Vancouver Sun’s Carolyn Soltau. And thank you to Lost & Found Café and especially Heesue Sim for a comfortable place to work and countless free cups of coffee.