Kristen McCarthy gets an insider’s tour of the Downtown Eastside
“Eighty percent of the people down here are parasites, maggots, and predators,” says Rory, my Downtown Eastside guide, who comes equipped with a cocaine addiction, hepatitis C and a decade of experience “playing” on the streets. The remark is his catchphrase, a smart-mouthed personal slogan. “Then there are the people like me,” he adds. “I'm an emotional puppy.”
Starting with Carnegie Centre, the belly of the beast, Rory has agreed to show me around his neighbourhood in exchange for a Chinese noodle lunch at Tinseltown mall. Last month, he moved off the streets and into a low-income hotel at Princess and Hastings—the first room of his own in years—and he’s in newfound “couch potato” mode.
In front of us, Carnegie’s granite steps are visibly covered in pee and spit. Once the pride of the community, the domed sandstone building and its grounds are buzzing with dubious activity. Shaggy panhandlers, bleached-out hookers, illegal immigrants in baggy jeans, and regular Joes slouch up against its walls. They smoke, laugh, dart their hands in and out of each other’s pockets, and hope like hell to get high.
Suddenly, a police cruiser slams into a Ford Expedition at the corner of Main and Hastings in a botched attempt to join a live crackdown . The crowd throws up its arms, whistles and applauds. A skeletal grandmother missing teeth, reminiscent of the wise hag Baba Yaga, rolls her emaciated torso around in circles and laughs.
An Asian police officer with frosted, spiked hair emerges from the smashed cruiser to deal with the shaken SUV driver. His partner swaggers over to join a fellow pair of officers in the takedown of a mouthy blonde in a blue jersey marked number 15. The audience’s heckles turn to boos, but as soon as the target is cuffed, they turn back to their smokes and resume their business.
“Carnegie is a zoo,” mumbles Rory. He’s lost most of his teeth, so his speech can be hard to decipher. “I wouldn’t be caught dead there.” He’s hardly the only one who feels that way. The almost cartoonish power games between dealers, prostitutes and police play out here amid homelessness on a daily basis. For most Vancouverites, these Downtown Eastside images have become a cliché.
A few blocks further on, we circle the parameters of Oppenheimer Park, infamous as a place to see junkies shooting up in broad daylight. Rory also despises this seedy patch of green, where Christmas lights hang dead in the trees and Trinidadian dealers loiter in the urinals. A gang of three jumped him here last night when he wouldn’t buy their crack.
“I told them to shove it up their asses,” says Rory, who’s cut down to booze and bread because his body can’t handle the usual. So they smacked his head with a wooden plank and stole his shoes. “I had to walk through the snow all the way up to the liquor store on Alberni Street in my socks, for chrissakes.” This morning he paid his buddy $5 for a new pair of runners, but offers no explanation of where shoes that cheap came from.
“The predators and the feeders are capable of anything,” continues Rory. “They would take the gold fillings out of their dead grandmother’s mouth during her funeral, and their explanation would be: 'Well, she don’t need ’em no more.’ Technically correct, right? But that’s not the point.”
Rory is 6'3" with a wild strawberry-blonde beard that covers the dull scabs on his face. He clasps his hands together like a parson, perhaps betraying a desire to be considered well-spoken and knowledgeable. Although he often makes a point of setting himself apart from others in this neighbourhood, he’s also the first to admit he fits right in.
“The lifestyle here is all about instant gratification, right? I’m no different. Nobody here wants to build something, to create something that takes a long time, or that gives you that pleasure of accomplishment when you’re done.”
Adjacent to the park on East Cordova, a thick lineup forms outside the Franciscan Sisters of Atonement church, where the Catholic nuns ladle out 300 to 500 daily bowls of soup to the homeless and semi-sheltered like Rory.
“They’re one of the good guys,” Rory says as he points. “They don’t ask for anything, don’t advocate anything, just feed people who’re hungry. Down here it’s important to recognize someone’s true nature. It’s like the scorpion and the frog. You have the good guys being bad guys, the bad guys being good guys. So you always have to ask yourself: What is the nature of the thing?”
I look around the park. Rainbow patterns decorate the fence and sidewalk. In an alley across the street, a Native girl huddles next to what must be her pimp. She’s like others I’ve passed before: a shy smile before she glances away, like I’m the cool girl at school, someone from an imaginary world where life is golden. No wonder Rory hates this place.
“But this is your neighbourhood,” I say. “There must be something redeemable about it.”
Rory narrows his eyes at the shuffling lineup, and his words turn on me in rapid fire: “Listen to me. If you gave me a gun right now, I’d shoot every fucking single last one of them.” He jerks his hands like live wires and quickens his pace, only to ease back and reclasp his hands, calm and mannered once more. “Sorry about my language, but that’s the nature of the conversation, isn’t it?”
* * *
The winter winds have been especially harsh, and a strain of pneumonia specific to Vancouver is claiming Downtown Eastside lives. Nurses in yellow coats post health warnings advertising free vaccinations to prevent deadly blood infections among the homeless. Street kids curl up in alleyways, knees pulled up underneath their sweaters, faces shoved deep inside where warm air circulates. They are runaways, vagrants from the foster-care system, from all across Canada. Nothing buffers them from the cold sidewalk but thin pieces of cardboard. On any other day, I might have said hello, plunked a loonie into their cups, or bought a jug of milk for one who swears she’s headed for detox. But today it doesn’t seem to mean much.
* * *
Rory holds open the door to the washed-out Patrick Anthony hotel, inviting me upstairs to check out his single-occupancy room. Inside, the caretaker roosts in an office at the bottom of the stairs, chain-smoking. On the wall behind her is a sepia map of old Vancouver. She’s a Native woman with a weary face, but when Rory passes, she gives him a tight smile. He hasn’t bothered to learn her name yet, or the names of any other tenants; he keeps to himself and likes it that way.
Upstairs, the hallway leads to a row of individual rooms, one shared bathroom, and a coin-operated washer/dryer that costs $2.50 a load. Rent is $380 a month. Welfare pays Rory $500, which leaves $120 dollars for booze, food, laundry and other essentials.
Rory’s room is more like a squat than a place to live, but it’s dry and private, and he manages to keep it tidy. Winter jackets hang in a line near the window and blankets lie folded in piles. He has one burner for cooking, an empty egg carton, and stale bread that his brother bought for him a couple of weeks ago. Recently, cockroaches infested his toaster and laid enough eggs to short-circuit his television. He’s placed Chinese pesticide chalk along the baseboards.
Until he moved in, Rory was considered one of the “street homeless,” but when I ask him about the estimated 2,300 people who live and sleep on Vancouver’s pavement, his shared experience doesn’t elicit sympathy. Maybe he’s just too familiar with their vices.
“There are only 10 percent of people here that don’t do drugs. Ninety percent are on some kind of drug: jib, heroin, coke, speed, booze.” Rory clasps his hands in his lap. “I know. I live here.” He believes 30 percent of drug users in the area are mentally ill and would benefit from some help, but the rest of the population, according to him, are write-offs.
The new room allows Rory to complete his New York Times crossword in peace and distance himself from weeklong cocaine binges he describes as “parties.” On rare occasions he’s helped consume thousands of dollars’ worth of drugs and alcohol, funded by troubled outsiders who came to play rough—even a suicidal murderer once.
If it weren’t for outreach workers from the Triage Centre around the corner who found him this room, Rory would still be sick and on the streets, unable to detach himself from a drug-fuelled lifestyle. They arranged his very first welfare cheque this month; despite his long-term on-and-off-the-street history, he’d never applied for social assistance. But even with a roof over his head to shield him from winter, Rory isn’t convinced that Triage is doing the right thing.
“It keeps people alive, but is that better than them dying?” Rory says. “If they died, there wouldn’t be areas like this.” He looks down at his hands and tells me he can still work a couple days a week in construction like he used to, that he’s good at what he does, thank-you-very-much. He momentarily forgets that on some days, he doesn’t have the strength to leave his room.
“I never wanted to be one of those people that sit there and wait for their welfare cheque, blow it on drugs and go party for two days, then scratch themselves for another month, waiting for that welfare cheque again. No thank you.”
“But it’s $500 in your pocket,” I say.
“I was never inclined that way. The government don’t mean nothing, the government sucks, okay, if I wanted something from the government, I’ll take it. Guys in my position, we’re peons. We mean nothing to them. I’d rather rip them off then have them give me money.”
Rory is eligible for disability but hasn’t crossed the Ts and dotted the Is on that one. He calls himself a “master procrastinator”—someone who’s been “29 for 19 years” because he’s too “irresponsible and immature” to be 30. For now, being able to wear dry shoes and clean his clothes is a priority. In the future he wants to get his teeth fixed, but welfare benefits won’t cover it.
“I used to have sympathy for people down here, before I had these circumstances,” Rory says. “I’d drive by and see an old lady in the doorway and I’d wave to her. But now, I take the time to enjoy the sight because I know how they got there. They’re there because that’s where they put themselves. They’ve stole, lied and cheated from everyone who has ever known them.”
* * *
East Hastings is home to relics like Save-On-Meats butcher shop, Spartacus Books, and the ghost of the now-demolished Woodward’s building. These are reminders of the past, an era when an east-side pharmacy like Owl Drugs could exist without a trace of irony. On any given day, absurdity reigns: a stuffed donkey Eeyore dangles from a parking meter by its neck; a man grabs a half eaten cheese bun from off the top of a Canada Post mailbox; an elderly man in a soda-pop-orange top hat parades down the sidewalk along Pender and disappears around a corner. The Downtown Eastside is like the centre of a kaleidoscope, where nothing is what it appears to be.
* * *
“It’s a wild game down here,” Rory tells me. “Amazing things take place.” We walk down Pender and turn onto Gore. “People can see things here that they can’t see anywhere else.”
I just see the obvious: people shooting up in doorways and alleys, dealers mingling with addicts in open-air markets, a sometimes arrogant and largely ineffectual police presence.
“When people get busted around here, it’s called 'going to get healthy,’” says Rory. “No kidding. It keeps the neighbourhood quiet—six months in jail, six months on the street.”
Rory’s worried about talking too much. Yet he tells me that abundant sums of money flow in and out of the area, and that the Los Diablos gang—or “the boys,” as he refers to them—controls that flow. Even some of the cops, he says, sell drugs. The addicts are at the bottom of the food chain, especially the homeless ones. There’s a particular terminology, too.
“A panner is called a beggar; a beggar is called a panner,” Rory explains. “When a panner gets a big chunk of cash it’s called a 'good takedown.’ I once knew one that found $65,000 in three Velvet Crown baggies. He blew it all in four months.”
Rory is sure that the mentally ill would benefit if drugs weren’t so easily available in the Downtown Eastside, because they’re not the type to seek them out. “The rest of us are all just dysfunctional party animals,” he says, matter-of-factly.
We pass Sunrise Market on Powell, where a young Asian girl walks by holding an umbrella decorated with the words love and peace. Her presence prompts Rory to tell me that no one dares rip off the “Chinaman” or their family businesses because they are too wily. Chinatown seems to exist as a separate world in the middle of the chaos.
The dereliction thins out as we make our way towards Cordova and Abbott. “It’s a very basic way of living down here,” Rory tells me several times. “Very basic—you’re a sub-citizen.” The cops have roughed him up more than once. He sees them as much a part of the anarchy as the street people and the gangs. “Most people here are looking outside of themselves for answers. They want control—they’re the kind of people who think respect is fear, because they never had any respect in their lives.”
Rory’s eyes flit down laneways, jump around corners, and scan each figure that passes. As nighttime advances, he loses patience with conversation. He appears disturbed by the fact that he doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head.
“You have to live here to know, and you don’t want to live here.” Rory is finished with my tour. “There is no substance, no truth, no fulfillment.” I leave him at his favourite liquor store on Alberni, a little ways further along in the business district. He disappears inside so quickly, I barely have a chance to say goodbye.
* * *
Gastown acts as a border between downtown proper and skid row. Here, two worlds seep into one another the way blood clouds a plastic syringe. In the alleyways, decayed cardboard signs read: need money for weed, adopt a skid for just 99 cents a day, take me home, broker than the ten commandments, broke as fuck spare a buck, will take verbal abuse for change, will eat pussy for food—I’m not a tease, please do not be sorry be generous. In the storefronts, thin mannequins draped in cloth, faux fur, and high-end costume jewelry stand like silent statues of worship. Here at the edge of town, along the former waterfront, the sheltered and unsheltered frequent the same ground. All the while, the city stays asleep.
* * *
Once upon a time, Rory was a handsome man and father with a youthful Irish face. He still has the aqua-blue eyes that are so sensitive to the world, and still possesses a magnetism that draws others to him. But somehow these qualities have been altered, his outlook shifted. His potential has turned to helplessness, bitterness, resignation.
Sometimes Rory talks about his two kids, both adults now, who live in Calgary. He remembers how he lost custody of them when they were small, and how, later, his daughter was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed Ritalin. He hasn’t seen or spoken to either of them for more than 10 years. Once, he tried to pass along messages through their grandmother—fatherly advice about boyfriends to his daughter and a cautious hello to his son—but neither responded.
He reminisces about the past earlier in the day with his big brother Kim, who joins us for lunch at the Tinseltown food fair. I listen while they laugh and tell stories back and forth.
“I remember when you were 10,” Kim says. “You came up to me and said: 'Dad says I can start to smoke and drink when I’m 13.’”
“Did I?” asks Rory. “Yeah, smokin’ a Kool, getting high on nicotine, and tossing the ball around.” Rory downs his second beer and hits Kim up for $20 when I go to the bathroom, calling it his “allowance.”
Rory’s been thinking of hitchhiking up to the Queen Charlotte Islands to visit his father’s grave. His dad was an alcoholic, but he insists that term is a label and “don’t mean nothing.” He never made it to the funeral seven years ago. Kim laughs and asks Rory how he thinks he’ll get there.
“Why are you laughing?” Rory asks. “I said it was a dream, a plan, a goal.” He can’t understand why his four brothers didn’t dig their father’s grave themselves. He would have.
I cut in to ask Rory if it’s really a choice to be on the street.
“In my case it was—I guess,” he stammers. “But the majority, no. That’s what they’re used to, that’s what they grew up in. Most grew up with parents that were drug addicts who sat around eating boxes of macaroni and getting high.”
“Does anyone get out?”
“The odd one. I’ve seen one. But you’re talking about one or two percent.” He tells me about his buddy Rob, who was “really wired and messed up three years ago,” but who managed to turn things around. A year ago, Rory was walking down the street when he heard Rob call “Hey Rory? Hey, hey, hey.” He was clean and had started his own contracting company.
Rory squeezes his hands together a few times. Perhaps he imagines them at work. “So he made it—he made it on his own. When great change happens it comes from inside.”
He looks up at me. I still recognize my uncle’s blue eyes.
“Where are you going to be 10 years from now?” I ask.
“Dead.”
“Five?”
“Maybe dead. I’m already brain dead.”
“Is there anything you want to do before you die?”
“My kids. I want to see my kids.”
In the silence that follows, I remember a story I heard about Rory and his brothers when they were kids in Montreal. They lived down the street from the Wilcox brothers, troubled kids who chained up their dog in the front yard, roamed the streets, and got up to no good. One day they stole Rory’s sister’s bike and smashed it into a cement post until it was mangled beyond repair. So the next day, Rory and his brothers snuck into the Wilcox’s backyard and lit the wick ends of a dozen smoke bombs. They opened the basement door, rolled them inside, clink, clink, clink, and watched the house begin to fill with smoke. His brothers all ran, but Rory just stood there until his eyes burned, until he couldn’t see two feet ahead.
Copyright © Kristen McCarthy, 2008