When did I get here,
why did I come?
I think it was the Same day that my dad told me that I “need a new life”. The Words slipped out by accident. Funny how what’s most accurate is often a fluke.
"Die Pretty (The Writing's On The Wall)" by scarsarestories, January 2011
I decided to put my (limited as they may be, Doctor Heidi Rimke) credentials to work, immersing myself in a Vancouver neighbourhood for my first “street sociology” project, based on participant observation that would never be approved by a University “ethics” (read: lawsuit avoidance) board. It is probably the most notorious of spaces in the city, and because of the open-air use of crack cocaine and intravenous heroin and cocaine use, as well as unhidden sales of these and almost any drug you can imagine in front of the Carnegie building at the intersection of Main and East Hastings – prescriptions being the most common, but of course second to ”up, down, and hard” (powder cocaine, heroin, and rock crack cocaine). While walking through the DTES, down East Hastings Street (a major route that runs through the whole city) surrounding the blocks above and below main, the words are repeated by a good number of the people you pass, mostly men but women as well. “Up down” ”Up down” “Hard, Up, Down?” “Up, Down, Hard” “Up Down”. Takers follow the sellers into doorways or alleys where deals are made, and drugs often consumed immediately. Though the area is known by the rest of the city as a place inhabited by junkies, it is really, first and foremost, a place where the city’s poor live. Drugs are secondary to a reality that demands blurring. This is very difficult for those who have never lived it to understand, but I hope, with this project, I can make a few people think about things differently.
It is the only place in Metro Vancouver where one can find a residence that costs $375, the housing allotment given to income and disability assistance recipients and a cruel joke in a city where my $800 studio apartment is considered to be cheap. The apartments available are rooms with mattresses and sinks that sometimes work backwards, only from one knob, or not at all. Anyone who has been homeless, however, knows that this is of little consequence when one’s other choice is the street. Bathrooms are shared by all twenty-two tenants per floor in this building I have been staying in fairly often, as most people I know here just happen to be neighbours, while newer facilities at the same price have private washrooms. Like so many things down here, where you get in is determined by luck after spending years on a waiting list. All have free cable and utilities, more than I can say for myself.
I know – I have a nice home. But I had been spending most nights wandering these streets, searching for something in the streetlamp-light silence of foggy February alleys and strangers that talk, that tell you their story and sometimes their name. There is a magical hour, when the buses and trains stop running, the only cars that pass are sporadic, either taxis or cops, the sirens that scream throughout Vancouver days stop long enough for relief to wash over us, caught in this space, wishing time would stop ticking just this once and let the peace reign over the noise for more than an hour. Of course it never does, and up starts the train and first buses, men line up outside the “Union Gospel” complex across the street several hours before coffee is served, inevitably fights often break out between fellow poor fellows with nothing to do, and there is money to be made with the turn of the day so the “up, down, hard” winds up until the dark hour comes the next night.
I’m seduced by the silence, the hiding in dark, but most by the rawness that residents of the DTES epitomize. Money comes with so much pretentiousness, even if it’s not much, the dressing up to get groceries, the wicked things women say about one another but never to another’s face, the boiling anger of hipster boys pretending to be calm and grey-haired men just as unimpressed with the police state of the times, the shiny objects that beep and blink status, labels instead of real people speak everywhere else in Vancouver. I came here in search of something real, and everything on the DTES has a price but the raw frankness is free and necessities are sold cheap. The line between needs and wants is thin and tricksters will try to trade you one for the other with a missing-teeth grin. But you can’t trick a trickster. At least not that often.
The women here fight as hard as the men and if a girl’s got a problem she tells you. I appreciate this honesty so much, and it’s missing among all other socioeconomic classes and their respective spaces. If a guy is ripped off or owes money (money is usually the reason for anger, this cuts across classes, it’s the method of dealing with it that changes) the issue is resolved by a fight, followed by slaps on the back, even a hug. No one laughs or stares at the people that speak “to themselves”, soliloquizing as they walk down the sidewalks, past wheelers, dealers, the chased and the chasers, the buyers, the bought. The only dishonesty is the passing of make believe drugs, pure baking soda sold in flaps (folded up square papers, a kind of origami, really), and I don’t believe it has ever killed a man – no one fights to the death. When someone in the community here dies, everyone talks about it for days.
This is the main difference between my hometown of Winnipeg, specifically its downtown core, and the Downtown Eastside: violence involving more than fists here is considered stupid, and people talk about it when someone pulls out a knife. In Winnipeg people are stabbed to death daily, and nobody speaks. I don’t care how many times a man tells me “on the DTES someone will kill you for ten dollars”. This simply is not true. Anyone that has emigrated here from elsewhere in Canada will agree. It’s one way to judge whether or not someone’s originally from here.
I suppose I came here because I too am a hungry ghost. My appetite is insatiable, and I’m a spectre to so many people I once knew, even my own family. When you talk in a room of people and no one responds you feel like a ghost. If I try to spend time with friends from late adolescence and early university days I’m treated like trash for being intelligent, for actually having something to say. Down here, it’s respected. And a lot of smart people can be found if you look in the right places and keep your head up.
For the sake of comparison and as a point from which to take off, I’m comparing the lives of those I encounter here to how they’re described in this book, by a doctor that has worked here for a long time, but without living here:
Thirty pages into Matés In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts, I am blown away, realizing again a lesson that lately permeates every day – I’m a copy of copied, twice rewritten pages. Everything I say has already been said and there is nothing special about me or my story. There is both solace and sadness in finding this out. I read a line in the book that I had no idea was common, almost identical to something I have been saying since I was a small child, that I am scared of being alone with my thoughts, especially in the insomniac dark when trying to fall asleep:
“At all costs,” Maté states, “drug addicts want to escape spending ‘alone time’ with their minds.”
After reading this, I’m more afraid than ever, so it’s a blessing I am in a place where there is always someone to talk to, and someone who will really listen instead of just waiting for their turn to speak – they know because they’ve been there themselves with a head full of thoughts that need voicing else there be risk of damaging oneself, even if they forget what you tell them by the time the birds start chirping, dogs begin barking, and men line-up chattering while waiting for coffee.
Hell, this is the most expensive city in North America – a decade ago the “best” but the sky here falls quickly along with the rain that washes our dirt down the gutter along with the pain – a free cup of coffee is a goddamn miracle. As long as you can avoid hearing the preacher who tells poor men that their lives would be different if only they chose Jesus over the quietness offered by drugs. Freedom’s just another word for losing God’s game, important papers that went missing and wanting more than another day that like each passed one, looks exactly the same.
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First, I had to learn how to get along with him.
. Perhaps – as everyone, not just people that a doctor has called “bipolar”, experiences – the psychosis resulting from severe insomnia is a kind of alternative to dreaming: an infringement of the dream world upon the “real world” that can be very frightening, especially to those who have been taught since early childhood that such experiences are not only “abnormal”, but are associated with “madpeople” like John Wayne Gacy and Brian Jones (of Jonestown).
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. He claimed to be a “hardcore feminist” when we met, and then near the end of our relationship, stated that “his ideal life partner would be a woman who would please his every sexual demand or fancy that arose immediately, “on command”, whenever, wherever.” He is a phony, a fraud, a fake – even the photograph proudly displayed on Mad Praxis is one that I took as photography grew to be a hobby last spring. Indeed, I was running around taking photos of cherry blossoms and trying my best to attend classes while his behaviour was more like this “Maureen” character’s. He cried, “me, me!”, and “played dress up”, putting on one of the suits that he bought during a shopping spree that took place when he came into a stack of cash which quickly disappeared into thin air. I would at least like a credit for my intellectual property!
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)…not usually. But Effexor-wise, this is kind of how I feel about my week without Effexor, and its end in a plant-derived, dopamine raising substance that wasn’t paid for by the government, as the Effexor tablets, that would cost about $400 a month are. I made a “mistake”, more an accident, by destroying my supply of Effexor for the week. Then I tried something I basically knew would be impossible – of course with some hope in mind that this would magically be the end of popping three very large red gelcaps every morning to keep my head together, just as I have that spark of hope each time I walk into the office of a new psychopharmacologist (let’s call them what they are) that usually leads me on for a few hour-long appointment, about helping me get off this drug, but soon grows annoyed at talking about life and tries to convince me that I can achieve this goal by taking a new handful of gelcaps or packed pills or the ones you can peel a layer off of…just like Anne says – blue, yellow, green; “I’ve become quite the addict” – to to learn how much of an addict they made me, to learn how deep Effexor is in control of my brain. I sure got my answer. I was expecting it would be sickening, and expected the second after second after half-second brainzaps and light-sensitivity and walking into doorways I got this morning, when I finally got off the couch, the brown couch 
, wanting desperately to get something done – Indian Summer, the smell of sweet decay in the air and smoke lingering from bonfires from the night before, all the while feeling heat on your October-skin. Zap zap zapzapzap zap zapzap zap, as I sat on the toilet, light on like nails on a chalkboard in my brain. MUST. DO. SOMETHING. I cannot lie on that couch, nor can I vacuum and hide pills for some night-terror induced reason involving relatives I haven’t seen since I was a small child (indeed, red alert, in the Ashcroft-model sense), for a sixth day. Well, the first two were not so bad, although I do have a very difficult time remembering them, interacting with people? It doesn’t seem reasonable after the past days of constant nausea and terror/sleep. The horror of Apocalypse Effexor is making it difficult to enjoy any kind of “relief”, whether it be from zaps (other symptoms still present – read the pamphlet, I’m in Effexorlessness) or lack of energy. Well, that’s not really true – I remembered and discovered some really interesting things about brains on music and my own – playing all evening would have been wonderful but I have to keep in mind the possibility that figuring out how to access that skill I was starting to master might not always be pretty and enjoyed by my roommates, who have put up with my couch-ridden delirium for the past three days. I didn’t want to have to inflict myself upon others 24/7 again in my short life, but that was, financially-speaking, a complete pipe-dream, at age almost-26, living in Vancouver, where rent in the “ghetto” is now almost as high as rent in the West End. The odd much bigger pipe loft thrown in there, millions upon millions, the rest of us. Who do not perform “perfectly”, who show emotion, who have vices, who feel really damn lazy sometimes, who feel the pleasure and the deep pain of being strapped to this body. So, an experiment, and the results yielded were interesting. They bring tears of terror to think about, but they were very interesting and revealing of what I am facing here. There has to be a doctor out there willing to help people get off this poison without the pain that we, uneducated consumers socializaed from birth, very literally – is it not a doctor we look in the eyes before those of our mothers’, no? – to take his (for those of us that were searching for “father figures”, men and women/and her orders and prescriptions strictly – finish all of these antibiotics, take two pills every six hours, one in the morning and one and a half at night. Are these to be our fathers? Washed down at the demanded time. Mornings are long. Hours are longer. Tears without water, cutting scenes out of paper for dear life, running around the building and collecting power cords from the old apartment now – I am thankful to be freed of our – it was mine the whole time, my little mess, intentions good, nature uncontrollable, the pain of now not being sure if he thought I was malingering around his only intellectual equal on the planet!’s survey contemporary theory class. No, life has been painful, I would not seek (the tears have turned towards a belly full of silent laughter) to pretend to make it more so, so much that doctors had to dig through my guts. Heads need shaking. Some stream of consiousness, good girl, mention Ophelia, gossamer in water, I picture green with pink embroidery, personally. Mistakes paid forward. All meant in ‘good faith’. This is my body and my mind and I shall do with it what I wish and I’m sorry if you have a problem with that but your status does not trump my right to stop taking my Flinstone’s Vitamins for a short while to see if I can live without hoping I’ll get a red one. Red mistake. I will dust myself off good and proper on Monday, I will be over homesickness for a place I hoped would exist before I got here but never did, after an hour or so the tears will never be wet and I can not sleep through an appointment – why is there always an appointment – some obligatory time sacfricied for “the man” – more tears turn to belly laughs, no sounds of sobbing from my eyes or my guts – literally – reading over your credit card bill twice and figuring a way to pay it and the psychological aftermath of economic instability – the fallout. I don’t think I’ll open my Simon Fraser University inbox ever again, and I should have done so a month ago. I do not care. I do not care if a professor is going to take the words of a white, blue-eyed, Texan businessman who employs underage women and exploits the sacred tradition of Shamanism and sells it as drug-induced psychotherapy to wealthy westerners, charging them a fortune that seems like a good deal to North Americans and Australians, white haired, blue-eyed, to look into the beautiful dark eyes filled with anxiety at fetching you the right drink even though she has no clue what you are saying, whose pubescent buttocks are seen for a few seconds as she hurriedly goes inside to the bar to decipher these foreign requests for ice and liquor and coca leaves – something with coca leaves because they’re not legal in the ex-pat’s home and native land – over the word of a young, feminist scholar who is known for radically exposing the truth, no matter how sick it is, and in addition, never done a qualitative project where such raw research, if it must be ethnographic, gets the “publishable” stamp without a chart of outdated subculture theory and consists mainly on argot and hierarchies – so it’s okay to talk about “tramp stamps” in L.A. – if one of the participants in that project contacted the professor of the same class she was subject to participating in a qualitative study – M.A., maybe Ph.D., lumped together, same thing, different stage of cash grab – a young woman and gang member who called out the researcher for calling her a “hood rat” because her stamp was not on her lower back but across her neck – falsified data, the need for another member of this category later to be charted, made public, created…social change?? 
– In this scenario, which could have happened – who would be believed? The woman with “publishable” data that is already out there but used different terminology, and comes to class, every class, on time and wearing much perfectly applied make-up – no dark circles – asks questions that threw us off, and my temperature rose as I left the “hot seat” and realized she had mixed me up with big words but I had a perfect defense…but I was not fast enough and she looked so utterly “professional” in a suit at times, something I will never adorn…, or the straggler who unearthed an illegal business that is likely common to certain cities/towns in the Amazon where “culture” can be experienced by the slightly off the traveled off-road, maybe adorning dreads or a dirty pair of runners and muddy socks – corruption of the highest degree in the name of tourism – government grants, I bet, for Americans to bring a taste of cannibalism to a new place, wow, true Freudian slip, I meant to write capitalism and am actually quite shaken. Whoa. Tourism in Peru, G.D.P, money, hands. Academic dishonesty! Holy crap what has it come to…
. And so we shall convene, an urban family, three humans, three cats, not at the end of the world, but right in the middle of it – as we should have long ago, but in this life there can be no “woulda, coulda, shoulda”, but only how to survive this day, this moment. My current mission? Paying the final rent payment on this apartment. I must pull it off. I will.
But, for you, time to be honest about my present.
, it’s time to get the pencil and calendar back out.
Or lookey-here, here’s a post that uses a clever little double entendre you came up with as a title 
I don’t have that privilege either (time to dick around with).