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.
… 
would lend this attractive, well-dressed young woman their phone for less than one minute (though it is a Sunday and calls are free for cell phone owners on weekends) to call him and find out where I could collect him to 
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, before revealing who these women are, the “true crime” genre tale entwined in their episodic madness, and leaving the viewer with some tough questions to answer regarding crime, punishment, and psychiatry.
) but he was trying to initiate an affair with me, and had perhaps been successful! I was accused of this a few times, but after I was able to convince my ex that I had no interest in my pot-bellied, going-on-50 landlord, the main concern became the fact that he was dangerous. Some threat had been made, had it not?
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).
“, I received a text from Lady H., who accompanied me to 
It is not often that I bring numbers up, as I am rather the opposite of a braggart, but is that why over 1500 people now subscribe to this blog via e-mail? Really?
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(That means you, 
Tammy, Bethany, Sarafin, Wendy, Holly, and of course I would Jima if she didn’t live in Spain 
). But, not even half an hour into the first episode, I was fast asleep.
