Lessons: A Creative Writing Contest Winner

By: Jamie Rhiness
Winner: The People of the Book

So you wake up to the street cars rattling above you, as they cross the bridge keeping you sheltered from the rain or snow.

Pigeons painfully cry in vein as they are pecked at by others. The dusty ground is contaminated with PCB’s. You don’t know if it’s this or the exhaust fumes billowing down that cause your nagging morning cough.

If you’re lucky, you have a cigarette, or a swallow of something to keep you from regretting surviving yet another lonely winter night.  Your frozen, shaking hands clumsily load your pack. You’re in a hurry to use the bathroom, and to hydrate yourself before a monster headache begins to catch up with you. The quicker you can get this done, the sooner you can start the whole miserable routine once again. You figure you would be used to it by now. That you’d have toughened over the years. Instead, the cold is hitting you harder. The alcohol is proving much more difficult to keep down, and illness comes upon you more frequently and sticks around longer.

Where is everyone else this winter?

Am I the last of the bridge trolls?

You cast a glance around the bridge to see the ghost shanty town that you once shared with dozens of other kids. Now you share it with three stray cats, and some terminally tortured pigeons.

You take your time walking to the drop in. It’ll be another forty five minutes until it opens and the cold has a harder time sinking into your bones when you’re mobile. As slow as you may be moving with that heavy pack strapped to your shoulders, some citizen is in even less of a rush to get to the office.  He or She knows you’re behind them, but they are having some argument with a spouse over bills. They’re stressed about being down to their last few grand, and might have to cut that trip to the Caribbean short this year.

It must be rough living under a roof.

You play up the pariah “Excuse me, body bugs coming through….” The citizen makes way post-haste and you pounce at your chance to get ahead.

On your way, you check the parking meters for the time, dreading your inevitable early arrival. You grab the city’s free dailies to assist you in passing the time. You skip past the bad news for the horoscopes to find out that you’ll soon find romance with a co-worker, and that finances will shortly take a turn for the better. Good news. The plus seven sleeping bag could always use some help warming up for the night, and you would always enjoy some bank leftover for beer the next day, before the DT’s kick in. Something tells you that this isn’t what the astrologer had in mind, but eh, a guy can dream.

A panhandler sees the butt you’ve found in a frozen snow bank, between your fingers, and asks you for a smoke. You politely inform him that you’re in a like situation, although you consider yourself superior for actually braving the elements, instead of sleeping in some shelter.

Doesn’t he see my pack? Do I not look dirty enough?

You’ve just been mistaken for a middle-class backpacker and not the hard core, hard drinking, hitch hiker you think you are. This irks you. Sure, you’ve shed the punk rock uniform. The patch pants, the piercings, the Mohawk. But shouldn’t something still shine through?

Your mind wanders to more pressing concerns. It’s too cold to use soap and water on the wind shields, so you’ll have to grab a bottle of washer fluid.  Jesus might have been able to turn water into wine, but you’re the only one around that can turn washer fluid into a bottle of malt liquor.

At last you find your way to the colourful alley that is home to the Youth Link Inner City. One of the places that has kept you alive throughout the years, even at the times you didn’t care to be. Inside is food, a shower, and dry socks. You can keep in touch with friends and family over the internet, and give someone a call. Still, outside stands a group of shaking shelter kids, using language just as colourful to describe their disdain for the “cold hearted” staff, blatantly refusing to open the shelter twenty minutes early.

You shake your head at the fact that they awoke with a warm toilet readily available. They spent a night in a bed that would be more comfortable if a guy could sleep through the whining, or the fighting. The feeble shoving matches and tough talk sparked by shady drug deals, or some kid with something to prove. You think about the squeegee punks. Hitchhikers and train hoppers fighting for fun. We call it sparring. Of course, where are they now? We were the bullied, not the bullies, so nothing about this kid impresses. It’s all drama, street soap opera. The mindless distraction that keeps a person from knowing their real enemies, the courts, the cops, the government, and the rich trying their best to get out of paying their wages.

The clicking sound of a lock unlatching signals that staff is now prepared for another thankless day of complaints and verbal abuse.

The two quickest on the draw rush to the computer. Another set, to spend a solid half hour in the washrooms. Staff plead with the rest to sign the stats sheet, explaining that this is how the drop-in keeps its doors open. A handful of people may listen.

Inside you have all kinds of people from all sorts of backgrounds, punks, metal heads, hip hoppers. Former dealers , former users trying to stay away from making money or current users trying to sleep off days of making money. There are kids killing time until the shelter opens, and kids killing time until a dealer turns on their phone.

Then there’s the odd squeegee kid waiting for the cops to leave the Queen-Spadina corner. It’s a mismatch of people that on the street shouldn’t work, but for survival sake does. Staff tries their best to keep our personal prejudices and old beefs from escalating into full-out physical conflict; on most days they miraculously succeed.

I tried to spend as little time in these drop-in’s as possible. If you can’t already tell, I have a lot of pride. By ten or eleven, I’d be out the door, making a couple more bottles, than getting drunk in a park or alleyway, until all could be forgotten. Then I’d wake up under a bridge to start it all over again.

I started as a teen in a small town drinking, thumbing, or just doing anything at my disposal to kill the boredom. By winter ’07, nothing cut it, and I just couldn’t take another night under the bridge, or another run down the Trans-Canada.

Still, an extreme transition like this would take six months for me to grow into. I’m leaving a life I’ve travelled tens of thousands of kilometers for, had three lifetimes worth of fun, but also lost ten years and more friends and loved ones than I can count.

I had to give trust a try, and I had to give shelters a try (now I realize that shelters can be a lot worse than any bridge I’ve stayed under. As a matter of fact, I’ve been in correctional facilities with more personality and less restrictions). It’s within this time that I took part in the peer program at Youth Link Inner City. It’s because of this that I got to actually know some of the kids that I had been misjudging all of these years.

I learned a lot about myself and a bit about the world outside the one I’ve been living for so long. I’ve even been meditating on the fact that those citizens might actually have genuine problems, regardless of the size and location of roofs they live under.

I’ve hung up my squeegee, and shed my ambivalence about wanting no more than some company to share my misery with, and some leftover bank for the ten o’clock beer run.

So now I lay on our new couch by the window, on a humid Sunday afternoon. After my girlfriend and I make supper and do the dishes, we’ll take in a movie, and eat ice cream, before turning in for the night.

Tomorrow, I’ll probably head in for my shift a bit early to grab the free dailies that will tell me to expect a new budding romance and that my finances will take a turn for the worse. I’ll ignore this as always, choosing instead to strike up a conversation with some of the folks waiting out front, who always ask me how the new place is coming along, and that they are happy for my girlfriend and I.

They’ll tell me about their new job or apartment and I’ll continue to be amazed at how hard we all try, no matter how hopeless the papers or charity advertisements at times makes us sound. I’ll start one of my few remaining shifts a little saddened that a part of my life is ending, but I’ll be comforted with the fact that a place like Youth Link Inner City exists to help keep the street kids fed, clothed, safe, and sometimes even alive, even at the times we didn’t care to be.

* * *

The Creative Writing Contest is part of Ve’ahavta’s Homeless Initiative department. Every year, we distribute hundreds of packages into the street and through shelters, containing a sign-up form, a pad of paper, a pen, and a self-addressed envelope. We ask people to write a poem, a song, an autobiography, a recipe used to survive on the street… They have the option of writing a fiction or non-fiction piece. The possibilities are endless.

Posted by Vanessa |