Tales From the Shelter – 3

MARBLEGATE

‘Retarded Martha Stewart” drives everyone up the wall.  Everyone.  Besides her incessant chatter and talking ‘at you’ not ‘with you’, she preaches about ‘her personal gawd’ …she’s a christian bot, and under all her superficiality is one sick puppy.

I bought some marbles from the dollar store with my last pay cheque…i don’t have substance abuse problems so can stretch my cheque a little further then some.  Marble.  Good fun, reminder of youth , recalling cat-eyes, steelies and the such.  I placed them outside on a table on the smoking deck.  the table was make-shift….Retarded Martha had an empty , black plant pot out there that looked like a cremation urn.  A fake silver tray made the table top.  There the marbles sat.

The next morning I came out for my constitutional smokes and the ashtray was gone, along with the marbles.  I lifted the silver tray and there was the ashtray.  After lifting the ashtray up , there were the marbles mixed in with cigarette buts…a dirty little mess.

Someone tipped me off that Martha had done this while muttering something about ‘people’s crap’, so i confronted her.  Martha’s eye go total bug when she’s afraid or on the defense.  I’m thinking it must be an allergic reaction to her perfume, which smells like insect repellant.  She told me Doreen had done it, I said bullshit, and Martha said to bring Doreen right to her.

retarded martha spends her days walking.  She walks from downtown to west vancouver or kerrisdale, the neighbourhood she brags having lived in (some kinda living, she looked after an old man, moved herself in, took over, and the daughter had to have her removed).  nevertheless, kerrisdale is her ‘mark’, her status, albeit a false one.  Martha goes into high end hotels en route and gets free coffees and hones in on special lunches, pretending she’s a guest.  she gets very aggressive and i’m sure the quest host people give her stuff just to keep her quiet.  She was going to a travel service business everyday that offers it’s clients free coffee….they finally got tired of her and started charging her a dollar so she quit.  I can see her there though, sitting with her legs crossed, her bleached blonde hair taking over the room, and giant teeth ready to chomp anything.

i see her rattling on to the clients and workers, “you know, i worked through something yesterday and my god forgave me .  And that’s ok, you know, because i remember my chaplain reading a bible passage’ …………and on and on and on.

I told our ward’s supervisor about marblegate and she was holding her seething in.  I informed her I told martha i am not speaking to her and to never speak to me.  The supervisor said to leave it at that.  Ever since, Martha can’t help herself and her guilt comes out in a heartfelt voice with things like, “hello, scout’  or ‘i’m sorry i hurt you, scout’.  hurt?  nuh uh, i got a demonstration in her sickness and don’t want to be around it, that’s all, pretty simple call if you ask me.  But Martha continues to perplex our floor.  She saunters onto the deck while everyone’s talking about something , wanting to know if we can see her bra under her top.  Or her panties under her shorts.  Or she wears her white dressing gown and sits with her legs up, secretly moving the housecoat back and down to expose as much thigh as she can.  why….to us?

the table and chairs on the patio belonged to martha and in a snit over marble gate she removed them and took them to her room.  it was hideous watching her wrestle with one of the white plastic chairs , brining it out from her room onto the deck so she could sit on it while she smoked, then bringing it back in with her when she was done.  it was like the kid in grade one who always had to bring some huge thing to show and tell.

martha came out to the deck yesterday while i was discussing stephen harper’s move to host an international conference on women and children and divulge that canada would not give monetary support for abortions in developing nations.  i said i would like to see mr. harper adopt some children from one of these nations….he’s rich, he could take in about 10 or so, right?  I mean really, what does Laureen have to do besides addressing oppressive ‘real women’ groups and being a manequin in helping to strip our rights?   martha got up, i’m sure she went to the chapel to pray for me.

everything’s all complicated right now with some women moving out to Hope House, the Armie’s next housing stage.  It’s bachelor digs, downtown eastside , and not QUITE all independant living as it’s high barrier and i’m told some of the front desk clerks can be nazis.

My marbles are back on the deck for anyone to play with. Martha, stay away!

The supervisor has moved Martha’s volunteer duties to another floor in an attempt to sqelch an all out war against this sick piece of work.  Life by rote must be difficult and I’m sorry she’s this insecure and probably had a shitty childhood and all but comes a point and I ain’t gonna let her put her illlness on me.  Marbles over Martha anyday.

Tales From the Shelter – 2

“Rock, powder, down.  Rock, powder, down”.  There’s something strangely melodic yet dissonant about the dealers cry of crack, cocaine or heroine.  It’s a lonely tune yet somehow devised, whether haphazardly or on purpose, to lure the craving and lonely into the den.

Soundsscapes along Vancouver’s infamous Main and Hastings (Pain and Wastings) blocks blend or rip , depening on the dealer or what’s being sold.  “Rock, powder, down” is whispered, a lull, while ‘cigarettes’ comes at a few decibels louder.  “Ssssssig a rettesssssss”.  A young woman with a skirt up to her crotch is bending and flexing while rapping out, “I gotta clean pussy, gotta gotta, clean pusssssy”.   All the while I walk up and down , checking out what the boosters are selling in hopes of finding some remnants of goods stolen from my van by some crazy, tweeking crackhead fucker.

“It’s the drug, not the person” I have to remind myself.  A middle aged man who looks 65 stares at me, I suppose he’s thinking I’m a cop or something of the likes, but no, he says “Rock, powder, down”.  I suppose he was eyeing me up for just the right timing to ask, then again I don’t know that the people down here are that sophisticated;  desperation, survival and addiction seems to have taken most to ground zero in human existance.   Meantime we send money to Haiti for earthquake victims knowing most of the money gets spent on transportation and fat ass officer’s salaries, with the troops receiving less then poverty wages.  Is something just oh-too-wrong?

I’m still walking and hating these scabbed, skinny people…they stole from me.  I’m forgetting it’s the system that creates the pain they hold in the first place.  But then again, I overcame my childhood abuses and am not an addict…am I lucky , because the economic status of your parents doesn’t seem to make any difference to my fellow shelter dwellers.

“We are the evidence, not the crime”.  I must remember how John Doe looks at me – a toothless rat on disability with no cast to give a visual reminder of my disability.  Perhaps I should go to the pharmacy and buy an elastic wrap for my head and put fake blood on it…bipolar isn’t a visible impairment.

No sign of any of my stuff.  I did spot my tool box one day but the cops weren’t into helping.  They said they’d ‘try’ to send someone down and to keep my phone on if i was going to wander elsewhere.  I spotted two beat cops across the street, thinking they were ‘my men’.  Turns out they had not been contacted by dispatch so they radioed, things were explained to them and they told me they’d get on it but had another call to do first, so it would probably be in an hour.

An hour standing here?  Nope.  Dragged my ass home after first being verbally assaulted by a contract flag person who yelled, “Come on, hurry up or you’ll get your fat ass runover”.  I couldn’t hurry, I was carrying bags and slow from depression.  As i passed her she shoved me.  I yelled, “Fuck you!”, she yelled the same back.  Once I was curbside I took some pictures of her on my camera…knowing that if I didn’t have the energy to persue getting her sorry ass fired , it would at least stress her out for a few days.  What’s that called, passive revenge or something?

A few days passed and no police had gotten a hold of me so I called them.  They said they sent an officer but I wasn’t there.  I said I had a phone and they have my number so didn’t understand the problem, especially because the cops had no description for me…I reported in by phone.   After a slurry of phone calls I finally landed on a web site that has a pdf form for police complaints.  At last!  Well, not to be because while the pdf appeared to be portrait print, it was actually landscape and I ended up with a chopped up form.  Maybe another day, maybe another day I’ll print it out correctly.

And all I can think about all this is, “Fuckers”.

Tales From The Shelter 1

Nancy is a soft spoken woman.  I barely know her but she asked me if I could go with her to the police today as emotional support.  I didn’t know the circumstances, save to say she had told me one day she had been raped a few times in her life.  I agreed to it because we had formed a bond after she made a first Nations drum and when i saw it I gave her some sage, cedar and sweetgrass.  Consequently she had asked me to be present with her when she took the drum to the beach to smudge it and give it it’s birth.

I waited outside the library for her and was glad I put my sunglasses on as the fellow at the next bench was from one of the shelters I had stayed in and I really didn’t need anymore ‘egos du jour’, having had my fill of them in today’s Sally Ann courses.

Nancy finally caught up to me and we went to the cop shop, a young officer ushering us into the same room I had been in a few months prior when I had to identify the pork-headed arse who assaulted me in one of the shelters.  Oh, hello, did I mention I’m homeless?

The cop asked Nancy some basic questions and went over that he would be turning on a camera to record everything.  While Nancy was soft spoken she was not demure and surprised me when, after the cop asked her to describe the relationship she had with the man she wanted a restraining order for, she replied , “We fucked”.

The cop wanted to know if she had given her consent and Nancy said, “It was a fabricated reality.  He gave me drugs, when he was high and I was high he wanted to fuck and sometimes I wanted to fuck but  because he’s the one who fabricated the reality then my realilty of pulling back or saying no had no meaning to him”.

I don’t think the cop understood what she meant but at this point in proceedings it didn’t matter because Nancy was still traumatized and trying to navigate through denial, nightmare, hell and society’s very decay.   That she had even made it as far as the cop shop was a miracle , an act of braveness not everyone takes.   While the young officer was sensitive , he could only work as far as a cop can under laws, procedures and regulations that are not meant for the healthy, let alone the marginalized and disenfranchized.

“He took all my money.  This was after I bought us a tent when we got kicked out of the shelter.  I had no one to trust, no one, but he was there for me in a fucked up way because all he wanted was a stoned me and fucking.  We even asked the cops where we could camp but they pointed out places that were too far away for accessing facilities like mental health, food and pharmacies.  So then he dragged me to an alley downtown.  We even fucked in the alley.  This wasn’t me.  I like fucking but not when I’m high and not in back alleys.

The cop turned off the camera as thought things had wound down but just as he did that, Nancy became more coherent.  Afterwards, in my van, she said that she didn’t quite realize that everything had to be dealt with on a logical basis when it came to the law and that there is  no law for the emotions.  She said she couldn’t see this before as had been healing but by healing, only working with the emotions.

I told Nancy there was an article in the Georgia Straight by a woman who advises that mothers don’t put their sons in hockey as rape occurs so often, not just with boys but man on man action too, to give a slight porn tilt to the facts.  This woman says we live in a rape society.  She’s right.  From phallic missiles to drilling for oil by sticking diamond tipped drills into Mother Earth,  we rape everyday , everything.  The prick rules while the vagina is culled from the frey as a pussy , twat, or cunt.  Perhaps many men ultimatley wants to have a dink so big he can fuck himself up his own ass.

We drove along East Hastings, slowly, as I wanted to see if anything that had been stolen out of my van by ass nose crackheads may be being boosted.  I doubted it as it had been a few weeks already, but there was that little shred of hope.

Parked in front of the Sally Ann hotel, I ran in to grab a few things before moving the van to the parkade’s ‘random rooftop parking’ deal , but came out to find the fucking bylaw officer had had it towed.  Christ!