Red Cedar

it’s a scar not a scab , so if i keep at this i don’t think it will bleed. and you might wonder now why i am continuing – why i do not walk away now just as i did not walk away then…. for i could have, then, walked out of that hotel and maybe found someway to help myself, maybe called my folks and let them know i was dangerously close to dying in the ways i inherited. but a lot of forces brought me to that place at that moment and i wasn’t finished being there yet – just like i am not finished being here.

of course it just gets worse on out (the turning point or moment of redemption does eventually happen – just not for awhile).

i spent three weeks at hamilton street, sleeping in a locked room with two boys sworn to protect from other squatters and cops – about 17 years old and all street smarts like only a teenager can be. i was ill then, but didn’t know how bad it was getting, the prior year of ingesting any toxin that came my way was catching up faster than my years would have suggested. on the street there in vancouver, i didn’t use drugs so much as drink into stupors.

cold nights that year, unseasonably so for the coast and always damp through and through. one night woke to a squat full of smoke, some drunk two rooms over had started a fire in a metal garbage can and then vacated the building – leaving the rest of us to choke to death in our sleep – but for someone who caught it in time.

occasionally one of the crew would get the keys to a room at a flophouse hotels in the downtown eastside and we would go and crash there a night before the manager cottoned on and kicked us all out. but overall squats were preferable as they were safe (hotels were full of lurking dangers – needles shoved in the frames of mattresses, desperate junkies who would roll you outside, men who would crash through your door to get a smoke), and there were no roaches – i swear you have never seen roaches unless you have spent a night on a skid road.

i roamed then, through the days, panhandling – doing not too much but surviving and amusing ourselves i suppose with whatever it was we did. my hand glances now, through a journal i carried with me at the time, mostly full of bad and lonely poetry, and i am caught by this passage:

“busy street and hum of tobacco
sings our melody – family love
cousins, sisters, brothers and enemies to ourselves.
starvation sets in periodically
and we dine on lsd, brown rice and
sex
clawing for the comfort that is gone
following a knife fight where the great lord byron is clubbed
about the head.”

which rushes me back – just a single night could be any city – we are panhandling in front of the roxy downtown. me and a friend – this is december still. we are cold, hoping the bar crowd will get us enough money to get drunk. me and jd – that’s who it was – and these three other punks we know come down the street and start jawing. they are drunk a little already, ask us what we are doing, start going on the way you do when you have nothing better to do on a friday night on south granville street…. one of them is yelling – mark – mouthy guy in a studded leather jacket looking heaty – and some guy comes downstairs from the hotel, it’s all drunks living up there in that hotel, and this is one mean old drunk. he’s yelling that we’re all making too much noise and to get the fuck outta there and he’s gonna fix us good. and then he runs back upstairs and returns with an iron bar in his hand – maybe a foot and a half of metal an inch or two thick – making a lunge for mark – smartass that he is. off comes the chain and the two are ready to beat each other to a bloody metal pulp leaving rustmarks where bruises should be… and it starts to go — but then a shift — and the cops show up grabbing mark and one of the others (a skinny 15 year old with a green mohawk named byron). handcuffed, up against the car, the cop takes the billy club – one – two – three – shots at the back of byron’s head…. unhandcuffs him and lets him stagger away. he is not bleeding, there are no marks – quick but obviously not painless.

they do nothing to mark except search him and the old man with the iron bar is sent back upstairs. now we have a half-unconscious byron and the cops have left – the old drunk yells down from his window that we better get the fuck out of there because he’s got a gun – and he waves this handgun out the window – says he’s coming down. what to do but get up – me and jd – and get byron between us (his friends long gone) – staggering up the alleyway to our safe squat – looking over our shoulders the whole way visions of hand guns and cops forcing us to take the long way so no one can follow us home.

this is the event from the bad poem – and it nags at me now a book of bad poetry is all i have to remind me what happened then because i never kept a real journal – one where i wrote down things as they went – everything instead couched in the nonsense and posturing of 18 years old. in this black book i have written two lines about a man offering me tokens instead of money for sex – what tokens i think? and another about sleeping with a knife at hand (just a pocket-knife, was all i had)… and i still can not find her – this girl and her motivations – in those pages…. only an idea of what went on which weighed more than a rock and a penny, the loneliness of an old man and our friend byron slumped across our shoulders….

(this post follows this one)

in writing about this man, the artist who gave me the fifteen dollars to lie down beside him (and no, i did not have to touch, it was all about proximity), i have remembered one other thing he gave me in the morning as i swung my pack back on my shoulder. in front of me now (for i have always kept it), the medicine pouch of deer leather with its small pinch of sage and tobacco, holds an item i ferreted away at some point after my encounter with the artist. i felt it when i searched the pouch out from a tangled drawer – a small black stone shot through with quartz, rubbed smooth from being worn close to the skin in a small leather bag for at least two years. and now, feeling again, i find one more thing – a penny with my birth year on it (1973), also tucked away.

these tokens from my past almost forgotten tell me now i must have been a young woman who relied on some sort of luck or magic to inure me to the street. i feel the weight of these objects in my left hand as the right wields the pen – the weight of asking for a protective spell to survive each day, the weight of atheist prayer carried in a medicine bag gifted by a man contributing to my loneliness with his own.

i do not remember putting these objects in the pouch, though i know along the way that bitter winter i must have – living in a squat known as hamilton street that later burned down in a fire (long after i had left). lucky i was to find fellow travellers who were not so opportunistic, who i could fake out with a sneer as if i was really tough (and maybe it is true my anger did make me tough). when i remember it i recognize that although i knew people with places to live in the city, i chose instead to squat with strangers – it seemed easier than explaining i was coming apart.

but why? i don’t know – but all reeked cataclysm at the time – the death of a close friend, the end of a relationship, my cheap rent in an unheated basement room, people telling me over and over i was too reckless and thus too disrespectful. i don’t think i stood straight or sober a single day in two years from 18-20… and to think of the degree to which i used….. there were not many days where i did not think about calling it over as it seemed there was nothing but that emptiness, that desire for anonymity and ultimately escape, awaiting.

i carry this past like the weight of the stone, of the penny marking my year of birth, like the old man’s loneliness – mostly unnoticeable until another hurt is piled on and my nervous system begins to complain, to tremble with it all.

(for whatever reason this is coming out – it seems to be and so i will keep posting under this heading whatever is scribbled as it emerges – i want no one to take any of this as me being in a bad space… i am actually in a very good place right now – just writing a lot of interesting stuff as it turns out)