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  Love VI

  Kayla was much older than me I wasn’t even twenty years old and I never had a relationship before and so maybe she was the blueprint for all those future hookups and I feel so disappointed that I can’t look back with appreciation for her, for providing me with definitions of what love was, and it was a textbook case for domestic violence and still I stayed because I never felt that way for someone before; in the beginning love was full of nervous energy and urges to touch and bashful glances and it soon developed into endless desire and urges to please and to look after what had become mine, but drugs poison everything so the demons came out to play and twist what we had come to share, tempers became short and scary fights repeated as frustration spilled over and we were bouncing from place to place sometimes getting kicked out sometimes sleeping on the SkyTrain to rest somewhere safe and that first moment of violence as Kayla threw a cd right at my face, she was so sorry she didn’t mean to and it was forgiven but it became usual and expected like how she controlled whatever I did and how I got so dependent on her for drugs that the violent outbursts were worth it and soon I was a cash cow and that was that, I hit bottom; when everything changed I hid the part of me that escaped her anger, kept this part of my soul safe, safe from a lover who’d broken me into pieces.

  Rush

  At least part of the rush was the construction of the crack pipe: my heart beat so fast as I crumpled the Brillo into a ball and heated it up and crunched into the stem and fit the small plastic hose onto the pipe, placed the rock in and lit up; Kayla would snake a long hose up her sleeve that came out her collar and she’d do a toke on the SkyTrain or the bus or even while she walked down the street and often smoked a cigarette at the same time to disguise the smoke, she used a torch lighter and burned the rock in a way that got you high as a kite and sometimes after such a hit she would think the cops were coming and stuff her pockets with her dog’s ashes, with cigarettes, with her id or whatever she thought was important to go to jail with, you could call her an expert when it came to the mechanics of using drugs and though she taught me I was only able to replicate her heart-busting tokes a few times.

  Pay Phone

  I was gone for too long so Kayla smacked my head against a pay phone, she’d told a drug dealer that I’d blow him for crack however a few minutes in he started getting phone calls from clients wanting to buy dope so I rode shotgun with him while he delivered drugs all over town and it was a relief to spend time away from her as I felt like she was drowning me; one of the ways we would keep in contact while we roamed around town was that she would whistle very loudly and I’d go to that location, however as I was dropped off this time I could see she was very angry but the violence of having my forehead smashed into the pay phone was something I was not expecting even though she often put her hands on me, I don’t know why I kept coming back and I don’t know why she didn’t leave me if I angered her so badly though I think we were tied to each other, she felt responsible for me and I felt dependent on her, it was running not on love and respect but on money and dope, she was my first girlfriend.

  Bunk

  The emotion you feel when someone bunks you is the worst feeling of frustration and anger, the times I was bunked with wax instead of crack made me feel murderous and if I had the guts I’d beat the crap out of whoever ripped me off, there is this energy in finding money and then trying to find a dealer, and in those moments of craving is when some asshole decides to give you crap instead of crack, when you get too dope-simple and trust whoever says they have rock to sell, and it’s your own fault for trusting people, it’s wise not to trust those who ride on bikes as it’s easy for them to bunk you and wheel away right quick but personally I’d be too afraid to go around ripping people off because that puts a big target on your back and you will eventually get caught and who knows what will happen then.

  Domestic

  I was afraid he would hit my friend the wrong way and kill her cuz he’d already stabbed her with a metal push stick and broke her glasses, one time after arguing with him he snuck up behind us and pushed her against the wall, while she protested for him to leave her alone, two construction men were watching and I was afraid to step in and get hurt but he forcibly kissed her and left, after that we sat on the bench and smoked rock, I listened to her talk about her boyfriend and how she loved him and I thought to myself how I ignored those first signs of violence like the moment Kayla threw a cd at me which made us go silent with shock and then how laughter followed, as time went by her anger progressed but there were loving moments after the violence as she apologized for hurting me and it’s these moments that made me stay but I was also afraid that she would go too far and that I would die at the hands of someone I loved.

  Love VII

  I was cold and tired and had just fought with Kayla so I convinced a taxi driver to drive me home, my mom paid him, the area of town we were hanging at was Kingsway near Slocan and we got separated after a typical scrap so I decided to fuck it and just see if I could go home to my parents, I was tired of being stressed and bullied and sold on the street and letting myself be treated this way, what was wrong with me, so I slept and then woke up to Kayla in the backyard asking to speak to me, so I went out and she said how much she loved me and needed me and wanted me by her side and I fell for it hook, line and sinker, when we were good together it was great and we were a team, we made intense love but when it was bad there was so much anger between us that sometimes it came out as violence and humiliation yet we always ended up back together no matter that there seemed to be no respect left, the last time I saw her before I was arrested she made me sit on a backpack in front of her on the ground so she could keep an eye on me but I had enough so I left and fell asleep on a bench in a park and in the morning she left my backpack at a Western Union with the message that she would be downtown yet I wouldn’t see her until a couple years later, I truly believe that if I wasn’t arrested I would have died either by a trick or an overdose or even by Kayla cuz she was so much stronger than me and expressed her anger by raising her hand to me, that time between the first time I used and the time that I was arrested was one long downward spiral where I lost weight and self-respect and probably almost my life.

  Part Three

  Witness

  The dtes is full of Asians working and living their lives, I also think they’re an audience to the tragic comedy of skid row’s drunks and addicts, Hastings is like a fishbowl unaware of the outside, like a world unto itself, the residents of Chinatown watch the show while selling herbs and ducks and doing their daily, once I started noticing it I saw watchers everywhere like older men walking with their hands behind their backs looking at deals being done or addicts huddled against buildings smoking dope, on Cordova Street groups of Asians have their work breaks and smoke their cigarettes and watch the busy business of street traffic, they’re mostly silent watchers as I’ve never had an Asian resident of Chinatown or the dtes bother me or tell me to fuck off, it’s just a consistent surveying; though I mostly ignored them, sometimes I became angry like when this one man kept staring at me, he would walk by blatantly eyeballing me and when I complained to my friend he pushed the dude to get him to keep going, overall though I really don’t mind because with all the bullshit that goes on in the streets it might as well be a reality show.

  High

  Sometimes people act very strangely when they’re high, this one woman was nodding out while standing on the sidewalk drooling and then she took off her shirt and shuffled around half-naked, of course the cops came rather quick for that one, another woman would do a toke and then twirl around all over in circles obviously orbiting the moons of Jupiter and taking over space on the sidewalk, one woman would smoke and her eyes would bulge out of her head and she’d go silent, not making a sound, while looking around like she’d lost her marbles, every time when I saw a junkie nod out I couldn’t help but worry that they’d crack their heads open, my one friend would inject a big
hit of coke and heroin which caused her to nod until her face was at her knees however she never fell even though I was sure she would, what grinds my teeth about guys getting high is that sometimes they would get aroused, like this one man who got a raging hard-on every time he smoked rock and would fondle himself with this stupid look on his face; when I got high I was no better as I’d get quiet and think there were small cameras on the tv or a stereo that were recording everything and I’d get leery about who I was with, everyone has their own way of experiencing a high and sometimes it’s totally wacky or annoying or downright scary.

  Dealer

  I tried dealing a couple times and failed miserably cuz to deal one has to be able to capture the attention of people walking by and have an ability to hustle and negotiate and be tough enough not to get bullied; I have a hard time yelling or talking loudly so imagine me trying to sell to people especially with the stress of dealing under the watchful eyes of the man, once I was ten dollars short and got smacked in the face a couple times, it’s like being cuffed to the person you’re working for cuz you owe the dope you took to sell, it’s a way of making money so a lot of people do it but I’m glad I quit while I was ahead before I started owing a lot of money which is never a good thing, people get in trouble when they owe especially if a debt collector is sent after them which is scary, like once I watched a collector get creative and put together different types of weapons which was pretty clever-looking and ominous, this system works for you and you can double your money but either way it’s vicious.

  Native

  I’ve seen so many down-and-out Native people, it hurt my heart to see them drinking Listerine and cheap wine, constantly drunk and red-faced; as an Aboriginal I have to admit it shamed me that I had become another statistic as if I proved to racists that Natives were just alcoholic drug addicts, we have feelings and loved ones and stories and struggles and fears, we are people and we have dreams, people see rough-looking men and women swaying while walking maybe talking to themselves and smelling like shit and see only the outside, I saw myself as a stereotype going around smoking crack and drinking and not respecting my body or mind and forgetting the power of my culture, I see generations of dysfunction and trauma, souls destroying themselves through drink and crack and heroin and how people turn away not wanting to look.

  Theft

  I couldn’t believe it that Kayla managed to steal a dvd player from the mall, me and my friend were at the edge of the parking lot when we saw her running toward us with a big box in her hands and no one was trying to catch her and so we sold that for drugs, a lot of addicts are damn thieves and will steal stuff to sell or trade and Kim was an expert at it, she often used small copper pipe fittings and a long hose to make crack pipes and you find this stuff at places like Rona where she often stole the pieces she needed, there are also those shitheads who ride around on bikes with bolt cutters in their backpacks looking for places to break in or when you’re grinding for dope and stupidly give your money to a middleman and they disappear; the only time I ever stole was my sister’s cellphone which I sold for a measly twenty bucks and boy did I feel bad afterward because stealing kind of rubs me the wrong way but there are people who would sell their own grandmothers for some rock, one thing I never did was steal someone else’s drugs because if you are found out prepare for a sustained beating or worse so going down the path of the thief is something I would not recommend.

  Females

  Women really do get the shit end of the stick, women do what they have to do to survive in a world where men exploit them and control them and rape them and kill them, men use drugs like a carrot on a stick to lure women into trading their bodies for a high, for cash, women turn hard to deal with the ruthlessness of the streets and many take advantage of each other, women are humiliated and hurt and cuz the area is small they run into their rapists on the block or in rehab or needle exchanges, young girls get turned out to endless tricks while being forcibly confined to some scummy, scary hotel room by pimps, one woman told me not to do this trick cuz he tended to degrade but she needed the money which was only twenty dollars and she would give me a few rocks so I stayed in the bathroom while he took advantage of her desperation and sodomized her, there was this other woman who was a predator herself and often resorted to violence to intimidate and collect, now as much as women fuck each other over I blame the men for an environment where exploitation and violence thrive.

  Vermin, Bugs and Birds

  The rats that populate the dtes are big and fat, the back alleys are their playground and they’re not afraid to go right up to people while they’re smoking rock or shooting up smack, sometimes when I got stuck in the alley after doing drugs I sat on some stairs so still that the rats would come out and scuttle around my legs and I would fear that I would get eaten alive, once this girl let me stay in her room for a bit and soon I heard noises deep inside her pile of clothes and this little mouse peeked through and looked at me, I swear the pigeons get high on all the dropped crack cuz they spend all day picking the ground at the feet of addicts and dealers and fly over alleys crapping on people’s heads; now bed bugs and cockroaches are what I hate the most, I’d be sitting in a room and the walls would start crawling and I’d see roaches in the sink and on the floor which would make me feel itchy and out of there I would go, bed bugs are even worse those little fuckers will find a way to infest all the corners and radios and beds and sheets of a room, these things are the wildlife of skid row, surviving on garbage and leftovers.

  Health

  As my drug use continued to rise my health began to fail, in the beginning the meth that I was doing leaked out of my pores and caused the first rumblings of drug psychosis, it didn’t help that the woman I was doing crystal with thought there were aliens and cameras everywhere, soon I lost a lot of weight as I often forgot to eat and when I did it was fast food and as I began to smoke crack I had twigs for legs and my hip bones jutted out and I became dehydrated from not drinking enough water, for a long time I didn’t brush my teeth and they became yellow from doing drugs and eating junk food and smoking cigarettes, an abscess infected part of my neck coming up the side of my face and I had tiny cuts on my hands from the Brillo and it felt like I was hacking up my lungs every morning, I was weak and my brain cells were getting killed, I was becoming slow from all that dope, I would stay up for days and become paranoid about everything; it took jail to recover my mind and body, I had to get locked up to save my life.

  Hospital

  I ended up in the hospital for different reasons, one time I woke up at St. Paul’s being warmed with blankets, I freaked out cuz I thought I was being assaulted so they kicked me out and I passed out across the street and was later thrown in the drunk tank, another is when I was deep in a cocaine psychosis, digging a hole and acting bizarre and someone called the ambulance on me and I spent my time verbally abusing the hospital staff, I got knocked out once and the blood was all over the place but I was okay and they released me, before going to youth detox I cut a large hole in my arm and at the hospital told them I fell on a nail of course they knew that was bullshit, after a stupid fight with Kayla I overdosed on Aspirin and spent sixteen days in the psych ward where my parents would visit me and bring burgers and during one of their visits I puked my guts out after swallowing the charcoal and trying to eat the kfc my parents brought me; that was the longest time I was ever in the hospital and almost every hour they took blood until my veins were shot and the nurse burst the vein in my hand and it turned into a bubble, my mother said she would never forget the look on the doctor’s face.

  Hope

  I know what it’s like to have no hope though I felt no emotion about selling myself when I was high, the self-hatred I had when I was sober ate me alive and could only be blocked out by the constant use of crack cocaine which was my drug of choice and no matter if I was cold or hungry or thirsty, making money for rock always came first, it came before family before my self-respect before fo
od before friendship before love, before life—hope had no place in the life I was living and the only thing I looked forward to was my next toke, I would sit on the stairs in the alley so high I was unable to get up and I’d see the rats and shit and garbage and needles and I would briefly wonder if life was worth living and if this is what it all came down to; when it came to love I thought I found it and that we would live happily ever after and that she was my hope for something better but instead everything grew worse until I couldn’t breathe or talk or do anything unless I had permission; during those early times I was rarely sober but when I was clean for a day or two I felt so empty it was like I turned into a skeleton with no guts or heart just a mouth to smoke crack.