Nobody's Girl

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This girl in the pho­to­graph lived in the Astoria with me for a while after I’d taken the pic­ture. Just friends. I didn’t know her really and I was look­ing for pho­tographs. It was day­break so there’s some nat­ural light and there’s very lit­tle traf­fic. She was sit­ting on the cor­ner doing her makeup and I asked if I could take her pic­ture and she says “Okay, but you gotta wait ’til I fin­ish doing my makeup.”

So I said “Fine,” I says “Do you want a cig­a­rette?” so I rolled her a smoke, which is what she’s got in her fin­gers right there. She fin­ished doin’ her makeup and says “Okay, you can take your shot now.” So I took that one.

She usu­ally hangs around on Kingsway. Her mom lives on the island. She went back there to try and find a bet­ter lifestyle but she didn’t get along with her mom’s boyfriend. She stayed with me for a while. She needed a place to stay. Things like that hap­pen often in the Downtown Eastside.

She asked me “Can I stay with you for a while, I need a place to stay” and I said “Well I can’t,” you know, think­ing that my girl­friend would get jeal­ous. Girlfriend is not really the proper way of say­ing it, you know, you call them street sis­ters I guess.

I met Kat on the very same cor­ner where I took this pic­ture, just after Christmas, and right away we knew we clicked and she hap­pened to have Dutch ances­try as well. She wanted to come and see me but the guy she was liv­ing with at the time made sure my tele­phone num­ber disappeared.

I’d gone out between Christmas and New Year’s and my room­mate stood me up the year before on New Year’s, you know, like went out the minute before mid­night and I thought that’s not gonna hap­pen again so I’d given up on her com­ing home and us hav­ing a celebration.

I went out for a walk and on that same cor­ner Kat comes rid­ing by in a taxi­cab and jumps out of the car and she explains the story with this other guy that she was stay­ing with, that she wanted to get away from him. She really wanted to be with me, she said, right away and she went home, picked up a few things and basi­cally moved in.

Then the guy she was stay­ing with found out where she was and he came knock­ing on the door the next day and said “I want my girl back” and Kat went “I’m nobody’s girl, I’m my own. Go away.”

Kat and me clicked right away. She was a very sig­nif­i­cant per­son in my life. She died last Christmas. Not even twenty-three, four weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday.

We went through quite a few things when she was dying. She told me about a week and a half before that she was gonna die. She told her grandpa a month and a half before, and basi­cally it’s “Why me? I’m so young, why am I in so much pain?” 

If there was legal heroin to deal with people’s pain you wouldn’t get these infec­tions. If peo­ple were treated a lit­tle bit bet­ter even though they’re drug users, if they weren’t moved around so much, if they actu­ally had a home where they could stay for a while to recu­per­ate, these things wouldn’t happen.

She died because no doc­tor could be found to come give her the antibi­otics that she needed. That’s what she died of, not get­ting a renewal on her antibi­otics. Apparently a doc­tor needs to be pre­scrib­ing it, and there was no way that she wanted to go in an ambu­lance to the hos­pi­tal and wait in emer­gency. I’ve taken her to the emer­gency in a wheel­chair and she’s been refused med­ica­tion for pain because she was a druggie.

The main rea­son that I open up my doors to peo­ple on the street is so that they would have a place to sort of come home. They’d have a refuge and a chance to sta­bi­lize. I’ve taken care of a lot of peo­ple, peo­ple with stab wounds, peo­ple that wanted to get off the drugs. It was a safe injec­tion site before the safe injec­tion site was open. We had to do that out of our own apartments.

There’s a lot of places called sros right, single-room occu­pancy, or sin­gle occu­pancy res­i­dences as they’re called. I don’t think they’re very well man­aged in gen­eral. I had a place I had to vacate because they weren’t doing the main­te­nance. The fridge had an elec­tri­cal short in it so if you touched the sink and the fridge at the same time you’d get a shock. They wouldn’t fix that. The fan in the bath­room had stopped work­ing so it was get­ting mouldy. They did nothing.

You know, peo­ple out there are freez­ing. I used to make the rounds when I was stay­ing in the shel­ter. I’d hand out left­over food and there was cloth­ing. I’d look after a few peo­ple and if every­body does that, looks after a few peo­ple, then the world’s much better.

The safe injec­tion site could’ve been open as a health care facil­ity right off the begin­ning, but it started up as a research facil­ity. All the reports are out, now it’s gotta be con­tin­ued as a health care facil­ity. Of course Harper’s gotta play out his cards, you know, like they make all these promises at the begin­ning, being Conservatives, “I’m gonna do this, I’m gonna do that.” So they get all the votes. He has to say “I’m against it” but then there’ll be an over­whelm­ing major­ity that will pres­sure him into the exten­sion that they need. People will be dying if they shut down the safe injec­tion site.

If you read the reports it’s been shown to be every­thing that it was promised to be, and we should’ve known that a long time ago. 

I’m going to the Netherlands next week. My par­ents live there and I do research there. This time I’ll look at the hous­ing sit­u­a­tion. Holland’s done quite well. They had a major prob­lem with a hous­ing short­age since the Second World War and they’ve always been open to refugees and yet they don’t seem to have many peo­ple on the streets.

One of the res­o­lu­tions is that they don’t allow any build­ing to be vacant for three months. It’s gotta be used. I know when I was on the street in the win­ter you can’t sleep any­where because it’s too moist. By the point that you start falling asleep you shake, you wake up, and after a while you just get to the point where falling asleep becomes syn­ony­mous with being in shock. At night when you’re on the street and I’d be walk­ing past these build­ings and there’d be like one per­son in there, a secu­rity guard, and the whole build­ing would be heated.

I also met a per­son who does the street paper in the Netherlands. He was amazed that there were so many peo­ple on the streets here, espe­cially, Indians as we call them — you know, Natives — and I explained to him that we destroyed their cul­ture and that’s what happens.

I’ve been in the Downtown Eastside for about five years now. Before that I was twelve years on a farm, liv­ing in a log cabin. ’Til my mar­riage broke up, and then I was still there for three years. I have a degree in biol­ogy and zool­ogy from ubc. I love liv­ing in nature but when you start talkin’ to your­self, you gotta answer your­self back.

You know, Kat still comes to see me. I mean just yes­ter­day for instance I was work­ing on my com­puter, you know how the screen goes black, then if you haven’t used it for a while you have to touch it to make it turn on again? Well I just walked by it and all of a sud­den the screen goes on. She does these things with elec­tron­ics. She used to turn my tv on for a cou­ple of min­utes, just to let me know that she’s there. I really loved her. She loved me too. She said she’d stay with me ’til she died and, you know, she did.