Monday AM. Wet streets of Chinatown in half-light. Red streetlamps seem to hold up the street and push it down.Past the white-walled garden and grand arch with elemental embellishments of waves and Chinese totems. On a lamplit corner a man feeds a gang of crows scattered across the sidewalk. One crow with a biscuit in its beak eyes me, others swing empty beaks and march legs, hop, flit up in sprays of inky angles then touch down.Up the block. Silvery half-light fills the wet stones and flattens against others. Near the base of the magnificent red arch, where gods process, a crow dips its biscuit in a puddle.The pre-dawn corner by MacDonald's is alive! A man going somewhere fast! Another man going somewhere else fast! Everything about him seems under a murk: clothes, skin, air. When he's close enough, too close, it's clear he's not well: sunken cheeks, clouded eyes fixed on the invisible, wild prize of his next fix.
You recall the man you saw last week: Another grey morning, three-quarter light; the man in ragged jean jacket and pants feeding pigeons from his hands, outstretched arms teeming with birds, scores of birds clamouring at his feet.
At the gym you exercise and pray and chat with the woman whose son refuses to eat vegetables. She tells you her friends from her Chinatown school are now the street people that roam the Downtown Eastside, recalls her five-year-old classmates sniffing glue at recess.
"We made it," you both say. "We made it."
"Do you ever feel bad that you made it and had to leave people behind?" you ask.
Like you, she switched to a West Side school to escape the maelstrom. "The Chinatown kids were so smart, smarter actually than the West Side kids. But none of them went to university."
That night you take your friend from Toronto out for dinner to thank him for doing your taxes. You leave an impressive tip and the waiter with the waxed moustache and cream-plastic choker crucifix tells you twice that he loves you.
Standing to leave, in the lucid revery of a red wine high, you perceive and declare how all the people waiting to be seated in the restaurant vestibule are, "Slumped under the mesmerism of their own self-underestimation."
Through the ink of evening you cross the viaduct on foot, past the glittering condos and shining night waters of False Creek. The viaduct touches down on Main and you cross into your beloved, loathed neighbourhood, the Downtown Eastside. In a park that borders another leg of the overpass, a kindly old man on a bench calls to you, drunk, his speech completely smearing. Can you to retrieve something for him from under a tree?
You approach the item, a bottle of some kind, flip it over. Mouthwash. The man is drunk on mouthwash. "You can't drink that," you say softly. "It's not healthy."
He's beautiful: 60, portly First Nations with horn-rimmed glasses and white hair flying up and back in a cartoonish shock, like a Beethoven; skin pocked, eyes sparkling, innocent.You leave the man and the bottle behind.
