When I was about 7 or 8 I found a couple of books in my sister’s room and was absolutely fascinated by the contents held within for a year or so. These books were a series made by Ripley’s Believe It or Not, each with it’s own theme and the pages were just bursting with stories about fucked up people, events, and things. I’d read them over and over again and think about what a crazy world it was, filled with all kinds of wonders that you wouldn’t even imagine existed living a sheltered life in prosperous suburb of a somewhat major Canadian city in the middle of the 1990’s. Mermaid skeletons, whacked ass African tribes, weird and obscure religious rituals, freaks of nature. Fascinating.
Years later I was in Oregon on a road trip and went to the Ripley’s museum there. The magic was gone and it was somewhat depressing thinking that you’re kind of trapped in a mundane existence where reality encroached on your imagination and sense of wonder - gaining a bit of ground every day until you’re left with nothing but that cynical “seen it all” attitude. I guess that is one of the things that makes childhood so great, but you just don’t understand it when you’re younger. The genuine excitement of the unknown, being a stranger in a strange land. It kind of dies in you for the most part somewhere in your teen years.
Before I go on, I should explain something. I live in Vancouver, which is a very nice and fairly wealthy city save for one neighborhood: The downtown eastside. This is the poorest area in Canada and apparently one of the most drug riddled neighborhoods in North America, if not the most. I’ve been in various poor areas of various cities in the world, and they’re all different, but I can say that this is the most fucked. Certainly not the most dangerous, but the most fucked up to see. It’s essentially like a different world during the day, where if you hit the really bad part of it you’ll actually think that you’re in the middle of some sort of post-apocalyptic movie. But generally, during the day it’s not bad at all.
At night it’s no worse really. The cops are driving around and there’s people going to bars. Cars on the street, and most of the junkies disappear. You can walk through the parks and everything alone and generally you’ll be fine for the most part as long as you know where not to walk and generally not to stop in certain spots for too long. I’ve never had anything really bad happen at night here, and I’d probably say it’s a bit more sketchy in the day.
That doesn’t really cover everything though. There’s another period that I don’t really consider to be strictly day or night, but somewhere inbetween. I think we all know the time – after bars close or you’re going home from a party. Personally, when partying I’ve found this to be the most interesting time of the night because something whacked usually goes down. Good or bad, it’ll be interesting. In fact, this goes back to the first part of the post – the wonder. I find this time fascinating like I found those books fascinating. A whole different world, and it’s hard to turn down the potential excitement in can provide in return for safety. The best place to be in this period? The downtown east side.
I believe I told a story of one of my experiences there at 4 in the morning sometime last year. To sum it up; couldn’t get a taxi, ended up there, crack heads running around, some dude following me, me about to either stab him or hit him with a brick, maybe false alarm maybe he heard me flick open the snap-lock utility knife in my pocket from work. Either way we both won. I went home, went to bed. Good times.
So a similar thing happened again a few weekends ago, but substantially less potentially dangerous. Essentially, I ended up wandering around there in this time period for about an hour trying to get a cab, ran into a friend of mine from highschool, which was pretty fucked up, and went home.
The thing is, that it was fucking fun. It was seriously like being in a game or movie where mankind just got absolutely fucked up and degraded. There are no cars driving on previously busy streets, crazy people yelling and fighting, and I saw a guy taking a shit in the middle of an alley. Nothing at all sketchy happened, so it all worked out.
So the next weekend I leave the bar which is conviently positioned on the other side of this neighborhood to where I need to be, so I do the reasonable thing and cut right through the heart of it. Not the pussy route, the fucked up back alley route. Is that guy asleep or dead? What the fuck are those two cooking? Are they seriously about to light a fire in that garbage can? AWESOME. I’m pretty pumped – this is very entertaining because it’s not just poor people, it’s poor people who don’t live in the same reality as the rest of us. They run around a lot, bump into shit, and it’s fucking fascinating.
And this is where I probably make a bad decision. I’m pretty drunk at the time, but I’m also pretty amped. As I’m walking out of this alley a totally haggard crack whore looks over grabs my arm and pushes me back into this alley. “How much money do you have?” Now, this makes me wonder…are people really coming down here, picking up these girls and nailing them? I mean, obviously someone is paying for their services, but I always figured it’d be other crack heads. I’m not dressed like a crack head and I don’t even have any HIV legions. Aparently, normal people are coming down here paying change to have sex with some of the most hideous and haggard people I’ve ever seen.
All that aside, I’m not an idiot so I don’t tell her how much so I start walking away. Then she throws out “5 dollars?” So, if this chick is willing to fuck for 5 dollars, what else is she willing to do? I want to see something even more fucked, so I make a proposition: I will pay her ten dollars to take me to wherever she’s going to buy whatever she’s going to buy. She’s visablly tempted, but suspicious. She uses her crackhead legal knowledge to inform me that if I’m a cop and she asks I have to tell her I’m a cop….and then she asks me if I’m a cop. Great, transaction handled we’re walking down an alley.
I don’t know if it’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done drunk, but it’s certainly up there. None of the bad things this could lead to have crossed my mind including: drug dealer getting suspicious and doing bad things to me, this being a setup to me getting jacked, cops thinking I’m picking up a crack whore and arresting me, cops thinking I’m picking up some crack and arresting me. No, I’m about to see some rad shit, and that’s what matters.
And it was rad. She takes me to this alley within an alley, which in itself was fucked, but it’s also like the candle that these moths are drawn to, because there are so many motherfucking sketchy people here. There’s some dude sitting on a stoop behind whatever building is here, and she tells me to wait and walks over to him. I’m looking around and that’s when I realize that I’m totally not in a place someone with anything to lose should ever be in. I’d guess that I was the only person out of 30 without AIDs. I’m also in nice clothes. Not really expensive by normal, I have a job, standards, but I’m in new jeans, white kicks, and a back and white DC Shoes hoodie. These guys are wearing the clothes I wore in highschool that my mom gave to the Salvation Army 8 years ago. They’re also randomly yelling at each other, laughing at nothing, and shuffiling around like the infected in 28 days later. Once again I’m a stranger in a strange land, but this time I’m not reading a book. No, I’m in a fucked up back alley in the poorest most destitute place in Canada with 30 crack heads watching a drug deal go down and I can see someone who may or may not be trying to get behind me out of the corner of my eye. So, while I’m trying to position myself so that he can’t get behind me, I’m also trying to do it in a casual, but really drunk/high way so as not to appear like I’m worried that someone might try to steal all my money and stab me with a dirty needle. Because then they might realize that I’m horribly out of place and I have more money on me then all thirty of them will touch in the next month combined.
So, I’m about 9 seconds from just turning and booking it when this chick comes back, grabs my arm and leads me out of the alley. We get out and I get the fuck out of there, into a cab and go home. It’s starting to get a hint of light in the sky, and it’s time to go to bed like a normal person.
I ended up down there last weekend as well, although more by accident. I saw like 8 people getting arrested by like 12 cops, but that’s about it. People all seem to have opinions about the people down there, but most of the time the opinions just mask an agenda, whether it being gentrification, development, or poverty awareness. In either case I don’t think most of these people have seen it during the hours which fascinate me so, and I really hope I don’t get stupid drunk and end up seeing it during that time again. The more you roll the dice, the higher the odds of snake-eyes staring back at you.
