portraits....
Sara and Bill - Hope
- Shoeshine
Sara and Billback to top
They were both AIDS positive. I had seen her only once before, he was a regular at the small free lunch cafe where I did my counselling sessions as they had lunch. Sara and Bill (not their real names) chatted closely the previous day, I marvelled how despite their obvious advanced illness and their desperate situations they flirted coyly with the same innocence as anyone else.I'd not be able to say how old they were, after years of living homeless and addicted twenty five often looked like forty or fifty, most of them were barely past childhood when discarded by society and family. In each other they found interest and affection, the place was of no consequence and their troubles fell off. Instinctively we all gave them space, no one tried striking up a conversation or asking for anything. Bill cleared the table and brought Sara another coffee.
Afterwards each went their own way. There is a territoriality and work ethic in this population, begging or sex trade it is still work and attending clinics, hoop jumping for services and counselling, standing in line for methadone. It is foolish to think this does not require some self discipline. These were not things that could be done together.
They were both back. Sara had come first, she glanced around for him. She bit her lower lip, deep in thought, hoping, not eating. Finally, Bill turned up. His face flushed when he saw her. She stood up to wait in line beside him then they took a table outside. I had just sat outside to have a smoke and talk with another client. Bill asked me for my lighter. The triumphantly he took out the stump of a candle (origins unimportant). With great ceremony he arranged the table, and put away the trays. He placed the lit candle-stump on the table and they sat, holding hands, and eating lunch. For just a few moments, they were human, their lives mattered to each other.
Hope...
Her eyes were sunken, her skin lifeless, her hands nervously wringing her sweater. After hearing only part of her story I marvelled she had the strength to sit there and ask once more for some help. She had been beaten. Some of the bruises were fresh others were older. The new ones Hope attributed to her husband whose relentless beatings were to force her back on the streets, to turn some tricks, get cash for his drug habit. She was happy to be on methadone, it meant she had to earn a little less on the streets, just his habit, hers was now free. Hope, however, was not free, wherever she turned, someone else was calling the shots and ultimately she could be set free only if she had the financial means to do so.She had run away this weekend, we were trying to find some place for her to go. Shelters can afford to be picky whom they'll help. Drug addicted prostitutes with sociopathic husbands are not high on their list. We'd failed to find a shelter for abused women that would take her. Rehab housing would accept her only if she had detoxed, but Hope was on a methadone program, the government was happy to give her the methadone but would not support any housing for women in her position, and there are many.
Hope was one of seven children born on a reservation. She was separated from her family and placed in a foster home. She was bounced around from home to home, and, like most children in foster abused in several of those homes. Others were nothing more than foster child farms where this was the main source of income, the money given for the child was never spent on that child, but on their own. Handy servants and sex toys with a monthly cheque from the government, very little protection, kids too scared to open up to social workers.
Dogs are better treated than most of these kids. So, big surprise, she ran away. She was put in a group home, prison for orphans. She maintained with great difficulty some contact with her family. At age 26, and looking more like 50, she was the last survivor among her siblings. Suicide, murder and AIDS had claimed all of them.
Hope was HIV positive, drug addicted since age 14 and working the streets since age 15. Before looking down at her imagine for a moment the sort of animal who will use the services of a 15 year old girl. Hope had among her friends several of the women who later were found murdered art the now infamous "Pig Farm". Predatory men continue to have easy prey thanks to policies keeping so many women poor, desperate and alone. Hope said as horrible as it was, it was better than a group home.
Out of a misguided sense of loyalty and an innate desire to have a family she married and had children, and both of her children are now in foster care. Not surprising, it is very hard to be poor, addicted, have no sense of ever being cared for yourself and suddenly having children as well. She still had the optimism to think she could one day, after cleaning up, have her children back.
You hear them, and you want so much to make it all better, to take the abuse out of her life and let her live for her self, not to be used and abused. Many, many phone calls later we shook a little money loose so she could rent a room for the night, but that is all we could accomplish. There are no services for women like Hope, and it is precisely for her that crisis shelters are so important, without them she is likely to miss a chance to clean up, as long as she faces living and working on the streets to survive, she will not escape addiction and abuse.
Some weeks later Hope found out she had uterine cancer. It was cancer, not drugs or HIV that killed her. Twice her surgery had been cancelled adding more than a year to being untreated for it. No matter where she turned for help she was ignored. Her entire family, brothers and sisters dead before age 30. Hope never knew a day in her life of being safe, having enough or being cared for. Somehow she could always manage a smile, she had a sense of humour and always listened intently wanting to learn something, anything. Given a chance she would have been a lovely productive woman, and also importantly, her kids would have had a caring mom. Hope (not her real name) is not a combined story but a story of one single woman who deserved better. If only she was an isolated case, but she is not.
After her death three years ago services became worse. After 60 missing women -- many of their remains discovered at the pig farm -- the current government felt somehow justified closing many women's programs. Leaving even fewer brief moments to reach out and save a life. Services which are life and death to many, abandoned once again, because some lives are judged by those in power as more deserving than others.
Shoeshine
He was slight, skin tightly wrapped around his bones. We stood eye to eye, but somehow he carried himself as a taller man. The others called him shoeshine, simply because that is what he did. He made his living shining shoes. He took great pride in his work. with great enthusiasm he would take away my shoes and shine them and he was disappointed if I cam in wearing sandals. Shoeshine himself was wearing an old shoe on one food tied with strips of cloth, his foot so swollen from and infection. It made him limp, but with some almost Gene Kelly-like smoothness he made the limp look like a cavalier swagger. Like most people too thin from illness he could not easily stay warm. Despite all this he had class and a unique style.aletta mes, 2004He earned his keep shining shoes, he did not take handouts. He had a daughter somewhere, and a ex-wife he was still deeply in love with. He'd blown it. Daddies should not be drug addicts if they want to be daddies. it was a lesson he learned just a bit late. His addiction was now terminal. He had already entered the full-blow AIDS stage and he was weary. He knew it. He resisted being put on the AIDS cocktail, it was too expensive, getting it subsidised was complicated by his not being in the system for it. Nonetheless we wore him down.
For a brief time, after the projectile vomiting stopped, he felt better. Old wounds from rat bites were starting to clear up without the prolonged eruptions. Yes, rat bites. he could only afford a room in a local hotel and they had rats. I believed it that he did not notice when he was still on drugs, but he was noticing now. This was not how and where he wanted to die. I explained hospice to him. He was delighted, said he had never heard of it before. He dedicated himself fully to earning enough to pay in advance for his hospice, so he could die in dignity on clean sheets.
Then quickly his health declined yet again. He was in and out of delusion. One afternoon we were sitting in the courtyard swapping stories of when we were "young". Out of nowhere he started to giggle, the laugh lines around his eyes crinkled. "What?", I asked. He explained that I had two really cute little pink squirrels playing on my shoulders. Pink ones, mind you. That told me he was at peace.
He noticed I was a bit down. I told him I could not afford a gift for my daughter's birthday. He acknowledged my pain, and then was back watching the squirrels at play.
A few days later shoeshine presented me with a gift certificate with a hairdresser for my daughter. One of his steady clients was hairdresser. After he assured me it had cost him nothing, I hugged him with heartfelt gratitude. I told him that his daughter was missing something not having him in her life, and I meant it.
I visited him once in hospital when he had a bout of pneumonia. He'd held back a pack of menthols for me. He could appreciate the concept of having nothing. He made it a mission to tell me exactly how to survive, he told me all that social workers were mandated not to. I met his mother at the hospital, a lovely woman. I think had shoeshine not contracted AIDS he could have put his life back together. Unfortunately when quite young, this young man had been to ill to work in any meaningful jobs because he repeatedly had cancer. He became angry, married, could not deal with the anger and threw it away when he tried numbing himself with drugs and then on top of it contracted AIDS.
I became too ill to work there anymore and sat a last time with shoeshine. I gave him my number but suspected he would not call. Happily he did not need me, he was ok. I still think he might have lived longer if hospice was simply available to him, the cocktail might have had a better chance if he was not so overworked and stressed. All the same, he died not much later, in hospice, on clean sheets. Shoeshine was not nobody, he was my good friend.
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