Homeless in Vancouver: Caring for my friend, the stereotypical street person

On the morning of January 2, I saw that a homeless friend of mine was still camping in front of a furniture store besides the McDonald’s in the 1400 block of West Broadway.

On the night of New Year’s Eve, he had even built himself an entire structure out of cardboard boxes right there between the sidewalk and the storefront.

An actual street person sleeping in a cardboard box fort and with a shopping cart! The universal stereotype, so rarely seen in the real world of Vancouver homeless people.

I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t take a photograph.

I took one on New Year’s morning, though.

He wasn’t in a photogenic cardboard box fort anymore but he was still every bit the cliched homeless person; sleeping beside his own mess and what was either vomit or a spilled frappé.

The discarded cups and other garbage were no more or less than the sort of litter you might find in any messy person’s room. It just looked so much worse because this fellow was making room for himself and his personal slobiness on a public street.

Unless the other mess really was just a spilled beverage it testified to the fact that he was still as miserably sick overnight (dope-sick and sick-sick) as he had been the last time I spoke to him, on December 31.

I satisfied myself that he was still alive before I left.

His New Year’s of living dangerously

The last time I’d seen him up and about was at the end of 2014. On New Year’s Eve morning, he was rapping on the glass in front of my window seat in McDonald’s.

Having been barred from entering the restaurant, he needed an intermediary to get him a morning coffee.

I took his money and bought him a coffee (large, four sugars, three cream). A half hour or so later he was back so I could get him his free refill.

He told me he was just around the corner in the alley, camping in a doorway alcove.

He looked awful by the way; eyes barely half open, bent over like an old man, stiff and in pain. There was a good chance he was flat broke and enduring heroin withdrawal symptoms—and his hands!

“Ahhh, my hands”, he cried softly, holding out his scab-pocked hands, swollen like inflated rubber gloves.

His hands were visible reminders of the constant battle his weakened immune system waged against MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus).

It was most likely his intravenous drug habit that led him to contract MRSA in the first place. Now the act of injecting heroin into his bloodstream seemed to just aggravate the antibiotic-resistant superbug that completely colonized his body.

I asked him if it was bad enough this time for him go to a hospital and left it at that.

Ten years of repeating the same cycle of suffering tends to inure both the sufferer and their friends to the inevitability of it all.

I watched as my friend took his refill with difficulty in his sausage-like fingers and shuffled, zombie-style, back to his cubbyhole.

Beyond that, I also sought the advice of the South Granville Concierge who was on duty when his security patrol brought him into the McDonald’s.

I explained how worried I was for my homeless friend staying out in the sub-zero cold, given how sick and weak he was. Perhaps we might be able encourage him to go into either a hospital or a shelter.

The Concierge went ahead into the alley to have a go and I joined him a few minutes later.

“Good news! He’s agreed to accept medical help,” the Concierge told me during a lull in the conversation he was having on his phone, with a care provider of some sort, I guessed.

Under bright sunlight and amid greasy steam billowing from a kitchen vent, the blue-jacketed concierge was pacing around in circles, talking both into his phone and to my homeless friend who was standing up in the doorway alcove kicking at his nest of blankets and sleeping bags.

Beside the alcove was my friend’s blue shopping cart piled high with more bedding and garbage bags full of who knew what.

Could I help out and put the stuff in the shopping cart on my trailer? the Concierge wondered.

No, I said.

I’d hauled my friend’s stuff on my trailer a few times, when he had court dates and such downtown and he tended to trespass too much on my time, disappearing and leaving me holding his bags for days.

Instead I told the Concierge my good idea for safely storing the loaded shopping cart while my friend was away.

Hearing this he suddenly and loudly declared as stomped in his alcove, “I’m not going anywhere!”

At that moment from the 10th Avenue end of the alley came a shout:

“Did you call us?”

It was a fire and rescue team from the Library Fire Hall around the corner on 10th Avenue.

The Concierge had and he waved them over, but by the time they arrived it was clear that the help they offered was being angrily spurned.

My homeless friend had now determined that he wasn’t going to accept medical help and he wasn’t going to a shelter.

He said he could do all that later. Now he was going to take his shopping cart and panhandle!

The rest of us stood around for a moment and absorbed this. There was nothing to do but apologize and thank the four firefighters for making the short trip.

They all smiled and one of them shrugged and said that it happened all the time.

I was left standing there with the Concierge while we both watched the four firefighters walking back to their fire hall. They were closely followed by my homeless friend pushing his shopping cart in the direction of a good panhandling spot on South Granville Street.

What had just happened seemed clear enough to me.

My homeless buddy had finally shaken off his lethargy and woken up enough to think clearly, from his point of view as a drug addict at least.

The way I imagined it, his MRSA aside, he decided he needed heroin more than help—he needed some right away, before he went into a hospital or a shelter, where he certainly wouldn’t get any and he needed enough for later, especially if he was going into a shelter. All of which meant that he needed money.

So first things first, he had to go panhandle to make the money to buy the drugs.

Whatever his exact calculation was, I’m sure it was an easy and obvious one for him to make.

If it’s even remotely true that how you see yourself determines how you see the world (to a hammer, everything looks like a nail), then it’s perfectly reasonable for a drug addict to see the world entirely in terms of their addiction and make their decisions accordingly.

It’s frustrating, I’ll grant you. A lot of the decisions they make will seem utterly wrong-headed if you’re standing completely outside of their experience.

How do you help drug addicts who can’t help themselves?

I don’t think you can begin to meaningfully help my heroin-addicted friend until you understand how he views things through the distorted lens of his addiction.

Even then I’m sure that it’s difficult.

Frontline caregivers would need to be thick-skinned and impersonal in a compassionate way so they could stay focused on the best interests of the addict without getting too distracted by the superficial phenomenon of their behaviour.

My experience suggests to me that effective drug policy and addiction treatment will never come out of ideology or preconceived notions or arms-length assumptions. It can only be built on a clear understanding of the reality of drug addicts and addiction.

It follows, therefore, that national drug strategies should grow up from actual frontline experience.

And seeing as few of the people who actually have this experience will be elected to political office, we should probably elect politicians who are intelligent listeners and who value the experience of others and can synthesize policy from best practices.

Finally, if only a small group of people in society have the required direct experience to speak intelligently about drug addiction, then that must mean that an awful lot of everything we hear and read on the subject in the mainstream media is nonsense.

That’s probably especially true of the stuff we see on the Internet and in, um, blogs.