In the writers’ group I started with a friend last month, we challenge each other to come up with different stories and writing stytles. It helps us with getting past the dregs of writers’ block, and it’s a good way to keep sharp. Our last challenge was to write an excerpt from a fictional character’s memoir. Below, my entry is from the experiences of a Granville St. street kid in Vancouver’s downtown core.
Late spring or early summer was when they would typically show up. It was easy enough to spot them; brand new Doc Martens, coupled with a rock T-shirt du jour and some creatively ripped jeans. Maybe a bomber jacket from Guess. At first glance, the average person walking the Granville mall would be hard pressed to tell them apart from the rest of us. They would come down as soon as the weather had started to relent, having been told by their parents to either get a job or get out of the house, and due to some romantic notion of street life being better than three squares a day, cable TV and a warm bed, they’d toss a middle finger in the air to all of it and head downtown.
It didn’t really bother me much, but for some of the other kids trying to scratch by on what they could pan over six or seven hours of the bar crowd stumbling by it was a death knell. “Sorry, I just gave all of my change to that other kid,” was a refrain heard all too often, and when the kid that got the change was decked out in the latest “street” fashion and spending that money on an overpriced gram of shake instead of food, it was enough to induce a boiling rage in some of the kids that literally didn’t have a choice but to be there. The twinkies, as they were affectionately referred to, probably had no idea the harm they were causing by cutting someone else’s grass but many of them learned a quick lesson once the legitimate panners caught wind of their intrusion. Most of them ran home after the first confrontation, some would try to act tough until presented with five or six adversaries wielding chains and bricks beat the lesson into them. Justice, such as it was, was incredibly swift.
Every once in a while, though, one would show up that really didn’t have a choice, or a clue how to survive in the morass of downtown Vancouver. They never wore flashy clothes, never had decent shoes. You could tell that this really was the last chance for them. Sometimes they’d have visible wounds from the last confrontation with “dad”, or a way of looking you over that spoke to their experience with a handsy brother that wouldn’t take no for an answer. Fear was prevalent in their eyes, and immediately identifiable. Those were the kids that we protected. We were the same, we had seen what they had seen and we knew the abject terror of spending one more night under that supposedly safe, suburban roof. We taught them where to find a bed for the night, what shop owners were to be trusted, who you could buy smokes from with the Meal Tickets the Ministry of Social Services provided, but most of all, we taught them that we could be counted on to come to their aid any time it was needed.
We became the family they should have had.
