RUINED - An homage to PTSD
RUINED
By Mack McColl
Copyright 2023
Prologue
You're not telling me anything because I'm too stupid to listen, and too young, and you're too old, and we don't speak the same language.
Under the observation of a pathologist, I would have been a John Doe, a no-account dead man in a reasonably clean shirt. I would have been an unidentified frozen corpse with multiple contusions having a set, no, a series, of previous abrasions and bruises as if I lived the life of a street fighter; Injuries and defects in this unidentified corpse include a severe concussion from the first of a total of four lethal assaults in the past six and a half weeks. The last one was designed to put me on the slab once and for all. Yet I survived. Oh yes. To tell stories like this one.
Chapter One: No good deed will go unpunished
In the beginning, God lived in my basement and I remember from when I was three years old, at most, even though someone told me once, “Aw you were too young to remember anything at that age.” This is the consensus. No. I remember because it is something you don't forget being in a house with God in the basement. People are told to look up for God and this seems to be a major deception throwing everybody off the trail.
I say from personal experience I didn’t look up, instead, I crawled down wooden steps to the basement. And there I sat across the room staring at him, in my infancy, of course. The pure infant me relates this in the face of a lot of literary directives from high-minded sources, raising the need to discuss things I have read through the years, including the Holy Bible, a book with a long history containing intense mystery. Okay, enough about that.
One of the first things we learn is we are dust. We are told so by an illiterate God, and his message in the Holy Bible is presented as so much, oh my, such an awful lot, of baffle-gab, somehow inciting people to murderous impulses in so many ways the mind boggles.
Is it objectionable to blame God for taking apart people limb from limb through the millenia based on the instructions from the scribes? Thou Shalt Not Kill (in hordes of less than 5,000 per day in sub-tropical zones with rivers nearby and industrial-grade transportation facilities).
Laying on my back in a snow bank awaiting a slightly less cold slab, I wondered what would land me in my position. Is it possible not all of us arrive in a world accompanied by months of close confinement with the Almighty? It was the end of my innocence, I can assure you.
We are innocent in the eyes of virtually everything and everyone, except God. He's forgiving, not forgetful, yah, forgiving is what he is and does, but innocence doesn't enter the picture as far as I can tell.
God was in the basement during an infancy of twists and turns setting the archtypes of a peculiar bent entirely beyond my control. My older sister would not visit God in the basement, and she was perfectly aware he was there. She refused to hang around him. She didn't like him. He took up space she was accustomed to playing in, with me, of course, and her own friends, so she was angry at him. It is incorrect to suggest God wanted me in the basement either; in my experience he didn't. I remember him barely tolerant of my tiny presence. But God had no friends. None. So I visited.
At some later date in life, I came to view this friendless God in my basement is a perpetual refugee. Heaven remains a wonderful place to be, no question, and very much around and of the earth. I met God in His ongoing exile from the best parts.
Meanwhile the thieves, typical of those with sociopathic tendencies, expend extraordinary energy spoiling the stolen possession, intending to run it into the ground. They won’t be stopped until they are done abusing everything, being especially hard on a predestined few who invite God out of exile and loneliness, which must surely be misery. These few become guilty of aiding and abetting Public Enemy Number One. These are the worthy and the result is important. “You get to live with me. We live 10 feet under and eat a lot of worms. And eventually it shall come to pass during your waking hours we rebuild the completely destroyed world stolen from me and ruined while out of my possession. Thanks for your support. You're going be living like God, with me, working hard till the job is done.” He doesn't use a lot of words because he's not verbose (his son is) but everybody gets the message. Eat worms, fix burned-out paradise.
Being with him is going to have an impact. One assumes it is designed to. Why did he live in a chilly concrete basement? Surely he was up to something. God is a high achiever obviously. Granted, he declared low expectations of his achievements (man), informed as he is (by Satan) that man is a source of continuous disappointment and torment to God, Satan says, Jesus supporting the argument by being half-a-man.
In later years I came to understand, in the face of a terrible ego problem all my own, which, according to Dick G. of the Coastal Health Authority Urgent Response Team in the Alcohol and Drug Abuse department of the Pier Health Resource Centre, in the D.E.S. of Vancouver, B.C., Canada, prevents any real understanding, except of the obvious: God prefers it below the surface when he's hanging around because on the surface the world is a perfectly horrible place to him.
The world is filled with difficult chores and God showed me a few years later how it's a mean, miserable, contrary place (for him) to exist; perhaps more so for him to exist. None of us respect God for who he is while he roams and rambles like damaged goods picking up shattered pieces of his second favourite creation (his first being a 'Tree' possessed of an invaluable fruit). Being exiled means this invaluable fruit is beyond his reach, he exiled from knowledge, which belongs to him, was stolen and is yet to be returned, withheld even by those who feel sorry for him.
Hell, it's no tea party for me either, damaged goods that I am and occasionally picked up and delivered to a form of succour, but, for God, the best thing to do is hunker down ten feet beneath the surface and let it unravel up here (it could not be unfolding, does anybody think it's unfolding?).
I am saying God seems to be a people-person. Unlike the pretenders who shall remain nameless, who play aloof, God tries to make friends with the few-and-far-between who accept him for exactly what he is, a large, rank, really big loser. What I know, is, for whatever the reason God prefers to minimize his exposure to the world on the surface.
What is he? Is he homeless is he dumb? The dumbness is silence. He is smart enough to create the world and stolen paradise, but something went wrong and it got away from him. He lacks retention skills, including the loss of eternally valuable knowledge from a tree that others are exploiting under false pretenses.
Here's what my two to three year old mind remembers about God in my basement. He was huge, a big fellow. He was rough and tumble, not friendly. I would scramble down the wooden staircase to the basement and toddle into his space and he would sit and I was probably interrupting him from picking his nose or other thoughtful endeavours. I had no words; I wasn't speaking. I would find a basket of laundry to sit on and stare. He would stare back and he was quiet. We made eye contact. I recollect him smiling or laughing, encouraging me to repeat the staring matches. Sometimes he would be gruff and a bit snarly about me walking into his space but allowed me to sit and stare at him for a few minutes.
My mother would yell, "Get up here!" I would resist and God would indicate I had to go, wave his arm and shoo me out. Did I a sense a happiness to be rid of me? I surely hope not. But I remember feeling I wasn't done with him, and I would crawl up the bare wooden stairs; and I even remember being angry at my mother for calling me out of these meetings. She would be angry back and instruct me to, "Stay out of the basement."
In a few months God was gone and I didn't see him again for 22 years. When I saw him next time he portrayed his circumstances differently, and I suppose he was older but I can't differentiate between his age and condition because there is not much memory of the first meetings. Not surprising I met him the second time in a similar vicinity, that is, another basement. I will tell you about this meeting. It was short. God had been drinking heavily. He wanted to sober up and I was on-call to do 12-step service in AA. Don't be fooled. I bore witness to the fact he would change his mind about sobriety. Staying on the same page with God is both daunting and inevitable in my experience.
Chapter Two: Disobedience
It is autumn of the year 2009 in the month of October, and I am reported to be seen in the notorious D.E.S. -- Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, B.C.. Let the continuous camera surveillance do the talking. They say I live one floor above the last bar open each night in the pre-2010 Olympics frenzy of the greatest city on earth, Vancouver, British Columbia. I live a floor above the hard rock/dance bar dance floor of the nightclub called 50 Bourbon Street and the music blasts until 3 A.M.. I live one floor above the music. At this moment in history, there is no place else to live in Vancouver.
The Hildon Hotel is a single room occupancy (SRO) in the most poverty-ravaged and drug-ravaged neighbourhood in North America. I neither affirm nor deny my whereabouts in the D.E.S. (“The 'what'?” D-E-S, muthafucker. . .That's Downtown East Side) once fielding a team of serial killers making victims out of drugged sex-trade workers.
“Snuff films,” says Randy. Ugh, I reply, adding a few self-serving remarks about deeds behind-the-scenes of the Military Industrial Complex. “Did you know they called it the Indus tree after they were planted east of the Indus River?” He did not.
Vancouver has a large film industry. They are perpetually shooting in the D.E.S. and caravans of trucks and trailers park on the streets with valuable movie-making equipment, and movie stars and 'players' in the industry walk parallel lines with 'players' at the end of time.
The Hildon Hotel was built by Masons in the Gastown waterfront district in 1909. Today it is a geological anomaly putting everybody in the building six feet under (the filthy gray carpet is the magic), closer to God, but four feet out of touch.
The Hildon is a shit-hole run by reformed alcoholics and drug addicts, dry-drunks and ex-junkies with habits reduced to coffee, methadone, and marijuana. Monkeys could run this five-storey hotel (elevator a deceiving piece of machinery with up-pointing arrows, another deception) composed of $500 a month rooms rented to drug-tethered tenants queuing at the front office for income assistance cheques on a day welcoming the monthly drug frenzy in the D.E.S.. After the first few weeks of 'living' here, I was so disgusted by everybody in the building, when cheque day arrived, I started singing, loudly, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas, 'Cause it's the Best Time of the Year,” until somebody named RJ came to my door, and said, politely, “It's called Mardi Gras.”
The search for oblivion becomes frantic in the yawning 30 day stretch between Mardi Gras'; these days between are insufferable on the five stinking floors. A search for drugs produces turns acquaintances into barking-mad adversaries. Hammering at doors over cigarette-paper-sized debts, pitiful larcenies, and strange women begins at all hours of day and night. Other fucking assholes try to play bashed up stereos past the nightly till 4 A.M. musical experience occurring a floor beneath me. It's easier to get obliterated than sit around wishing everybody dead.
The wailing of threats conjures nightmares to haunt the hotel denizens other than myself who is haunted by far too many ghosts to be concerned about a bunch of low-track junkies, crack-heads, and fucked up people bent on self-immolation.
Empathy is a thought I cannot spare.
I am entwined in this lawless neighbourhood, I am almost one of those dangling at the bitter end of a city's tether watched by bullies. It fits as a doppelganger of hell. Vancouver Police Department has a simple code for inhabitants of the D.E.S.: a 'one' is a seller, a 'two' is a buyer. There is a one-sentence description of the VPD: Adolf Hitler wants you.
Police surveillance in the D.E.S. is persistent to say the least, squad cars circling and beat cops walking continuously at all hours in all weather through all seasons, and police are carefully surveyed by Ones and Twos, and everyone agrees it's a matter of containment.
There is gentrification underway curbing the corrosion by moving a better class of drug user in to dine at upscale restaurants. I know an employment program is making bone-racks into street janitors by giving them a stick with fingers on it and paying them to wear fluorescent yellow and orange jackets, so the current milieu is geared to put a mask on things for the 2010 Winter Olympics, which are coming to the city in February.
This part of the city is the circus midway in a macabre carnival taking place whether half-a-million visitors arrive for a marvellous world spectacle of sport or not. This neighbourhood will be one of the tourist destinations, ya know, because of the gentrification, and other possibilities.
Vancouver is a port on the Pacific Rim with a history of international comings and goings. The scuttlebutt in the halls of the Hildon is that longshoremen unions are controlled by the underground and the import of narcotics spans the spectrum. Like I give a fuck to hear this nonsense.
In the halls of the Hildon Hotel's five floors, and on the streets of the D.E.S., the hard drugs are available at the wink of an eye, with crack cocaine leading the list, followed by heroin, morphine, oxycontin, percocet, other pills, pot, and the rest.
It's not always a wise choice to shop here, but the alleys of the D.E.S. are drug emporiums day and night with supplies coming from various sources. Today's drug drops in the D.E.S. come from organizations with racial profiles, but also biker gangs, and it is an enormous drug sector. The business begins at Cambie Street and West Hastings Street (which turns into East Hastings Street a block later), and runs east six blocks past Main Street, down to Water Street beside the harbour for a total of 20 square blocks. The mayhem is contained directly to the south by historic Chinatown.
Drug sales are made in the streets, alleys, and in front of everybody on East Hastings. Drugs are consumed in the open air under close surveillance, you have to see it to believe it, and you will, often in front of police who make occasional arrests. The cruisers flash the lights, a body is snatched, the marketing continues without a hiccup. More often, cops tell the number twos to drop what they are doing and step on it and the user scowls in defiance and steps on the glass pipe, even shrieking their rage after a hit has been erased. No charges are laid.
My new friend in the Hildon tells me when VPD (Vancouver Police Department) makes a 'sweep' to take down a few drug dealers (as they do on occasions like when a neighborhood improvement opens a new sidewalk or hi-rise building) the phenomenon known as 'bunkers' arrives.
My new friend lives across the hall on the second floor, and he tells me these people come from Surrey and other areas in the Lower Mainland to sell fake 'rocks' of crack cocaine for $20 each. They cannot be busted because they're not selling drugs but money gets exchanged and buyers walk away to an unexpected, unwelcome surprise -- they are drug-free and smoking hard wax. These bunk cocaine rocks are cut with chemo-therapy drugs or other concoctions to fry the brains, says my fry-brained friend.
My new friend, Dyna, comes by the name because he used to ride a DynaGlide Harley Davidson motorcycle, tells me there is a method to avoid a 'bunk' street purchase. He says these bunk sales are underway all the time and you have to be careful to avoid a rip-off even in the 'best' of circumstances (as if any of those exist within a mile of this place). You can say it out loud. Nobody's gonna argue. You might get elected.
The habituation of 'buying' involves the typical cagey crime-like maneuvers, an ancient statement of self-defeat involving artful dodging, which appears to be dancing in the middle of a restless crowd. The crowd pleaser enters the large scene on East Hastings (or at the entrance to an alley on Carrall and Cordova) and this Two approaches that One, and the conversation (= negotiation) commences: "I got crack," says a tall, gaunt-featured woman, "and it's good stuff." "Let me have a $5 toke to try it out," the 'two' replies, and Dyna hands over a 'fin' ($5 bill). She breaks off a piece in her palm and Dyna extracts a thin pyrex tube which gets lit at the 'toke' end. "I'll take a 20," says this satisfied 'two,' 'Make sure it's the same rock,' and he walks into the throng with the remains of the smokeable $20 hit.
Crack cocaine is sold in various sizes, $10, $20, or $30 rocks, weighed pieces, a commonly smoked daily dose for the average D.E.S. user. It's garbage. Alternatively, a smart connection leads to a gluttonous session beginning at $110, known as a half-ball. A $210 rock is called an 8-ball, which I like to call an iceberg, a 3.5 gram rock. Two of those in a row is what I like to call a very satisfying three and a half to four days.
Chapter three: The contest commences
I don't get paranoid and nor do I see a threat in the wispy spectres (black shadows) floating in the room at a higher density of inhalation. This black stuff is suspended in the air and becomes noticeable after the first two or three hours. I inform these black shadows this user has no use for boundaries. The voices are trying to inform whatever presence is in this room about some kind of fucking line being crossed and there is no coming back. Uh huh, I decide, and I know I might be thinking out loud, but I'm contesting, so I say, “I'm taking you with me,” and the black shadows flicker, and fade away in the breeze from a window that is shut.
Hildon`s rooms are among the cheapest in Vancouver, but that's not why I'm here. I'm here to entertain a few mice, to cross paths with rats on my way to endure fumigation, I've been through three in one month and saw no change whatsoever, except the cockroaches were less repelled. I live here for the catastrophic decibels of music, and truly, fucking obnoxious neighbours. One or two have a human streak but I'm not looking for any. My contest is something else.
Rooms have a sink, window, four walls, ceiling, and a filthy fucking grey carpet. I would be truly mortified to see it on LSD. There is a small fridge, a couple kitchen chairs, a bed, a desk, a mirror, and a coat rack or a few wall hooks. Tenants fix up their rooms to a remarkable degree, like Dyna, who has a battery of cookery, fans, stereos, tv, and fridge all arrayed in two wall plugs. I soon learn he makes a lot of trips down the hall to the fuse box.
The Hildon's washrooms and showers are shared. I don't take showers, yet, though I am intending to somehow, someday, make exceptions once a week. It's not the fact the shower hovels are like serial killer's armpits. It's the fact I'm lazy and the disgusting conditions are an excuse. I don't eat excess junk food so I don't stink much. I have a strong constitution so I use the washrooms to piss, and even to shit.
It doesn't bother me or make me quail to see the toilet overflowed with greasy reams of shit. You see it often. To some, this filth could be daunting. After all, the toilets are plugged with all due regularity, defecating being something certain individuals have not learned how to do in public on a daily basis, or perhaps they are psychologically unhinged individuals who would learn something from a beating with a stick that has lots of nails in it.
The welfare pays the bills for 99 percent of the rooms in the SRO. People living in SROs in the DES are unemployed SOBs. In the streets it's not uncommon to see 9 or 10 year olds, usually female, alone, in the middle of the night, abandoned by tormentors. These unfortunates never had a chance before dropping out of sight in a dark place under glaring street lights, invisible in plain sight standing on a street, nothing more than a torn flag flapping in the faces of passersby.
The multi generational prostitution is a drug exchange. Nobody wants money except as it equates drugs, and mostly equates crack cocaine. The outcome for prolonged users of cocaine is defined as 'anhedonia' by the medical establishment, loss of the ability to feel pleasure.
Everybody in the DES is connected to a doctor to plug an abscess and a dentist to pull rotten teeth. They have a social worker to hear viral lamentations, and the most important connection is a 'trustworthy' source to deliver a constant flow of anaesthesia to be smoked or injected or swallowed. One psychiatrist who works across the street from my humble abode, and who coincidentally lives across the street from my office where I am contributing editor to a nationally distributed newspaper, says the DES has an invisible fence keeping people in the neighbourhood.
Local convenience stores (non-franchised) sell drug paraphernalia found in everybody's hand, the glass pipes, snags of brillo filament to ignite the melted rock turning it to vapour to fill the lungs to capacities that are barely conceivable.
Few of these drugs are 'fronted,' this is rare because small debts bring large and dangerous consequences to the DES, for instance, a $60 debt can cost a person their life, or lives, plural. Apparently knives are the weapon of choice but I have seen none of this. Dyna informs me knife attacks occur over drug debts. He has a collection of implements, aluminium bats, finger cuffs, hand cuffs. I almost always pay for my drugs in advance in a perfect world.
Addicts in the DES 'find' things to sell, prescriptions of lesser favourites to buy greater favourites. They sell cigarette papers for a quarter. The place Dyna took me to demonstrate safe-buying practices on the street is what I call 'Murderers Row Mall.'
“Oh, this is a lively place, this murderers row mall.” Dyna might wish I would shut up. Murderer's Row Mall is a two block stretch of people selling particles of value, pieces of stereos or whole ones, musical instruments like guitars, amplifiers, keyboards, and electronic gadgets including cell phones (but only the 'chip' phones), battery chargers, computer monitors, small televisions, cameras (I was immediately informed 3.2 mega-pixels = $20 rock of cocaine); bicycles whole or in part; rolls of tape, shoes new and used, I got me a grey-coloured hoodie for an embarrassing low price, as if I was 'issued' the article of clothing. Cans of tuna go for 50 cents. Everything on the street in this neighbourhood I am reported to be in is 'boosted' (stolen) from stores, cars, hotel rooms and transported in clattering shopping carts through alleys for blocks, across bridges, up streets, down alleys to be dumped on East Hastings in Murderers Row Mall. It attracts a crowd. Underneath it of course is a shockingly intimate exchange of high powered or dangerously adulterated street drugs
The windows and doors of businesses in the D.E.S. have steel bars. Hundreds of homeless live next to their shopping carts in the streets full of garbage. If feeding the mycoplasma bacteria swelling the brains of each of us is considered eating, they eat. Christian organizations stop and put up tables with peanut butter and jam sandwiches, juice, and candy. Guru Nanak provides a spicy meal every Saturday and Sunday at the corner with the Carnegie Centre.
Homeless people bundle up and huddle tight in doorsteps in the depth of winter, enjoying the best climate in Canada in the most liveable city in the world, holding place along the wall of an alley or lying down on East Hastings Street. Dead people are found. My brother told me dead people laying in the streets was a defining feature of the city of Goa, India. Fine. I am in Vancouver.
The scene on East Hastings Street is a sight. I rarely go see it (as I am steeped in a mission, part strategic and part tactical, contest and practice, life and death) but Dyna says food is delivered to the street at all hours of day and night by community associations and church groups. Bodies converge and queue to feed on noodles, macaroni, sandwiches, and soup, then disperse with renewed energy to engage in the pursuit of addiction.
Outside of the truly awful people in my immediate vicinity (a shit-challenged crowd on the second floor of the Hildon Hotel) D.E.S. folk can be friendly. They can be trusted for nothing and that's as plain as the bent noses, scars, and warts on their faces, but they share what they have as long as it isn't drugs. They share a toothy smile and a laugh when they can muster. They share food when they have it, including sugar, tea, bread, and cinnamon rolls, and a lot of conversation about infamous histories dealing massive quantities of drugs. They are under the weather and commonly prone to disabling diseases.
The DES is the end of the line, and they say drugs is the reason. This I would reply: here's another deception, like if you believe in an all-knowing, all-seeing God, which is a story perpetrated, possibly by the Prevailing Order delivering repackaged truth. It is a stumbling block to belief, especially if he's not all-knowing, and does not himself pretend to be. We humans tend to live with doubts. Why not he?
I might agree he's all-consuming, and waiting to consume the rest. In my experience he's not all-seeing but known to refuse to see, to bear the affliction of blindness rather than look upon the earth awash in foul deeds. Drugs have nothing to do with this roiling neighbourhood being filled with misfits. Drugs are performing a service whereas another culprit is inflicting disabling diseases at the centre of the attack.
