She just happened …

What brought her to the city was some sort of scholarship –

Some fancy New York fashion institute.

Her junkie boyfriend took to crime which took up too much of her time:

It only took a year until she took a different route.

-- “She Just Happened”, Mighty Mighty Bosstones

I’ve found myself slipping into my anecdotage this past month. It was partly to do with turning 57 and explaining to people that yes, I am old enough to collect my pension, albeit a “reduced” one; but also to do with meeting up with my high school grad class for our 40-year reunion.

The experience was fun, but it was tempered more than somewhat by the discovery that 17 of our classmates – well over 10% of our total number – have already passed away. One of my friends noted sadly that, with the women, it appears that cancer took many of them; many of the guys died from drugs.

And then there was Vicky. Murder, we were told.

According to one of the few people who had any contact with her after graduation, she had fallen in with a seedy crowd. I had heard that she had found employment “displaying her shape”, as Damon Runyon delicately described it, at various clubs around the city. At the time, I had simply said, “hmm”, but didn’t think much of it.

But at the time, I didn’t know what that crowd could be like, and apparently, neither did Vicky. I don’t know any more about the circumstances, and I don’t think I want to – the more I’ve thought about it over the past couple of weeks, the more I’ve remembered how dear she was to me. The idea of her being killed by someone else’s hand is something I don’t want to contemplate.

Vicky and I were never an “item”, although I did ask her in 11^th grade if she’d “go around” with me. She laughed in my face, not unkindly, kissed me on the cheek and said it would be best to keep it as “just friends”. Cool: I was no stranger to rejection and she was a nice friend, anyway. At least she was honest. 

Vicky was the partner for my first "stage kiss". In 10th grade, we played boyfriend-girlfriend (I was the boy) in a student drama festival production. In one of those ironic situations that can only happen in high school, I was cast as her father in My Fair Lady the next year: Alfred P. Doolittle to her Eliza (although I pulled out of the production due to schoolwork); and the year after that, she played my aunt in Arsenic and Old Lace. 

In fact, Vicky learned Cockney for her role of Eliza and would use it outside of rehearsals. In class, she would mutter, “I ‘ave ter git me pensoh” in that accent. Even now, I hear Vicky’s voice when I look for a “pensoh” to do the weekend crossword, although I had long since forgotten why that phrase and voice were so embedded in my mind.

So while we weren't "involved", Vicky and I were fairly close friends and she opened up to me in ways you could only open up to a good friend. We sat together in Socials 11, talking about places we wanted to go to and things we wanted to do with our lives. Over the phone, she once read me a poem she’d written: “it’s not about anything I've done,” she said, as if she needed to explain something beforehand; there’s no doubt that the line, “and then he impales you with his sword of love,” did require some background.

It was about a year or so after grad that I heard my “good friend” was doing a strip act. That was the last I heard of her until I saw her name on the list of “angels” passed around by the organizer the reunion.

What just happened?

She just happened, she just happened to cross my mind.

Without warning, she crossed my mind:

What just happened to me?

The other night, I found myself letting out a heavy sigh from time to time, for no apparent reason. I hope my wife will forgive me.

Not to diminish what it was

Well, there’s no reason to, because

Ago, it was so long and away, it seems so far.

Whom are we kidding, guys?

This spring has brought a new crop of people into The Lord’s Rain, although the new young women have not started arriving. High school isn’t finished yet, so I suppose that influx is a month away, as girls, talented, confused and starry-eyed, fall in with guys who promise easy money and “things”, so long as they “do a little work for them”.

One of the new girls: the guy in the shades
appears to be "with her".

Other “she”s have just happened to cross my mind lately: women who would come into The Lord’s Rain and then, not come in anymore. Shannon, Leanne, Chrissy, Charlotte, Cherie, “Little One”, who was the first woman to have shower at The Lord’s Rain: have they stopped coming because their lives have turned around and they’ve moved away? Or have they, like Vicky, run afoul of their “boyfriends”?

Jade

(On reflection, Shannon is a slightly different case: she was a bright light at the Mission, overcoming her own issues to talk to others and, if nothing else, expressing a pure love to them that reached out in ways I couldn’t seem to. She and her husband, Brannon, found a place on the south end – a considerable distance away from the DTES – where it was quiet and Brannon could rest and take care of his various kidney and liver problems. The last word I got about Chrissy is that she goes to Ontario for extended periods to see her family.)

Jade, who came in to Ladies’ Day at The Lord’s Rain when it first launched on Friday nights in 2008, died of blood poisoning a few months later.

I have hopes for Davona. It’s now three years since I saw her with her baby, Shine. We collided in Waterfront Station, which is sufficiently removed from the DTES that, it appears, she has turned things around.

This leads, by a grand leap in thought process, to musing about the Great Stupid Question about the disappearances of women from the DTES a decade ago. By “stupid question”, I refer to something a former colleague in Victoria radio, the late Joe Easingwood, used to say: “The only ‘stupid question’ is the one that doesn’t get asked.” In all the finger-pointing at police for the way they handled those cases, I never heard anyone address the question of how those women wound up on the DTES in the first place. Why had they left their homes? Why were they reduced to selling their bodies to get drugs? 

Why, indeed, did Vicky get lured into a world that eventually took her life?

(Another "stupid question" is, where were the media, which leapt all over the revelations but didn't start digging until relatively late in the game? I remember getting a call from one of the women's relatives in 2002, when I was assignment editor at a station in Victoria. Because the answers had to come from Vancouver Police and we had limited resources as it was, I seem to recall we decided to "leave it to the Vancouver stations". Maybe I should have pushed to get our Vancouver reporter to do some digging. I wonder ... But if I was getting calls in 2002, how many reporters were getting similar calls at that time or earlier? What happened with the story then?)

Of course, the view from the bleachers is always clearer than the view on the field. I remember the experience of a woman I knew in Victoria about twenty years ago, whose daughter fell in with “the bad crowd”. Shari was a single mother, raising two children and holding down a job, so she wasn't at home when school let out. Her son had activities like sports that kept him occupied, but the girl quickly found other "interests", and it wasn't long before certain young men started convincing her that her mom didn't really love her but they could give her something her mom couldn't. 

Shari tried everything she could think of, including showing up at one hangout with her (large and imposing) boyfriend and a camera, snapping pictures of everything and everyone before dragging the girl home. It made a lot of people nervous, at least for a time. There was even a “scared straight” session with Victoria Police, in which one cop told the girl, “I carry a gun, and I won’t tangle with those guys!”, but the impact was only temporary. The lure of the vast opportunities in Vancouver and a nice trip to Hawai’i with some very nice gentlemen, coupled with the repeated conviction that she was being denied something on the home front, proved irresistible.

(Another flashback takes me to the killing of Reena Virk 20 years ago in Victoria: the crowd she had fallen in with -- and which ultimately turned on her like a murder of crows attacking an injured member -- had also convinced her that her parents were preventing her from "living".)

It's tough - especially when parents who try to "train up a child in the way he (or she) should go" (Proverbs 22:6) are portrayed as "stifling" their children and denying them their freedom. 

So while that “unasked question” may appear to be rhetorical and not a little judgmental, there are answers, and none of them is simple.