Bart shook his head. “A man drink like you
do,” he said, “he gone die!”
The Kid thought about that for a moment,
then said, “When?”
-- from “Blazing Saddles”, 1974 (slightly
novelized version)
“He’s been
drinkin’ rub,” Sheila said, “and some o’ that!” she added, pointing to an empty
bottle of Jack Daniels.
I passed the
information on to the ambulance dispatcher. It was Friday morning, and Bruce
(who can be seen on our video presentation about The Lord’s Rain) had come into
the ministry to get me to call 9-1-1. “Someone’s havin’ a seizure,” he said.
“Rub” is
rubbing alcohol, which is usually watered-down or mixed with Listerine, but
Sheila insisted that Ashley had been drinking his straight. Ashley was lying on
one of the benches, twitching slightly on his left side. He was breathing
normally, a fact confirmed when the dispatcher had me watch him and say “now”
whenever he took a breath. But the ambulance was on its way and got there in a
couple of minutes.
Before they
got there, Ashley came to and managed to sit up. “I’m epileptic,” he told me,
and a couple of the others said, “he’s OK – he doesn’t need an ambulance.” But
Sheila laid down the law. “They need to check him out,” she declared.
It turned
out that one of the paramedics knew the patient. “Have another seizure,
Ashley?” Ashley nodded. “Want to go to the hospital and get checked out?”
“Yeah, I wanna go,” Ashley replied. They walked him to the ambulance and helped
him in. As we watched him, Sheila pointed with her foot to the bottle of Jack,
almost in wonder at the amount Ashley had put away.
Again, I
marvelled at the compassion shown by the paramedics. Not only did one of them
know Ashley’s name, but also remembered that he had a broken collarbone, which
had not been repaired – probably for the same reason Jim Ritchie hadn’t had
surgery to repair his collarbone: too much risk that he would fall, break it
again, and get infected.
On Saturday,
I strolled over to Pigeon Park again, and there was Ashley, sitting on the same
bench, slugging back something from a bottle. I asked him what happened at the
hospital. He didn’t really know. “That was Thursday,” he said.
“Friday.”
“No –
Thursday. I woke up at home this morning.”
Nothing I could say would shift him from that
belief. Apparently, he’d lost a day due to the stroke.
“Hey – I’m
alive,” he said, smiling and taking a pull on a bottle of something dark and
strong-looking.
A couple of
the others at the park came over and chatted and one, whom I’d never seen
before, said, “thank you for praying for us.”
What can one
say, besides “you’re welcome”?
I’ve said
before: The Lord’s Rain has been serving basic human needs beyond the need to
be physically clean. People anywhere – especially in a place like the Downtown
East Side – have a basic need to know that they’re in right standing with God. Being
prayed for goes a long way to that end.
Anyone can
do that, too – although it’s important to offer the prayers in the
hope-against-hope that knowing how much God loves them will gradually provide
greater comfort than rubbing alcohol, Jack Daniels and whatever Ashley had in
that bottle.
===
The word “gradually”
is important. My friend, Cal Weber, who leads Campus Ministry at the BCIT (BC
Institute of Technology), once noted that water, flowing over a rock, has the
same impact as a sledgehammer; it just takes longer. But when the job is done,
the rock is completely worn away, without the big chunks a sledgehammer leaves
behind. So it is with Ministry.
===
It is six
weeks, now, since Vicky, one of our regulars, came into The Lord’s Rain. She
bypassed the coffee line, looked at John, Danilo and me and burst into tears. “Harold
died this morning,” she said.
Harold was
her male companion (for want of a better term: they weren’t married, and “boyfriend”
sounds trivial, especially under the circumstances), and she had woken up that
morning to find he had passed away in the bed beside her.
On Friday,
Vicky was back at The Lord’s Rain, still grieving, carrying with her the little
leaflet from the memorial service. She poured her heart out to John, which was
actually a good choice, as he had had a similar experience – waking up one
morning to find his roommate dead on the kitchen floor – and he is known to
people in the area as an excellent listener.
---
How about a
little good news?
I have
mentioned Maggie before, although I’ve only seen her in The Lord’s Rain once. A
very small woman, somewhere between age 45 and 60, she gets around by pushing a
wheelchair (although she recently got a walker, which is easier to handle). For
the past couple of years, she’s had a little camp in a doorway on Cordova
Street, just around the corner from The Lord’s Rain. Last year, the space was
renovated into a restaurant and delicatessen, but the proprietors let Maggie
stay in the doorway, which isn’t being used, anyway. A gate was installed and
Maggie was given the key. Little by little, her camp has grown, with pillows, a
sleeping bag and books, and people drop off food for her, or she goes out to
find a meal from one of the outreaches.
On Friday,
she called me over. “I’m moving into my new place in December,” she announced.
It turns
out, she’s had a room at a single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotel called the Marble
Arch, which is just outside the DTES. “I’ve been payin’ rent there,” she said, “but
I refused to go back until they fixed the place up. It was declared
number-one-worst place in the city.”
But now, it appears,
the renovations have been done. “I got new furniture and a kitchen with a microwave
that works!” It appears that she’d been paying rent for her room at Marble
Arch, which held it for her in the mean time. Disabled and ravaged by drug
abuse (it’s hard to say which followed the other ) and occasionally subjected
to verbal abuse, like the guy who yelled at her, “you brought it on yourself!”,
as he blew her off, Maggie is about due for a break.
===
(Do you
remember a song from the 1980s, called “The Way It Is,” by Bruce Hornsby and
The Range? The opening verse describes a homeless guy begging on the street,
and someone drives by in a car shouting, “get a job!” We all nodded sagely and
opined how awful that was and how true and but it must be someone else who had
such a stinking attitude. To borrow Walt Kelly’s overused line, we have met the
enemy, and he is us.)
===
An article
in today’s Vancouver Sun makes interesting reading. It’s on a national
study that’s just been released on housing for the mentally ill, and suggests
mentally ill people tend to “do better” living in self-contained apartments
scattered around the city, rather than in SROs concentrated in a particular
area. They benefit, the study suggests, from being around healthier people and
socializing more. Interestingly, the NIMBY factor among people already living
in these neighbourhoods is not as pervasive as some might have thought.
It reminds
me of a remark our friend Marty made a few months ago. “It’s too easy [on the
DTES]. I can call a dealer any time, then take two steps outside my door and
meet him.” Others consider “getting the heck outta Dodge” to be a main goal in
life. The important thing is to impart sufficient hope to them that they will,
like Maggie, see that a breakthrough is not just desirable, it’s possible.
