About

I get off work just after the sun sets. I shove my STAFF vest into my backpack and stick around downtown[1]. The street lights turn on and the bars open, their lights reflect off the oil slick rainy streets, and I guess I’m cliche but it has always been one of my favourite things. The black pavement sparkling like outer space lends itself to this idealized persona I never grew out of. It’s all wrapped up in the sort of boozy street hardened writer I romanticized when I was younger, like Bukowski or Burroughs. They never pointed at beautiful new directions for the soul. They just let the city have its way with them, documented the abuse and took inventory of the wounds. Old cowboys on barstools with wise words and tall tales for younger generations. I ball my fists in my jacket pockets and walk how I figure they’d walk.

A trail of blood on the cement wall along the street leads to some clients under an overpass. They try to get some change out of me. I don’t have any. One girl has an infection that has made her whole upper lip up to her nose bumpy and hard like the skin of an avocado. As I walk away she calls me sexy. I cross the street and I know the timing to get to the next intersection lights on green, and where and how to jaywalk across which streets, and it dawns on me I’ve been coming to this strip of bars for almost half my life now. I can feel the separation. My feet leaving the ground. My girlfriend says I’m distant. I’m poor at keeping in touch with friends. I admit, when I’m alone it doesn’t occur to me to call them. Everything floats away. People skitter in and out of restaurants. They jaywalk lazily, holding up traffic. No tact. I’m making sound effects under my breath for the lights gleaming off the street. Shooosh. There’s something not particularly friendly about the way the moon looks down on city streets, and people act funny when they’re being stared at. Drunk girls are pretending to panic in the middle of the road but are just screaming for the fun of it. Everything is simultaneously silent and still, like I’m looking through the glass to pick the world out of a line up. Everything fits the description and stares expressionless back at me.

When I’m in front of Nathan, my bartender, he wants to know about the shelter. But I just got off work and I don’t feel like talking about it. What he’d really like to hear is a juicy story about junkies in a fight to the death armed with hypodermic needles. I don’t have anything like that. I disappoint him, and insist on making nonsensical statements about writers he’s tired of hearing about.

“When you get older you learn you’re supposed to appreciate Gabriel Garcia Marquez or the guy from Problogger or some shit. Which is horse shit,” I say in defence of some writer no one actually criticizes.

There are several wannabe Bukowskis that come to the bar every night who just drink a lot and don’t write a damned word. I know because I used to bartend. They’re naïve and uninteresting and want an excuse for their alcoholism. The only drunk I ever found interesting was an archaeologist. Nice guy, tipped well. When I got him going I could get him talking about ancient arrow heads for half the night. And, despite his alcoholism (rum and Cokes), he was actually a very well adjusted human being. Happily married, and had two lovely daughters in University. Maybe he’s the reason I quit bartending and took up work with the homeless. The only writers I knew were two young reporters for a national newspaper. They were cocky, and always in the bar trying to get laid by passing themselves off as ‘writers’. I hated them. Thankfully, they rarely got laid.

There I am in front of Nathan, imagining myself in a cheap brown suit and smoking cigarettes. In truth, I’m wearing jeans, white sneakers, and carrying a backpack. I quit smoking with everyone else years ago. My girlfriend straightened my jacket as we stood on the doorstep this morning. She laughed and kissed me.

“You look like a social worker,” she said.

The city has its way with people. The streets are romanticized with starry eyes and the great void stares back. Trying to write something down. Things trying to fit the description. You’re waiting for some friends and meet me in the meantime. You’re an archaeologist or whatever it is you do. You ask what I do and I say I work in the big homeless shelter. We get to talking and swap stories. And here on this blog are the stories I tell. Thanks for reading.

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[1] In truth, I normally go home after work and watch Star Trek Next Gen with my girlfriend.