I explain to her that due to privacy laws I can’t tell her if her daughter stays with us, however she is welcome to come up stairs with me and we can look for her. (Later, I look up her daughter’s name, to see if I can fudge the rules a bit.  There is no record of her.) She’s tiny and shaking. Walking through the room of hundreds of people, trying to pick her daughter out of all the haggard faces is only making her more distressed. I bring her back to the laundry area where it is a little quieter to talk. She cries even more and in between sobs pleads for me to give her a way to find her daughter. She keeps asking me if this is where people come to do drugs. I try to tell her that people who do drugs do come here but they do their drugs elsewhere (in a perfect world. I don’t complicate things). I say she can call the police and file a missing persons report.  Then, wait a minute, ma’am, do you have somewhere to stay tonight? She shakes her head no, and insists she’s more concerned with finding her daughter. I start writing off her daughter and start brainstorming places where she can go. She’s welcome to stay here but she says she doesn’t want to and looks terrified.

Our counselors are in their weekly meeting, so she can’t see them. I tell her to go down the street to the YWCA. They have a counselor there who will hopefully help get a lead on her daughter’s whereabouts. If she can’t get help there, I tell her to come back at 4 when our counselors are finished their meeting.

At this point I take my coat off, and am soon thereafter told there is a client on the floor of the washroom. I go in there and the guy is squirming and vomiting on the floor. Other times he just lies on his back. His skin is white from the pain and I can’t get too many words out of him except that I should leave him alone, and that he’ll be fine. I radio to staff the situation. The security guy and one of my supervisors come over.

“You had one of those chicken wings didn’t you?” says my supervisor. As it turns out, someone had (poorly) made hot wings with some sort of habanero sauce and people had been dropping like flies. The supervisor points at me an tells me to call an ambulance.

I go into the office and call 911 from one of the phones in there. While I’m on the line with the 911, Mick, who is working the office today, turns to me and screams, “Fuck!” He starts screaming at me about how it has to go through him. I try explaining this was security’s decision. Whatever. Mick is pissed off and goes to tend to the washroom situation as the paramedics come. The paramedics then chew him out about appropriate uses of 911, saying things like “Well, this is a good use of $2000 of tax payers money…” (So bare in mind, next time you are vomiting and in pain on a bathroom floor, don’t waste the paramedics’ time. Oh wait, that’s only if you’re homeless).

Mick comes to me and tells me next time I’m the one who gets to be chewed out by the paramedics.

I go downstairs and run into my little Chinese friend. She’s standing by the security office and still crying. She says the counselor wasn’t in at the YWCA. I sit her down in the lobby while I try to think of something. She tries to tell me that she wants to find her daughter first and that she is not concerned with where she sleeps tonight. Regardless, I start phoning every agency I can find a phone number for and I can’t get a hold of anyone. I realize how frustrating this must be for clients who are told to get help, only to wind up talking to answering machines.

So I stand with the lady in the lobby until I actually see a counselor walk by, grab him by the sleeve and physically pull him to the lady.

I look at the clock, and a mere two hours have passed in my shift. Six hours to go until the weekend.

“He says he thinks he can keep me from going back to prison.”

I say that’s good, he’ll want to stay away from there.

“I kind of want to go back,” he says.

“Why?”

“All the drugs and fighting. All you do is fight and do drugs. There’s no rules.”

I walk on the floor and the morning guy is standing with his hands on his hips and nods at a man on the floor in a green cap. He sighs. The man’s ass is all wet. It looks like he might have wet himself although he doesn’t stink, so he might have just sat in something. He’s rolling around in a bit of pain and keeps talking to himself, and crying, and stuttering. Other guys in Intox keep yelling at him to shut the hell up.

“The police just brought this guy in. I think he’s got some sort of multiple personality disorder or some shit. He keeps switching mid sentence between talking normal and this weeping shit. Well, he’s all yours.”

The morning guy leaves and the man on the ground calls me over. Sure enough he’s bouncing between two different voices.

“Excuse me, hello, yes I don’t mean to bother you but I I  I I I I NNNNNNNEEEEDDD  A AA OHOHOHOHOOOH OH HENRY BAR OH GOD, you see I have diabetes, and if MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM”

He reaches into his pocket while violently shaking and I tell him to give me $1.25 and I’ll go get him a chocolate bar.

“Thank you, it doesn’t have to IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE OH HENRY. ANYTHING CHOCOLATE. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND! OH GOD! Thank you.”

I bring back a chocolate bar and he eats it. Then he needs to go to the washroom and he needs me to help him to his feet. He can barely stand up, and staggers his way into the washroom while holding onto the walls. I think if I were to ask him where he is he wouldn’t be able to tell me. When he returns he flops onto the floor again and is writhing in pain. Except when he’s in his calm voice, then the pain seems to subside momentarily.

“I NEED SUGAR! PLEASE! I’m a diabetic, you see. I don’t think you understand. That’s alright. I HAVE NARCOLEPSY. WHY DON’T YOU MOVE YOUR STUFF OUT JILL? WHY DON’T YOU MOVE YOUR STUFF OUT JILL? WHY DON’T YOU MOVE YOUR STUFF OUT JILL? Can you please get me some food with sugar?”

A coworker is visiting and goes up to the kitchen and, after arguing with the chef, the kitchen eventually relinquishes some strawberries and bread. The man eats some of these and falls asleep. Everyone assumed he was completely drunk off his ass when he was brought in. My coworker and I discuss it and reckon between his blood sugar levels and multiple personality disorder*, he likely isn’t very drunk at all. Just completely disoriented.

After an hour, when he wakes up from his nap, he’s fine. He’s able to stand up easily and walks away. I see him later in the evening too and he seems in a good mood.

–

*Interestingly, many medical professionals actually feel there is no such thing as multiple personality disorder.

I ask her if she needs anything. She shakes her head no. I give her a new garbage bag in case she needs to be sick again. I briefly ponder whether we should call them utility bags instead of garbage bags because it would be more dignifying for the homeless who carry all their possessions around in these bags and the contents of their lives shouldn’t necessarily be referred to as ‘garbage.’  Her vomit is totally undigested chicken soup. I put the garbage bag into another garbage bag. I also wonder if there’s a more appropriate place for a garbage bag full of drug addict vomit, like some sort of hospital bio-chemical bin. But if it exists I’ve never seen it. We only have very small yellow buckets under the desks for needles, and there’s no way it’s appropriate to shove the vomit bag into a little bucket under the desk. So I take it to the trash compactor outside with all the other garbage bags. Sara seems fine after that, or as fine as she gets. She has a nap and eventually leaves.

In the evening, I’m on the fourth floor. There’s a volunteer up there. It’s her first day and she asks me what my ‘craziest story’ is. It’s a question I’m starting to get a little weary of, even if it’s a fair question. I tell her about the guy who threatened suicide in my first couple weeks, only because it is the fastest story to tell.

The next time someone asks me to tell them ‘my craziest story’, I’ll tell them this: All the agencies that help the homeless in this city work in direct competition with each other. They slag, badmouth, demean, trample, and suppress each other at every opportunity as they compete for funding from the government and private donors. An agency that helps put people in homes might not accept people from our shelter. Our shelter might tell clients to stay away from that agency because they’ll only get screwed over; we don’t want to give those agencies any freebies. Another agency might turn away anyone who needs a little extra help because they want their numbers looking perfect when the time comes to ask for more money. Furthermore, agencies come up with programs that are attractive to donors, not ones that are necessarily needed. So while our lobbies are full of aboriginal people with severe Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, administration thinks of things like Basketball Programs for Single Dads because funding agencies get all teary eyed at the idea.

That would have made her squirm.

Sitting down by himself over by the garbage cans is a strange man I’ve never seen before. He’s wearing a red valet jacket with a grey vest underneath, and no shirt under that. Both the jacket and vest are unbuttoned. He’s wearing grey dress pants and a spiky emo belt which is not keeping them up and you can see the crack of his ass when he stands up. He is old, with a wrinkled face that distorts and stretches like plaster. He’s muttering to himself and he keeps escalating to where he’s yelling all by himself. I wait for a quiet time and walk over.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“I’m good. Is everything ok?”

“I’m good. Is everything ok?”

“Right on.”

“Right on.”

He’s like a space alien who repeats everything you say in order to learn to communicate with our species. Soon he’ll be able to mimic my voice patterns. I smile and back away. He continues talking. I can’t hear what he’s saying, and I can’t tell if he’s talking to me or to the air. I smile and nod and casually walk away.

A couple hours later, I’m blocking off the stairs on the first floor. We do this every day to ensure everybody on the second floor gets fed, and we can keep track of who is coming and going to ensure no one steals extra meals or anything like that. I’m starting a line up for food on the first floor and once the second floor is ready, I’ll send up the next line.

Normally there’s three or four staff blocking off the stairs, but due to staff shortage today, it’s just me. The funny man in the valet jacket walks up to me.

“May I go up stairs?”

Sorry, no. Not yet. He’s telling me he just wants a smoke and I keep repeating that I can’t let anyone up. He’s getting angrier and angrier. He has a death glare he has obviously practiced before, where he scrunches one eye closed and glowers with the other. He starts yelling at me.

“Tell me right now why I can’t go upstairs to have a smoke!”

Because we close the stairs everyday at this time while we serve dinner.

“That doesn’t answer my question! Why can’t I go upstairs to have a smoke!”

Because those are the rules.

“You’re hiding behind rules! You’re not answering my question!”

It goes on like this for a while. Eventually he starts trying to provoke me.

“Do you know what you are? You are a fucking goof!” (Note: ‘Goof’ is the magic prison word to engage another person into a psycho murder battle. It means ‘pedophile’.)

I smile disinterested. Theoretically I could force him to leave the building, but in this case I don’t. He’s too old, and too ill. I’d fear for his safety if I sent him out in this state, even if he is no stranger to the streets.

He keeps calling me a goof a couple times and sits down at the end of the hall. He could just as easily walk out onto the driveway and have a cigarette there, but, apparrently chooses not to. I send up my first line and he seems to have forgotten about his desire to go upstairs. And later when I send up my second line, he politely gets a meal ticket from me. He says thank you, and seems to have forgotten about our arguement twenty minutes ago.

No problem, I say. She leaves and I put my ear to the shower door to see how he’s doing and I can hear him vomiting.

“How are you doing in there?”

“Oh God, I vomited all over myself.”

“Do you want me to come in?”

“Um … yeah … I guess so.”

I unlock the door and the poor guy has those crutches that wrap around your forearms because his legs are permanently disabled. He is naked and shivering. His eyes are red. There are flecks of vomit across him and he’s standing amongst lumpy red vomit across the floor.

“It was coming out my nose and everything. I’m allergic to tomatoes.”

I tell him to rinse off and we’ll move him to the next shower stall for him to dress in. After he rinses off I open the door again and have a towel ready to wrap him in.

“This isn’t going to work,” he says. “I can’t walk on my crutches and keep the towel on at the same time. It will fall off.”

I laugh because I have no idea what to do.

“It’s not funny!” he snaps.

“You’re right. It’s not. I’m sorry.”

He grips the towel in one hand along with his crutch and hobbles over to the next stall. The towel indeed slips down a little way. Then he says he needs a chair to sit on. I run and grab him a chair, but he’s already halfway in the shower stall, he’s shaking, and seems eager to sit down. It’s too difficult to move him out the doorway again in order to get the chair in, so I just set it down in the doorway. He sits down in the chair and he’s going to have to change halfway in, half out of the shower stall. His backside is exposed to the laundry area for everyone to see and I do my best to act like a screen to block him.

I hand him clothes as he takes his frustrations out on me. It’s tricky clasping his suspenders onto his jeans as fast as I can while he’s standing. At one point I even accidentally pinch some of the hairs on his ass with the suspender clip. He’s shaking because he’s exhausted from standing so long, but we get him dressed one way or another and he heads out to the dining area. The whole time he alternates between insulting me and apologizing.

I’m staying serious. I’m not laughing at you. I was just thinking about something funny Camus wrote.

I’m sitting on the curb with Dmitri, a huge Russian man who I’m eager to impress because he has a special kind of authority around here. Partly because he’s older. Partly because of his intelligence – in Russia he’s a cardio-surgeon, but here his English is too poor so he’s working in the shelter with kids half his age.  He also has a cool Russian severity that sort of demands you take everything really seriously without ever saying it. He has a handlebar moustache and a large, imposing figure, like he’s a biker in an alternate dimension.

Another great thing about Dmitri is that because of his limited vocabulary, and because he hangs out with so many young people, everything is “awesome” to him.

“How are you, Dmitri?”

“Awesome. How are you?”

“I’m good. Some clients were saying there’s no hot water in the showers?”

“Showers make cold water, so we just, you know, just reset boiler, now water eez awesome.”

“Awesome. Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you. I heard that there’s a large crime problem in Russia and that it’s very unsafe. Is that true?”

“Moscow is like one big homeless shelter.”

Conversations are limited and I don’t understand much of what he says. But it’s cool to get time with Dmitri anyway.

The kid in the white cap and his buddies have taken to throwing plastic pop bottles at each other and one almost hits a car. Now’s my chance. I stand up and walk towards them.

I yell, “Hey guys, will you stop throwing shit around please?” They vaguely mutter something about being sorry. As I walk back to the curb I glance up at Dmitri and I get Dmitri’s slow nod of approval. Awesome.

Then there’s some sort of commotion inside the building and Dmitri goes in to see what’s going on. I stay outside to keep my eye on everything.

The kid in the white cap and his buddies keep horsing around. He’s play fighting with his friend and they spill into the street, and I tell them to calm down. They’re so animated I thought they really were fighting but the people around tell me it’s ok, they’re just playing around and I shrug my shoulders.

Then as they keep fighting the drug dealer kid goes down and his head lands on the sidewalk. It makes that brutal pumpkin thud sound and he’s out cold. His friends are all crowding around. I look over my shoulders. Thankfully Dmitri didn’t see. After a few moments the kid comes comes to, but remains lying on the sidewalk. He tells his friends he wants a few minutes before he stands up and they lean him back against the wall. Eventually he’s back on his feet but has calmed down quite a bit.

Later, Dmitri returns with a client named Charles. Charles is hammered. He was trying to sleep in the intox room when another man tried to fondle him. He’s all fired up and screaming.

“I’ll kill him! I’ll kill the first Indian I see. Stay the fuck away from me!”

He’s giving the finger to anything that moves. A bus honks as it reverses, and he gives it the finger.

“Fuck you!”

There’s several staff outside now only because he’s a spectacle more than anything else. We stand and watch to see what he’s going to do. He doesn’t do anything except scream random obscenities. However after a full 20 minutes Charles (who has actually made a pass at me before) still won’t calm down.

“Go ahead and arrest me. I don’t care. I’ll fucking kill you!”

Dmitri steps up and says, “Can I geev you a kiss?”

He pronounces the words slowly with a space between each word so he can enunciate properly.

There’s a second of bewilderment in which Charles silently accepts. Dmitri wraps Charles up into a huge Russian bear hug and doesn’t let go. Dmitri kisses the air next to his cheek in that European way. He holds him there for a full minute or two, squeezing tight, and when he lets go Charles is calm and quiet. Charles just picks up his bags and walks away muttering to himself.

It is an awkward moment. The professionalism line has been crossed. The other two guys sense the awkwardness and keep saying how hilarious the picture is in the hopes it justifies the big awkward elephant in the room. Sandra tries to be as cool as she can about it. She puts her fingers in her ears. “La la la, I’m not listening.” She doesn’t bother looking at the screen. I am sitting in the chair right in front of the computer, and read it, and force a chuckle. But I don’t know what to say so I stay silent.  (These two guys find it absolutely hilarious and think it was written by a genius. I figure it’s about a 4/10 on the hilarity scale).

I’m as atheist as they come but I feel bad for Sandra. The picture is deliberately offensive. This is really unprofessional. She would be perfectly entitled to make a Human Rights complaint against them, and they would stand to face some strict discipline. One of these guys is even a supervisor. They just don’t get it.

More coworkers slowly make their way back to the office from their various stations in the building. Someone from the night shift pokes their head in the door as the tension in the room has reached its critical point and asks if there’s someone who can clean the washroom. We all jump out of the room offering to clean something.

]]> http://contractedtourniquet.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/offending-a-christian-coworker/feed/ 0 kencollapse Christianity demotivational poster http://contractedtourniquet.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/body-of-a-chainsaw-blade-of-a-circular-saw/ http://contractedtourniquet.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/body-of-a-chainsaw-blade-of-a-circular-saw/#comments Wed, 09 Sep 2009 16:23:39 +0000 Calgary Waiting Room http://contractedtourniquet.wordpress.com/?p=166 ]]> Every Friday at noon we empty the building to give it an extra cleaning.  The only people inside are staff, the handicapped, and a handful of client volunteers. On the main floor are some painters who are going over the autumnal brown with a fresh institutional gray.

I’m on the second floor looking out the window at the construction going on below. The city has dug up every road adjacent to the shelter leaving only a makeshift gravel road through some construction vehicles.

One of the client volunteers, Julie, comes over to chat. She’s transgendered, and in the midst of male to female gender reassignment surgery.

Julie is about 30 and has long hair dyed red. Small breasts are developing under a spaghetti strap shirt. She’s taller than I am and smiles a big toothy smile. The shelter is going through one of its razor shortages again, and Julie has unfortunate wisps of hair curling from her upper lip and chin. She’s very pleasant and eager to talk about being transgendered, and reassignment surgery.

She says she’s moving soon. It’s gotten very difficult to get gender reassignment surgery done around here, so she’s going halfway across the country, where it’s easier to get this kind of thing done. She’s excited.

“Plus out there there’s more work for me. Stripping,” she says. “Let’s face it, I’m not too bad looking.” She tosses her hair and bumps her hip out.

I remain expressionless.

She grew up an army brat, but has lived around here for a very long time. Her dad was in the army. Her mom was in the air force. Her dad tried to do boyish things with her, and as we look over the construction she mentions how hopeless she was at trying to build things with her dad. I infer they didn’t get along very well. By 16 Julie was in denial about her identity and was afraid to face it. She had severe depression, was masochistic, partied a lot and was a heavy drinker.

“Facing up to being transgendered was the greatest thing I ever did. I’ve never been happier.”

We lean against the window. Below there’s lots of construction workers puttering about and generally looking like they’re not being too productive. Julie and I make fun of them by giving them voices.

A crane picks up a cement tube while a dumpy looking foreman feebly measures it with a measuring tape.

“Yup, yup, let’s have a look here,” I say putting on a whiskey-throated red neck accent. “Oh sure, mmmm, gonna have to give’r a measure here. Oh yup, looks good.”

The guy in the crane shifts around trying to get comfortable.

“Gawd,” says Julie, imitating the crane operator. “Sure is hard to get comfortable with my wife’s thong riding up my crack.”

The dumpy looking foreman pulls out a tool and begins sawing at the cement tube.

“I may have been useless at construction but I did learn a thing or two,” says Julie. “That tool is a sawzall. I guess you can imagine why it’s called that. It’s got the body of a chainsaw but the blade of a circular saw.”

I give her a look, and she isn’t trying to be funny. The shelter reopens then, and she goes to sit down. People file in and we prepare the afternoon snack.

As with all gods during the modern era, Hubert does not intervene in the normal course of life’s events. He is an observant god. If a person is three sheets to the wind, he will not keep a car from striking them and crippling their legs. If a person is high on drugs in a parking lot, he will not prevent a pack of youths from attacking them. He is only their witness. And the wasted, often crippled and hobbling, may come to Hubert and he will keep them warm, and watch over them.

His face is on the wall in the shelter’s Intox room, way up high almost touching the ceiling. It is a deer head printed in colour on some kind of card stock. I couldn’t reach it to take it down even if I wanted to, which I don’t.  It’s the right size to be a mask but it has no holes to see out of. It’s conceivable it might have once been a Christmas decoration, but there’s nothing Christmassy about him. Hubert has no antlers, and his face is shaped in such a way – narrow cheek bones, slender chin – that he looks on the verge of becoming humanoid, hence my thought it might be a mask. His gaze is set straight ahead, but wide enough that he’s looking over the whole room. Although the image is cut off at the neck, you can also see the tops of what must be a checkered red and white collared shirt Hubert presumably wears.

As I work in Intox, I look up at the deer face and ponder its creepiness. Intox can already get creepy enough. The lights are off for people to sleep, so only a pallid beige light glows out from the office. Ghosts of people stagger in, some emaciated, some bloated. Some have their faces beaten beyond recognition, like big purple plums with red eyes. Many people are trying to drink themselves to death and their mind has already departed but their bodies are still breathing on the rows of vinyl mats on the cement floor. Flies and bugs flit around. A pipe in the ceiling is dripping down the back wall. And, perfectly, Hubert’s inexplicable deer head is at the front wall, with his big shiny black eyes and teenage face looking out.

Nobody has ever so much as even mentioned the deer head, which only forces me to draw my own conclusions.

Here is what I’ve decided. Hubert the deer has been created by the Universe to help intoxicated people exist since the 7th Century. It works like this. Consciousness has a way of, well, nodding off, especially for drunks and drug addicts, but society’s collective consciousness falls away too from time to time. The Universe, though, needs to keep consciousness afloat in order to exist as it does and will create conditions to make sure we’re on the same temporal page as the Universe. It observes us as we observe it and this is how everything is formed, as opposed to everything being some non-mathematical abstracts in some alternate dimension or parallel universe.

It was in the 7th Century when consciousness was in such dire straights that the Universe needed to create Hubert. People were dozier and sedate, or wearied by the worldly troubles of the day. People had less bounce in their step, fewer jokes were told, puzzles went unsolved, the open sky was less inspiring, and the Universe shrank a tiny, little bit (about a billion light years). So the Universe sent down an entity to deliver a proverbial kick in the pants and it took the form of a deer. A pagan named Hubert was out hunting in the woods. His mind was distant because his wife died while giving birth to their son. The great cosmic deer emerged from the woods with a glowing cross between its antlers and the voice of Jesus told Hubert to seek God via the bishop Lambert or else he would burn in hell. (Oh it was a simpler time back then and the gods had to get more involved, and had to give cruder ultimatums). Hubert immediately ran to see Lambert. He studied under him, and eventually became a bishop himself. He distributed his personal belongings and the episcopal revenues among the poor, converted lots of pagans, and was a much loved and respected bishop. He is now referred to as St. Hubert, patron saint of, among lots of things, hunting, optics, and mathematicians.

You will also likely remember this story’s cosmic deer from the side of the Jagermeister bottle. The cosmic deer on the bottle accompanies Otto von Riesenthal’s poem, which roughly translates to:

This is the hunter’s badge of honour
That he protect and nourish his game
Hunt sportingly, as is proper
And honor the Creator in creation.

The gods no longer seek to determine the outcomes of people’s lives. We’ve grown in our relationship with the Universe since then. St. Hubert continues to care for the poor, especially the intoxicated poor, and appears as a deer when he comes to watch over them. Those who get totally fucked up do so to black out, to lose all consciousness. Their minds are too distant to connect with the Universe, and so Hubert comes to observe them, to be witness, only so they might exist as they do in this Universe.

As he looks out from the wall at the front of the Intox room, he sings this song:

Take Care of All of My Children – mp3

UPDATE Sept.12 2009 – Hubert is a coat hanger! The fire marshall did an inspection of the building and didn’t like Hubert hanging at the top of the folding wall divider. Hubert was taken down whereupon I realized he’s a really creepy looking coat hanger. Hubert is now in the security booth.