JUST A REGULAR GUY

But for an unguarded moment when he got smart with a cop, Don Granbois
would have a job right now. He's not like the others. Not a chance.

It's shortly after 9 a.m., the morning has turned mild, and Don Grandbois
is on Hastings Street, trying to figure out where he can go to smoke his
first rock of the day.

He hates smoking crack in public. But he doesn't have a room of his own. He
doesn't have the $10 for the guest fee they charge to get into the hotels
around here. He has only the $12 his friend Dennis gave him from his
welfare cheque for one rock and a pipe.

And he's not like those idiots at the corner of Main and Hastings who shoot
up right in front of the old Chinese ladies waiting for the bus. Or the
ones with the wormholes in their faces, those scabs that never heal on the
girls' faces when they pick away at their coke bugs with dirty fingers. Or
the ones twirling around on the corner and doing everything: up, down,
pills, coke, you name it. These are the people that give guys like me a bad
name, he thinks every time he looks at them. Don't they have any self-respect?

He's not like everyone down here. He's not even on welfare, which is why he
didn't get a cheque today. He's just finished school, a six-month
warehousing program at Kwantlen College, something that will get him away
from the grinding asbestos-stripping work he's done for the last 10 years.
He came in third in the class and he would have had a job at the end, if
things hadn't got messed up.

There's no way he's going to end up like the losers down here, man. They're
like little kids: "Ooh, only three more sleeps until cheque day." They act
like they're proud of what they're doing, boasting that they've been down
here for 20 years straight, getting all excited about pea-soup day at the
Dugout or the beef-stew at UGM -- Union Gospel Mission to outsiders. And
then their 175 bucks on welfare day. Big winnings. Jeez, get a life.

If any of the hundreds of commuters streaming down Hastings to get to work
downtown this morning were to look out their car windows for a minute at
Don on the sidewalk, they wouldn't see a crack addict.

No wild hair, no filthy jeans, no staggering around. As Don walks briskly
down the street toward a buddy's place at the Europe Hotel, where he used
to live until a few weeks ago, hoping he can get into his room to smoke, he
looks like what he is: a working-class East Van boy who can still operate
on the other side of the door, in the world of normal.

With his broad forehead, receding hairline and prominent eyes, he's been
told by more than one blasted woman in the alleys here that he looks like
Doc from the movie Back to the Future. But his build is more like Michael
J. Fox's. He's slight, with the look and attitude of a bantam rooster,
putting as much as 150 pounds on his five-sixish frame at peak weight, less
when he's using heavily.

But, after 37 years of hard living, cigarette smoking and the rest, he
doesn't have Fox's boyish face. The bones and veins show on his thin face
and there are faint lines around his mouth and eyes. His wavy,
shoulder-length graying hair, always brushed straight back from his
forehead, is longer than he likes, but he's going to get that fixed soon.
He's always been meticulous about the way he looks. Today, he's wearing
new-looking hiking boots, and his light-blue jeans and white tourist
sweatshirt from Nova Scotia are spotless -- no easy feat, since he's
currently homeless. Only his jacket, made out of that shiny old ski-jacket
material with a Bar-K Transport Ltd. logo on the front, is a little frayed,
with ground-in dirt around the cuffs that darkens the original royal blue.

Don and his friends -- glaziers, machine operators, construction workers,
forklift drivers, even the occasional former men's wear salesman or
painting-company owner -- are part of the hidden drug world down here.

They're not spinning on the corner, shooting up in the alleys, breaking
into cars. You won't find them offering to fix themselves on camera for $10
from a desperate-to-get-the-shot-for-6 p.m. TV crew.

Some hold down the same job for years. Others bounce between work and EI,
EI and welfare, welfare and retraining; between legitimate work and
dabbling with gangs and dealing; between hotels and shelters, and between
girlfriends and "working girls."

They don't hang around on the street. Instead, they zip down to do their
shopping at Oppenheimer Park or the corner at Main and Hastings or Crack
Alley, just across the street from the corner. They buy their rock and
their pipes in a less than a minute, go back to their rooms, and smoke up
far from the crowd. But it's their dollars and their intensive buying
pattern that have helped create one of the most prosperous open drug
markets in North America.

Don was on his way back through the cycle to being a working guy again when
everything got messed up a few weeks ago. He'd done great at school -- a
program that his welfare lady had put him on the road to -- only doing a
little crack, ignoring everyone smoking around him in his room at the
Europe while he concentrated on his homework.

There was a lot to learn. Warehousing is way more complicated these days
than people think. You have to know computers and all kinds of stuff.

But he'd done well. Don likes to yap. In fact, he talks almost non-stop
from the time he gets up in the morning until he can finally get to sleep
at night, his monologue filled with descriptive noises, imitated speech
patterns of others, and the driving rhythm of a stand-up comic or soap-box
speechmaker. But that helps him make connections and it keeps him going.
Keeps other people going, too, so he's been told. He's a motivator. That's
what this drug counsellor said a few years ago, and he likes that idea of
himself. He'd kept a couple people in the class from dropping out.

And he'd had a work practicum at a place in Richmond and that had been
going real good. The guy liked him and was going to try to get him some
paid work at the end of it.

But just a few days before he was supposed to finish, everything got
screwed up.

It was a Sunday, the first day of October, and he was walking through Crack
Alley when he ran smackinto a couple of cops, who'd asked him for his ID.
When he said, 'Who me?," one cop had wisecracked, "No, the guy behind you."
And Don, kind of knowing he was going to pay for this one, turned around
and looked behind him. Ha ha.

So he broke the first rule for dealing with the cops down here: Don't be a
smartass.

In the policing chaos that has ensued as the Hastings open drug market has
exploded in the last five years, creating the potential for a thousand
arrests on every city block of this war zone every day and, to all
appearances, a resulting utter lack of consistency in who gets arrested,
people like Don have developed their own understanding of what the code
seems to be. It's generally this: Don't be so dumb that they're forced to
arrest you for dumbness, because you're standing out in the rain by
yourself still selling crack when everyone else has gone home. Or because
you smoke right in front of them, instead of politely turning your back a
little. And don't be in their face. So jokes -- your own, anyway -- are a
bad idea.

Then he broke the second rule. He told them his real name. Even though he
knows he doesn't have to. He knows his rights and, unless they say they're
arresting him, he doesn't have to tell them dick. But he did it anyway,
even though he didn't have his ID with him, as usual, so there's no way
they could have found out for sure who he was. It's almost like he wanted
to go down, he thought later.

So, of course, when they radioed back to headquarters, they found out he
had an outstanding warrant for trafficking, this dumb charge he got way
back in March the year before.

Don has done plenty of dealing in his day, working New West and Granville
Street and Victory Square with his pot, moving into cocaine dealing a few
years ago. Still, on that particular day, March 7, 1999, he didn't have
anything on him.

But he was walking down Granville with a buddy, who did have dope on him --
10.96 grams of marijuana in several blue ziplock baggies, as it turns out
in court later. Don wasn't wearing the nice clothes he does when he's
dealing but was looking kind of scruffy, in work clothes, and the cops
busted both of them.

His buddy, known to the court as Zakarius Casey Vass, eventually pleaded
guilty, but Don ignored everything. He went on to dealing crack at Abbott
and Hastings -- the only white guy in a crowd of Hispanics that usually
dominate that corner, which he thought was kind of funny.

But then, with winter coming on and the cops starting to line people up in
front of the Woodward's building and take their pictures, he'd decided it
was time to retire from dealing and get an asbestos job.

So by Sept. 13, when his court date came up, he was in the middle of a
$1,000-a-week job stripping asbestos in the Telus building on Seymour and
he couldn't be bothered with such a stupid charge.

Big mistake.

After he was taken off in the handcuffs Oct. 1, he ended up spending 13
days in the jail on Main until his lawyer finally got him off. He knew that
would happen. He knows the law. They can't do anything if you didn't have
any dope on you. He got one official day in jail, for failing to appear
back in September, and then he was out.

But he had to spend the 13 days before everyone got the picture and, by
then, everything was off track. He still graduated from the course, because
he'd done so well.

But he lost his place at the Europe when he was in jail, had to get a buddy
to pick up his stuff and stash it in his room, and now he was going to have
to go through all the hoops to get back to normal again. And he lost his
chance to get taken on at the place where he did his practicum.

So screw it, he thinks. He's going to go on a mission.

When he gets out of jail, he picks up one of his last training-support
cheques that he's entitled to and parties that $400 away.

He gets back into the routine of the line-ups: coffee and soup at the
Dugout in Gastown in the morning, coffee and clothes shopping at First
United after that at Hastings and Gore, snacks and coffee at Mission
Possible on Powell after 1 p.m., dinner at UGM in the evening. Don, being
organized, is always one of the first in line at 6 p.m.

To sleep, he moves around among the different shelters down here -- the
Haven, UGM, the Crosswalk -- and occasionally gets a night in a friend's room.

But it's not going to stay like this. The week after next, he promises
himself, he'll get back on track. There's no way he's going to get in a rut
down here, like the rest of these idiots. In the meantime, he presses the
buzzer at his buddy's place at the Europe, waiting to get in to smoke his
first rock of the day.

Profile of Don Grandbois.