DOWN AND ALMOST OUT

They never had it all. But they had something: Homes. Jobs. Dignity.
In a sickening flash, it was all gone. What on Earth went wrong?

Ever looked them in the eye? Wondered who they are?
Were?

Tried to imagine the life they led before they ended up on the
streets? And thought about why it happened to them and not to you?

It doesn't take much hard luck to lead to homelessness these days. It
doesn't even take much of a reason. A lot of people are just one
paycheque away from it themselves - that's the truth of it now.

They may not get to the point of sleeping on wet, ragged cardboard in
dank doorways or under filthy sleeping bags billowing from borrowed
blasts of heat from downtown sidewalk vents.

But they will know what it feels like to fall from grace, to have no
place of their own to sleep and therefore, no place in this city and
our society. Like the people profiled below, they'll learn there is no
peace being on the outside.

In these four tales from our streets, lives were upended by death,
happenstance, naivety, loss - and because not one of us is perfect.

When she started doing heroin, Gail Dawson, 36, was a wife and mother,
a gymnastics coach, a Toronto Sun Sunshine girl. Life was wonderful
then. Her boys were growing up smiling. Her marriage to the man who
had been her high-school sweetheart was solid.

All their friends were using heroin. Nobody knew it was addictive, she
says. They just knew it was the '80s and the drug was trendy.

``I didn't know it would grab hold of our lives,'' she
says.

She gave up coaching because she didn't think she should be
responsible for children. Her husband began losing jobs, then stealing
to pay for their habits, then staying away from home because of what
he was doing to pay for his own habit.

Dawson sent her boys to their grandmother. ``It's the worst feeling in
the world, knowing I'm letting my children down. When you lose your
children, what is there left?''

She roamed the city, prostituting herself, doing anything to buy
drugs. ``Now that I'm clean I say: `How could I do that?' But, it's
the easiest $20 you can make. I wouldn't wish that life on my worst
enemy.''

She stayed at all the available hostels for women at the time, or
she'd sleep outside on the streets, or with johns.

Dawson was still using heroin when she landed at the 60 Richmond St.
E. hostel last April. At first she hated the place. Now, she credits
it with turning her life around.

There was a curfew - be in at midnight or don't bother coming - but
there was also no one throwing them outside in the morning. It's open
24 hours a day.

Slowly, Dawson began spending nights inside. She had her own bed - ``a
touch of privacy, but it was enough'' - access to television, meals, a
shower, plenty of towels. ``Funny, the things you miss,'' she says.

She's become the hostel's women's representative, the middle person
between staff and residents. She's also a confidante to many of the
younger men and women there. She'd love to be able to do it someday as
her job.

She says, laughing: ``That's because they can't put one over on me. I
can actually give something back. It's a nice feeling.''

How good was Karl Schmidt's life? Well, there were $600 suits and more
than one tuxedo at $1,200 a pop in the closet of the penthouse condo.
In the underground garage was the $31,000 Chevrolet Lumina, (he paid
for it in cash) alongside the Mustang convertible.

How bad is Karl Schmidt's life now? He's 48, on welfare and paying
$350 a month for a small, beige room in a house in the former city of
York, unfamiliar territory for him. Before that, home was his mattress
and blankets on the floor of the hostel at 60 Richmond St. E.

So what happened? How did this graduate of the University of Leipzig
come to this bleak point in life?

In East Germany, he'd been in charge of a 24-hectare fruit farm, but
when drafted into the army, he was assigned the border watch. He told
them he preferred jail.

``I refused to shoot my own people at the border,'' he
says.

He was imprisoned for three years. He came to Canada determined to
live well. After a series of jobs, he became an entrepreneur, driving
tractor-trailer trucks until 1994 - the year his life fell apart.

His wife, Helen, who was a nursing supervisor at Mt. Sinai Hospital,
died suddenly of an aneurysm. She was 39.

``Everything went downhill,'' he says. He started drinking, using
cocaine. ``I'd never used it before. I wasn't addicted, I was in
pain,'' he says. ``It's only been this last year that I can talk of my
late wife without breaking into tears.''

He lost his driving licence and his livelihood when he was arrested
for speeding on Highway 401 between Montreal, where his in-laws live,
and Toronto.

He had more bad breaks. Friends sold his clothes; he was robbed while
living in a cheap apartment. Then, he was stabbed at Jarvis and Queen
Sts. and in the hospital for three weeks.

But he's had some work, including a stint of paid work at the Richmond
St. hostel. His two-page resume is tight, professional-looking and
impressive. Schmidt is counting on that.

He says he would be happy to earn $11 an hour. He'd like to work in a
shelter again or do construction or renovation work.

``Seriously, I'm struggling,'' he says. He lives on $170 a month. ``My
wallet is empty.''

Yet he is determined to call the Distress Centre to volunteer. And he
wants to show Toronto's hostel manager John Jagt his design for a box
bed, so people in hostels wouldn't have their belongings lying all
over, he says.

``I wasn't always on the bottom. I know how it is to live. It comes
from holding things together,'' Schmidt says.

``I don't want to go big, big anymore. I've learned I like to help
people.''

Since she's been sober, she's been doing a lot of reading, hence the
new pair of glasses. They definitely change her look - and they may be
changing her outlook.

After all, Kathleen Noah, 35, asked to start the Antabuse, a drug used
to combat alcoholism.

That was three months ago - a long time for someone who used to
``stem'' (panhandle) and sleep on ``blowers'' (street vents),
snowbanks - soaking wet, coated in leaves, dead drunk.

She knows what she wants now. She wants her son back because she loves
him. She wants to work in an office with computers because she loves
them. She wants to stay sober because ``I can talk to anybody when I'm
sober.''

A member of the Delaware nation near Chatham, Ont., Noah hasn't had an
easy life since she left home. Her teenaged daughter still lives with
a foster family. Their contact is by phone and infrequent, but Noah is
proud of her - she's going to make good.

But it's been six years since she has seen her son - Joel would be 8
now - and it's killing her. The story is complicated but she says she
and the boy's father had one of those tumultuous relationships
inflamed because both drank.

They split, she sobered up and was making a good home for her child in
Alberta - until her ex failed to return with the boy from a weekend
visit. She has searched Alberta and British Columbia but she hasn't
seen her son since.

She sits in a coffee shop across the street from the Open Door drop-in
centre at Dundas and Sherbourne Sts., where she used to spend many
mornings, and tells her story. Until recently, she spent a lot of time
there and stayed at the Street City hostel, where you don't have to be
sober to get a bed.

A lot of her friends stay there. Noah looked after them. Sober, she is
a steadying influence on them, a mother figure.

But when her boyfriend, Shawn Williams, found a room in the west end,
she decided she should move, too. One of her Street City friends
actually got down on hand and knee, begging her not to leave.

But Williams, 23, and now sober, decided to change his life and turf.
``I don't miss the area or the lifestyle but I miss my friends,'' he
says.

Noah's off the Antabuse now, because it upsets her stomach, but she
says she understands she has to stay sober to find a home, then a job,
and then, finally, her little boy.

That's what she wants.

Look at him: Handsome. Lithe. The sort who'd run circles around the
guys Sunday morning playing soccer in the park - no matter what he'd
been up to Saturday night.

And that's exactly who he was - a regular guy making a pretty good
living from his painting and redecorating business.

Now, Paul Murchie, 51, lives in a hostel run by the Salvation Army.
He's one of the few there who doesn't drink or do drugs. He makes a
point of being clean-shaven, clear-eyed, always in fresh clothes - and
he hasn't a prospect in the world right now.

Liverpool born and bred, Murchie was brought up by his single mother
to stay positive about whatever life deals out. But recently, as he
lined up for lunch at the Good Shepherd, he watched two rats feeding
by a storm sewer and he thought: ``If there is such a thing as hell,
this is it.''

Even more chilling is the fact that what brought him to the street
could happen to anyone.

On May 16, 1998, en route to visit his younger son in Port Credit, he
was hit by a Harley-Davidson and thrown nearly eight metres in the
air.

He almost died. He was rushed to hospital with multiple head injuries
- - but without his wallet and all his identification papers. They have
never been found.

He was discharged almost a month later to his boarding house. The
accident left him with a brain injury and he says no one told him how
serious it was.

At work, he now had trouble getting up a ladder. He couldn't put
things in proper sequence. It was clear he couldn't work and he was
running out of money.

Deena Ginsberg, a care co-ordinator with the Acquired Brain Injury
Program takes up his story: ``All of a sudden I realized Paul had no
I.D., no social insurance number, no OHIP. I made calls but there were
all these roadblocks.''

Murchie had always worked for cash. Officially, it was as if he had
never existed. By August, he overheard his housemates agree to evict
him for not paying the rent. Two days before he was to see a doctor,
he left the boarding house. He slept on a park bench.

``The second night I was up all night walking - I was that scared,''
Murchie recalls.

But he kept his medical appointment. He was rushed into an operating
theatre for spinal cord surgery. He had two cracked discs. One slip
and he would have become a quadriplegic. His surgery was Sept. 8; they
took bone from his hip and grafted it to his neck. He was discharged
Sept. 9.

Ginsberg was frantic - she tried to buy him more time at the hospital
while she worked to find him a place.

``It's not that I'd given up, I'm a real fighter,'' Murchie says.
``But the hospital had cutbacks. If I died on a park bench, so be it.''

Ginsberg found Murchie a bed in a psychiatric facility - ``I was
desperate,'' she says - and Murchie pronounced it ``a haven.'' He's
grateful. Without her, he would be alone.

He was quickly given a room of his own in a Salvation Army hostel.
It's small, but he's not complaining. ``It's like a cabin on a lot of
the ships I sailed in,'' he says with one of his wide smiles.

He's got his landed immigrant papers and OHIP records back; he's in a
rehabilitation program. He speaks slowly and sometimes must pause to
collect his thoughts, but he speaks clearly and well.

Sometimes he tires walking and he's not going to be playing soccer
just yet, but he's still lean and getting stronger.

He never gave in to drink or drugs. In fact, he says he won't touch
beer until he's up and back working again and can hoist a pint with
his mates.

``They don't come prouder than Paul,'' Ginsberg says. ``He's a ray of
hope for the other guys. He's a beautiful man.''