SKID ROW HIGH

Haunted By Painful Pasts, Vancouver's Addicts Work The Downtown Eastside's
Hooker Stroll Looking For Their Next Fix

"I get yelled at a lot by people driving by," says Jason, staring into his
coffee cup. They "come down here from the suburbs and from their houses and
they treat the people down here as subhuman."

"Down here" is Vancouver's notorious downtown eastside. Years ago, the
neighbourhood was known as Skid Row but things have gotten much worse since
then. Today, the downtown eastside is infamous for its drug addicts,
prostitutes and despair. From these streets 50 women have vanished since
the 1980s, and the neighbourhood is Ground Zero for one of the biggest
police investigations in Canadian history that has already seen six charges
of first-degree murder laid against Robert William Pickton, 52, a Port
Coquitlam pig farmer.

"They're like young kids, young men in from wherever looking for a working
girl," says Jason. "And they yell at me and throw things at me. It's their
night on the town, I guess."

Jason, 29, is a crack addict. Across the diner table, eating a plate of
chicken, is Mary, 31, his girlfriend. Later, Mary's friend Brook arrives.
They are addicts, too.

All three live for drugs -- to buy them, to use them, to get the money to
buy more. "I can easily spend $500 or $600 in a day," says Jason. But "$250
would keep me going. If I space it out I can get by for a day on that."

We are sitting in a downtown diner, stale with cigarette smoke. At the next
table, a middle-aged man wearing a black cowboy shirt and a matching
stetson hunches over a chess set, his bushy grey beard twitching as he
concentrates and grimaces. Everybody calls him Midnight Cowboy. His
opponent is the diner's manager, a grey-faced Chinese man.

Jason, Mary and Brook are concentrating, too. On their next fix. Brook is
only 23 but she is clearly the most physically damaged of the three. Her
elfin face is thin and lined under a ball cap too big for her tiny head.
Her blue eyes water, her nose runs. She moves in jerky motions, her words
tumble out and snap off in mid-sentence.

"I mostly use heroin," Brook says. "I'm not a crack fiend but I smoke the
odd ... " She breaks off, then jerks back into motion. "I spend more money
on the heroin addiction because that's why I'm here. It's like it totally
rules my ... " Stop. "24/7 it rules me. It's like a controlling boyfriend.
It's kind of weird cause it's like a substance ... " Stop. "I'm thinking,
after I do a hit of something, I'm thinking already if I have no money what
I'm going to do next. Before I even do it."

Mary uses cocaine -- crack or powder -- and heroin, though she says she's
quitting heroin. Track marks snake up her arms. One angry line, as thick as
my thumb, looks like a white vein streaked through marble. "That's from a
gram of powder (cocaine)," she says.

Mary is tiny. Her black hair is short and spiky, her eyes shrouded beneath
a thick, black, theatrical smear of eyeliner. Her voice is high and quiet,
girlish. She could still pass as the runaway teenager she once was.

Her drugs cost her $300 or $400 a day. To pay for them, she works the
downtown eastside hooker stroll, a bleak, dark industrial district next to
Vancouver's harbour.

"Sometimes," Mary says, "if I'm really hurting (for drugs) I do a date for
$30 or $20." Like all prostitutes, Mary tries to develop regular customers
and stick with them. "I do $20 with them sometimes but it's just a hand job
or something. It's not like sex or something. And then when they get paid
they come back and give me a hundred bucks or two hundred bucks, right? And
that's how you keep the same guys all the time. And it's better that way.
Safer."

Until recently, Jason, who has been a crack addict for three years, managed
to pay for drugs by working at regular jobs. Now, "welfare helps out about
one day a month. And the rest of it winds up being crime." He nods his head
slowly and adds, "Shoplifting and things like that. I'm not a violent man.
I never have been." He recently pawned a Gore-Tex jacket for a few dollars
that vanished up a crack pipe, leaving him to endure the cold drizzle in
only a sweater.

Jason, Mary and Brook are all homeless but in a sad twist, heavy crack use
eases their need for shelter and other basics. Food isn't so important
because cocaine suppresses appetite: "You get really skinny. Plus
dehydrated, and sometimes eating makes me sick," says Jason.

He ate today and probably will again later. That's why he looks good today,
he says. He's undeniably handsome, graced with a warm smile and charm that
in a better place and time could be found in the pages of GQ. "But I can
look pretty skidded out sometimes, too."

Extreme cocaine consumption can also keep a user awake and wired for days
at a time, spawning psychosis and violence. That's how Mary received a
two-and-a-half-year prison sentence

"I was shooting cocaine and I'd stayed awake for too long. I was awake for
almost a week. I started to hallucinate," she says. "It was raining out and
this guy picked me up and he decided he didn't want a date with me after we
drove around the block a couple of times, right. I wasn't going to take no
for an answer so I pulled out a big serrated bread knife. And I grabbed him
by the hair and put it to his throat and I robbed him. And I cut him and I
didn't even realize it. I didn't remember doing any of this."

These streets are drenched in violences. Addicts rob hookers. Dealers beat
addicts. Bloody-minded johns hunt hookers. Drugs and prostitution generate
most of the money here, which is why most in this netherworld see the
police as a threat, not protection.

"Police are assholes," Mary says. She has been trying hard not to swear,
apologizing demurely whenever she slipped. But not now "they don't give a
f--- about us."

A few weeks ago, Mary says, she and a john smoked crack with in his car.
When it was finished, he asked for more; she had none. "He goes, well, I'll
just take it out of your ass. And he pulls out this great big f---ing
hunting knife and he stabbed me right here." Mary points to a knife graze
on the side of her chest. "I don't know how I got the door open even, but I
ran. I was so scared."

As Mary talks, Jason leaves to find a dealer and buy a few rocks of crack
cocaine. Later, when Jason tells his story, Mary will do the same. Brook
slips in and out several times. Someone is always in motion, scoring,
using, or seeking cash to score again.

For the addict, the constant scramble to get drugs, use drugs and make
money for more drugs, all the while avoiding a beating or having your
throat slit, is brutally demanding. That is the irony: a fierce work ethic,
dedication and intelligence are essential.

"It takes brains to survive on the street," Mary says. "No matter which way
you do it. You can be a panhandler or a prostitute or a drug dealer or
whatever. It all takes thinking and brains."

They stay only because drugs won't let them leave. A chronic user who stops
will go into withdrawal. The experience varies depending on the drug, but
it's always brutal. Heroin withdrawal, says Jason, "is like the most
extreme flu that you can possibly imagine. You cannot stay awake, you
cannot stay asleep and every part of your body hurts. Even your teeth. Even
your hair."

Jason talks in detached pop-psychology terms, as if he's analysing someone
else. Only when prodded does his detachment fail and he begins to offer,
slowly, piece by piece, the source of the emotions that he dulls with crack.

Only then does it become clear that for Jason -- and for Mary and for Brook
- -- that drugs are not the problem. Beneath the drugs -- the crack, the
heroin -- the filthy streets, the prostitution, crime and violence, Skid
Row is built on pain.

"My mum was a heroin addict, right," Brook says. "I think of heroin like a
disease." Brook's mother, dead since 1996, lived on Vancouver Island and
moved in with a man named Tony. "He was short, maybe a little taller than
me and curly, curly hair. He look like a clown." She shakes her head. "He
used to beat her a lot. My mum was tiny, she was tinier than me. He took a
hammer to her, to her head once."

But Brook's mother always went back. Until, when Brook and her twin sister
were 11, Tony beat her mother again "and I was mad. Never felt like that
before. I hit him over the back of the head (with a piece of wood) and I
just grabbed my mum by the shirt." At a neighbour's house, they called the
police. "We ended up in a transition house. And then my mother, three days
later, after being there, disappeared. And I knew what happened. Obviously,
she went back to him."

Brook and her sister were placed in foster homes but when Brook turned 13,
she hitchhiked to Calgary.

"I couldn't get a job because I was too small, too young. They wouldn't
hire me. After a few days of panhandling the same guy would come to me each
day and ask me to do a date. He offered $250." At first she refused, but
eventually went with him to a van in an underground parking garage. "I was
younger then, more naive, but man I was happy after that. I was in this van
for not even five minutes and I had $250."

Two years ago, when she was 21, she found heroin hidden in a boyfriend's
bathroom. Before long she became an addict like her mother.

A majority of people who use drugs do not descend into addiction. Only a
blighted minority are held in its white-knuckle grip. In almost every case,
addicts were in pain long before they discovered drugs. They saw addicted
parents. They suffered physical or sexual abuse. From their earliest years,
they experienced violence, broken trust, abandonment, mental illness, crime
and suicide.

Mary's story begins: "My mother was a heroin addict." Mary is originally
from Halifax. She doesn't have much to say about her father. "I remember he
taught me how to cook Kraft Dinner. That's the only thing I remember." But
she does know he was a "speed freak.

"My mom was, I guess you could call it, looking after me. She'd leave me
home a lot, by myself. And she'd go out. She'd leave other guys to babysit
me, like her friends, friends that she used with, or her drinking buddies.
Or my grandfather. That's how I started using."

When Mary was 11, her mother "left this man, Dave" to babysit. Dave gave
her a joint. "It made me happy. It made me feel like nothing could touch me
and everything was OK. So I started stealing my mum's drugs."

Of course, she was caught and locked in a closet. "I was in there for
almost two days. After that happened, I guess a part of me changed. I
didn't care for anybody. I hated the world after that. So I ran away."

Mary was put in foster care. Her mother went to court, promised to stay
away from heroin and got her daughter back. "Everything was OK for about a
year after that. I would have been about 13 then. And she left my
grandfather to babysit me and he raped me. And I ended up pregnant."

Tears spill over Mary's black eyeliner. She lets a little time pass. Her
grandfather had abused her before. "But my mother chose to ignore it.
Whatever he was doing for her was more important than me. Everything else
was always more important than me. Not that I blame them for the way that
my life is now. But you start to hate yourself and you think you're no good
for anything else. Just to be used."

Mary spent her teenage years taking drugs and paying for them with
prostitution. "I had four kids by the time I was 19." All were adopted.

She went to prison in XXXXX for attacking a john and, craving a fresh
start, she asked to serve her parole in Vancouver. "I really was sincere, I
wanted to change. But wanting it and doing it are two different things."

At first, Jason seems to have arrived on the downtown eastside from a
different planet. He says he was born and raised in a Toronto suburb. Went
to university. Became a professional dancer. Danced in Toronto and New York
City. He met and married a fellow dancer who got a Canada Council grant and
they both worked in Europe.

Jason didn't touch a drug until he was 24 and his wife introduced him to
marijuana. He immediately started using pot compulsively. He checked
himself into rehab, which didn't work so well. "You know how criminals
learned to be better criminals in prison? I learned about (hard) drugs in
rehab." When he tried crack for the first time his life shattered.

Today, his wife and his two-year-old son live an hour's drive from
Vancouver. Jason is reserved and analytical, until he speaks of his son.
"It's hard," he says, struggling to talk. "'Daddy come home.' It's rough."
He takes a deep breath and exhales. "When I say that I have become
something that I have contempt for, a big part of that's not being there
for my son."

How did it come to this? Jason offers the details reluctantly and it
becomes clear he's not so different than Mary and Brook.

Jason never knew his father. "My mum was 16 and single when I was born. We
lived with her parents."

Both of Jason's grandparents were alcoholics. "And my grandmother was
addicted to Valium as well." Both grandparents "drank until they died. My
grandmother killed herself when I was four. And my grandfather drank until
the day of his death.

"I was sexually abused for the first time when I was five. My teacher at
school, who was actually a woman." When he was 13, he worked as a volunteer
at a nursing home, he says, and "there was a male orderly there who raped me."

Here's what Mary wishes people would understand. "All the drug use and all
the grossness they see, there's pain behind all that. It's all pain. We
didn't get here because we chose to be here. We got here because we don't
want to face our lives. Because people have hurt us all our lives. And the
only way I know how to survive is to do drugs. If I don't do drugs, I feel
like I'm going to go insane. Because I have all these thoughts and all this
pain in my heart and I can't get rid of it, you know. Drugs is the only
thing that takes that away. That's why I do drugs. Because it keeps me, not
happy, but it keeps me from being so sad that I want to die."

We step onto Skid Row's frigid, rain-slicked streets. Jason and Mary leave
to find a dealer. Brook says we can take pictures if we like.

We arrive in a back alley, the sort of black, wet and empty place where
johns and hookers do dates.

Brook pours powder cocaine into the reservoir of a needle, adds a little
water, shakes the rig to make a milky white liquid. Shooting the powder
gives a bigger rush than sniffing, and getting the best bang for the buck
is all that matters.

She wraps a rubber tube around her tiny arm and slaps her skin, making the
veins bulge as large as the track marks that snake up her arm. She jams in
the needle.

Within seconds, she's jerks upright, energized. She stuffs the needle and
rubber tube back in her bag and starts off down the alley with eyes wide
and arms and legs pumping even more awkwardly.

She snaps her head to the side. "Look at the way you're are looking at me,"
she says. "You're treating me different."

It doesn't matter what I say. She's wired.

Brook crosses the road in stiff strides and heads for the stroll. She's
used what's she's got so she's got to start the whole cycle again.

She won't trust me or anyone else tonight.

Dan Gardner writes for the Citizen.