From the Ashes

by Jesse Thistle

  SMITTEN

  WHEN MY STRENGTH WAS UP after the overdose, I got a job at a local grocery store near Jerry’s as a produce clerk, stacking fruit, cutting lettuce, crushing boxes. Josh sent $1,000 to help get me on my feet. “I love you,” he said on the phone. “We all do. Just don’t kill yourself.”

  I kept chasing death, though. Each time I got my paycheque, I went out and spent it on comfort for my mind. I started banging needles of crack, melted down with vinegar, with working girls in the train yard at Dufferin and Queen, across from Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. They didn’t judge me, and there was an honesty to what they did, like they had the courage to take things all the way. I had respect for that. There is perfect order in perfect chaos, I philosophized. We’d shoot up in the abandoned trailer one of the ladies lived in. I brought food from work sometimes, and we’d listen to Charlie Parker or the Velvet Underground or some other brilliant junkie band. They were my friends. My only friends.

  One morning while I was stacking apples, my boss, an old Italian guy, glanced down and saw the bruising on my arms and my track marks. “You know, Jess, there’s no shame in being sick,” he said, but he was polite enough not to say anything outright.

  I knew he couldn’t complain about my work performance—I worked hard and got the job done, just like Grandpa had trained me to do.

  Sometime later I saw a crisis support line number scrawled on the job chalkboard. I called, but the addictions worker told me, “You need three months or more before your employee insurance kicks in.” I wasn’t surprised. I’d tried accessing treatment before, many times, but the places all had long waiting lists, or needed insurance, or were outpatient only—there was always some kind of restriction. Detox worked, sure—but after that, I’d be left with nowhere to transition to and would relapse. I knew I needed quick isolation to get clean—total, immediate immersion for months and months.

  My addictions had become unmanageable. I couldn’t escape the horror of being involved with people who’d taken someone’s life in such a gruesome way. And I had recurring nightmares of that jersey melting into my body, of being stabbed in the neck, of people lying in wait to ambush me around every corner.

  With rent squirted up my veins, I ran away, leaving Jerry and my boss high and dry.

  I fled to the Brampton shelter and, to my surprise, met the most beautiful girl. She was just sitting there, surrounded by a pile of plastic bags and suitcases. Her hair was blond and pulled back into a tight ponytail that lifted her eyebrows up, and she was well taken care of.

  I went into the washroom to comb my hair and straighten my shirt, and then went over to her.

  “I’m Jesse,” I said, holding out a cigarette. “You smoke?”

  She smiled and took it. Her name was Samantha. She placed her bags near the front office and asked the staff to watch them, then we went outside to the smoking pit.

  Straight away I knew she was fearless and powerful, like a lone she-wolf who didn’t need help fending for herself. She had no problem talking about how she’d ended up at the shelter—her parents had kicked her out because she was an independent thinker and she’d lost her job at the local gym.

  “They’re very Christian,” she said. “Not me—I love to party.”

  For two and a half months we tripped around, getting high, staying on people’s couches, then decided to combine our welfare start-ups and leave the shelter. We finally got a place and began picking trash to furnish it. She didn’t mind, and even brought stuff home herself—an old couch, chairs, a microwave, and a TV.

  Uncle Ron saw that we were trying and got me a job building countertops. I still took off on paydays trying to numb myself out, but now Samantha blasted stones right by my side—we were like two quarry workers chucking dynamite and smashing crack boulders together.

  I ghosted work so often that the owner of the business, Randolph, changed paydays from Thursday to Friday just so I’d make it into work on Friday mornings. I worked my ass off, though, doing the jobs of four men—made sense, I was jacked on cocaine and moved faster than Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics.

  Randolph ended up firing me, furious because I was so unreliable, but as soon as he axed me, he’d hire me right back—he knew no one could work like me. I was probably fired and rehired over twenty times.

  Samantha and I soon lost our place and started moving constantly, gathering household belongings and then jettisoning them like spent rocket-fuel containers whenever we missed rent and entered homeless orbit—we must’ve moved about thirty times. Everything I pulled in at various temp jobs went to feed our addictions, to keep those nightmares at bay, and we always ended up at another shelter, in another city, or at Jerry’s. He always had his door open, and Samantha and I were thankful. But I could tell he was reaching his limit.

  In between cheques, food banks, and jobs was the hardest. We’d have no food, no alcohol, no fun, and no hope. I began stealing ground pork and ramen noodles at a market over in Chinatown. I did it at least a dozen times, stuffing my backpack and booking it out the front doors, until one day a security guard stopped me. I broke free and ran but was headed off. Security brought me to the backroom. I shouted and fought, but the security guard restrained me, pushing me to the ground and holding me tight with my arms behind my back. I was sure they’d call the cops, and I’d go to jail on a theft-under-$5,000 charge—the standard Canadian charge for shoplifting. I sat weeping, and when my energy was spent, the owner came in.

  “Why you steal from here all the time?” she said with a thick Cantonese accent. “Go steal somewhere else, bad boy.”

  Bad boy? I thought, thinking that was kind of demeaning and strange. She was right, though. I always chose her store. It was big, and I believed its size concealed me. Obviously not.

  “I know the other owners,” she said. “They see you, too!” Her neck turned red as she flailed her arms.

  “I’m sorry, miss. I—”

  “I know you, crackhead.”

  Her voice made me feel ashamed.

  “I see you steal ginseng and steel wool for your pipe.” She wagged her finger, a look of disgust upon her face.

  How did she know about that, or where I got my gear? I wondered, shocked. Had she seen me steal it from the local convenience stores? Did she know all the local merchants?

  She pulled up my chin and forced eye contact. “Too skinny,” she said, then slapped my cheek, but not with anger. It was like she was sorry for me. “Look at you. Too skinny.” She took my backpack and opened it. “You have my pork and noodles.” She shook her head.

  I felt like an idiot.

  She motioned to the security guard and the few employees who were there to leave the room. When we were alone she squatted next to me.

  “I was hungry a long time ago, too, you know,” she said. “Someone fed me, too.”

  She got up and went over to a skid and grabbed some noodles and yelled something. A man came through a plastic flap door with a big clear grocery bag of ground pork. He handed it to her, looked at me, then left. She stuffed both the noodles and meat into my bag and plopped it into my lap.

  “Go now. And don’t ever come back.” She stood me up, and then shooed me out the back door before I could thank her.

  I never stole from there again.

  Everywhere else was fair game, though—thieving was the one thing I was good at that Samantha and I could count on. I grabbed her whatever she wanted—meat, alcohol, smokes, the odd article of clothing. I was smitten with her, and it was my selfish way of keeping her by my side.

  Maybe I should’ve just let go and let her be.

  THE KING OF SOMALIA

  “GOOD NIGHT, ABDI, YOU CRUSTY old bastard,” I said and rested my head on my pillow. Abdi was a Somali man of about sixty-five. He was my buddy and always slept in the bed next to me at the homeless shelter. Samantha was off on the women’s side.

  “Hey,” I said a minute later. “I’ve been meaning to ask. You said you were the king of Somalia. I
s that true?”

  As expected, Abdi’s face flushed and his eyes bulged. “Would I lie, peasant? Of course I am the king of Somalia. How dare you question my royal blood?”

  Obviously I knew he wasn’t Somali royalty. I liked joking with Abdi to get him going, and he’d do the same to me. It was our only form of entertainment in this hospitable yet horrible place.

  Life hadn’t been good to Abdi. He’d fled Somalia with his family when civil war broke out in the early ’90s. Soon after he’d become an alcoholic and his wife had left him for another man. Abdi would reminisce about his homeland, telling me how he used to shepherd massive herds of cattle between Kenya and Somalia, and how he’d sit every night watching the orange-red African sunset. By the way his eyes lit up, I could see it was something he missed dearly. I tried to imagine how hard it must have been for him to be forced out of his homeland, to end up in a homeless shelter in a foreign country that seemingly didn’t want him or his problems.

  “Hey, Thistle,” Abdi said as he leaned over. “You know how I know you’re a real streeter like me?”

  “Maybe it’s the way I drink the last of the Olde English piss water?”

  He cringed. “That’s just disgusting—dirty Canadian drinking dirty American beer. No, young blood, it’s in the way you sleep.”

  “How do you mean? And why are you watching me while I sleep?”

  “I always watch out for you when you sleep, to make sure no one steals your stuff.”

  I thought about it, and he was right—I watched out for him, too. It was just what friends did in this place.

  “Indian, you’ve had your shoes stolen so many times you sleep with them on. See?” He pulled up his blanket, exposing his grungy, mud-covered black boots, and smiled. “You see those young guys?” Abdi pointed at two men with their shoes placed under their cots. “They’re little puppies, down on their luck momentarily. One day, if they’re at it long enough, they’ll learn like we did: never take your shoes off.”

  Having no shoes and being homeless was the worst. It could take a day or two to find a new pair that fit from the donation box—and that was if you were lucky. Other times you’d have to leave the shelter shoeless at seven a.m. to go and wait at the chaplain’s office until eight a.m. to get a voucher to take to the Sally Ann up the street so they could outfit you with a new pair. Or you had to go without for a few days. Or steal a pair from Zellers and risk your freedom. When you were shoeless in the winter, it was almost unbearable.

  I surveyed the shelter beds. Only about a third of the guys had their shoes on.

  I’d never noticed, but every night I tied my shoes on with triple, even quadruple, knots, just to give myself a chance of keeping thieves from stealing them right off my feet. Even then, they got them sometimes.

  “I guess I do sleep with my shoes on, eh, Abdi?” I said, and laughed.

  LIFE AT GUNPOINT

  FLIP’S 38 WAS PRESSED HARD into my forehead.

  Flip was one of the more aggressive and secretive crack dealers who served the downtown core. He’d been doing it for decades and was a wild card, trigger-happy, too, and even the rival gangs let him chop uncontested. I didn’t like going to him—no one did as far as I knew—but he always had good dope, at all hours, and was one of the only choppers who’d exchange goods for crack at a fair price.

  I was hoping he’d buy the Gucci bag I’d just stolen from a car with my high school friend Marko, but, in desperation—no one else had dope—I’d disregarded the various rules Flip had put in place to protect himself from crackheads he didn’t know.

  His number one rule: no new customers.

  His number two rule: no new customers, and so on.

  I thought our longstanding relationship might supersede the formalities. Marko kept bugging me to sell the bag, and thought maybe our friendship was good enough to get him access to Flip.

  “Who is this fool you brought here? I told you not to bring anyone to see me!” Spit and angry breath hissed through Flip’s clenched teeth as the hammer cocked into firing position.

  “That—that’s m-my bu-boy . . . Come on, dog . . . I—I’ve known you for ye-years.” We only wanted to score some dope, and Flip was flipping out.

  Just then a cruiser rounded the corner. In an instant Flip rammed his pistol through his belt, pointed his finger at me, mouthed something, and fled down the street toward the Dairy Queen. He was gone before I could process what had happened.

  “Man, I’m sorry, guy,” Marko said. “I never thought your buddy would react like that. What is his problem?”

  I looked at Marko. His astonished words told me that he didn’t really understand how close I had come to death.

  A week after, the pinkish purple imprint of the gun muzzle, the size and shape of a Life Savers, remained engraved between my eyes.

  I never did another run with Marko again.

  WE ALL FALL DOWN

  THE HALLOWEEN PARTY AT JERRY’S friend’s house ran late into the night. I was dressed up as William Wallace from Braveheart, half my face blue and with a diaper of fake fur and a plastic sword. Jerry was a Viking with huge horns and a plastic battle-axe, and Samantha was the Pict girl from King Arthur, with leather armour and a bow and arrow made from household items. The rest of the partygoers wore costumes ranging from ghosts to Spanish matadors, but a couple of people were just dressed in regular clothes.

  One was a beautiful redhead in a tight black sweater. She was the girl from grade school who’d been nice to me on the hill.

  “Hi,” I said to her. “My name is Jesse. You’re Lucie, right?” I stuck my hand out like I had years earlier.

  “Yes.” She reciprocated like she had years before.

  “Do you remember me? I’m Jerry’s brother—we were in middle school together.” I motioned toward Jerry, who was chatting over near the kitchen.

  “No.” She grinned, shrugged, and then turned away to talk to a bald guy. Samantha came up with her bow drawn, half-drunk. I disarmed her, and we mingled into the heart of the party, asking people if they had any coke, but I kept looking back. I was enchanted by Lucie, and the fact that she wasn’t interested attracted me even more.

  After a couple of screwdrivers, I was hit with addiction cravings so bad I ran to the toilet—I needed to take a dump—then I ditched the party and Samantha and went out scouring for a twenty stone. I found plenty, spending our rent money and shoplifting things to generate more cash. Before I knew it, it was around four a.m. I drifted back to the party, but almost everyone had left. One of the last people trailing out told me to get home quick because Samantha was livid. I did my last toke and walked back to Jerry’s, which was miles away.

  When I got there, I picked the outside lock with my health card. I didn’t have my own key—Jerry’s rules, even though Samantha and I’d been staying with him for months at his new place in Toronto after we’d fled from Brampton. The inside door to the apartment was locked. It was steel, bolted shut, and impossible to bypass with any of my thieving skills. I banged on it.

  “It’s me. Open up!”

  Nothing. I banged some more. Again nothing. I started kicking the door, the boom echoing through the hallway, and a neighbour stuck his head out his door and said, “Keep it down!”

  I kicked the door again. I wondered if Samantha was being faithful to me. Why would she be? I was a terrible provider. I didn’t treat her the best. Maybe she and Jerry are inside having sex. Maybe she’s exacting revenge on me for stealing our rent, for smoking it. Or maybe it was just the copious amounts of crack that was making me paranoid.

  I noticed the window down the hall. It was about three feet wide by four feet tall and opened onto the street. I went and stuck my head out of it. Our living room window was about ten feet over to the right. It was open, almost begging me to climb over. I decided to go for it. After all, I’d scaled up the sides of apartment buildings before, and this shimmy between windows was only thirty-five feet above the ground.

  Piece of cake.


  I charted out my climb. I’d swing from the ledge of the hallway window over to the brick notch between the two windows, where there was a good grip, then swing over to our window and plant my toe, and then pull myself up.

  I lowered myself out, swung over, grabbed the notch, then swung over again and grabbed the window ledge.

  Perfect so far.

  I took a second to collect myself for the pull into the apartment. Scar, Jerry’s dog, a pit bull–Rottweiler mix, stuck his head out and started licking my hands.

  “Get. Get,” I shooed. The fucker was blocking my entrance. He didn’t budge. He must have thought I was playing a game or something. A drop of his saliva fell off his tongue and into my eye.

  “SCAR, GET!” I blinked to clear my sight. My strength was fading, my fingers slipping. I yelled “get” one more time, desperately, and he finally listened.

  I hoisted myself a quarter of the way up and planted my toe against the wall and pushed, but slipped. I was still holding on, but barely, my arms carrying my full weight. I examined the wall closely and noticed a cluster of black cables—rows of them, one over the other, stapled to the bricks. I hadn’t seen them in the dark. I mustered my last bit of strength to pull myself up toward the window, planting my toe higher than before—but there was another cluster of cables. My toe slipped. My hands let go.

  People who say your life flashes before you when you’re about to die are full of shit. What does happen is your world slows down—seconds feel like hours, the sounds all around become clearer, colours and lights become so bright you can see everything—every bug and creepy-crawly thing in existence.

  The milliseconds I was falling to my death I thought of a hundred different ways to fall so I wouldn’t die. I could try to land square on my feet like I was doing a powerlift, but my face and skull would be ruined as I fell forward into the brick wall with thousands of pounds of force. I could try to do a commando combat roll off to the side but would hit the air conditioner and break my neck. Or I could try to catch the ledge of the windows below. I tried that, but this wasn’t Die Hard, and I wasn’t Bruce Willis.