by Yasuko Thanh
“Jesus fuck, Pat!” I sat up. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Don’t do that.”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Geez, what are you, a fuckin’ perv?”
I went back to sleep, but awoke a few minutes later with Pat on top of me.
I was sober enough now to grab my duffle bag, its weight pulling my arm to the floor. “I’m fuckin’ outta here,” I said. But that’s when I realized I’d lost the rest of my clothes. I was wearing a tank top, and rain battered the window.
Where would I go anyway?
I returned to bed, fighting against every instinct I had to lie back down on the flipped-open, pulled-out thing that stank, that reminded me too much of my old living room chair as a child. I lay there rigid, exerting the effort of an athlete to remain still, biding my time until the rain stopped, until the buses started running, until I could walk out not with shame but with pride, until the new replaced the old in my body. I was never coming back. Comforting myself with the word never. With the “Now they’ll see. Now they’ll be sorry” of my childhood. Every nerve ending was on edge, poised for battle.
If I stayed still long enough, could I disappear?
When morning came, and the first sound of buses, I found my clothes. Rain was still falling.
* * *
—
For the next few weeks I slept in bandstands, bus stops, and stairwells, using my clothes as a pillow. The streets were always the noisiest when the bars let out, then they’d quiet again. The coldest time of night was never its middle but right before dawn, a last push to freeze anyone still outside. Each stairwell I slept in I’d make homey with whatever I could find, ordering my cigarette butts, naming the pigeons and appropriating them as pets, shifting this bit of garbage from one corner to the other. By moving something within it I made each space mine, at least for an hour or two until security would tell me to “move on.”
One night I snuck into the Empress Hotel, a national historic site and the costliest place in town, and crashed in the basement next to the vacuum cleaners. I hitchhiked, asking, “Where’s the party?” I learned how to absorb my menstrual flow with the ripped-off corner of a kitchen sponge, rinsing it in the toilets of public bathrooms before reinserting it. I hardened myself. No shame in survival. There was no disgust, only satisfaction in doing what needed to be done.
To survive, swing your arms, keep your hands out of your pockets unless they’re wrapped around a switchblade. Learn how long to hold a stare to prove you’re not intimidated. My needs had been reduced to dry clothes, food, and a place to sleep, in that order. I schlepped two tote bags around, going to the food fairs in malls and asking people, “Are you going to finish that?”
Freedom came with hardship. I reminded myself, Isn’t this what you wanted?
In the months to come, I panhandled. The coins in my pocket jangled; cupping their solidity in my hand calmed me. Then I refined my straightforward panhandle into a hustle. One involved stationing myself in front of bars at two in the morning.
“Mister, I’m so sorry to bug you,” I’d say to men who were not drunk and with a woman. “I missed my bus. My stepdad, he’s such an asshole. There’s no way I’m going to make it home in time.” Then I’d cry, “Oh my god, I don’t know what to do. My friends were drinking. I didn’t want to go with them. Oh shit, oh shit. The last time I was late my stepdad beat me. Oh shit.”
No man wanted to look like a schmuck in front of his girlfriend, so he’d drag out his wallet and relinquish a twenty-dollar bill.
If I began to feel down, I’d turn to poetry to lift my spirits.
Underworld Prison and Chamber of Ice
Carey Road was a receiving home, a cross between a group home and a halfway house, a splint for troubled youth. After therapy failed to reunite me with my family, the system had forced me there. But I could lie still until morning, pretend to be sleeping, bide my time.
On my first day I went into the pinball room where a boy with a shaved head played, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
“Got an extra smoke?” I asked.
He scowled. “No, I don’t have an extra smoke.”
I shot him a look, then stepped closer—you don’t intimidate me—and glanced over his shoulder to see his score. Before I knew it he’d pushed me, sending me flying off my feet backward. “Fuck off!” he yelled.
Welcome to Carey Road.
An office by the front door was the only thing that made the house look institutional. It was impossible to explain to the counsellors who lived and worked there that the ideology of the streets made the wood floors and sparse furnishings of Carey Road no more than a badly decorated waiting room on our way to freedom—the freedom to go hungry, the freedom to piss on a street corner, the freedom to beg leftovers from the malls’ food fairs.
One evening after dinner, about two weeks into my stay, a girl named Ruth and I caught a bus downtown to the Thunderbird Motel. She was a seventeen-year-old prostitute who lived across the hall from me. “Be careful,” the youth worker had warned me. “Ruth has…problems.”
Ruth’s boyfriend had a room at the Thunderbird that he shared with another man. A shitty motel across the street from the park. The kind of place that should have been full of overseas tourists but was full of people who looked like us, hitting town to buy or sell anything from hot stereos to heroin. The room had two beds and a kitchenette. Knives blackened from smoking hash littered the stovetop.
Away from Carey Road, anything could happen. I sat on the edge of my seat, as firm as a hand, waiting for it, watching Ruth’s boyfriend tie her off with a belt that had silver stars on it. I liked to observe Ruth’s pupils contract to points when he plunged the needle of Dilaudid into the crook of her arm. While Ruth shot up I sat with her boyfriend’s roommate; he was shirtless at the Formica table, a can of beer in front of him. He had lips I could imagine kissing, satin hair that hung to his shoulders. I drank one cherry vodka cooler after another. I’d already decided the moment I saw him that if he wanted to fuck me, I was ready. I wanted real sex, with someone who was beautiful, who mattered. My encounter with the act at Pat’s hadn’t counted. If you hadn’t asked for it, it never happened. Even the twelve-year-old girl down the hall at Carey Road had a boyfriend. It was time for me to have one, too.
Drunk, high, all four of us got on a bus headed for Carey Road, and from our seats at the back we laughed at the top of our lungs, making passengers glare in our direction. Once at the receiving home we tiptoed through the shadows cast by the oak trees that lined the driveway. Then, after showing the two men the fire-escape stairs to the bathroom window, Ruth and I strode through the front door, checked in with our workers, and went upstairs to let them in.
We all went to Ruth’s room. My boyfriend-to-be and I flopped down on her extra bed and slipped under the covers still wearing our clothes. The beds were side by side, a few feet apart. My toes tangled in the bedsheet as I wriggled closer to him so that I could undo the button fly of his jeans, yank his T-shirt away from his belt. I traced his contours: his chest, his nipples, his jutting ribs. Then slid my hand lower, finding a thick, rigid cock. The scent of his deodorant mixed with Ruth’s perfume intoxicated me.
The thrill of Ruth’s bad-girlness had brought me into the bedroom with her as much as my desire for true love, to have it inside me, to absorb its power. In a way my parents could never have imagined I’d become myself, defining myself against the parameters of what Ruth, her boyfriend, and his roommate needed and wanted me to be.
The warm, wet noise of her boyfriend’s mouth between Ruth’s legs made the heat between mine rise. The springs squeaked as he covered her body with his own, two leaves pressed together.
I watched his buttocks moving between her open legs as I undressed and brushed each piece of my clothing over the face of the man in my bed; I wanted him to smell me, need me. I fluffed my hair and lay my head on the pillow, tugged my lover toward m
e, my foot on the back of his knee.
Ruth moaned in her bed and I in mine. I dug my heels into the man on top of me, squirming beneath him at the sound of her short sharp breaths. We kissed. He was still wearing his underwear; where the head of his cock pressed up against me the fabric was damp, and chilly at first, but the cotton created a good-strange friction that began to dissolve me.
He ripped off his underwear. Amid a flurry of squeaking springs I felt a sharp pain, and then no pain as he entered me. My back was up against the mattress coils. Ruth moaned like a pro. I, too, moaned on cue with every thrust, thinking this is what you were supposed to do. Someone shushed us from the hall. I giggled. I thought, Finally, it’s over. But unlike what I had prepared for, I felt no love. Luna and people like her had led me to believe that the act was special. I felt nothing extraordinary. Only something primitive, something universal to our animal nature. I felt predictable. Typical. Common.
In two weeks I’ll pass this man on the street. We won’t nod at each other. We won’t even smile. We’ll walk past as if we were strangers. He doesn’t remember my name.
* * *
—
The next day I went downtown with Ruth again. One block from City Hall, on the same street as an outdoor supply shop and the locked doors of a nightclub that wouldn’t open until eight p.m., in broad daylight, she swayed her hips, and smiled, and winked, and blew kisses at traffic. Then she hopped into a stranger’s car, flipping her long brown hair without looking back at me. She returned twenty minutes later. I’d been worried about her the whole time, biting my nails to the quick.
We’d reached the corner of Yates and Broad when I asked her, “What do you do if…it doesn’t work? If the man, you know, doesn’t finish? Then what? Does he get mad? Do you have to give back the money?”
“No!” She laughed. “You never give a refund.” I puzzled over her lack of fear, her smile with its immortal exuberance, her promiscuous zest.
Hell Guards
I stole things and sold them on the street for a third of their cost: butane curling irons, Black Magic chocolates, diapers, whatever people wanted me to steal. I also sold grams on Yates Street in front of the pizzeria, up the street from the Day & Night greasy spoon. I stashed my supply of dime bags and chocolate-covered mushrooms in the wall of a florist’s shop on the corner.
I went AWOL from the receiving home and lived with a group of people I considered family: Johnny, Dave, and Juanita Call-Me-Chris. Some nights we prowled the streets, keeping our legs in motion to stay warm, waiting for dawn’s rays before sleeping outside. When we could afford it, we slept in motels that had sprouted fungus-like between gas stations and blue-collar apartment towers in the Burnside Gorge neighbourhood. I remember everything.
I can tell you which motels have beds that are cleaner than others, which ones have a saggy mattress that your body falls into. Some have a Magic Fingers box on the night stand that costs a quarter: I’ve always wanted to try but can’t justify spending twenty-five cents for a massage. I know everything about these motels, their floral bedspreads, their nubby bedspreads, which ones have bedspreads that are stiff, or soft, or itchy. The fingerprints in the grime on the laminate headboard, the table lamps and the locker-room smell of the carpet. How a cigarette burn feels like a scar when you run your hand over a table scorched with them. I can tell you where the pop machines are and where to find ice. I can tell you about chain locks and spoons burned black, rips in vinyl chairs, and which proprietor will trade a room for sex. Dusty glass protects yellowing prints of mountains or moose or dappled streams or flower bouquets in brass-coloured frames. Some rooms have curtains. Some curtains are too threadbare to darken a room. Some rooms have bottle openers built into the fake wood panelling and others are decorated with torn wallpaper. I know them all. People have cooked rocks in this room. Shot up in this room. Been beaten here. I know the shapes of the stains on their bathroom floors, I know which rooms you need to be eighteen to rent, which one is carpeted with Astroturf, which one’s key has a red plastic tag. The Friendship Inn, the Sherwood Park, the Jolly Knight, the Scotsman, the Coachman, the Robin Hood, the Oxford, the Dutchman, the Doric, the Traveller’s Inn, the Tally-Ho, the Colonial. I know them all.
Since we earned less than three dollars on each gram of weed, we couldn’t always afford a motel. We’d wash in gas station bathrooms, have Cheezies for breakfast, and when my tank tops got too dirty to wear as shirts I’d wear them as miniskirts, the dirt being further down and so less noticeable. I learned how to turn a T-shirt back to front, then inside out, and wear it three times longer. I convinced myself it was romantic. We were no different from nomads seeking their own desert oasis. Shunned by society. Outcasts. We were hunting for paradise. We were a new breed of pioneer, our untamed wilderness the urban jungle.
Yvonne, a well-known working girl, always had a motel room, wore a rabbit fur coat, and, at twenty-five, walked like someone who knew exactly where she was going, like someone unafraid.
She lived with her boyfriend at the Skyline Motel, a five-minute cab ride from where I sold drugs. She felt sorry for me, or she thought I had potential, or she saw my vulnerability. My need for love made me exploitable; I wore my weakness like an open wound. She took me under her wing. I’d watch her put on lipstick in the afternoons, chin in my hands, gazing with the love of a child who hopes to one day be as beautiful as her mother.
Yvonne could cuss out anyone, but she made it sound like poetry: she’d picked up her verbal-assaults-turned-fine-art from her Jamaican boyfriend, Nicky, who, with his waist-length dreadlocks, also never ceased to astonish and thrill me. That a couple like them had taken an interest in me made me feel special. I worried that I’d say something stupid when Yvonne curled her eyelashes or slid her feet into six-inch heels; she’d notice the look in my eye and say, “Girl, what’s wrong with you?” I already knew she thought my crush on Johnny, one of my roommates—his blue eyes, his Bon Jovi hair—was moronic. I basked in his presence despite his basic disregard of mine, even on nights we shared a motel room and a bed. The truth was I’d “chosen” this street family because Johnny was in it. The possibility of romance overrode Yvonne’s assertions that he was a waste of my time. Every day she told me I should grow up. But there was no way to tell Yvonne that once upon a time, when Johnny was drunk, he’d kissed me, and that I’d do anything short of murder to have his tongue in my mouth again.
Once, when Yvonne and I were in Harvey’s, where she’d bought me a burger because she knew I hadn’t eaten in days, she asked me, “What’s he going to do for you?”
I wished I had an answer. He was unemployed and of no fixed address. All he had was an Ibanez guitar, an Adidas bag full of dirty clothes, and a father who wanted him to work in forestry. But the way he played his guitar turned my heart into water. As did the way he could throw a roundhouse kick, his foot connecting with a solid thwap against anyone’s head.
But I was only fifteen and Johnny was nineteen, and fifteen was Johnny not talking to me as a woman. Fifteen could never be as beautiful as twenty-two; fifteen was jailbait. Pimply boys my own age riding BMXs, fat men with beards and leather vests who wagged their tongues between their fingers and said “I eat great pussy”—they wanted me. Not Johnny. If I’d answered Yvonne’s question with “He’s going to love me,” she would have laughed. And if I’d told her the truth, that “It’s not what he’s going to do for me but what I’m going to do for him,” she’d stop grooming me. Then poof, no more Yvonne to show me the ropes.
* * *
—
Today Yvonne was in bed, ringed by Kleenex, but she was still taking me downtown. Her grit was inspiring. Coughing and feverish one second, her nose red and sore, the next she was putting on makeup to hide the blotches on her face. I’d taken a shower and my hair was clean. I’d put on a fresh set of clothes. Yvonne had started blow-drying my hair when she ducked into the bathroom, looking for something she’d forgotten.
“Suko,” she said. Som
ething about her tone put me on edge.
She stood in the doorway, pointing down. Had I left a mess? My clothes in a heap on the floor? I rose and walked sheepishly toward what she was pointing at. A large puddle of water leaking beneath the metal transition strip and beginning to soak the motel room’s carpet.
She led me to the shower curtain. “You have to put this,” she said, grabbing it, “on the inside of the tub. This is where it belongs.”
I hung my head. Why was I such an idiot? Had dope fogged my brain? A lack of food and sleep? My parents didn’t have a curtain but a shower door; still, that couldn’t explain it. Yet I remember the water, Yvonne’s look of dismay, and my shame. I waited for her to yell. I waited for her to slap me.
She smiled, her frown giving way to a smile that showed the gap between her front teeth that I’d always thought was one of the prettiest things about her.
* * *
—
Yvonne and I could have walked to the shoe store, but instead we caught a cab. Downtown, in the middle of the day, bustled with people. I sat up straighter, lifting my chin to look down my nose at them the way Yvonne did.
She talked about the places we would visit together, across Canada. “But I’ll make you go back to school. You can study by correspondence,” she said. “A good education is really important.”
I raised my eyebrows. She looked me square in the eye and told me that she worked to pay for her son’s boarding school. I’d heard of this school, a prestigious one up-island.
She had everything together. She had it all. A bright motel room, hair-styling implements, a boxful of makeup, respectable clothing, a modern haircut, a boyfriend, the walk, the talk, a reputation on the street. To badmouth her spelled swift and severe retaliation. Yvonne had everything anyone could ever want. She ate and shopped where she liked. Had money to burn. The world she’d surrounded herself with radiated and reflected her talents, her smile, its undercurrent of danger, her hospitality bestowed on the few and deserving. She controlled this world. She decided who entered or left. Things didn’t happen to her; she made things happen.
