We have two cars out of commission and parked in our back parking lot. One is the 1970 Jaguar XJ6 Series One, and the only thing really wrong with it is the flat tire and the undeniable drinking problem. That car guzzles gas like nobody's business.
The other car is the 1987 Honda Civic in a light metallic blue-grey. The Honda had been cared for lovingly before it came to us in the fall of 2006, and we cared for it almost as well. But in August 2007 it got schmucked by a Dodge Caravan, the frame buckled, and it has been awaiting the decisions of the insurance folks.
The Honda has issues. One window won't go all the way up, and the frame has buckled so the trunk doesn't shut quite right, and the passenger side doors are stuck shut.
Back when we had a Neon, the local vagrants would smash the windows so they could spend the night in the car. The police advised us to use a club on the steering wheel, make sure nothing of value was left in the car, and leave it unlocked.
The Neon was stolen and we bought these two cars with the insurance money. So we keep clubs on their steering wheels and we left the doors unlocked until we found we were attracting tenants. Now the Jag is locked, but we can do nothing about the Civic. And Wayne has moved in.
We've kicked him out once already, and we're going to have to do it again. We can't get rid of the car until the insurance folks say we can; it can't be driven and it can't be secured. And we've made it clear to Wayne that he does not have permission to stay in our car.
The first time I evicted Wayne I made a pile of his belongings: a couple of blankets, some spare clothes, tools, frozen eggs, needles (used and new), a plastic pail with cigarette butts in it. A candle. Lots of garbage. In the trunk there were good work boots and some electrical wire for his job. We had given Wayne several days' fair warning that the insurance adjustor was coming and he needed to be gone.
He's back.
We gave Wayne one meal at Christmas. He came in, ate in the kitchen. Told my other half about how he'd gone into a spiral when his girlfriend was murdered. The murderer hasn't been caught. I think his girlfriend was one of the many locals working in the sex trade.
It's hard not to look at Wayne and see him through my mother's eyes. When I was growing up, my mother would tell me that Indians were all lazy and drunk. She didn't say anything about residential schools, about the drug trade, about sextrade workers being treated as disposable. She probably didn't know - didn't want to know. We lived in Montreal, and the Indians were kept on the reserve.
Here he is. Not too different from dozens of guys we see in this area: a casual labourer with nowhere to live, a substance problem, and out on the streets dancing with the ghost of his murdered girlfriend. And, yes, he's being evicted from our car. Because the car is not a safe place for him. Because it's not safe for us to have Wayne in the car. Because he stole the neighbour's extension cord. Because the car is now covered in broken, frozen egg and when spring comes there's gonna be an awful mess. And I admit to not being smart enough, or kind enough, to help Wayne with the big issues.
I admit it: I am the sanctimonious result of the kid who grew up memorizing Bible verses for the Women's Christian Temperance Union prizes. I do not understand substance abuse and I have zero patience for it, especially when there's a lot of help out there. And I live with the discomfort of feeling I should be able to do something more for Wayne, and being angry that Wayne is so willing to make his problem into my problem.
We went through a situation like this last year. A neighbour felt the "Christian" (her word) thing to do was to bake cookies for, and provide blankets to, a gentleman who took up residence beside her garage. A residential back alley is not the best environment for someone in survival mode. Daily, I vascillated between anger at myself, for wanting to deny basic comfort to another human being, and anger at the neighbour for putting this situation (almost literally) in my backyard. Her cookies must not have been that good, because the gentleman left of his own accord :)
ReplyDeleteWayne knows this situation is not tenable. And I think you've extended yourself 150% more than the average person would.
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ReplyDeleteThis is tuxandtales's "other half" borrowing his sign-in (because I'm nowhere near my own computer) and weighing in on Wayne.
ReplyDeleteWayne is a trouble to me too. I don't approve of him: from my own disapproval of substance abuse, my own dislike of thieves, my own distrust of substance abusers in general and boozers and crackheads in particular.
Giving Wayne food was my nod, not to Christmas, but to the fact that Wayne was drunk or stoned and missed the Christmas dinner at the Hope Mission because he thought it was already Boxing Day. The food kitchens were closed, and we had leftovers from Chmas Eve, sent home for us by the friends who coooked that meal -- and we were leaving for two weeks the next day. So this wasn't even giving him something at a cost to myself. It was a kind of karaoke charity. ("Kara-oke" means "empty orchestra".)
Another motivation for having him inside was that without going out and getting cold I wanted to warn Wayne that he was going to be kicked out of the car, temporarily while the insurance company investigated its condition, and permanently when it was towed away.
The car smells -- stinks, actually -- inside, of unwashed clothes and dirty bedding and broken eggs (what is it with raw eggs? Is it a drug medium or something?) and is littered with the detritus of a disorganised mind and a marginal life. Wayne is not completely broken yet but he's close. Somebody could rescue him, he says: if he found a good woman, he'd have a reason to quit the crack and the boooze. Hmm. (I don't believe him, but that doesn't matter either.)
He told me when I gave him the meal that if the killer of his girlfriend (whose name is on the city's celebrated and shameful roster of murdered prostitutes whose killer or killers isn't caught yet and may never be) is jailed, he's going to have to commit a crime to get in there and kill the guy. "Fight in jail," he said reasonably, "nothin' they can do, right? Manslaughter -- I'd probably only do five years..."
He turned his hands up in the confused, slightly piteous shrug of a Reasonable Man in the Midst of Unreason. Five years seems a reasonable sacrifice to honour Bonnie's memory and his love for her. And his guilt: he thought she was mad at him and had "taken off", was surprised that her "mad" dragged on for a month, and then -- her body was found.
Everything about Wayne's world and my world is different. The only place we overlap is with relation to a 1987 Honda Civic 4-door, and even then, our Venn diagram cuts at a sharp angle.
My distress is not about that. I don't have to like Wayne, or even care much for Wayne as himself or as an immortal soul or any of that. But I haven't called the cops yet to roust him out of the car. I haven't tried any do-gooder interventions. I haven't called a social agency. This problem is going to solve itself in a week or two when the insurance company or the Kidney Foundation comes to tow away Wayne's little home. The moral coward's way out? Or a tiny bit of charity-by-default, now done? From inside my own head, I say, definitely the former.
If Wayne makes me feel anything, it's the kind of guilty annoyance that labels my class and nationality. Nicely Canadian, vaguely middle-class. The only difference between me as a resident of Boyle-McCauley and me as a resident of the upscale yuppie neighbourhood I used to inhabit is that when I let a social problem drift, it's drifting under my own nose and, quite literally, in my own back yard.
Some smart guy of the past said, "If ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." If I stay just slightly ignorant of Wayne's true nature, I can walk by the window when I see he's out there without my fingers actually dialing the police complaint number. Then I don't have to face trying to explain why after a month or so of his presence, today is the day that I've had enough.
This is Boyle Street Blues's Babe signing off...