What's an interesting life experience you've had?
Apr 8, 2014 5:09:09 GMT
Mariah E. and cree like this
Post by Kristoffer Hansen on Apr 8, 2014 5:09:09 GMT
Writer's write from empathy. We don't have to experience something first hand to be able to write about it. Most often, we'll borrow stories from other people's lives to fill in the gaps in our own experience and create a whole... thing out of them. So I thought it might be neat to offer a place where we could share stories that offer a unique perspective with one another. Stuff we've done or been through that can help our fellow writers fill in those gaps some.
I'll start. For three months in the early 2000's, I was homeless.
A couple of months into my nineteenth year, I tried to kill myself by taking far more Tylenol than a person ever should. What I didn’t know at the time was that Tylenol, while certainly lethal in a high enough dose, is not the sort of thing that lifts you painlessly from the mortal coil and into the soft forever-sleep. Instead, you die of sclerosis of the liver. Many, many, painful months later.
I realized my mistake after hours of not dying. I didn’t know about the sclerosis thing, just that I wasn’t dead yet, and it seemed like that much Tylenol would make me pretty awful sick if it didn’t kill me. So I walked to the hospital in Stettler, Alberta at three in the morning on a weekday and let them know that I would probably need some sort of treatment for that.
They gave me some charcoal yop in a little plastic bottle. It made me hurl, which is apparently what you don’t want to have happen, so they gave me another one. They pumped some drugs into my veins that are apparently the opposite of Tylenol. I learned that day that my normal breathing patterns – I breathe very slowly – make hospital machines nervous, because every few minutes a claxon bell would start ringing for the nurses. They eventually took the little thing that reads blood oxygen off of my finger, and I took a nap.
Turns out, I have depression. When I was young, that depression was so pronounced that it caused a number of interesting side-effects including auditory and visual hallucinations, which the doctors in Stettler’s hospital took to be schizophrenia. I didn’t exhibit most of the symptoms of schizophrenia, but I trusted that the doctors knew what they were doing, and when it came time to figure out what the hell I was going to do from here, I decided I wanted to be somewhere that I could get the most support possible for the condition they’d told me I had.
Lethbridge is the home of the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta, and so I decided I was going to move there. I packed what little I had left after my roommates had destroyed most of my things, and I took a long, awkward car ride with my ex-girlfriend. On the way, I stared out the window, and I didn’t say much. I was being treated for the wrong thing, and the anti-psychotics they had me on were doing a number on my ability to be social at all. I saw the kick-ass model of the Starship Enterprise they have in Vulcan, though, so that was dope.
I took up a room in a hotel, paying a monthly rate that was about as much as I would pay for an apartment down there. I didn’t know that at the time, as Stettler’s apartment prices were actually pretty steep, but my welfare cheque did not stretch nearly as far as I had hoped it would because of it. I didn’t have a kitchen, or access to one, but I only figured I’d be there until I had a few paycheques under me, and then I’d be looking for a real place. My job search, though, was made more difficult by the weird living arrangement in that I didn’t have a reliable phone and I had no real address to speak of, so when the first month was nearly up, I dropped off my resume at the hotel front desk, and was surprised when they hired me on the spot.
My job was to work in a little side-bar, a place specifically for VLT gambling. I had a little fridge behind me that I manned, and my job was mostly to run the Interac machine and give people money. The pay was pretty close to minimum wage, but they let me stay in my room indefinitely, rent free. I’m not very good at math, though, and the meds I was on made it a lot harder to think, and so all of my paperwork was horrible. Every night, I’d be off by some ridiculous margin, and it wasn’t much of a surprise when they finally canned my ass.
What was a surprise is that they kicked me out that same day. If I wasn’t working for them, I didn’t get the privilege of the room. With only a week’s worth of money in my pocket and no way to pay them I was booted to the street with nothing but a backpack full of clothes and a pocket full of the wrong meds.
That night, I stayed at a Tim Horton’s, nursing coffee after coffee as the hours ticked by. I was trying to figure out what to do, think of my next move, what clever thing could I do that would get me out of this mess? I didn’t have a cell phone, this was in late 2000, early 2001, only rich assholes had cell phones. I didn’t have a way to get in contact with my parents, I didn’t have any friends in town who didn’t also work for that goddamn hotel, and my ex-girlfriend had made it pretty clear that she wanted nothing to do with me anymore. I wracked my brain, but I couldn’t come up with anything, and by the time morning came around, I still didn’t have a place to sleep.
I found myself moving from store to store in the day, trying to keep myself awake, trying to think, but I was in a drug-fueled sleepless haze. I ended up falling asleep in a Laundromat and waking up to an angry Indian lady screaming for me to get out hours later. That first week, I probably should have died. I pissed off the wrong people, the guys slinging drugs in the city center park, I made weird turf decisions that made me no friends and fewer favors, and I kept trying to think of how to get out of my situation instead of trying to figure out how to survive it.
That was the mental shift, though: when I stopped thinking about getting off the street and started thinking about living on it, I got a lot better at what I was doing. I knew from experience now who I should avoid and what parts of Second Ave were open to guys without crews like me. I knew who I could afford to piss off and who would stab me in my sleep if I crossed them, because I’d crossed the wrong guys already. I made myself scarce, I kept a low profile for a while, and I worked on how to get through, rather than get out.
I started with the charity guys. I hit up the food bank and got as much as my backpack could carry. I had a little busted Swiss army knife that had a can open on it, but there aren’t many ways to cook when you’re a bookish nerd on the street, so I ate a lot of cold canned food, bread that was a few days past due. I didn’t have a reliable fridge, either, so stuff like packages of frozen beef or frozen peas or whatever got trashed. There totally are ways to cook on the street, I just didn’t spend enough time to get to know them, and had no one to teach me, so I lived pretty lean. I started begging in the neutral areas, placed that weren’t claimed by any of the other guys pacing the Ave. I wasn’t very good, though. I’ve always been a big guy, and it’s hard to find sympathy for the fat homeless guy.
I taught myself how to juggle, and I was horrible at it. It didn’t help that I was wearing mittens most of the time, either. I’d stand in front of business doors telling passerby to “Come watch me play with my balls! Or pay me to stop!” and that line served me well for the next two months. People will pay you to stop, and business owners will pay you to go juggle embarrassingly in front of their nearby competition. I made okay money from people who thought I was funny, or people who took pity on the guy trying to juggle hackey sacks in the middle of fucking January. I started to put together more money than I was spending, which was nice. A lot of the guys you see on the streets, they stay there because they have habits that need feeding. Booze is the big one, especially with the First Nations guys. Something about the way they metabolize alcohol makes them particularly susceptible to alcoholism, and when you’re spending the whole fifteen bucks you made that day on another bottle, it’s tough to get resources together to get yourself off the streets. I didn’t shoot, smoke or drink anything in a way that was detrimental to my finances, and I had something of a head start from that week’s worth of pay. Some of that went to a sandwich from Mac’s or a cup of hot chocolate on the really rough days, but I managed to keep most of it in the bank.
I didn’t carry cash with me, really. I’d get some money together, and I’d hit the bank in the afternoon. If I’d made good coin, I could walk away with close to a hundred bucks from juggling, begging, being funny and being paid off to go somewhere else (my going rate for that was twenty bucks, and sometimes a couple of guys would start a bidding war; those were good days). On my worst days, I wouldn’t make anything, and I’d freeze my nuts off for nothing. Lethbridge is sort of a horrible city to be homeless in, honestly. It’s a lot of rich white Mormon folk, and for all that they’re spouting about Christian responsibility when they’re knocking on your door, they don’t tend to show a lot of charity when they’re out doing their shopping.
I started to make some friends, people I could share food and warmth with, people who were willing to take in a lost rich white boy who just happened to be less rich significantly less white lately. There was a lady I stayed with sometimes who had this ridiculous horde of cats. Every time she hit the food bank, she made sure to get cat food and tuna, and she would leave it out for the cats to eat. Eventually, she got this crew together from all over the place, like fancy-pants cats with collars and ragged toms from down the alley, and they’d chill out and eat her food, and they were surprisingly warm and cuddly. If I could stand the smell of cat piss – and to this day, I have a crazy tolerance for the smell of cat piss – then I could keep warm and snuggly basically all day for the price of a can of fish. A couple of the performer guys, the sorts that do like, push-ups for money or they’ll spit freestyle rap for a dollar, started to help me out with my routine a bit, and it tightened up, started getting better money for less work. I started involving my audience a bit more. I’d hit a kid with a hackey sack or something and when he’d toss it back, I’d throw another one at him until we were just standing there chucking hackey sacks at one another and his mom would throw a five at me for entertaining her kid. And I started to get noticed again by the wrong sorts of guys, the ones who had two habits: whatever substance they could put into their body that day, and violence.
After a particularly good day, I hit up one of the apartment building back entrances that had been pretty good to me. They didn’t check it often, and most people didn’t go out that way. Once in a while there would be these old ladies who would give me some money on their way out the door, and it was the sort of place I didn’t get kicked out of as often. Some of them even knew my name, which was nice. I’d just come in, hadn’t even had a chance to take my backpack off, when some dude pushed me into the wall from behind, and before I could even register what had happened there was a knife in my face and a hissed voice demanding that I pay him for performing on his turf. It was bullshit, I’d been at this for a while now and I knew turf from nothing and this guy was laying claim to nothing.
I pushed off the wall and made like I was reaching for my wallet and just headbutted the guy as hard as I could in the nose. He slashed out, caught me just beside my left eye – and I still have a little scar there from where he nicked me – but he was bent over and cupping his bleeding nose in his hand so I took his knife away and went to a different spot that night. My face was bleeding like crazy, as face wounds have a tendency to do, but I decided that night it would be best if I took what I got and made the best show of it that I could. I had a little under a thousand dollars in the bank.
I went to talk to a psychiatrist.
He gave me a full evaluation, changed the meds I’d been prescribed, which had run out forever ago, and had me fill out a bunch of paperwork to get me rushed through the AISH program. My schizophrenia diagnosis was actually pretty helpful in that regard. Then he set me up in a group home called SASCHA House, where people with developmental and emotional disabilities live. The rent was only $400 a month, and I had a good phone line to use, an address and three square meals a day. I didn’t really fit in there, but I met some people who didn’t suck, and ended up moving in with one of them, a fellow named Nathan who had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia – and who also seemed to show very few signs of the condition – and got a job working in a casino, first as a dealer and later as a cook. From there, my first and most important goal has always been to keep a roof over my head. I don’t care what I need to do to make that happen. I’ll flip burgers, I’ll wrap tacos, I’ll clean toilets, don’t matter. My time on the street wasn’t even really that horrific compared to what a lot of people go through, and three months isn’t all that much when you consider that some of those guys, the cat lady and the guy who raps at you for a dollar, have been there for years. But it’s still not something I’m ever going to repeat.
I'll start. For three months in the early 2000's, I was homeless.
A couple of months into my nineteenth year, I tried to kill myself by taking far more Tylenol than a person ever should. What I didn’t know at the time was that Tylenol, while certainly lethal in a high enough dose, is not the sort of thing that lifts you painlessly from the mortal coil and into the soft forever-sleep. Instead, you die of sclerosis of the liver. Many, many, painful months later.
I realized my mistake after hours of not dying. I didn’t know about the sclerosis thing, just that I wasn’t dead yet, and it seemed like that much Tylenol would make me pretty awful sick if it didn’t kill me. So I walked to the hospital in Stettler, Alberta at three in the morning on a weekday and let them know that I would probably need some sort of treatment for that.
They gave me some charcoal yop in a little plastic bottle. It made me hurl, which is apparently what you don’t want to have happen, so they gave me another one. They pumped some drugs into my veins that are apparently the opposite of Tylenol. I learned that day that my normal breathing patterns – I breathe very slowly – make hospital machines nervous, because every few minutes a claxon bell would start ringing for the nurses. They eventually took the little thing that reads blood oxygen off of my finger, and I took a nap.
Turns out, I have depression. When I was young, that depression was so pronounced that it caused a number of interesting side-effects including auditory and visual hallucinations, which the doctors in Stettler’s hospital took to be schizophrenia. I didn’t exhibit most of the symptoms of schizophrenia, but I trusted that the doctors knew what they were doing, and when it came time to figure out what the hell I was going to do from here, I decided I wanted to be somewhere that I could get the most support possible for the condition they’d told me I had.
Lethbridge is the home of the Schizophrenia Society of Alberta, and so I decided I was going to move there. I packed what little I had left after my roommates had destroyed most of my things, and I took a long, awkward car ride with my ex-girlfriend. On the way, I stared out the window, and I didn’t say much. I was being treated for the wrong thing, and the anti-psychotics they had me on were doing a number on my ability to be social at all. I saw the kick-ass model of the Starship Enterprise they have in Vulcan, though, so that was dope.
I took up a room in a hotel, paying a monthly rate that was about as much as I would pay for an apartment down there. I didn’t know that at the time, as Stettler’s apartment prices were actually pretty steep, but my welfare cheque did not stretch nearly as far as I had hoped it would because of it. I didn’t have a kitchen, or access to one, but I only figured I’d be there until I had a few paycheques under me, and then I’d be looking for a real place. My job search, though, was made more difficult by the weird living arrangement in that I didn’t have a reliable phone and I had no real address to speak of, so when the first month was nearly up, I dropped off my resume at the hotel front desk, and was surprised when they hired me on the spot.
My job was to work in a little side-bar, a place specifically for VLT gambling. I had a little fridge behind me that I manned, and my job was mostly to run the Interac machine and give people money. The pay was pretty close to minimum wage, but they let me stay in my room indefinitely, rent free. I’m not very good at math, though, and the meds I was on made it a lot harder to think, and so all of my paperwork was horrible. Every night, I’d be off by some ridiculous margin, and it wasn’t much of a surprise when they finally canned my ass.
What was a surprise is that they kicked me out that same day. If I wasn’t working for them, I didn’t get the privilege of the room. With only a week’s worth of money in my pocket and no way to pay them I was booted to the street with nothing but a backpack full of clothes and a pocket full of the wrong meds.
That night, I stayed at a Tim Horton’s, nursing coffee after coffee as the hours ticked by. I was trying to figure out what to do, think of my next move, what clever thing could I do that would get me out of this mess? I didn’t have a cell phone, this was in late 2000, early 2001, only rich assholes had cell phones. I didn’t have a way to get in contact with my parents, I didn’t have any friends in town who didn’t also work for that goddamn hotel, and my ex-girlfriend had made it pretty clear that she wanted nothing to do with me anymore. I wracked my brain, but I couldn’t come up with anything, and by the time morning came around, I still didn’t have a place to sleep.
I found myself moving from store to store in the day, trying to keep myself awake, trying to think, but I was in a drug-fueled sleepless haze. I ended up falling asleep in a Laundromat and waking up to an angry Indian lady screaming for me to get out hours later. That first week, I probably should have died. I pissed off the wrong people, the guys slinging drugs in the city center park, I made weird turf decisions that made me no friends and fewer favors, and I kept trying to think of how to get out of my situation instead of trying to figure out how to survive it.
That was the mental shift, though: when I stopped thinking about getting off the street and started thinking about living on it, I got a lot better at what I was doing. I knew from experience now who I should avoid and what parts of Second Ave were open to guys without crews like me. I knew who I could afford to piss off and who would stab me in my sleep if I crossed them, because I’d crossed the wrong guys already. I made myself scarce, I kept a low profile for a while, and I worked on how to get through, rather than get out.
I started with the charity guys. I hit up the food bank and got as much as my backpack could carry. I had a little busted Swiss army knife that had a can open on it, but there aren’t many ways to cook when you’re a bookish nerd on the street, so I ate a lot of cold canned food, bread that was a few days past due. I didn’t have a reliable fridge, either, so stuff like packages of frozen beef or frozen peas or whatever got trashed. There totally are ways to cook on the street, I just didn’t spend enough time to get to know them, and had no one to teach me, so I lived pretty lean. I started begging in the neutral areas, placed that weren’t claimed by any of the other guys pacing the Ave. I wasn’t very good, though. I’ve always been a big guy, and it’s hard to find sympathy for the fat homeless guy.
I taught myself how to juggle, and I was horrible at it. It didn’t help that I was wearing mittens most of the time, either. I’d stand in front of business doors telling passerby to “Come watch me play with my balls! Or pay me to stop!” and that line served me well for the next two months. People will pay you to stop, and business owners will pay you to go juggle embarrassingly in front of their nearby competition. I made okay money from people who thought I was funny, or people who took pity on the guy trying to juggle hackey sacks in the middle of fucking January. I started to put together more money than I was spending, which was nice. A lot of the guys you see on the streets, they stay there because they have habits that need feeding. Booze is the big one, especially with the First Nations guys. Something about the way they metabolize alcohol makes them particularly susceptible to alcoholism, and when you’re spending the whole fifteen bucks you made that day on another bottle, it’s tough to get resources together to get yourself off the streets. I didn’t shoot, smoke or drink anything in a way that was detrimental to my finances, and I had something of a head start from that week’s worth of pay. Some of that went to a sandwich from Mac’s or a cup of hot chocolate on the really rough days, but I managed to keep most of it in the bank.
I didn’t carry cash with me, really. I’d get some money together, and I’d hit the bank in the afternoon. If I’d made good coin, I could walk away with close to a hundred bucks from juggling, begging, being funny and being paid off to go somewhere else (my going rate for that was twenty bucks, and sometimes a couple of guys would start a bidding war; those were good days). On my worst days, I wouldn’t make anything, and I’d freeze my nuts off for nothing. Lethbridge is sort of a horrible city to be homeless in, honestly. It’s a lot of rich white Mormon folk, and for all that they’re spouting about Christian responsibility when they’re knocking on your door, they don’t tend to show a lot of charity when they’re out doing their shopping.
I started to make some friends, people I could share food and warmth with, people who were willing to take in a lost rich white boy who just happened to be less rich significantly less white lately. There was a lady I stayed with sometimes who had this ridiculous horde of cats. Every time she hit the food bank, she made sure to get cat food and tuna, and she would leave it out for the cats to eat. Eventually, she got this crew together from all over the place, like fancy-pants cats with collars and ragged toms from down the alley, and they’d chill out and eat her food, and they were surprisingly warm and cuddly. If I could stand the smell of cat piss – and to this day, I have a crazy tolerance for the smell of cat piss – then I could keep warm and snuggly basically all day for the price of a can of fish. A couple of the performer guys, the sorts that do like, push-ups for money or they’ll spit freestyle rap for a dollar, started to help me out with my routine a bit, and it tightened up, started getting better money for less work. I started involving my audience a bit more. I’d hit a kid with a hackey sack or something and when he’d toss it back, I’d throw another one at him until we were just standing there chucking hackey sacks at one another and his mom would throw a five at me for entertaining her kid. And I started to get noticed again by the wrong sorts of guys, the ones who had two habits: whatever substance they could put into their body that day, and violence.
After a particularly good day, I hit up one of the apartment building back entrances that had been pretty good to me. They didn’t check it often, and most people didn’t go out that way. Once in a while there would be these old ladies who would give me some money on their way out the door, and it was the sort of place I didn’t get kicked out of as often. Some of them even knew my name, which was nice. I’d just come in, hadn’t even had a chance to take my backpack off, when some dude pushed me into the wall from behind, and before I could even register what had happened there was a knife in my face and a hissed voice demanding that I pay him for performing on his turf. It was bullshit, I’d been at this for a while now and I knew turf from nothing and this guy was laying claim to nothing.
I pushed off the wall and made like I was reaching for my wallet and just headbutted the guy as hard as I could in the nose. He slashed out, caught me just beside my left eye – and I still have a little scar there from where he nicked me – but he was bent over and cupping his bleeding nose in his hand so I took his knife away and went to a different spot that night. My face was bleeding like crazy, as face wounds have a tendency to do, but I decided that night it would be best if I took what I got and made the best show of it that I could. I had a little under a thousand dollars in the bank.
I went to talk to a psychiatrist.
He gave me a full evaluation, changed the meds I’d been prescribed, which had run out forever ago, and had me fill out a bunch of paperwork to get me rushed through the AISH program. My schizophrenia diagnosis was actually pretty helpful in that regard. Then he set me up in a group home called SASCHA House, where people with developmental and emotional disabilities live. The rent was only $400 a month, and I had a good phone line to use, an address and three square meals a day. I didn’t really fit in there, but I met some people who didn’t suck, and ended up moving in with one of them, a fellow named Nathan who had also been diagnosed with schizophrenia – and who also seemed to show very few signs of the condition – and got a job working in a casino, first as a dealer and later as a cook. From there, my first and most important goal has always been to keep a roof over my head. I don’t care what I need to do to make that happen. I’ll flip burgers, I’ll wrap tacos, I’ll clean toilets, don’t matter. My time on the street wasn’t even really that horrific compared to what a lot of people go through, and three months isn’t all that much when you consider that some of those guys, the cat lady and the guy who raps at you for a dollar, have been there for years. But it’s still not something I’m ever going to repeat.