One night, well, one morning I should say, I left the club feeling especially wired and rattled around downtown for a few hours, finally winding up in the park looking west off of the sea-wall. I remember having an epiphany on that picturesque spot, something to do with cleaning up my life and renewing efforts at self-improvement. I walked slowly back to the train feeling unusually good and rode home to my crime ridden neighbourhood.
Just before I got to my place I remembered that I needed a few things from the store and diverted up to the busy thoroughfare that crossed the end of my block. As drew closer to my street I noticed an an Asian housewife waiting for a ride to work. As I as I came closer I tried to make out her ethnicity. There was a large Vietnamese community in my neighbourhood, but this woman looked Chinese or Korean. It wasn't until I was almost past her that I could see that she was a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty. I was at the store before I realized that she was a prostitute. On my way back home I slowed down to have a look at her. She was pretty, but was wearing very frumpy clothes and had such a worn out look that she appeared older than she was.
"Hi."
"Hi."
"Ah, are you... working?"
"Uh.., yeah," she looked at me suspiciously.
"How much is it?"
"I usually go fifty/eighty."
"Okay well my house is just over here, but we'll have to go to the bank machine first." She gave me a wary look and nodded her head.
We began to walk back towards the store and the intersection with the bank machine, but she was hobbling like a macaw. Her foot seemed to be injured and to make matters worse the bottom of her shoe was falling off. "We're going to have to go slow," she said, taking hold of my shoulder and smiling up at me a little meekly. As we made our way slowly across Kingsway, the early morning commuters stared at us from their cars.
When I had finished at the bank machine on the far corner she paused. "I'm going to have to get some down (heroin)." I realized then that she'd probably been on a long cocaine bender. We kept going down the same street with the bank machine for only another half block when she led me down the alley and to the back yard of a nondescript house. "I'm going to need that money now." I gave her a hundred dollars and she crossed the yard and knocked on the door of a basement suite where a bald, heavy set, Vietnamese man in his fifties let her in. She was in there kind of a long time and I couldn't help wondering if she had taken off with my money. Finally she came out and limped back to me, taking my arm. As we walked she said, "I'm going to need your help. I haven't had the greatest day."
We j-walked back across Kingsway, hurrying as best we could across that busy street and entered the park at the end of my street. The hurrying tired her and she stopped, leaning on my shoulder with her hand. She seemed to have a thought and narrowed her eyes as she looked at me. "You don't seem like the kind of guy who would have a hard time gettin' women," she said.
"Yes, well, some girls like me," I said, trying hard not to seem delighted.
She stopped walking. "So why are you doing this?"
"I don't know, you're...attractive" She happy with that answer she continued to walk with me up to the unornamented, tidy character home where I was renting an apartment from a Portuguese family. My landlord was a man who lived next door with his family.
"Wow, pretty nice. Are we in the basement?"
"No it's an attic suite. I was living in a basement suite before, but I like being able to see the sky. She nodded. "It's small though, I'm a student." She didn't ask me what I was taking.
We went upstairs and she tossed a full gram flap of heroin down on the coffee table. She'd spent the whole $100 I'd given her. My living room and bedroom were all one room with my bed behind a curtain. She sat down on the couch and rummaged around in a white plastic grocery bag that she was using as a purse. She fixed up a shot for herself and started trying to shoot up. It took her about twenty minutes to find a decent spot and she kept swearing like a sailor every time she lost her vein. Her arms were ravaged with the longest track-marks I had ever seen, the kind you get from shooting up cocaine every 10 minutes for days on end. Finally she was done and offered me her dirty needle. I decided I would snort a couple of lines instead. She hadn't bathed in several days and as I bent over to do the dope I caught a whiff of her.
The smell of a woman who isn't quite, you know, fresh, makes me crazy, crazy horny. I picked her up and threw her down on the bed. "Easy tiger," she helped me off with my pants and I more or less ripped her clothes off. Something about the combination of the speed and junk made me incredibly virile and I fucked her like a prize fighter for the better part of two days. We also added some vodka and a bottle Tuinal to the mix so some of the details are a little spotty, but I remember her telling me to go get more money and then going over to my landlord's place a couple of times to borrow eighty dollars, once without a shirt or any shoes on and his wife in her black head scarf and dress handing me the cash.
************
An urgent knocking at my door woke me.
"Where the fuck have you been for the past few days?"
It was Lauren. Lauren was the one girlfriend who I could never quite seem to break up with. There was always some reason for us to be together. There were her two daughters for one thing, who I had spent a lot of time living with and even caring for in their early years.
"I've been phoning.., like five times."
I didn't remember the events of the previous couple of days at first, but as it started to come together in the strange mood of my gathering speed hangover, my distorted mental image of the girl I had been with grew to Olympian proportions. She seemed so mysterious to me, like a witch from one of those ancient Greek islands. My mind drifted out into the streets trying to divine her dark, enigmatic activities.
Lauren snapped her finger by my ear, "Are you even listening to me!?"
Me and Lauren had a pretty open relationship and she would often relate her sexual escapades to me. Foolishly, I told her about my experience with the girl. "Jesus! And I have to beg you for money!" As she nattered on and we drove back to her place, I glanced over my left shoulder as though trying to realize the past and looking back through the rear window of Lauren's old BMW I saw my girl! She was getting out of a car and twisted her hips as she walked up the side street back to the main drag. I didn't make the connection right away that she had just turned a trick. I figured she must have been hanging out with one of her equally mysterious and powerful friends. She stopped at the corner, jauntily locking her hip and putting her thumb out for a ride with a wry shit eating grin on her face. As I watched her sneering good-naturedly at the oncoming traffic, I was devastated that she had forgotten about me so soon and was having such a good time turning tricks.
The next morning I woke up with the blackest speed hang-over I had ever had. Everything was pointed down, down, down. I think I might have have done myself a harm were it not for finding a half gram of H. that the girl had abandoned on the edge of the bathtub. Part of it was wrecked from water but it was mostly still good. I snorted a line and the awful depression lifted instantly, like I was being released from a curse. I did my homework and even went out for a jog. When I came back I was starting to make dinner when someone rang my bell. I opened the door and it was the girl. She was wearing an orange motorcycle jacket with some paint stains on it and some jeans. She had makeup on and actually looked quite beautiful.
"Uh, hi. Can I come in?"
I let her in and while the details of our conversation are lost to me now, I remember it having a confrontation edge. I asked her her name. "It's Chi. It's spelled like the Chinese energy thing but it's pronounced 'Kye'. Can I use your washroom?"
She went in there and didn't come out for a couple of hours. I was studying but after a while my curiosity got the better of me. I opened the door and she was sitting on the toilet, slouched against the wall on the nod. There were streams of blood running down both of her arms and it was all over the bathroom floor. I looked closely at her arms and could see that she'd been at it with the cocaine again. She looked like she'd been torn up by a wild animal. I tried my best to clean off her arms with some cotton batten and hydrogen peroxide and she moaned and shifted uncomfortably in her sleep. Once I was done I went back to studying. About an hour later I heard her swearing and I looked in on her. She was awake and trying to shoot up. Her left arm was covered in blood again. "Do you mind!?" she barked at me angrily. I closed the door but after a while I needed to use the bathroom and started to become irritated by the whole situation. I opened up the bathroom door ready to lay down the law but she was passed out again. When she finally woke up I told her that I had work to do and said that she'd have to leave.
"Okay no problem," she said a little unsteadily and reared back, trying to stand. She put her weight on the toilet paper dispenser which broke causing her to fall ungraciously to the floor. After I had helped her outside I watched her shuffle down the street and across the nearest corner of the park were it was bordered by the main arterial route we had crossed on the morning we met. There were some shops over there, mostly tucked around the corner out of sight from my apartment but you could see the stairs that ran up behind the last store to the floor of apartments above. One of the apartments was empty and being used as a squat by some street kids, street kids in my neighbourhood being hookers, a pimp and whatever the rest of the less physically developed guys managed to get up to. There was only one pimp though. He was a young guy with curly blond hair, a crack smoker who none-the-less managed to maintain an incredibly muscular physique. He bullied all the working girls in the neighbourhood, using them for sex and taking their money. I watched Chi make her way up the stairs to the squat.
A couple of days later there was an almost imperceptible knock at the door. I looked through the peep-hole but couldn't see anyone. There was another knock and I opened the door. Chi was standing there wearing a white cotton dress, her arms were loosely bandaged. She was so tired and stoned that she could barely stand. "Can I come in?" She looked so pretty and helpless in that white dress it was heart-breaking. I let her in and she flopped down on the couch and nodded off for a few moments. When she came around she frowned with the effort of trying to focus on me.
"You know, we're not so different, you and me."
"No?"
"I was in a boarding school, all girls. It's just, me and this one other girl,.., well, we like the cocaine."
"Yes."
"I got kicked out, for doing bad things. Can you imagine, me, doing bad things?"
"No, that seems impossible." We both had a little laugh.
"Come here," she reached out towards me and I moved over beside her. She had full beautiful lips, although they were dry and blistered from the cocaine. She gave me a searching look and stroked my face. I kissed her for a few moments until she held up her hand and said "That's enough!"
"Do you think I could crash here for a while?"
"I don't think so, I have to study."
"Please."
My phone rang and I went to the kitchen to answer it. It was Lauren. When I went back into the living room Chi was asleep on the couch. I had to do a few errands and so I went out and came back about an hour later with two coffees. Chi was sitting by the kitchen window smoking and looking out over the park towards the west.
"Aren't clouds funny?" she said.
************
A few days later Chi came by again and asked to borrow some money. School was done for the semester and the thought began to form in my mind that we could could do some drugs together. It could take the place of the usual alcohol bender I went on at the end of a semester. I gave her some money and told her to go and get us some coke and some down. I knew she would want to shoot the coke but I gave her specific instructions to get rock. My parents had spent a fortune on rehab over the years and I wasn't about to flush it all down the toilet.
She went out to get the drugs and I waited. Minutes turned to hours and then it was nighttime. She wasn't coming back. I was quite bummed out and not just pissed off that I had been ripped off. I had hoped that we could have a little party and recapture some of our old magic. I closed my eyes, listening to the traffic and sirens and my mind drifted out again trying to find her in the dream-scape of those hard streets.
She showed up the next morning wearing these green oriental looking pajama type things that had short pants. "Where were you!?" I was exasperated.
"Mike freaked out and I... and then..."
"Oh fuck, never mind."
"Can I borrow twenty dollars?"
"No you can't borrow twenty dollars!"
"Okay! Fuck!"
"You better go," I opened the door.
"Okay, whatever."
As she was leaving I could see her face contorting with down sickness. I felt like I was catching a glimpse of one of the damned. I felt a little queasy from guilt and grabbed her shoulder. Hang on I said and went and got her thirty bucks.
"Thanks Todd," she kissed me on the cheek and for some reason I didn't feel like a total chump.
I didn't really see much of her after that. She would come over once every so often to borrow a bit of money. One time she was all decked out in this sexy outfit and seemed sort of pissed off that I didn't want to fuck her for the money, but I was in a long distance relationship with someone by then and was feeling unusually complete.
Another few months went by and I hardly saw her at all until one day she knocked loudly on my door. I opened it and she pushed past me and flopped down on the bed. I could tell she was sick but she didn't ask me for money.
"I need to stay here," she said. She had folded the quilt over herself and was lying with her face turned away from me, looking out the window.
"Why? What about your place?"
"I'm not giving Mike any more money," she said through gritted teeth. "And I just, I just don't feel like sleeping with him. Not when I feel like this." She took a deep breath. I could hear her weeping and I touched her shoulder trying to see her face. She started really crying and then became almost hysterical. "God - I - don't - want to - su-sleep - with th-that - g-guy - again," she said between huge sobs. She turned over onto her other side and I could see that her left cheek and jaw were badly bruised. There was dried blood caked around the edges of her nostrils. I tried to comfort her but she didn't seem to want me touching her. When she finally calmed down she asked me if I had any food. I went and heated up some leftover Chinese food in the old "Radiation Master 5000", an ancient micro-wave that I had gotten from my parents basement that was slower than a conventional oven. I used to go into a separate room every time I turned it on and when I came back into the bedroom I watched Chi lying there, staring up into the morning sky. From that angle and with the sunlight playing on her face, she looked younger and very innocent somehow. I wondered then if she might ever pull out of this and get her life back on some better track.
Chi slept for about three days. She would usually wake up in the evening and ask for something to eat and I would go and get us some take-out. One night I made spaghetti. The first night or two she was kicking her legs quite violently in her sleep and I had to be careful not to get booted. By the third night she had settled down a bit and even wrapped her arm and leg around me and snuggled up behind me for a while. By that time she was also starting to smell like an old tuna fish that had been left out in the sun too long and it was turning me on so badly that I had to take a couple cold showers. Luckily the bed still smelled like that for quite a while after she left and I used to like being able to smell it as I drifted off to sleep. When she was feeling better on the third day she took a bath and then was lolling around on my couch in a t-shirt with no pants or underwear on, looking at me coyly. By this point in time I had totally sealed the deal with my friend Erin in Montreal and in an uncharacteristic act of responsible behavior, I decided not to fuck around with Chi that morning. Erin aside, I just didn't want our lives to get any more intertwined.
I talked to her about her options and tried to convince her to go into rehab. She had told me about her son previously, who was living with her mother. I tried to use him as motivation but just wound up really upsetting her. That evening she left and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She left behind a bag of clothes.
The next day I came home from school and there was a message on my answering machine. "Hey Toodddd," it was Mike the pimp. "If I catch you skipping around East Van I'm going to stick a knife up your little sack and split you open!" I wondered at first how he had gotten my phone number but remembered that I had written it down in this little green address book of Chi's, in case there was a real emergency and she needed to call someone. I should probably have been terrified, but being threatened with violence at that level was so far out of my normal frame of reference that it felt like it was happening to someone else.
A couple days later I was going to the store and there was a line of working girls hanging out in front. I was pretty fascinated by the seamy underbelly of where I lived and so I was always pretty nice and friendly to the girls because I was curious about them.
"Hi Todd!!" they all chirped and waved at me. They were being much more friendly than usual and so I didn't notice Mike standing down past the last girl, beside the door of the store.
"Oh no!," he said, looking up from the ground and putting his hands up to his cheeks in mock alarm. He opened the door to the store with a flourish and gestured for me to enter. Once I had got what I needed I became nervous about what was going to happen when I went back outside. Finally, after screwing up my courage, I strode out the door. They had all vanished. It was like they had vanished into thin air and had left no residual presence behind.
A couple weeks later I saw Chi down at a busy intersection to the north of my neighbourhood. It was a corner that had a lot of drug activity and there were hookers and crack dealers everywhere around there that night. I saw Mike sitting out of sight on a wooden stairway between some stores, keeping an eye on one of his women. Our eyes met. "Hey, look who's here!" he said with exaggerated friendliness and sneered at me. Chi was wearing a beautiful jade green oriental dress with a matching jacket that her parents must have bought for her. She was really wasted but she spotted me and came over.
"Todd I left some things at your place."
"Yes I've got them."
"Okay, can I come and get them some time?"
"Sure, come on over."
She showed up two or three days later. I had washed her clothes along with mine and she looked at them in wonderment. "So nicely folded," she said, stroking a sweatshirt that was on the top of the pile. I thought I could see a tear in her eye.
A couple nights later she came buy and asked me for thirty dollars. I could see that she was sick but I was so broke at that time I really didn't have a nickel to spare and I said no. She gave me the most hateful look I had ever seen. It actually scared me. She just as quickly switched to a more playful tactic and kept saying "Please, please, please," over and over for a long time.
"Okay fuck!" I finally said, giving up.
"Ha ha, I love you," she squealed and bounced over to kiss me on the cheek.
I few weeks later I learned from one of the girls that Chi had been very badly beaten up. The girl wasn't exactly sure who had done it but she said that most people thought it was Mike and a couple of his women. I wandered around the neighbourhood whenever I had spare time, trying to find someone who could tell me a little more about what had happened. There was this big bear of a guy I knew, a crack smoker who was always down at the corner where I had seen Chi in the green dress. This guy had a bit of a thing for Chi and sure enough, when I finally found him he was able to give me more of the story. He said she had been beaten within inches of her life and thrown in a garbage dumpster. He thought that they had actually been trying to kill her and that she had been left for dead.
I really didn't know whether or not Chi had survived that attack. I phoned around to all the hospitals but could not find anyone who knew who I was talking about. It was three or four months later that she came to my place. She had a short hair cut that made her look very cute and a little boyish. They had to shave her head she explained because she had been laying in the dumpster so long that her head wounds had become badly infected. She had a few light scars here and there but didn't look any worse for wear, in fact she had gained some weight and was looking very healthy. "I look like a boy!!" she screamed from the bathroom as if seeing her new haircut for the first time. We talked genially for a while and then she left. I watched her walking slowly up the street, looking around a little fearfully but marching determinedly up to the main drag. She could only have returned to the neighbourhood for one reason and it was stronger than any fear she had of Mike or anything else.
Chi died of an overdose the following day. It happens to junkies a lot after they have cleaned up. They do the same amount of dope as before but their tolerance is way down. I heard about it from the guy who owned the convenience store. I cried all the way home and for quite a while afterwards. When someone dies you can't help thinking about what a good person they were and how much you really liked them. I thought about her little boy and really started bawling. I lay on my bed looking out the window at the late afternoon sky. Aren't clouds funny?
You're a brilliant writer Todd...
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