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: Punk History Canada Articles : : The Story : : Culture : : Arts and Literature : Excerpt from "East Van" :: By Chris Walter
Dill is a hope-to-die punk junkie with holes in his boots and a room in the deplorable Belmont Hotel. Stephen is a highly paid real estate developer with a million dollar house and a beautiful family. The two men cross paths when Stephen makes plans to convert four hotels on the Downtown Eastside into backpacker’s hostels. As violence erupts on the mean streets, Dill and Stephen discover that they have only one thing in common: addiction. Desperation is the glue that binds the addicts together as they race towards ultimate destruction and a nightmare from which escape is unlikely. Chris Walter writes with humour and passion, and makes his readers laugh at things they never dreamed they could laugh at. Both darkly hilarious and emotionally devastating, East Van is a story with characters so strong and a message so powerful that its impact will linger long after the last page is turned.
-1- The books lay tossed amongst the trash. Dill hung over the edge of the dumpster and flipped through the titles. Melville, Atwood, Sinclair, Thurber, Laurence: the novels were all shit as far as he was concerned, and it was easy for him to understand why they were in the garbage. Still, they might be worth enough to provide the first fix of the day, so he brushed a wilted shred of lettuce from the cover of Moby Dick and added the heavy tome to his shopping cart. It made no sense that anyone would use so many words when a few would do. Words could really bog down a good story. A sharp stab of pain brought Dill back to the reality of the situation. His body needed drugs. Now. Taking a last, desperate glance at the contents of the dumpster, the sick junkie picked up all the books he could find and dropped them into his East Van Taxi. Spasms of liquid agony ripped at his bowels and his sphincter threatened to explode. How could he possibly make it all the way to the bookstore and back? It just didn’t seem possible. The wheels of Dill’s shopping cart bounced along the rutted alley. Discarded clothing and garbage of all kinds made navigation difficult, but he plowed through puddles of stinking water and dodged fellow junkies as if motoring on the Autobahn. Nothing short of a nuclear strike could stop him from reaching his destination. “Hey!” shouted a toothless wreck of a man. “Slow the fuck down! Yer gonna run over somebody if ya don’t look out!” He went back to digging in his arm with a loaded syringe. There had to be a vein there somewhere. Dill ignored him and continued recklessly down the alley. If these fools wouldn’t get out of the way, it was hardly his fault. The cart rolled over a clump of shit and the right front wheel stained the asphalt with ever-diminishing splotches of brown. He didn’t care about the excrement, or a car that nearly struck him; in fact, he cared for nothing but the hunt. Waves of nausea wracked his guts and hydrochloric acid ran in his veins. It was drug stabbing time. The bookstore was on Main Street, four blocks distant. It seemed to Dill that he was pushing his cart up the side of a mountain––a mountain that got progressively steeper with each step. Sweat rolled freely from his scalp and his sockless feet grew slippery inside tattered combat boots. At least the holes offered ventilation. Then, without warning, a rear wheel slipped into a crack in the sidewalk and the cart came to an abrupt stop. Dill, of course, piled into it at full speed, barking his shin painfully against the bottom rack. Tears sprang instantly to his eyes. “FUCK!” he screamed, bending to rub the injured limb. Holding onto the side of the cart for support, the junkie shook his fist at the sky and cursed the gods for his miserable existence. Surely no benevolent god would punish him so relentlessly, and in every aspect of his life. Traffic thundered past, and the people in the cars did not care about the angry man at the side of the road. To them, he was invisible. The desperate addict resumed pushing the cart up the mountain. His shin throbbed painfully and molten steel flowed where his marrow had once been. Deliriously, he imagined buzzards circling in the sky above him, ready to strip the last leathery bits of flesh from his bones. Up and up he went, as the oxygen grew thin. Where were his Sherpa guides? Then, just when he was absolutely certain he could not take another step, Dill reached the peak of the summit and stood trembling in the frigid air. The book-store was at the far end of the street, shimmering like a mirage. Dill ran toward it, his feet flying as he pushed the cart at top speed and with reckless abandon. Citizens at a bus stop scattered as the madman screeched to a halt with his shopping cart full of trash. They watched from a safe distance as the gaunt, unshaven scarecrow pulled a stack of hardcover books from the cart and dashed into the store. How could anyone possibly live like that? A small bell over the door ring-dinged as Dill made his entrance. The clerk behind the counter frowned as he took in the shabby clothing and wretched appearance of the customer. It would be tricky for the new arrival to steal anything with his hands full of books, but the clerk tracked his every movement just the same. You could never be too careful. “Can I help you?” asked the clerk, eyeing the books dubiously. “You sure can,” answered Dill. “What will you give me for these?” He placed the musty books gently on the counter. Suddenly they didn’t look so valuable. The clerk lifted a copy of Atwood’s Life Before Man and held it at arm’s length. “Where did you get these, anyway? They stink!” Dill ignored the question. “How much?” he asked, as a knife of need perforated his kidneys. He had no time to haggle. “Five bucks.” “For each of them, right?” said Dill. “The lot,” said the clerk. Why did the junkies always act as if the books they brought in were the undiscovered works of Shakespeare? Perhaps it wasn’t too late to look into the refrigeration course his mother was always nagging him about. “You’ve got to be kidding!” Dill said angrily. “You know these books are worth at least five apiece. If I look on your shelves, I bet I’ll find similar titles selling for ten bucks minimum!” The clerk scowled. The customer was always right, except when he was a strung-out piece of shit junkie. “It doesn’t matter how much we sell our books for, and I’m certainly not going to argue about it. Five bucks––take it or leave it.” Dill had already resigned himself to failure. Fever swept across him like a forest fire. He was going to die. “Ten bucks and they’re yours,” he said, head bowed submissively. “Seven. Best I can do,” said the clerk. Dill looked up sharply. “Done.” He hadn’t expected the clerk to budge. Now he knew for sure he was getting ripped off, but what could he do? He took the money. The mountain Dill had climbed to get to the bookstore was now only a mild slope. His shopping cart slid down the hill at warp speed, faster than a heart attack. Soon he was back on the Downtown Eastside, scanning the streets desperately for the first available dealer. He didn’t have far to look, but there were other considerations. Chico, standing in front of B&G Market, always had good product, but would absolutely not give any credit. Manny, slouched up against a streetlight, sold shit that stopped just short of being total poison. Wanda the Witch never had the best gear, but under the circumstances, she was his only real choice. Dill rolled up with his cart, and he was gasping like a carp. “Gimme a dime.” Wanda sneered. “Money,” she said, muttering into a shabby grey scarf. Bundled in many layers of ratty clothing, the middle-aged street dealer was as short and squat as a Volkswagen. Eyes like darts penetrated Dill, and it was very clear that she cared little for his plight. “Actually, I’m three bucks short. I was hopin’ ya might let me slide for a day or two.” Dill tried to hand Wanda the seven dollars. His heart thudded weakly. “No fuckin’ way,” Wanda said, without taking the money. She was the ice queen. “Aw, gimme a break, Wanda! If I wanted ta get shut down I coulda gone to Chico. At least his product is the real thing.” “Whaddya mean by that?” glared Wanda. Now her eyes were chips of granite. “Nuthin’ Wanda––can’t ya just cut me a break?” Dill cursed himself for pounding a nail in his own coffin. No way would Wanda front him now. “Get lost.” It was all over, and there was no court of appeal. Dill pushed his cart away blindly, lost in misery. He stopped and sat down on the steps at the First United Church, buried his head in his hands. His withdrawal symptoms, kept at bay by the thought of scoring, returned full force. The world just kept on sucking and sucking. There was nothing left––nothing left to suck. “What’s wrong, Dill?” asked a caring female voice. Dill lifted his head and snot dribbled like water from his nose. It was Angie, prostitute and addict––friend and neighbour. “I’m sick, Angie. I got seven bucks but nobody wants to front me. I’m almost desperate enough to score from Manny.” He clenched his ass cheeks tightly to prevent brown water from squirting into his boxers. His body was shutting down. “Don’t do that!” said Angie, with alarm. “I hear he’s been cutting his junk with meat tenderizer again!” Her thin frame shuddered as she imagined nasty chemicals eating through her veins. “Listen, I’ll lend ya three bucks, just stay away from Manny.” She dug in a tiny handbag and came up with a string of condoms and a few loonies. “I love you, Angie!” said Dill, leaping up to take the coins from her hands. It didn’t matter at all that craters covered her face, or that her bleached blonde hair was falling out in clumps. She was an angel, heaven sent. “Whatever,” said Angie, dismissing him with a wave of her bony hand. “Now go get well––you look like shit!” She scratched at her arms with lazy heroin fingers. Dill almost kissed her on the cheek, but caught himself at the last second. “Don’t worry about getting the money back––you’re the first person I’ll pay back on welfare day.” He rushed off, abandoning his cart altogether. Angie laughed, displaying a hole in her smile where an incisor should have been. “I’m sure you will, honey.” She wasn’t going to bank on it. Minutes later, Dill was in an alley, unwrapping a spitball with hands that were suddenly tremour free and steady. Before he managed to get the layers of green plastic open, however, a police car screeched around the corner and two cops jumped out. “Dill,” said the driver, snatching the spitball from the junkie’s disbelieving fingers. “How many times do we gotta tell you to take that fucking shit down to the safe injection site? You know better than this.” He smeared the fruit of Dill’s labour into the concrete with the heel of his Brogan. Nothing remained of the heroin but a dirty beige streak. “Now get outta here, and next time you go to jail.” Addicts were only supposed to get one chance, but Dill had already had three. There wasn’t nearly enough room in the city lockup for every minor drug violator. Dill wanted to scream. How the fuck was he supposed to have waited until he got to the safe injection site? The cops might as well have asked him to quote passages from the Koran. His bowels, which had been ready to forgive him until now, reacted to this latest outrage by voiding a foul and soupy liquid into his pants. The police car drove away and Dill fell into a pit of the deepest despair.
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