Another Brave Choice

My climb up from homelessness.

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The motel door opens. Sunlight pierces the blackness inside the room. Used needles and scavenged junk fill the space. Two people are there—a man and a woman. The man is in his early 20s. Thin. Pale skin. His teeth are going bad, jagged, broken. The woman is in her 50s. She’s in a bathrobe, laying on a double bed with legs sprawled out. Craters from old abscesses mark her calves like a fleshy battlefield. Wounds from old infected fentanyl injections.

Each one signals an attempt to escape her pain, both existential and physical.

Fentanyl has her on the nod. A tiny stream of blood dribbles from the injection site down to her wrist. A dog is there–a big Shepard / husky mix. It’s with her on the bed. Ears perked up. Alert. It does not bark or growl at me. Just watches. Intently.

The room stinks. Body odour, excrement, second hand meth smoke. I hold my breath to prevent the stench from reaching into my lungs. Movement catches my attention. My head turns. A young boy’s reflection in the window of a nearby room, his face a flicker across time.

A memory is triggered.

It’s nighttime. 1982. I’m 11, looking at Houston, Texas through the broken window of a welfare motel called The King George. My mom and 15 year old brother are with me.

Social services gave us a voucher to stay for free.

On the run from mom’s bad marriage, our escape route led from Detroit to Houston. Dick was her husband. He was a college professor. She was an auto factory worker at the time. Dick treated her well at first. Fine dining, weekend trips. Atlantic City and Vegas. They got married. We moved in with him.

Soon after, mom was laid off from the factory. Dick turned out to be an alcoholic. He downed a couple of martinis at lunch to make it through his afternoon classes. At night it was a bottomless stream of vodka drinks. Dick was a mean drunk. Mom went from being his “honey,” to being a “gold digger” and a “parasite.”

One night I heard them fighting upstairs. Roaring man. Woman screaming back. A slap. His hand on her face. My mom was a fighter. I was confused why she didn’t hit him back.

Was she afraid of him?

In her defence, I grabbed my pellet gun. It was a pump action. With every pump, the pellet had more air pressure behind it. I shot Dick. The pellet blasted his foot.

The fighting got more frequent. I began to expect it and started to withdraw. Powerless to stop the conflict, I wondered if things would be better if I didn’t exist.

A hard question for a ten year old to ponder.

I locked myself in the bathroom with a butcher knife and a bottle of extra strength Tylenol trying to find an answer. I didn’t attempt suicide, but I held the knife and the pill bottle, considering it.

We left Dick while he was at work. It was a hard choice for mom. She still loved him. And, given her status—a single mother with no savings—she was taking a brave leap of faith, like a teenage girl hitchhiking from the Atlantic side of the country, heart pulled by the dream of the west.

Mom pawned her wedding ring to fuel our trip to Texas. There was no reason to stay in Detroit. Economically, the whole mid-west was in shambles. Poverty, record unemployment.

Down south it was different. The economy had boomed with oil. Thousands of rust belt families descended, following the collapse of the auto industry. We were one of those families, but our migration happened too late. When we reached the south, Houston was drying and the oil industry was bottoming out. Massive lineups formed for the few available jobs and vacant housing. Cheap motels flashed no vacancy. When people could no longer afford the daily rates, they went to the street.

We started our time in Texas at one of those motels—a place off the interstate called The Roadrunner—but ended up living in our car.

I was excited for the King George. Car life made us vulnerable. We moved constantly to evade detection by police and the looming threat of foster care. At night, perverts knocked on the windows, propositioning my mom, leering at her, me, and my brother. A hotel would beb reprive. I imagined the King George was upscale, given the name. I pictured an indoor swimming pool under an atrium, surrounded by tropical plants, a hot tub, rec. room, comfy beds.

Situated on Preston Avenue, near the Greyhound depot, the King George was in a rough neighbourhood. A place of transients, desperate addicts, and predators of various sorts.

We arrived in the evening.

The lobby was empty except for a young, dark skinned woman in her late teens with blue shadowed eyes and red painted lips. She wore skimpy clothing. Edgy and restless, she sat on the edge of a dingy green vinyl sofa. A television mounted above her caused a play of light on her cheek. My brother drew her attention.

Would he be the one?

At the far end of the lobby sat the clerk. Indifferent at first—an old man who had checked poor luck people into that place for decades and he didn’t care anymore, not for the people coming in, maybe not even for himself. Cigarette smoke billowed around his head like a formaldehyde spectre promising a slow and ugly death–one that he was already living, but when he looked up at my mother, his face changed. He saw her.

Men always turned their heads toward her.

Red headed woman. Feminine, yet solid. Green eyes. Striking, like a Sophia Lauren face. Dressed decently in job interview clothes. She was a trained singer, master of voice. She devoured literature: Whitman, Emerson, Henry Miller, Ayn Rand, Thoreau. She loved good conversation–ideas, politics, science, philosophy, religion, art—anything but emotional talk. Emotions were ephemeral. They could be like quicksand if one wallowed too long in them. The clerk didn’t know any of this; couldn’t identify the facets that made up the character of her existence, but he recognized that she carried a certain dignity and an intelligence incongruous with the filth of that place.

“Before ya’ll sign in,” he said, deep Texas accent, eyes cradled by big purple bags, “have a look at the place. See if ya’ll belong here or not.” He handed over the room key, pointed to the stairs.

“Elevator don’t work,” he said.

Upstairs was more like a holding centre for the sick, addicted, and mentally ill rather than a place to stabilize and get back on your feet. It was a filthy meat locker of throwaway human wreckage, forgotten about and left to rot. Rats scurried down barely lit halls, navigating an obstacle course of empty booze bottles and garbage. Intermingling smells of spilled alcohol, vomit, and decades worth of stale cigarette smoke penetrated the very structure of the building like rust eating into metal. In the hallway I saw a man’s body slumped against the wall.

From the looks of it, he may have been dead.

In the room which was to be ours up on the third floor, we found a place curated from a nightmare. No sheets or blankets on the bed. Mattress stained from various fluids that had leaked out of hundreds of bodies over the years; a spray of old blood across the wall. Traces of someone’s DNA.

Had they lost hope and ended it in that place?

I stood in the broken window, looking out on the neon flashing of the city at night, feeling the chill in the unheated room, wondering if it could get any worse.

The clerk was right. It wasn’t for us. My brother argued. He was drawn to explore the dark hallways. He wanted to poke the man slumped against the wall just to see what would happen. He was looking for stories and experience in shadowy places. He was fascinated by the macabre: Alice Cooper. The Exorcist. He dreamt of playing guitar in a heavy metal band. He would name it Executioner.

My mother was unwavering. She knew that if we chose to willingly climb into that six story sewer hole with its broken people and bottomless negativity (the cardinal sin in my mom’s book), odds were we would never get out.

“Choose your thoughts carefully,” she often instructed me. “Your thoughts become your actions. Your actions become your life.”

As we crossed the King George’s lobby, the young woman on the couch was still there. She was waiting for something or someone—a deliverance of one kind or another. Sex, money, drugs. It didn’t matter. Searching for anything to fill her holes. Ignorant to her divinity. Open to whatever might choose her—some person, some circumstance, some experience to help her feel something. My brother eyed her again. Hers starred back. He walked out of the lobby with us, but he wanted to go to her. Mom took my little hand as we stepped onto Preston Avenue. Another night into the unknown, but we would face it with some agency.

Another brave choice.

Her hand around mine was safety. Warm and loving, yet strong and protective. On our way back to the car which was to be our home for many more nights, in cities across the West, she spoke with her deep resonate tone:

“Don’t you ever think you have to settle for something like that. When you get the feeling something isn’t right, listen to it. And don’t you ever take for granted the power of choice.”

Back in the present, 43 years later, the man who opened the door for me is beside the older woman. He is checking on her. They have been through a lot. They share blood.

Mother and son.

The dog remains on the bed, still the silent witness. Does he wonder why we humans imprison ourselves, shackled to our stories, tied to our addictions, bound to both fear and comfort even while they slowly kill us?

Entering further into the room. Mouth breathing to avoid the smell. Two backpacks hanging from my shoulders. One with first aid and harm reduction gear; the other with nutritive supports. Remembering the old clerk at the King George asking if we belonged there.

Do I belong here?

All my life, I used choice like a machete, clearing a path that would otherwise entangle me. Eventually leaving the nightmare of cities I was homeless in–Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. I went from being a drop out to getting a degree in biological sciences. I pulled myself out of poverty. Pushing myself towards greater levels of Self-realization, over decades and mountain ranges. Homesteading in Alaska and researching grizzly bears on wild northern coasts. Then moving to Canada. Becoming an artist. Taking a job in social services. As a man of 54, I’m drug and alcohol free. I don’t even eat sugar. I wake at dawn to study, meditate, move my body, lift weights. Health is my priority. I mean this physically, emotionally, and spiritually. I’m ecstatically married with a family and a stable little home out of town, at the edge of the Selkirk Range.

Deliberate steps toward a better reality.

And yet, this job connects me to my past. Standing in a motel room on the side of the highway where a mother and son live in squalor, seeing my younger self in a streaked window pane.

Mirror reflection. A spiral pattern. Circular but ever expanding.

I ask the man what he and his mother need. He’s tentative. Moving away from the light streaming in, back toward the piles of trash and shadows.

Sleep deprived. Tweaking a little.

He has always been unsure of me. His trepidation extends to all social service workers. His life has been lived at the extreme edge. Born addicted to crack, barely attended primary school. Home has been garages, campers, tents, trailers, and cheap motel rooms like this.

He lived under the threat of being taken away from his mother by social workers. The people he grew up around were beaten, abused, and addicted to drugs. A feedback loop of trauma.

Thieves and gangsters were his role models.

His starting point in life was as far back as it gets. Given the context of his birth, the reality he was raised in, it would be surprising if he wasn’t an addict. He doesn’t know our lives were similar; he’s not aware of our parallels—that as a child my biggest fear was also being taken away from my mother.

He accepts the supports I have—protein drinks, bandages for wounds, Narcan to reverse overdose, a box of clean syringes—but looks away, staring at the TV instead of making eye contact, taking the bag of supplies with fingers that are carbonized from a meth torch.

The dog still watches, loyal to his pack, yet shifting, muscles ready to leap toward the freedom of the open door.

I look at the woman, still on the nod, alive but somewhere else. She doesn’t know I’m there. The blood trail down her arm is drying, a thin red line on a map leading nowhere.

I think of my mother’s hand in mine, that night in Houston.

Her grip pulled me from the King George’s pit. She chose to walk away, facing the mystery of another night on the street, guided by the belief that she would find a way to free us. Her example became a way of life for me and so I chose to keep climbing—up and out of decrepit cities, through pain, through my own trauma. Each step swinging that machete, carving a path to the mountains, to a life of health I built by intention, discipline, and will.

But here, in this dark room, choice is a phantom. The world the son and his mother inhabit is a prison cell I don’t have the keys to open. I can point toward them, but no one can free another person from a cage built from within. All I can offer is some immediate relief to get them through the day and (if they notice) serve as a living example that another life is possible.

When our exchange is done I step back into the blazing light. The little boy in the window is gone—my younger self in the dirty glass, a faraway point on the spiral’s arc. I start the engine then pull onto the highway. The motel fades in my rear view, but the stink of the room clings to me.

Soap can’t wash it.

Sometimes it takes months to clear what I see during the course of a day from my psyche. Driving home, tires on asphalt humming toward the highlands of spruce and pine. My mother’s voice cuts through:

“Don’t you ever think you have to settle for something like that.”

I repeat this line of simple advice to myself, aloud. Her deep tone and cadence is palpable, as though she’s in the seat beside me, whispering guidance from another lifetime as I ascend toward the mountain pass.