I finished a feature first draft the other day. It hangs together as far as What Happens and The Most Important Relationship, but there's a lot that's still thin. It's the kind of thin where I need someone else to evaluate it. I can see where the hole will form but what's missing from the weave--or how it's missing and how it needs to be woven in--is something I need from other minds.
There are more autobiographical elements in this story than I've ever put in any other story. I have evaded overt personal history in my fictional work for over a decade, though it finds its way. This is more like the Canadian Version of what being institutionalized at a young age would be like, as well as the less flight-driven path that probably would've followed. It's hard to say--I can only make up a version of my own.
The clearest reminder I have of the near-miss I experienced in Olympia, WA, is in fact Vancouver's Downtown East Side. Seattle's version of that is Pioneer Square. I spent a night in the Downtown Emergency Shelter, and had it not been for the sheer good luck of motivated family friends, I might have lost my footing that morning. Because I sure as fuck didn't have any family present to take up the slack. The closest blood relations I had in the western part of the continent were cousins on Vancouver Island, and again, sheer luck that they were in a position to help me find my way to this present version.
But I hold on to those moments. Not just because they were traumatic, but because they are instructive. This is the contract a storyteller makes with their experiences. It's the story I consult when I pass by Pigeon Park, and I see the community devastated by substance use. I remind myself that as uncomfortable as it is to witness, to witness and not be witnessed is a blessing. There is no way to explain this to someone who hasn't landed in a homeless shelter in clothes that don't belong to them, with no wallet, identification, or clear sense of self. This is not an equivalence, but it is insight. I did not go over the edge, but I did see across it, and I know what that fate looks like.
I don't know how to write about the DTES. The way I write about it in the script is more incidental and story-servicing than it is intended to be a nuanced representation. It will have to change, and be part of the larger story as the central dramatic argument takes shape. It's better to learn to forgive someone for their mistakes than it is to force someone to change. Forgiveness is the the release of all hope for a better past. These are tenents of harm reduction that can only be applied with near-pious levels of faith before they have any chance of making a difference. Some people never stop making mistakes, but you have to keep forgiving them because society ceases to have any real meaning when you leave the dying to perish and the dead unburied. Our ancestors set that standard thousands of years ago, and you can bet they had a few difficult cases on their hands.
Where it matters to me as someone outside is using a light stroke that is respectful, honest and not adopting any perspectives I have no right to. But this script is about Vancouver, and because I am determined to portray it honestly, I can't do that without incorporating what is one of our most defining features. We are immensely good at propagandizing our beautiful landscapes and multicultural offerings, but I'm glad that we don't have any way of really hiding the DTES, because it's been stubbornly parked right where it is for decades. Most people who live here probably find a way to block it out when they have to pass through it, but I try to look. I try to see what's happening. I keep an eye on the flashing lights and the paramedics, the loitering cops and the people in various states of being, or un-being.
The last person I know of to tell a story about anything like the DTES was David Simon in season 4 of the Wire. Hamsterdam was different in the sense that it was an attempt to ghettoize the substance use community outside of civilization. The unpreparedness of the authorities is similar in the sense that it never seems we are reacting in a way that sticks, and that our emergency services are constantly being drawn into the chaos to the detriment of their abilty to perform city-wide. Social workers and medical professionals who work with this community will tell you the biggest challenge they have, aside from those associated with being unhoused, is tracing members of the community to help them stay up to date with their medications and treatment. Paramedics will tell you they've narcan'd the same people multiple times. My partner, who manages the night desk at a supportive housing building, has also revived the same people multiple times. There is a pattern and a flow here that has been totally neglected in the stories we tell about ourselves as people of this city.
So I can really only go on my imagination. And I can only place my characters in such a way that their eyes provide windows into this very dark place. I want those windows to show something true, because something absolutely rebels in me at the thought of ever praising a city or a nation, especially mine, for accomplishments that are undermined by something so brazenly cruel.
I saw that dark place myself when I was 21, and my mental condition was almost completely disabling. I think other people need to see it. I think a lot of fear and rejection of solutions comes from an existential misapprehension of how invested we need to be if we want anything to change--which is more that regions beyond Vancouver are willing to offer. If the DTES is proof of anything it's that having to witness isn't the thing that destroys a society. Not being able to forgive fallibility or self-harm transcends the locale. Anyone can end up on the other side of the window.
