Prologue

Shadow and Muscle

In the big city where I live—Toronto, which has been my home for my entire life—there are 16,000 homeless people living among us. The shelters are stuffed with bodies, and, every winter, dozens of men and women are found dead on the streets. The decline in mental health services and the clawing away of the jobless safety net by successive government regimes has made it harder for people to find their way back after falling through the economic cracks. According to the City of Toronto’s annual homeless report, half a million Toronto households have incomes below the poverty line; a quarter of a million pay more than 30 percent of their income on rent; 71,000 families are on the city’s waiting list for affordable social housing; and 32,000 citizens (including 6,500 children) stayed in a shelter at least one night over the past year. These numbers, however, suffer from the nature of their subject. Accurately counting homeless people is a little like chasing ghosts, and the number is almost always higher, considering the depth of the shadows they are forced to occupy.

Despite the pervasiveness of the homeless, many of us—myself included—pass them as if moving through the shadow of a cloud. Slumped against the sides of buildings, surrounded by shopping bags at the end of a bench in a frozen bus shelter, or curled in the fetal position under the glare of a bank kiosk’s lights, they may become for us almost like pigeons: you throw them a crumb every now and then and watch their reaction out of the corner of your eye while you keep moving. Interaction is limited, but occasionally, lives intersect.

One afternoon, while riding her bike, my wife happened across a fallen man hanging halfway into traffic over the curbside. She stopped and asked if he was okay and if he might want to take himself out of the way of traffic for fear of being run over. He roused himself long enough to pull his body to safety. She started to pedal away, but the man raised his head and said: “Hold on, wait.” Janet turned back. He rubbed his face for a moment, then asked her: “So, how are you doing?”

Homelessness and poverty aren’t limited to my town, and to yours. While putting this book together, I opened the front section of the September 12, 2009, edition of the International Herald Tribune and, as an experiment, tried looking for stories in which these issues were the focus. It hadn’t seemed like a particularly distressing week; yet the paper was teeming with stories of dissolution and hardship. Over an 18-page folio, I read about dispossessed schoolchildren in North Carolina whose families had suffered mortgage defaults and foreclosures; Kenyans from Lake Turkana who had recently filled the slums of Nairobi after a prolonged summer drought; impoverished Bulgarian farmers who’d been victimized by governmental corruption and scandal; shopkeepers from Gabon attempting to rebuild their businesses after they’d been torched during election riots; a Mexican “Thriller” dance marathon organized to help allay tensions suffered during a record year of drug-related violence; the resignation of the Taiwanese prime minister after his inept handling of Typhoon Morakut left thousands of people displaced; the nomadic necessities of Sri Lanka’s Tamil community; an incarcerated Californian lamenting how the world’s economic crisis had led to the winnowing of food allotments in prison; four separate stories about the rootlessness of wartorn Afghanis; the largesse of rapper Ludacris, who donated 20 cars to contest winners chosen from over 4,000 laid-off workers; and the new novel by writer E.L. Doctorow, which documents the life of New York brothers who are notorious hoarders and who live in squalor until a newspaper tower collapses, killing one of them.

In the past, my encounters with the homeless and the dispossessed had been mostly limited to struggling artists and road-bound minstrels—people living on the fringes of art whom I’d met while travelling with my Canadian rock band. But my experiences weren’t exclusive to life on the road. There was Irene, for instance, a former Cuban soap opera actress who’d fled her country after being threatened by the government for a controversial documentary she’d made.

Janet and I met her after answering the door one winter’s evening. The first thing she asked us was whether or not she could have an old futon that we’d put at the curb. We told her that she could, and as we turned around to throw on our winter coats, she started crying. My wife consoled her while I stood there feeling awkward and bewildered. We helped her carry the bed over our heads and shoulders to her basement apartment like a lonely parade float. Afterwards, she returned to our home, and we talked for a while. She told us about her government’s oppression, how they’d threatened her with a lifetime jail sentence, and how she’d sought asylum here after attending a conference in Ottawa. We made plans to get together, but, a few months later, without notice, Irene moved away.

Many years passed before I saw her again, sitting with her husband on the subway. It was the dreary heart of February, and they had the hoods of their parkas pulled tightly around their faces, shading their eyes. I moved to talk to them, but Irene could barely speak. At their feet lay two shopping bags filled with their belongings. I asked how things were going, and she said, “Not well. It is very hard. My husband is sad, having had to leave Cuba.” Her eyes had turned hard and cold, drained of their soft Caribbean light. Her arms, which once butterflied when she spoke, sat motionless at her sides. When she reached her stop, I said goodbye, and then she and her husband disappeared into the muscle of the city.

Irene wasn’t the only one. In my recreational hockey league there was a referee named Jim MacTavish. Jim was a good guy and a good ref. No one ever had anything bad to say against him. He ran games in a calm, friendly, and communicative way, as opposed to simply policing the ice. He was one of the few officials who showed up at the league’s social events, and whenever it was time to make hockey cards for the league’s players, there was always a square of cardboard reserved for Jim. Then, one summer, Jim stopped showing up to his assigned games. League organizers were unable to locate him. Some time later, he was found living on his own in the parks and alleyways of Parkdale, Toronto’s hardscrabble west-end corridor. One league official, who lived in the area, asked Jim if he needed a place to sleep, but Jim refused, his old demons having found their way back into his life. Knowing him as I did, I never would have suspected that his troubles ran so deep. He’d kept his problems secret, not wanting to burden his friends with them. Jim was the father of two children, both of them unaware of his condition. He’d been divorced and, before he disappeared, he’d broken up with his girlfriend. There was nobody left for him but himself.

One evening, news reached the league that a man resembling Jim had been found floating off Port Credit harbour, along the shoreline of Lake Ontario. The coroner reported that his body had been drifting in the water for weeks. At his memorial, a friend told us that whenever they talked about death, Jim told him that when it was his time to go, he wanted to swim into the lake and just vanish. To his friend, Jim had just been bullshitting—as we all do—about our mortality, stupid drunken babbling that you forget about the next morning. Looking back, those around him should have seen signs of his demise, but the homeless, the jobless, and those who are torn apart from their families often descend in silence, too proud to ask anything of others, too weak and fatigued to cry for help.