I spent the past few days training at my new job at the women’s shelter. It’s a very secure building, as shelters normally are. An average shift inside this particular one feels like time spent in an Antarctic research station, all tenebrous lighting and whirring fans and a closed off, far-away feeling.

The building is old. It is a warren of hallways and stairwells and blank concrete alcoves. Walls are press board thin.

There’s no windows. To see the daylight women have to go outside or to the smokeroom in the back alley, a fenced-off area where the grease barrel is also stored, and the Dumpster.

At the beginning of the shift when I ring the entrance buzzer there’s the almost-perceptible sting of being looked at through the camera. I imagine I’ll get used to it.

The outside world with its dangers and downfalls must be isolated to afford the residents a portion of safety but after only two days my uncynical assessment is  the women here are their own worst enemies. Same as with everyone. Still I want to see more. I want to know the stories.

Sometimes I don’t care about the stories though. I just want everyone to behave so I can relax for a fucking minute, and take my 15 minute break in some dark corner with my lukewarm Mr Coffee in a big Dixie cup. I won’t use the mugs in the kitchen.

I wash my hands constantly. Everything is messy, dirty, fucked-with. I can’t keep up.

I have a strange, stinging wound on my arm that I incurred a few days before starting my shifts and even still a part of me is irrationaly convinced I pricked myself on a needle.

I love women for our vulnerabilities, roughness, despair and frazzled eyes/hair/speech. I hate all these same qualities. I want us to behave, to learn to adapt, to not be broken and weak and self-destructive. To be broken is to be useless. I want to see dignity. I want people to be worth saving. But I do not want to fall into that trap, that “helper occupation” trap, of thinking people are either saved or not – that glib division of humanity into little worthiness sacs, tidy dimensions of salvation, approval contingent on an authoritarian”if”…

Food is provided, and kitchen facilities are available around the clock, and the dormitories do not have locks. There is a television room with sofas and a dining room with a TV. There are no books but there are well-thumbed magazines. Vanity Fair, People, Better Homes and Gardens, miscellaneous free newspapers, and out-of-date advertising fliers.

I’ve heard the word cunt so much these past few days.

“Get off my ass you fucking cunt, you’re always on my goddamn fucking ass, take a PMS pill or something you fucking sea-hag!”

“Don’t look at me/speak to me/shake your head at me that way you stupid fucking goddamn CUNT”

“Tell your cunt boyfriend to stop ringing the ga-damn cunting phone off the hook all night long; that is SO RUDE in a building with 40 other ga-damn women in it!” (there is one public phone for personal calls)

etc.

Toe-to-toe scraps between women in pajamas from Chinatown, the cheap flannel kind with squinting-laughing cartoon characters.

Spatulas thrown, insults thrown, a hardboiled egg thrown. I thought a woman was on the floor looking under a cupboard for something but she was dizzy from her methadone treatment. Sat down with her, got some juice into her. A woman falls asleep drunk in a chair, a pile of chicken bones in front of her, her dentures sticking out – a horrifying imitation of death.

At 10PM or so the rain is coming down and rattling on the metal cladding. The place is bustling, everyone is waking up or moving around. Like vampires they become active when it’s dark. A dozen or so women are fighting for bathroom mirror space to get ready to go out to prostitute. Faucets run full blast. The bathrooms fill with the smell of Finesse hair spray, deodorant spray,  other drugstore cosmetic smells.

One woman razors her eyebrows into trim lines and then blacks them over. Her hair is brushed into a perfect, shiny black curtain. She walks past me down the hallway as I push a mop along, and she arches one eyebrow perfectly, dismissive.

If I didn’t clean the bedrooms I’d not guess their horrible hygiene – the beds full of broken glass, cosmetics, scratched-off Lottery tickets, syringe caps, empty wrappers and other garbage. The floors with spills, piles of clothes. Bedrooms like crime scenes. Dead flowers, moldering cups of chocolate milk, a shitty smell like morning breath. Whenever I push open a door I expect to find a body.

In the bathrooms, messy ablutions – Red lipstick shared back and forth, heavy foundation to help hide the sores, tight jeans over no underwear, cloth coats not suited to the rain falling outside. One woman spent the evening being sick, looking stringy-haired and slippery-pale as she walked around moaning and heaving. She emerges from the bathroom with her dry hair crackling-curly, dramatic lined eyes, a denim dress and smelling like she’d coated her sweating, thin body with a thick layer of Secret. She has a drug problem and HIV; she has to go out and earn more money. In an hour or so she’ll come back and warm up with some eggs before heading back out into the rain.

NO BARRIER housing means you can do whatever you want and not get kicked out. It is designed to encourage people to seek help or safety as they are, in even their lowest moments, without risk of judgment or being forced to jump through hoops, or being told to go away… in your shameful state.

Just don’t throw stuff at staff, and don’t do drugs inside the building (or at least not where staff can see you).

Most of the women are addicted or active in the sex trade or in some way fucked up.
A few are drug-free and keep to themselves but are in some way fucked up.

“The mainstream” at this point is a crushing current that would sweep them further away. So the shelter provides a tidepool. For better or worse, here we are…

I got sweaty-palmed anyway and for one day I took this site offline, intending to purge it of all work-related content.  It’s one thing to know that your co-worker is a poet, or an underground radio host, or a stripper on the side. But on this site I reveal a lot more that can be used against me, I think.

Then I looked at the scope of what I’ve written and work talk is everywhere. I got really lazy, basically. I’ve left everything as-is. Hopefully I can trust my colleagues, should they stumble across this hot mess. And hopefully I will become less divisive when it comes to my arbitrary and delusional “this is real life (writing)” VS “this is FAKE life (working)” dichotomy.

Plus, all names and locations have been changed, edited, or otherwise half-arsedly disguised. To protect the innocent!

On alone-mornings I climb into the cycling gear needed to keep me dry/illuminated/warm, eat a half-assed breakfast, dash on some lipstick to feel dressed-up although it will be licked off by the time I navigate traffic and arrive at work. I dream my way through the faked urban wilderness of the Greenway, swerve around slow-moving buses on Commercial Drive and envy the few people I see populating the JJ Bean at 6 in the morning, absorbed in books or papers and warmly getting caffeinated behind windows dripping with condensation. I hang counter-intuitive rights that go contrary to the bike lane and so earn me some honks – but the buttonhooks conveniently lead me into the heart of Vancouver’s shit district, the downtowneastside – all one breathless word of paranoid projection and cliche. Where I do have to dodge minivans, SUVs, a gamut of family vehicles driven by furtive men with their hoods pulled up, suburban family men with a need/taste for winter a.m. prostitutes in clonky Payless boots, crack acne, thin jeans caked around thin thighs and a harsh, begging glow in their eyes.

And I arrive on time, with 15  or 10 minutes to spare but no one notices or says hello. I just take up my post: 4th floor, a quarter-acre of hallway and bathrooms and a smoking room and 1 weak library conisting of Danielle Steels and cowboy westerns that smell like mould. As a housekeeper I am not one of the  ‘looked-at’ woman of society, I am the ‘back-drop’ person, someone who is invisible until something isn’t done. Someone who doesn’t take it personally when residents piss with the door open, piss on the floor, spill their coffees as they race up the stores in a jacked-up delirium; they ash their endless cigarettes all over the floor with a demented-offended “Fuck YOU” if you say anything.

And I ride through the dark streets with the city neon providing more illumination than any threat of dawn. It’s still dark and I am going to work at a ‘casual’ job. that is, a position that belongs to someone else and I’m just making ends meet while they go on holiday or call in real- or fake-sick. And my own impulse to write-off the day is very strong. I would like to call in sick and be drunk by 8 am on mimosas, or some other acceptable morning beverage at a breakfast dive, as I write in my notebook. I’d like to read my book for an uninteruppted 3 hour span with my coffee getting cold beside me. Wouldn’t we all?

There is something threatening about the touch of dawn on the massed-but-not-yet-bleeding rainclouds. In the morning I am always reminded of a loneliness that I’ve always felt haunted by, a feeling that threatens to shout gangway and trample my head. A creeping, sneaking loneliness, and it’s nothing so eloquent as ‘solitude.’