After All(46)

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Knowing I have a captive audience who might go report this down the entertainment grapevine, I say, "It's actually going really well. It's still really early of course, I met her at a mutual friend's wedding. But she's really quite special."

"She's very pretty," Tina, my makeup artist says, as she presses powder onto my forehead. "So natural looking."

"Yeah, she definitely doesn't seem very LA," Julian says. "Except for her tits, am I right mate? They have to be real."

For some reason it bothers me to hear him talk about Alyssa that way.

Remember, you're her supposed boyfriend. You should be bothered.

"That's none of your business," I tell him. "But yes, everything about her is real."

Well, everything except our relationship.

"So refreshing to see a man like you find a nice, normal girl," Yvonne, our wardrobe girl says as she adjusts the tie on the black suit I'm wearing for the scene. "Gives the rest of us hope."

"Yeah," Tina says with a dreamy sigh. "And to think you met at a wedding. It's just so romantic. She must feel like she's in a fairy-tale dating you."

Or a nightmare. It's hard to tell with her sometimes.

When the scene is over, fifty million takes later and all Julian's fault, not mine, I get in my car and leave the studios. It's too late to go and find Alyssa and I feel like she was pretty serious about having her three nights a week to herself, so I head downtown.

But I don't go to Gastown or Coal Harbor or Yaletown for a drink or a bite to eat. Instead, I park my car in a secure parking garage off Hastings, grab the plastic bag beside me, put a baseball cap on my head, and head out onto the street.

If you've never been to Vancouver's downtown east side, consider yourself lucky. And maybe a bit naïve. The city is known around the world as being one of the best places to live thanks to the gorgeous scenery and healthy living and it being Canada, of course. But aside from the outrageous expense, Vancouver has a dark and dirty secret that most citizens turn a blind eye to.

Homelessness and drug addiction rules the east side of downtown, so much that you can't walk down those streets without seeing something horrible. Hundreds of junkies wander about, sleep outside doorways, try and sell DVDs, yell and scream at nothing or shoot heroin right in front of you. The police can't handle it, the province and their non-existent health care sources can't handle it. So it's just this lawless town where people are dead and dying, a sort of limbo leaning towards Hell.

I grew up down here. I lived at the top floor of a flea-ridden apartment, the hallways filled with addicts trying to find shelter for the night. My mother did the best she could for me even as her addiction worsened. By the time I was ten, I was pretty much fending for myself while she tried to wean herself off her medicine. 

I was ten years old when she just took too much. She became another statistic, one of the hundreds of souls who die each and every month on these streets, alone and undocumented. If it wasn't for me, no one would have even noticed or known her name.

But for my shitty upbringing, one I try so hard to bury, one that's impossible to escape, I harbor no hard feelings toward my mother. Despite her addiction, she did everything she could to provide the best life she could for me. I never went hungry, I always had a bed. I was able to go to school with other kids who had lives just like me. On her best and brightest days we would escape the east side and walk just a few blocks over to where the scenery changes and Chinatown begins. We'd explore strange shops and she'd pretend she spoke Cantonese. I could never quite figure out if the merchants understood her or not.

And through it all, my mother always had a back-up plan. I think she knew, deep down, that she'd die from the drugs one day, which is why she arranged for her estranged-sister to be my guardian. She needed to know that I would be okay in the end.

Little did she know that I had actually preferred living with my comatose but loving mother in the zombie-like slums compared to the cold, Christian prison of my aunt. But life isn't something you can plan. You can only hope for the best.

"Hey man, can you spare a quarter?" a toothless man asks me. His face is caved in, covered in sores. Maybe meth, maybe carfentanil or whatever opioid of the month is killing people in the alleyways. Either way, though his voice sounds young, his face is halfway to dying and I have no idea his age.

I reach into the plastic bag and pull out an energy bar I had gotten from craft services on set. "I can spare you this."