poverty

It's a little closer to NIMBY-ism than I'm comfortable with.

Here's my quandary.

In some ways, my street is very quiet. Because of traffic calming we, well, we only have a very few calm bits of traffic. Because the traffic calming is big planters full of leafy trees and bushy bushes, the street feels like a very private place.

What this has meant up to a few months ago is that a lot of kids play on the street most nights. That you feel screened in safe once you walk into the green. That a lot of neighbours and other people wander up our street.

The House Across the Street has never been great. The landlord, particularly, is an asshole. Most times he shows up, he yells at or hits his tenants. Gossip tells me he's currently trying to shunt someone out in a way that contravenes the Residential Tenancies Act. The rent is super cheap, so many of the people who have lived there for the past 4 years I've been here are hard on their luck. There's generally been a lot of drinking, which occasionally would lead to an argument or some leering. Kind of unpleasant, but generally pain in the ass material.

Though if someone had come off the front porch and followed me up the road, I might re-phrase that.

Something happened a few months ago to poison the pretty stable dynamic that was happening over there. I'm not quite sure what it was. The drunkenness seems to have increased both in duration and quantity; seems like there's a pretty heavy duty crack dealer in there now, whereas before the dealing was on the QT. Lots of people coming and going. Enough people regularly hanging out there that it's taken me weeks to even partially figure out who actually lives in the house. The occasional groups of white guys in their early 20s who are either in a gang or, worse, wish they were, hanging out on the planters in front of my house, smoking various smokable things. Lots of people hanging out in the backyard of the place.

Which would be fine except that they're often loud enough that I can hear them. In my bedroom. Across the street. I can also hear the people who come to buy crack at 3 am walking down the street talking loudly. Sometimes through closed windows and earplugs. And the cops who come in the middle of the night because someone inside the house has called something in. They wake me up too.

I think what's putting me, what's putting anyone within eye- or earshot of the HAS, over the edge is that the loudness regularly shifts into aggression. Seems like there's one or two main instigators. Heavy heavy drinkers. This past weekend, the tall skinny man on the first floor punched a woman in the face, and then, when I was inside getting my phone to call the cops, he kicked her hard in the stomach.

I have become the sort of person who calls the cops on people. There is no way to tell you how much I resent that man and the people who drink there and get high there and beat each other up on the street for turning me into that person.

Now, any good therapist would tell me that they can't make me that sort of person, but what the fuck do I do? What is my neighbour supposed to do when he looks down the street and sees three guys pushing yet another woman around? Do I wait until the stupidly drunk guy who is in a gang, or worse, looks like he wants to be in one, and is yelling motherfucker, that's my beer and pushing someone off the front porch, do I wait until he pulls out a weapon and really hurts someone? Do I make a bet that the guy wielding the metal post won't actually bash in the head of the man with the long stick?

Honestly, if you have better suggestions of how to deal with this as it's happening, I'm all ears.

Because maybe we're overreacting, us neighbours. In both cases where women were getting pushed around, they didn't want to press charges. Of course they didn't. We're bringing the police into a situation with people who probably list "cops" as the last category of people that they want to see. Or would trust.

And with fucking good reason.

But I can't do it. I can't not call.

The drug dealing only bothers me because it brings a lot of people onto a really quiet street who don't care that it's a really quiet street. Crack houses belong on busy streets. I lived across from a couple on Preston, but I only knew that through street gossip and then careful watching. But they never disturbed me,* so what did I care? The drinking I don't like at all because it's being done in big groups of mostly men who seem to have someone with an unstable and vicious temper as their ringleader. Drinking makes people really fucking emotionally unpredictable in a way that it seems crack doesn't.

Besides the constant fighting that has me jumping every time there's a loud noise, what is stressing me out in all of this is that I am reminded of just how incredibly privileged I am. For 15 years I have have chosen run with people who critique, and are critical of, the reigning power structure. I have wanted badly to disown, or at least ignore, the parts of me that fall on the powered side of any continuum.

And yet, and yet. I have the privilege not only of current money but of class behind me. It is my expectation - no, it is a ingrained belief that I have the right to live on a street whose quiet is not broken by other people's despair and addiction.** And that class-driven belief - along with my colour, along with my education, along with the genes that have blessed me with a non-addictive personality - gives me weight with the cops to probably push these people out. The way they've probably been pushed out of other places before.

I am owning my privilege. It is currently making me a little sick with myself.

The fact that this is the first time I've really had to come face-to-face with how fucking privileged I am and that I find myself now actively participating in a system that I think is corrupt at its heart, that makes me more than a little sick too.

*Washington's customers, on the other hand, regularly forgot his address and pounded on our window at all hours. Nothing like being woken up out of a deep sleep by someone banging on the window above your head at 5 am.

**I know lots of people who are addicted to stuff (mostly alcohol) and are able to function quite well on a day to day basis. The people in the HAS are not those people, for a variety of social, economic and probably genetic reasons.

Unlike Zoom's son, I thought my family was poor when we weren't.

This may, in fact, be a hallmark of those of us lucky enough to be the first solidly middle class generation in a family. My dad grew up poor, my mom not much more than that. But they made decent money, enough that we never lacked food, or clothing; enough that we could take a vacation every few years. Nothing fancy, driving out east to visit family, or south for the Daytona 500, five or six of us, depending on whether gran came or not, packed into a car and off down the road.

At the time, jealous of the at the sun-spot winter vacations my friends were flying to, their fancy clothes, the new toys, the stuff they could just have; listening to my parent's sparring matches about money and how mom spent too much; at the time, I thought we were poor.

Though that's an exaggeration.

I thought we were always on the brink of being poor. It felt like we had our nails dug in and were fighting to stay afloat. I was constantly worried about when we were going to be poor.

It's still not clear to me how close to home that perception struck. What I can tell you is that the only times I went hungry were the times I turned up my nose at mom's cooking.

Then. During the first four years of university, I was poor.

This was not imagined poverty, not the nipping jealousy-of-Benetton-rugger-shirts poor. It was the kind of poor where you count your change and start rationing the giant $4 jar of no name jam, jam that was a treat in the first place, allowing yourself only a half teaspoon per slice of cracked wheat toast at breakfast, only a teaspoon for your margarine and jam sandwich at lunch. No snacks. Snacks are expensive.

It could have been worse. My parents gave me a thousand dollars for tuition each year, which in 1993 covered half. In 1997, it covered a quarter. I had a small scholarship for the first year. Two inheritances from great-aunts, also straight to tuition. I'd been saving for university from the time I was 12, so the rest of tuition and some of my books were covered that way. I worked to cover the rest of my books, my food, rent and entertainment. I made do.

The summer I'm thinking of particularly, though, the one that wrecked my knees, was grinding and exhausting. Jobs were hard to come by. I ended up as a personal care worker, going from home to home, a few hours at a time, helping people, mostly seniors, cope with their lives. I generally made lunches, did some cleaning, helped people bathe, got them on and off the toilet. A few clients were more labour intensive.

The pay was crap. $9/hr, if I was lucky, for work that wasn't uncommonly disgusting, for people who often treated me like detritus. When I had a full roster of clients, it wasn't too hard to make rent and keep myself fed, as long as I was very careful. But it often took a month or two to build up the roster.

That summer, the one that wrecked my knees, my mom bought me a pair of sandals. $10 Birkenstock knock-offs from the Stouffville Sales Barn. I had a little flexibility with the timing of my clients, so I would try to line them up with at least a 45 minute gap between and so that they weren't too too far apart.

I would walk: to, from, between clients, and then claim the bus fare anyway. I could make maybe an extra $10 or $15 bucks a week doing that. That buys 1 jar of raspberry jam, and 6 to 11 loaves of cracked wheat bread.

It was absolutely worth it.

Near the end of the summer, getting home at the end of a regular day, with swollen, bruised feet and creaking knees, I totted up my kilometers. About 10 clicks, all told. I'll do the math for you: that's about 50 kilometers of walking a week just for work.

In $10 knock-off Birkenstocks. Sandals that, by the end of the summer, were flat only when my feet were pressing them down. As soon as I took them off they cupped themselves into painful looking U's of fake cork.

The physical damage has been long lasting. My leg problems started a year or so later. I've had a host of them since then. My knees were completely fucked for a while, still aren't that great, even now that I am able to afford yoga and massages. Most of it I can trace back to that walking in those shoes, when an extra $15 meant a full belly - or something entirely outrageous, like a $5 used book and three hours reading it on the patio of Future Bakery with a bottomless cup of coffee.

It was a terrible summer: grinding, demoralizing, hungry, aching.

But it could have been much worse. I was in the middle of university. I had prospects. I knew that if things ever got really bad, my parents had the wherewithal, mental and economic, to take me in and take good care of me.

The emotional damage, from being treated frequently as second class, subservient, even stupid, was ephemeral. I knew I was poor, but I knew it was temporary. I also knew I was lucky.