Chapter 149

Olivier told Rawle that if he got to know the crowd in front of Crosstown Traffic, someone would probably front him an ounce or two of marijuana, to get started, if he wanted to deal dope.
A lot of kids dealt dope in downtown Vancouver, but there was always room or onemore.
After they left, Rawle went out front and started chatting up the crowd of hippies who were all clumped up together on the sidewalk.
He met a willing supplier, immediately. The second guy he talked to was a guy named Marcus Morgan, a fellow Bluenoser, a Cape Bretoner, with long brown dreadlocks and a greasy beard.
Marcus Morgan said some other Bluenoser had given him a helping hand when he first came out west, and by God he was willing to do the same.
He told Rawle to meet him later that afternoon, at the parkette across the street and he’d give him a quarter or two of pot to start with. Thenhe could work up from there.
He told him all there was to know about selling weed in the Downtown Eastside.
“Anytime you get caught carrying anything by the Pork, let them steal your dope and your money. And always tell them you’ll be their informer too,” he said, laughing, “then they’ll be nice to you. If you don’t offer something up, they’ll steal your dope anyways, and still give you a lickin’.”
Rawle went on his way, feeling elated, feeling like a free man.
He felt like he had the whole day to kill, and nothing to do but enjoy the sunshine and the street life.
He swore to himself that he would never work or pay for a place to live, again. He would be a free man like this, forever.
He headed toward the intersection of Main, Pain and Wastings they called it. After Main, Hastings turned abruptly from a laid-back pot-smoking neighbourhood, to a crack and whore-town.
He crossed the street. There was a steady traffic jam of desperate bums and skinny, wrinkly sluts populating the sidewalk, like giant pieces of fast-food garbage blowing in the wind.
A broken-up, scrawny prostitute, dressed in a jean jacket and weather-worn black Spandex tights that prominently displayed her camel-toe, came up to him and pleaded pitifully for some money. “Please, help us out? Help us out, and I’ll help you out.”
Rawle pushed her aside with his forearm. “Fuck off!”
As soon as he did so, a big, strong-looking, energetic black dude stepped out, right in front of him, on the sidewalk. “You wanna rock?” he said, in a baritone voice.
Rawle thought he was the hooker’s pimp, and wanted to fight, but then he pulled out a flexible green plastic tube from his coat and lit up a charred rock of crack in the end of it.
Rock of crack.
He was selling crack.
He could care less about the hooker.
“No thanks,” Rawle said, politely, and moved on.
Some sickly, skinny guys and hookers were curled up in a peeling doorway, keeping their white flesh out of the healthy summer wind.
They used their last bit of strength in the world, it seemed, to stick at their pasty elbows with a dirty needle.
An old guy with broken brown teeth crowded in front of Rawle on the sidewalk, and smiled at him, strangely. He didn’t somuch smile, as slide down his brownish bottom lip. Rawle looked closer. There were three or four pale rocks of crack stuck against his bottom gum. He was advertising. He was holding crack in his mourth, to swallow if the cops ever tried to take him in.
Rawle shook his head- no thanks- and pressed on through the crowd.
Suddenly, most guys on the street were selling buds again. Rawle had done a complete circle around the block and was back on Main Street.
This time he turned down toward the waterfront.
“Buds-buds-buds-buds,” the street dealers all chanted at him, like little chipmunks as he strode by.
One guy was sitting on the sidewalk, with a magazine open on the pavement in front of him. As Rawle walked by, he turned the page, revealing a big flat pile of fluorescent green pot spread out on the magazine. He looked up at Rawle. Rawle shookhis head, so he turned the page back, to cover up the pot again.
Rawle took notes.
After an hour of walking through Gastown, he headed back to the small parkette on the corner of Pain and Wastings, directly across from the infamous Astoria Hotel, on the other side of Main. The Astoria was a dilapidated crack and hooker-infested hotel and apartment building, which was a central landmark of the Downtown Eastside.
A group of kids from Food Not Bombs were beside the monument, in the parkette, dishing out homemade vegan goulash from a giant tin pot. They were serving hot food to a crowd of bums and slags.
Rawle lined up with the rest of the homeless people.
He had never smelled anything so mouth-watering in his entire life.