We're All Screwed 6

If you've already read the last five posts on this blog, Gentle Reader (and if not, then pray tell me, why?) please do not assume that I am trying to make the various gutter punks and ho's that I've known appear as saints.  They were anything but.  Many were lying deceitful little shits.  These were not nice people.  They were not the sorts of friends you would want to introduce to your parents, and they could make deadly enemies if you offended them, but I was very fortunate to not get on the bad side of any of them.  I don't know how that happened.  Maybe because I was feeding them, and in my own experience I can safely say that not even crows will bite the hand that feeds them.

I am thinking of J, who with his two friends who shared with him a small apartment in a very notorious heritage building in the West End, became a particularly close friend of mine during my ministry to gutter punks and survival sex workers.  J, like the female J mentioned in We're All Screwed 3, had the distinction of being both, gutter punk and sex worker. 

I first saw them, J and his two friends, on a particularly hot day in August.  I was seated in Taf's Café, enjoying a cappuccino when I saw them from the window.  Three very sad, bedraggled looking kids, two boys and a girl, all only a little past twenty, dragging with them on a leash a very sorry and tired looking small mongrel dog.  Later I went for a walk on the Stroll, as it was called, or Boys' Town, now fashionable Yaletown, where survival rent boys then plied their trade.  I saw them again, those three with the dog.

There was something about them that resonated with me and I couldn't quite make head or tail of them.  I don't know how I first ended up talking to them.  I think I just saw them panhandling on Granville a few days later and invited them for lunch with me at Taf's.  I can't rightly recall.  But we connected, all of us.  We became friends and soon I was regularly taking J grocery shopping.

He was a decent cook, and sometimes invited me for dinner in their cramped and very chaotic little apartment.  J seemed to have developed a crush on me, and this happened not infrequently with some of the working girls and boys I befriended, which was quite full of irony.  I was probably one of the least available prospects they could have expected: even if I was interested, I wouldn't be a paying customer, but as a Christian ministry worker called to a life of chastity and celibacy, as well as being naturally asexual, and also rather attractive to some people, I must have felt like a very safe person to feel this way towards, since there was no way I was going to respond and I was primarily and exclusively interested in contributing to their care and wellbeing.  Still, I can't say that I didn't feel a little bit flattered at times.

It eventually became apparent that my kindness was being exploited.  J was trading the food I was buying him for drugs, so I cut off the supply.  We were still in contact, for a while anyway, till I left the country for Europe several months later.

Those people, foul-mouthed, angry, dishonest little cheats that they were, also carried their wounds with even greater pride than their tattoos.  They were each a life support for a broken, wounded and still beating heart.  No matter how much some of them lied to me, they did absolutely nothing to cover their soul, as I found in each one the kind of naked and raw humanity that truly makes us beautiful.

I don't care what we, the professional stewards and care-givers of mental health and custodians for the care and wellbeing of the psychically wounded, might have to pontificate about trauma and how incapacitating it is.  Without trauma we never truly become open, receptive and vulnerable.  It is a rather horrible paradox, but I have to agree with the late Henri Nouwen author of  the Wounded Healer.  Only those who themselves have been pierced to the very heart of their souls, can from those very same wounds find the healing balm that will provide comfort and wholeness to themselves and the world.

Yes, the traumatized will still need support and loving care and encouragement.  But we also carry in our hearts, because of our trauma, the very surgical tools and healing ointment, and the wisdom, that can bring healing to our broken, violent and very troubled world.