How Street Life Taught Me Compassion
When you are on the bottom you see the other people there with you
Ray was a great guy.
You wouldn’t know it if you met him. He’s an older man, homeless, a paranoid schizophrenic. Get him cornered indoors and he might be violent. Actually, it’s pretty likely.
I don’t know if Ray is still alive. I haven’t seen him recently and the life expectancy for people like Ray tends to be low. I used to see him all the time.
I was homeless for a while. Some in Toronto, some in Halifax. When I was homeless in Halifax I didn’t know the ropes. I’d just moved back here from Toronto and the scene was different. There are so many tricks to living homeless and a lot of them depend on where you are.
My first night on the street in Halifax Ray showed me where to stay, places that were decent for a street kid to get food, the basics. He did that for most of the street kids in downtown Halifax. Boys, girls, whatever. Nobody who was on the street had a bad word to say about him.
Ray often panhandled, he was the dirty homeless guy pushing the shopping cart. Most people who weren’t on the street didn’t see him, not the person he was. They might drop him some change, or they might be offended by his presence, not give him change “because he’s just going to spend it on booze.”
Ray never drank that I knew of, and I hung out with him many a night. He was always surrounded by street kids. He never touched any of them, never made a pass, never acted sexually inappropriate. Sometimes he made passes at women his own age. He didn’t get anywhere that I know of, but he was at least reasonably inoffensive. I’m not saying he wasn’t sometimes a bit much, that there weren’t women who he made uncomfortable. I’m certain that there were. I feel inclined to forgive Ray in particular for that. His mind was very much that of the young man he was when he developed schizophrenia, despite his body being decades older.
There were rumours about him, about his background. When I was on the street I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. He was an ex-cop, he was a biker, he was a mobster. If you listened to him he was an outcast member of the mafia branch of the British royal family and was…
