Church doesn't turn anyone away
By MARK BONOKOSKI
Another Tuesday evening beckons on the expansive grounds of the Metropolitan United Church, situated hard by the hard times of street life in the inner city.
If there are magnets that draw the poor and the disenfranchised, the addled and the addicted, one of those magnets is here -- its boundaries being the eastern entrance of St. Michael's Hospital, the pawn shops of Church St., the Fred Victor Mission a little further own on Queen E., and the cubby-hole sanctum of the homeless man in the boarded-up entrance of the old stone manse on Shuter to the north.
There is a portrait here waiting to be painted.
And, deep in the seams of the brush strokes, there is also some comfort to be found amid all the first-blush darkness, mixed in with the blend of street folk and derelicts whose lives have bottomed out, and who find themselves here.
JACK OF HEARTS
As 6 p.m. approaches on a Tuesday recently past, a tiny woman with the jack of hearts pinned to her jacket leaves her knapsack on the steps where an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting is about to begin, and asks a stranger to watch over all her worldly belongings while she searches for the man who suddenly re-appears with a city-issued crack pipe, and a fresh score of rock cocaine.
"Why the jack of hearts?" she is asked.
"Because I couldn't find a joker," she replies.
Her crack-addicted partner laughs like a cartoon character.
He appears not to have a tooth in his head.
In this part of town, it becomes quickly obvious that low-end drug dealing is weak in its attempts at being clandestine, and therefore it goes on -- awkwardly and sometimes comically, as it does -- in the corners by the church's front steps, and in its architectural nooks.
Two cops from 51 Division are standing next to their patrol bikes down near the outdoor chess tables, watching over two men they have just placed in handcuffs.
They are shabbily dressed men, but not shabbily dressed enough to blend into the shabbily dressed crowd like the woman with the jack of hearts on her jacket and the cackling friend with the crack pipe at her side. And so they stood out enough during the exchange of money for crack cocaine to catch the eye of the boys in blue.
But they seem not to care about being arrested.
GO LEAFS GO
Instead, they are making small talk with the cops -- about the Leafs, no less, but not about another morality play already on stage, with that being the recent front-page trials and tribulations of Tie Domi and Belinda Stronach.
In the meantime, the Tuesday meeting of the Mount Royal chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous is brought to order. It is an open meeting, rather than closed to alcoholics only, and so the curious are welcome to attend.
The Mount Royal has been meeting regularly in these parts -- and particularly at the Metropolitan United Church -- since 1960; with its challenge, like all AAs, being the continued sobriety of its members, and with its goal being the serenity that is promised in what is called The Big Book.
The guest speaker on this night is Chris, his last initial being as unimportant as the importance of his anonymity. And, if his tale is true, he has been to hell and back during his years of drinking, but has not had a drop since 1988.
And that, without doubt, is a long time dry.
A dishevelled man, his mental issues at the fore, suddenly appears from an anti-room. He is lost.
"Where's the food?" he loudly demands.
"One door over," someone whispers.
And, indeed, one door over, there is a lineup of down-and-out men and down-and-out women stretching out to the church's parking lot, all waiting for the free supper provided nightly to the street people -- the Tuesday night offering charitably paid for by the lawyers of Osgoode Hall.
DAILY MEALS
In fact, according to Rob Udell, director of community services at the church, approximately 150 full-course meals are doled out daily in the basement of the church -- a church that also offers a food bank and a clothing room, as well as outreach workers who use the drop-in centre to deal with housing and addiction problems in what has become an small oasis in a small corner of a have-not world.
The 2005 numbers speak for themselves of the need: 9,664 visitors to the drop-in centre, 1,967 to the clothing room, 5,922 to the food cupboard, 22,000 to the Out of the Cold lunch program and just as many more for the suppers.
"We see them all," says Udell.
The AA meeting ends at precisely 7 p.m. Next door, the lineup for the free meal has subsided, and all will soon be fed thanks to those who wear the silks at Osgoode Hall.
The bike cops have moved on, their most-recent collars having been picked up and transported to 51 Division where they will be booked and charged with trafficking crack to such casualties as the cartoon-like man whose partner wears the jack of hearts on her jacket.
And, on the lawn, a derelict sleeps.
There is, however, no call for rain or frost on this night.
And that, perhaps, is the only good news in his life.
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