DRAGON WOK RESTAURANT:Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The Fateful Journey:

In the morning, Peter was awoken by whining tires as vehicles rushed over a busy overpass. He wasn’t wearing his watch and left his phone at home. It was dark and cramped. He rolled onto his knees and lifted his hands. He touched the roof. It was pointless to stand up. The first words that came out of his mouth as he gasped was, “WHERE AM I?”  At that moment, Peter was alone, very alone. He didn’t know where he was or how he ended up in the shelter. A distinctive chatter was barely audible just a few metres away. He stared into the darkness of his living hell. 

Peter had enjoyed a delicious dinner at the Dragon Wok Restaurant in the Central Okanagan twelve hours earlier. Still, any memory of this occasion was blocked by his undiagnosed retrograde amnesia, a common side effect of stepping through a portal.

Peter was wrapped up in an old, musty sleeping bag. The smell was revolting, but he was warm. His immediate question was how he got into the shelter. It was all a blur. He lifted the tarp masquerading as a door and crawled out on his hands and knees. He stood up and stretched his six-foot frame outside his tiny enclosure. It was dusk, and as he looked around, he noticed a flickering flame above the rim of a burning barrel with the shadows of a few bodies standing around it. Peter walked cautiously toward the barrel and felt the welcoming warmth of the fire radiating toward him. It was somewhat comforting but also terrifying. Peter was confused, disorientated, and frightened. Peter moved closer to the fire. The fire danced above the barrel rim shaped by two flaming hands, inviting him to move forward through blurred, bloodshot eyes. Peter had not slept a wink.

Peter called out from a few metres away. The hum from the evening traffic had intensified and drowned out his voice.

        “HEY FOLKS, CAN I JOIN YOU? I’m not sure where I am and how I got here.” All I know is I woke up in a tarped shelter. I hope you don’t mind my intrusion!” 

An unshaven hooded guy turned around and, acting on behalf of the others, said, “We don’t mind at all. We found you wandering and disorientated. You were shaking. We walked you to a vacant shelter and gave you a sleeping bag, a toque, and a heavy sweater. Come and warm up. My name is Christopher.”

 Peter shook Christopher’s hand. “My name is…uh..my name is..uh, I can’t remember.”  Peter dropped to his knees and started to sob.

Christopher touched Peter’s shoulder, “It’s okay, man; we all have our demons.” Christopher helped Peter to his feet.

“Are you hungry?”.

Most food is scrounged from bins outside restaurants and grocery outlets. Once a week, a nondenominational food truck would show up.

“I am starving, and the last time I ate was….” Peter couldn’t remember that either. Most amnesiacs are not like The Walking Dead. All their senses are intact. However, the amnesiac cannot recall any details of friends and family, and they don’t remember what they did for a living. Rarely but occasionally, a skill or memory may flash through their subconscious. The only path they will know is the one in front of them.

“This morning, we will cook wieners over our fire.” 

A grill was found in one of the dumpsters and used to cook food on top of the burning barrel. Once the flames died down, it was a perfect place to cook. They had even cooked a chicken on it. Christopher didn’t have the heart to tell Peter they had scraped the maggots off after being fished from a nearby dumpster. There were no buns, no ketchup, just blackened, overcooked wieners.  Survival was the key. 

  Peter woke up early on his second day. He lifted a corner of his shelter’s tarp and looked out of his squalid living conditions. He was part of the hidden homeless. Peter crawled out of his tarped-covered enclosure on his half-gloved hands and inched forward on his arthritic ailing knees on a fresh, dewy patch of grass. The cool, damp weather had not helped his arthritis, but Peter was thankful for the sun shining today. A public bathroom facility nearby provided a place to wash up and go to the bathroom. While in the bathroom, Peter had a flashback of a sizeable glassed-in shower with a rainfall showerhead and a sliding handheld device, and then he was awakened by a loud knocking on the door. He had temporarily fallen asleep on the toilet.

The motley crew was gathered around the burning barrel. Seven completely different individuals sat together around the fire. They were strangers in life but found friendship at the camp. No judgement. Mary was a recovering drug addict. She had forsaken her family, which included a husband and a daughter. One of the casualties of addiction is the path of damaged relationships it leaves in its wake. The others had similar stories. The streets gave them a sense of belonging, but they also had their perils. Peter was the only anomaly but also needed the group's companionship and camaraderie. The group's motto comes from Mother Theresa. "None of us, including me, ever do great things. But we can all do small things with great love, and together, we can do something wonderful." Their wonderful was survival.

 Every group member had an assigned task, which echoed a sense of civility. There were the fire tenders. They gathered wood and kept the fire going. Susan and Bob tended to this task. The groundskeepers controlled the area around the tents and other shelters, ensuring they were reasonably tidy. Rowan and Christopher managed this task. The camp was near public walkways, so they needed to keep it clean to avoid being shut down, although the public rarely ventured into this area. Finally, there were the food gatherers and, as the name implies, the dumpster divers. The remaining four, Peter, Paul, Mary, and June, tended to this task. Dumpster diving was an essential task for many reasons. Leftover food was the main reason, but items from A-Z were also discarded. Peter was quite happy to be on the dumpster squad. This was an everyday undertaking and a very sustainable one. Even if it initially disgusted him, Peter took to his new job with vigour and diplomacy. The pangs in his belly reminded him how important this job was to him and everyone else.

In his state of mind, Peter had adjusted reasonably well to the streets, but at night, Peter had difficulties. Recurring dreams of another place and another time tortured him. The visions were so vivid that a kaleidoscope of pictures and fragments from a past life flashed through his mind like a strobe light. His sleeping pattern became erratic, and Peter’s thoughts turned to suicide. Every morning, he struggled with his suicidal symptoms but had yet to act on them. He hadn’t shared this with anyone.

Mental health issues can be a big part of homeless camps.

Copied from Homelesshub.ca:

         People with poor mental health are more susceptible to the three main factors that can lead to homelessness: poverty, disaffiliation, and personal vulnerability. Because they cannot often sustain employment, they have little income. Delusional thinking may lead them to withdraw from friends, family and other people, and this loss of support leaves them fewer coping resources in times of trouble. Mental illness can also impair a person’s ability to be resilient and resourceful, clouding thinking and impairing judgment. For all these reasons, people with mental illness are at greater risk of experiencing homelessness. Homelessness, in turn, amplifies poor mental health. The stress of experiencing homelessness may worsen previous mental illness and encourage anxiety, fear, depression, sleeplessness, and substance use. 

People with mental illness experience homelessness for extended periods and have less contact with family and friends. In general, 30-35% of those experiencing homelessness, and up to 75% of women experiencing homelessness, have mental illnesses. 20-25% of people experiencing homelessness suffer from concurrent disorders (severe mental illness and addictions).

Community-based mental health services play an essential role. Homelessness could be drastically reduced if people with severe mental illness could access supportive housing and other necessary community support.

       It was just another day for the dumpster divers. Peter, Paul, Mary, and June headed down the walkway, pushing their grocery carts. The clatter of buggy wheels against the dry asphalt was the only sound on an otherwise beautiful sunny morning. The group systematically scavenged for food and any valuable items that would make camp more tolerable. It would take about ten minutes to reach the containers at this pace, but time was irrelevant. Peter always wore his half gloves to keep his hands warm but also to protect his hands while in the dumpster. He had found them discarded in one of the dumpsters; they were pink, which was fitting.

The strip mall where the foodie’s dumpster dived had a variety of stores. It included a grocery store, a meat shop, a liquor store, and a few restaurants. The Golden Wang Fortune Cookie Factory had a retail store with a small restaurant attached—nothing like leftover Chinese food. There were multiple bins to scour through. Peter chose the container behind the fortune cookie factory. Today, Peter scored big time. Lying beside one of the bins was a bag of scribblers and pens.

“Maybe they were stolen and thrown away by someone on the run,” thought Peter. It didn’t matter to him. He continued into the bin and found a box of discarded fortune cookies, a container of noodles, and some leftover soya sauce. Peter clambered over the side of the bin, almost falling. That night, he shared the box of fortune cookies with the group. By fate or luck, there were eight cookies in the box. Peter walked around, allowing each person to select a cookie. They all, in turn, read their fortunes. There would be no magic in these cookies, only a moment for the group to laugh. There was no order.

June read hers first. “A dream you have will come true.”

Susan: “You will travel to many exotic places in your lifetime.”

Mary: “If you have something good in your life, don't let it go!”

Rowan: “A new voyage will fill your life with untold memories.”

Paul: “Whatever your goal is in life, embrace it.”

Christopher: “Meeting adversity well is the source of your strength.”

 Bob: “You are very talented in many ways.”

Peter: “It is now in this world that you must live.”  Fitting, it had no magic but spoke volumes about his new reality.

Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.  Peter had yet to learn who he was or where he had come from, but he knew he had to start writing everything down. His newfound scribblers and pens would come in handy.

It had been two years since Peter’s disappearance. Brent had Peter declared deceased for legal reasons. He returned to his hometown of Calgary. He needed closure. It was a beautiful sunny day for a walk. He grew up in Bowness and loved to walk along the path near the river. On his walk, he walked past a fully bearded man wearing a red toque.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

Something was chilling about the stranger's voice: Brent got goosebumps but kept walking.

SIDNEY BOLIVAR