The Invisible Disability. Louis Shalako.

So, how's your mental health lately...

Louis Shalako

When every report on homelessness and poverty mentions mental health and addictions, one wonders how it is even possible that at least some of these people can’t qualify for federal or provincial disability benefits.

They all qualified for the most minimal welfare, didn’t they. In which case, they must have some rights. They must exist, if we can put it that way.

If nothing else, they are documented citizens.

It’s not like every asshole in town doesn’t somehow know that to be true—

Surely there must be some evidence for all of that, evidence other than the fact that they are homeless, for this is the old ‘coincidence-chasing-the-tail-of-causality’ ploy in all of its logical and rhetorical ugliness.

First, there is the stigma, a stigma that the exact same Canadian journalists are careful to remind us of, with depressing regularity, which as we all know equates with a good poop…it’s pro forma. They can’t help themselves. They must do it. If they were caught in a bear trap, they would gnaw their arm off, in order to continue to slather on the stigma, ladies and gentlemen.

Second, it is an invisible disability.

It’s terribly hard to prove something that is invisible, and yet the Chief of Police is quoted as saying that 88 % of the folks forced to live down at Rainbow Park suffer from a combination of these issues, thereby stigmatizing them and the other twelve percent…that’s because we cannot tell with a quick glance, who is who, and who is what, ladies and gentlemen.

Words have great power. They also have meaning, sometimes very deep meaning which goes beyond that which is in the dictionary.

Words can be used to obscure, as well as to illuminate.

And guilt is one of your weapons.

***

What’s kind of interesting is the sheer number of invisible disabilities. My mother suffers from vertigo. Shirley and Ron were driving the big rig, a brand-new tractor they’d financed themselves. It was a dream for Ron and Shirley was nothing if not game for adventure. She fell getting out of the truck. Hit her head, began experiencing symptoms. Diagnosed by her doctor, and now confirmed by thirty years of experience…the insurance company wouldn’t pay off. It was impossible to prove, and despite her own doctor’s signature, their own doctors were there to dispute it. The government is no better and perhaps no worse than the insurance company.

Ron and Shirley quickly went bankrupt, the costs of trucking being what they are—two drivers can keep that vehicle on the road twice as many hours per day as one single driver.

They did try to get another driver to help Ron, but when diesel went from thirty cents to fifty cents a litre it was time to admit defeat and hang it up.

The financial penalties were tough in such a situation. Bankruptcy is not fun, ladies and gentlemen, and it takes years, many years, to recover from such an event. My mother suffers vertigo to this day.

No one would ever say that my mother was disabled, (Shirley would never say such a thing), and yet, there are people who have been bedridden for years by vertigo. The sheer nausea caused by vertigo, the spinning head, and the loss of balance is purely subjective, in the sense that it cannot be measured by a blood test, an X-ray, or by a urine sample.

No one is going to take your word for it, not when there’s money involved. In that sense, the government and the insurance company are a lot alike…

This one will do.

If you’ve ever been right on the verge of going to sleep, and had that sudden falling sensation, that is very much what vertigo feels like. I’ve suffered from anxiety attacks, way back in the early 2000s. It is different but similar: a kind of rushing feeling, a feeling that the walls are squeezing in, and it is, in fact terrifying. I guess that’s why they politely call it ‘anxiety’.

What it is, is sheer, unremitting terror—all for no apparent reason, it’s all in your head. You’re sitting in a chair, in a room, watching television, and you’re absolutely scared shitless for no reason. By definition, a ‘mental illness’. And thank fucking Darwin that’s over and done with, those particular circumstances, the stress has been gone for a long time now, and I will probably never suffer from that again.

I was afraid to even leave the house for about nine months, funny thing was, I always felt better when I managed to do so.

It was the fear of fear itself, or so I guess.

***

When I was twenty or so, going to Lambton College, I worked part time at the old Woolco Auto Centre, doing oil changes, the old lube, oil and filter Saturday specials, and tires and the like. We had a mechanic. Rolly had to take the three-beer lunch, every single day. His toolbox was a rusted, pathetic wreck. Rolly had the Class A License, the boss hung it up on the wall or we would have hardly been able to stay in business.

Andy was a journeyman mechanic, not Class A, and his toolbox was very professional. I was just young and enthusiastic, in some sense. But poor old Rolly never should have been allowed to repair automobiles after a certain stage of alcoholism. The problem with alcoholism, of course, is that it is self-inflicted. It’s like shooting yourself in the foot—you might get out of work, or even out of a war, but no one is going to give you all that much sympathy. I guess that’s why we call it stigma…Rolly’s hands shook even on a good day, and it was Rolly who stood there and watched as I pulled off brake drums, brake calipers, the rotors, replaced bearings, and put new shoes and pads on the customer vehicle. His hands shook. Was that the booze, or was that Parkinson’s? I suppose I will never know.

Someone had to sign off on that repair…and it better not be an inexperienced twenty year-old kid, or the Ministry of Transportation would have every right to ask a few pointed questions.

And we have absolutely no idea of why any fairly rational person would do that to themselves.

We also have no idea of what the trauma in that man’s life might have been.

Alcohol is pretty insidious, and it takes quite a few people down.

They can still walk, they can still talk, theoretically, they should be able to look after themselves.

It’s a disease.

We're all getting older.

***

After thirty years on disability, (ODSP), I retire at age 65. This results in a substantial raise of three or four hundred dollars a month. Which tells us just how much the government values the disabled. There are seniors on similar benefits, one story on the CBC tells of a woman paying 100 % of her income in rent. What might be the only thing that saves me, is thirteen years in a rent controlled building.

In a recent story, also on CBC, they state that if you have been in a rent-controlled unit for five years, ‘you have a target on your back’.

It’s not a very nice feeling. They’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know.

So what happened, is that I fell from a scaffolding when a plank broke. That was May 4, 1989. I broke my back in three places, so there were compression fractures at T-6, L-3 and L-4. There was also a hell of a lot of pain, and a lot of depression to go along with that, and yet, I can walk. I can talk, I can look after myself pretty well, once I sort of adapted to the realities. Nowadays, I simply don’t work more than three or four hours a day, in winter, when sales are slow, that’s like maybe 12-15 hours a week, in summer, more like 24-26 hours a week. Oddly enough, the job is fairly physical. I just can’t do it full-time, and probably couldn’t live on that income alone…

That almost doubles the base ODSP benefits, and the fact that the government finally raised allowable earnings from $200.00 per month up to $1,000.00 was a big help and a big forward step—dare I call it a victory, for the disabled no matter how we choose to classify them.

Some people fought long and hard for that change, as well as regular raises from the Conservative provincial government, and in fact I was one of them…trust me, they know my name over there.

This is how I know that victory is bittersweet. I mean, we really shouldn’t have to fight that hard, just to get a little justice around here.

I do not know if I get a full payment for August. I do know that the OAS (Old Age Security), presumably CPP and GIS as well, first payments will be September 30.

Only an idiot wouldn’t take steps to prepare for certain eventualities. You might be surprised that I have been saving money, (rather than spending it all on cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines…etc. – ed).

(What I am saying, – ed., is that I will cover the Sept. 1 rent.)

I haven’t even bothered to call the social workers, neither did I appeal a whopping $4,000.00 in so-called overpayments. It took them five years, partly due to COVID-19, (they also tore down their own building), to rule on income dating back to 2019. Some things in life just aren’t fair, what in the hell are you going to do about it. Truth is, I should have fought them, even if I lost—I do reserve the right to tell them exactly what I think of them, although it might be pointless.

It can also wait.

I also know that a lot of folks simply can’t fight for themselves, and maybe I was cast in a somewhat more heroic mold…I am not without my own vanity. You can always fight for someone else, right.

All that juicy stigma.

You might even win a round once in a blue moon, and I have to admit, it feels like a kind of power, which is exactly what the disabled, visible or otherwise, lack.

***

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. The price of my freedom, is four grand.

They will cheerfully claw that back one way or another, with little regard to the impact on a senior citizen’s situation, which may be precarious for any number of reasons. What if I can’t work, what if the job goes away, what if I muff the income tax return and don’t get all the proper benefits?

My vehicle is paid off, and yet it is also 14 years old with 308,000 k on the clock. My job depends on a vehicle and having a place to live.

I haven’t had a winter coat in eight or nine years, basically I just dress in layers…and layers and layers.

I’ve cut my own hair for thirty years. I have used dish soap for shampoo, and brushed my teeth with baking soda.

One way or another, I will survive—

Assuming the landlord doesn’t get some kind of a brainstorm.

MillDon Enterprises has a thousand units across southwestern Ontario, and one wonders just how many relatives they have, in order to produce the N-12 eviction form, and to claim that they need the unit for a family member. The problem there, is that there is no follow-up, no verification, and no enforcement, and the onus is on the client to do all of that investigative work. Then take it back to the tribunal, hopefully with competent legal representation. Very few people get back into their old unit, and certainly not in any sort of time-frame.

I live in a three-floor walk-up in the central city. It’s probably the best unit in the building, top floor, (even the Mayor doesn’t have that), on the end away from the driveway, and facing the south so we at least get a bit of sunshine in winter…if you moved into an exact same unit, you will be paying at least double what I am paying. If this seems unfair to the landlord, or the other tenants, well, that’s too bad. I have some rights too, and perhaps the foresight simply to hang onto the place, even when there was a horrible noise problem, one that was never solved until three or four problem children simply moved on, as they almost inevitably will. The rest of us suffered through it, and that’s really all we can say about that.

Here’s the other thing: the company has been systematically renovating units, and raising the rents, as people ended their occupancy and moved out. You could call it a kind of natural attrition, and at this point in time, there are only six or seven units that have been occupied for ten years or longer. Some of us are getting older (we’re all getting older), and all the landlord has to do is to be patient. It’s not hard to estimate the income from this building, which has gone from about $28,000.00 per month to well over $40,000.00 gross income.

(That’s a half a million a year almost, from one fairly small building.)

It would be extremely unlikely that the company would evict the entire building (the N-13 ‘renoviction’), in order to renovate, although that is exactly the case in the building across the street. That building has been vacant since roughly June 1 of 2023, and there is virtually no activity on the part of contractors, although the grass is cut regularly.

The biggest issue with housing right now, even here in Sarnia, is that there is simply no place to go—

No place to go.

In which case, the only thing to do is to stand up and fight.

 

END

 

Landlord has brainstorm...

Woman Pays 100 % of Income in Rent. (CBC)

Apartment Tenants Renovicted. (Sarnia Journal)

Why do we Have to Prove Our Disability Constantly? (The Walrus)

The Invisible Disability. (Wiki)

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his works on ArtPal.

 

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Go Deep: The Systematic Failure of Ontario Social Policy. Louis Shalako.

In a kind of social horror, Louis goes deep on social policy, or so it is called...

Louis Shalako

The systematic failure of social policy in the Province of Ontario is no accident. 

That's because things are caused to happen.

It’s more than systemic, a pretty good word all on its own. It’s a little more deliberate than that. Systemic refers to those funny little provisions, built into the system, which sometimes makes some things difficult, and other things impossible. The so-called Catch-22, a wonderful story by Joseph Heller.

Systematic, means it is a bit of a lesson in applied cruelty, and this by a democratically-elected government, of whatever ideological stripe. It isn’t exactly enlightened, but it does stem from a kind of self-interest of the taxpayer kind. To claim it is a big conspiracy is to mistake its organization, for it has none. It is smugness, writ large; and its inevitable results, where the rich complain about the cost of housing, and bitch and whine about the costs of homelessness, all in one and the same breath. This situation did not come about overnight.

Our system of food banks and homeless shelters goes back at least forty years, by some accounts, although such things have always existed, in one form or another, probably since the dawn of time itself. There was a big recession, and remember when interest rates went just plain ludicrous—this would be the early to mid-eighties. When the old man went to re-mortgage the family home, the rate was over eighteen percent—and my father, a divorced parent, was scared shitless, too.

That was all so long ago.

More recently, it was Conservative Premier Mike Harris of Ontario and his ‘common sense revolution’, that struck the first and the worst blow, insofar as the present crisis of homelessness and affordability is concerned. We will talk about the impacts of ‘mental health and addictions’ some other time, although I am sure I will get to it someday.

It was in 1995, when the Province of Ontario, with the conservatives elected by a strong majority, gutted social assistance payments by twenty percent. Where the rate for a single adult had been $663.00 per month, it was reduced to $520.00 per month. Using an online ‘inflation calculator’, inflation has taken what would have cost $100.00 in 1995, up to $183.26 in mid-May of 2024. If we multiply that by 5.2, the figure would be $916.30 per month, and yet the current rate is only $733.00 per month. Welfare payments have not kept up with the rate of inflation, and in fact our current, Progressive Conservative government here in Ontario, did not give any raises to folks on disability, for the first five years of their mandate. They have not given one single raise to folks who are unfortunate enough to find themselves on ‘welfare’, social assistance.

Ah, but if we take a figure of $183.00 and multiply that by 6.63, the figure now becomes $1,215.01 per month. It’s still not a lot of money, what with the average cost of a one-bedroom apartment all across the province being much higher than that, but it would, under some circumstances, have given people a fighting chance, of at least keeping a roof over their heads. It is also true that if more people had simply been able to keep the roof they already had, over their heads, the average price of rent in this province would actually be lower—that is because, while the province does have rent controls, on buildings of a certain age, there is no rent control when a unit becomes vacant. The landlord now has the right to charge what could be called ‘market rate’, which is a fine term, useful enough, but only if we accept that things might have been different—if only the Province of Ontario had any kind of effective, or even just rational, social policy.

You're welcome to check the math.

If they had raised the rates, more people would have kept their homes—and if you, had moved within the last five or six years, into any apartment in this province, your rent would have been lower—

Ah, but you prefer to cut off your noses to spite your faces, because the ideology trumps truth, and logic, and utility, every fucking time with some of you people.

Some years later, in an interview, Mike Harris was asked about the common-sense revolution. He considered it his ‘legacy’, that within a fairly short time, unemployment went down, and had stayed down. Yet he made no mention, that it was the economy, (stupid), and not regressive social policy that had made that happen. I ought to know.

I have lived through every recession of the last fifty or sixty-plus years, although as an infant, I could hardly have been aware of such things. As an adult, it is much more up close and personal. When I was on welfare, however briefly, I was paying $450.00 per month in rent. Knock that welfare check down to $520.00 per month, and I had seventy dollars per month, for food, clothing, personal needs including soap, toothpaste, dish-soap, and quite frankly, hobbies, entertainment, were out the door. So was any hope of ‘bettering myself’ with training or education, anything that was not provided by the system. Training a guy with a broken back to become a mason’s helper, slugging 100-lb. concrete blocks, mixing mortar and wheeling that around in a wheelbarrow is simply not appropriate, and is simply not going to work—yet sending him to college or university, in order to train him, (or her), in something more appropriate, something that might actually be a viable career, was never in the cards.

What is interesting is that disability and welfare are always divided up into ‘shelter’ and ‘personal needs’ portions. The minute you lose your housing, you no longer ‘need’ that shelter portion, although the Province, so I have been told, does provide a meagre $100.00 per month ‘homelessness benefit’. Yes, you heard me right. Now you’re supposed to live on the street, feed yourself, stay off the dope and somehow, over the course of several years, without getting robbed and beaten for your money, to somehow save first and last month’s rent for an apartment you can’t afford in the first place, also bearing in mind after all of this you are sort of unlikely to do well in any sort of credit check—right???

The so-called homeless benefit mostly goes to the rich, in the form of reduced taxes.

Affordable, geared-to-income housing would appear to be a desirable thing, a ‘social good’ in every sense. Yet the County of Lambton appears to be totally incompetent to build any such thing in any appreciable numbers. When confronted by a looming crisis, the council voted unanimously to fund a five-year study. This was a cop-out by any other name, and of course the ultimate results of that study were a study in pure shamelessness.

The rich are your friends...

They’ve been spewing out this pap smear for years, and yet they haven’t succeeded in doing one damned thing about it.

Neither city council, or county council, have ever said one word about the levels of social assistance, federal and provincial disability pensions, levels of Old Age Security, Canada Pension Plan, or any other federal or provincial benefits for low-income Canadians. It’s almost like they’re afraid someone might do something about it—

If you look at the image, you will see that MillDon, recently split off from Steeves & Rozema, is charging three percent if a tenant shows up at head office to pay their rent by debit or credit card. Considering that a one bedroom unit is going for an easy $1,500.00 per month, this equates with $45.00, per month, for the privilege, of paying your rent. That is $540.00 per year, for someone just to pay the rent.

With a lack of affordable housing for working Canadians, we end up with a captive audience of renters. There is nowhere else to go. What are they going to do, especially as there is still a fair percentage of unbanked individuals, and they have to live somewhere. It’s a lot like the family doctor—so many of us simply don’t have one. Why would someone not have a bank account? There are a hundred reasons: garnished wages, child support or alimony in arrears, overdrafts, accounts frozen or sealed, unpaid fines, overdraft maxed out, service charges built up and no funds to pay—the usual sins of poverty, ladies and gentlemen, this is how folks end up taking their cheques to a payday lender, and end up hooked on that peculiar and rather predatory service.

$45.00/month, just for the privilege of paying the rent.

***

The landlord lies awake at night, wondering if they even have the nerve to try that with automatic bank payments; which don’t cost them a single damned cent. The simplest of software will tell you who has paid, and who hasn’t.

In one local development, affordable, geared-to-income development of over fifty units, a very small number of people wanted garden plots, and their wish was granted. Funny thing is, the landlord, in this case the County of Lambton, squawked about water usage, and therefore, imposed a hundred-dollar per month water surcharge, regardless of whether a household was using the vegetable plots or not. One wonders how many tomatoes one would have to grow to make it worth it to the individual user, or whether they had such plots the next year, or what the County actually did with the estimated $5,400.00 per month they gouged out of our most vulnerable citizens, (half of them dying of cancer), with that little stunt…

What I thought was interesting, was when tenants, all of whom are low income, many on disability or other benefits, had to pay for their own hot water tanks, installation and monthly fees. This is of course, over and above the one-third of income that the so-called rent is supposedly set at. One wonders what happens when a ‘client’ is evicted—where do we go from here, right.

This particular development is sort of high-end for subsidized housing, and yet the county has been unable to build anything like it since. We have, over the last ten years or so, ‘approved’ something like 2,400 housing units, many described as ‘affordable’, in Sarnia-Lambton. Some would even say 3,500, but some of those have been acknowledged to be dead in the water—which is at least honest, and one would hope that some other property developer will take that over and maybe do something—anything, with it.

Let’s not hold our breath waiting.

And I have often wondered. When the Doug Ford government imagines affordable housing, just exactly what do they see in the privacy of their own heads.

I’ll bet it’s nice.

Government: building more castles faster.

***

In the fourteenth century, the Black Plague killed anywhere from one-third to one-half of the population. The cost of labour went up. The profits of the lords of the manors fell, due to vacant lands. They had trouble getting people to work for them. The result, in legal terms, was that efforts were made to bind the serf ever closer to the land—and the master.

Naturally, it didn’t really work, and when someone who had gone to work in London, and yet found themselves disabled, they had to return to their home parish just to get poor relief, which did exist in those days. Back then, the Church provided virtually all social services outside of the military and the courts. To see the state still relying on that in modern times pretty much says it all...

The sumptuary laws literally told people what they could and could not wear. In 1 Corinthians 7:20, it says; Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called.

The ruling classes, of course, took it literally—or presented it literally, for they themselves, did not feel bound by it. Basically, do not quit your job and go looking for more money somewhere else. This was the original rentier class, and they meant business—even as they plundered France and held their captives for ransom, even as they built new castles with the money they had ‘earned’ by valor in battle. In their own eyes, the very paragons of virtue. But then, that’s what they always say.

***

With the aging of the population, and a falling birthrate, it is a similar situation. The cost of labour will go up, the number of hands will go down—and the upper crust of society will do all they can to continue to exploit the labouring classes. Not the least of which, is to just plain lie to us, and still expect us to like them for it. But this is why the federal government took a gamble on an increased level of immigration. This gamble will probably pay off in the long run, in the short term, it has indeed exacerbated the housing crisis. Or, as I like to call it, the income crisis. And I am not talking about the rich when I say that.

What would happen if we all just stood here and stared at the camera...

One aspect of all this is surveillance: at some point, the landlord put cameras outdoors, and then, they put cameras indoors, and then, some time later, put in more cameras, looking up and down the hallways. They call it security. It may actually provide some, assuming it’s not the landlord and renoviction we’re worried about. This is an effort to exercise their rights—in the future, tenants may be asked to sign an NDA, a non-disclosure agreement. If you prefer not to sign such an agreement, they might prefer not to offer you a lease. It’s their right. Not so much yours. It’s that simple. Odds are, you will sign it.

Oh, and when you do leave, and if you do open your mouth and speak about some negative experience, you have violated the NDA and you can be sued for ‘damages’ in a court of law.

It’s one more attempt to control.

 

 

END

 

Go deep: a theory of local journalism.

Okay. So, local radio reports on important local news stories. Whether it’s on the air or on the website, the stories are short and shallow. This is a feature of the medium, where the attention span is assumed to be about three minutes or less—accounting for the sort of music they play as well. In the local daily, stories range from very short, up to the average, roughly five or six hundred words, and a long story is maybe a thousand. In our local monthly, the same holds true, in that ‘genuine’ news coverage, biased as it might be, is no more than five or six hundred words, and the columnists, being mostly unpaid, about the same. It is true that the major news sources, the CBC for example, have the budget and the time to do investigative reporting, analysis, the regular panel of experts commenting on one major issue of the day. It struck me that in a media environment where the tendency is to go shallow, and devote the least portion of time and resources to news coverage, (the local market in other words) a person of some journalistic bent, someone with a few gut instincts, might go deep.

A bit of background. The Sarnia Journal won a Community Journalism Award for doing just that, going deep, in their series on homelessness and addictions in this community.

Yeah, but doesn’t that just prove what I am saying?

Go deep. It’s not like I have anything to lose, or anything better to do, while I await renoviction papers and a verdict of ‘mental-health addictions’, on the front page of those very same publications, when I finally am rammed through the cracks with a fine-toothed hatchet and end up living in a tent in Rainbow park, or maybe, if I’m lucky, in a van down by the river. Since I don’t work for them, I don’t have to play by their rules. I am a private citizen, not responsible to any other person or entity besides the law and the constitution, and I will say what I want, I will write what I want, and let the chips fall where they may. I do not have any advertisers. I do not rely on donations, corporate or otherwise. We're not selling Girl Scout Cookies here, ladies and gentlemen...

Maybe that’s why they want to get me out of my house, ladies and gentlemen—or am I just being paranoid.

(His instincts are killing him. – ed.)

The funny thing is, I have been very stable these past thirty fucking years on disability, and one can only wonder just what in the hell is the matter with you people.

Would you like to know the truth? You’ve probably guessed it already.

They—or maybe even we—in a collective sense, just don’t want to spend the money, unless it’s somebody else’s money—the very socialism they profess to despise, ladies and gentlemen.

#Louis

 

The Bank of Canada’s online inflation calculator.

A Three-Dollar Calculator Cuts Through an Endless Amount of Bullshit.

Catch-22. Joseph Heller.

Catch-22 available from Russian Website. Use at own risk.

Food banks arose to fight hunger:

The Interest Rate Crunch of the ‘80s.

If you can make any sense of this, please let us know.

Lambton’s housing pap smear.

Failure of the County.

Recommended reading.

The Hundred Years War, by Desmond Seward. 

English Society in the Later Middle Ages. Maurice Keen.

Also:

Check out How to Rob a Bank, an Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery, by Louis Shalako on iTunes.

Thank you for reading.

 

 

Core Values, Chapter Nine. Louis Shalako.

 

"You seem a little insecure..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Nine

 

Shrinks are people too…

 

 

 

“You seem a little insecure.” Dr. Chickadee was a West African with a deep, sonorous, cultured voice.

The man was Cambridge-educated. English or African, in his Nehru jacket and saddle shoes, Brubaker was sure glad he didn’t have the doctor’s nerve in his tooth.

What was he supposed to say?

“You seem well educated.” He began affably enough.

“Hah.” The doctor grinned. “You seemed a little paranoid when you were brought in to the hospital.”

Bru calmly raised an eyebrow.

“Tell me about the letters.” Chickadee added as if in afterthought.

Bru could read him like a book.

“I write letters to the editor. I sent one out to twenty-five different papers in Ontario. I’m trying to get a raise for the disabled. Five percent a year for the next five years.”

“Do you think you can do it?”

“Someone has to talk to the bastards. Most people who talk to the government have some kind of an interest. Why not me? Would you write a letter to the government?”

The doctor studied something in his file folder.

“In your most recent letter to the editor, you seem to relate pollution to the city government and the police budget?”

Interesting.

This was the guy who claimed not to read the paper, because it was too much bad news. He just didn’t have the time.

Bru never forgot stuff like that. Not that Chickadee was a bad guy. Bru liked him well enough. But he most assuredly wasn’t your friend.

Chickadee liked writing prescriptions, as he recalled.

“Pollution is a crime. Where are the cops when you need them? All of our leaders are absolute cowards when it comes to anything that might reflect poorly on the city.”

He thought for a moment.

“You want the truth, Doc? The Lennox cops are incompetent, and badly-trained. They have no honor and no integrity. They lack moral fibre, and violate the civil and human rights of suspects, witnesses and victims, including disabled people. It’s part of their daily routine.”

And that’s probably one of the reasons why I’m here, but it would seem too paranoid.

Cops lie. Cops lie all the time.

“That dirty little weirdo harassed me for fucking years down on Sigourney Street. As soon as I got done with him, the cops, and the courts, the fucking ODSP was all over me like a dirty shirt.” Brubaker was getting tired of trying to explain the facts of life to ignorant people. “If you threaten someone often enough, they may become a little paranoid.”

The doctor reached for his note-book…

“It’s a normal human reaction. You know, I’ve often wondered if someone was calling up the ODSP and giving them anonymous tips. Oh, I don’t know, maybe stuff about me working for cash under the table, stuff like that. Anonymous letters. That’s about the level of what I’ve had to deal with around here.”

“And did you?” The shrink, looking up.

Bru felt his face tighten up.

“No.” But maybe I should have—

He would study that one later.

Doctor Chickadee remained silent, looking inscrutable over the top of his note pad, with his brown, watery and wishy-washy eyes looking sort of skeptical.

“Look. When I started my business, I knew the guy was all over me like a dirty shirt.” Chuck tried to explain. “I knew my only protection against that little creep, and against the ODSP for that matter, was to keep good books and account for every fuckin’ dime, and every fuckin’ minute of my time.”

“And you don’t feel that’s paranoid?”

“I was right. I’ve known the ODSP was scum for a long time. They made that clear when I bought my house.”

The ODSP had freaked out when he bought a house for no money down and three hundred bucks a month. Besides. It was only sound business practice. But when he said it, it was always a sign of mental illness. Once they had you tagged, everything you said was written down and held against you in some way. He knew that. He couldn’t even attempt to tell the doctor that. They tended to have thin skins, and resented any implied criticism of the system which paid them the big bucks unquestioningly.

If you tried to be diplomatic, they would read too much into it.

“How do you feel now?”

“Well, you fuckers screwed up the only job I had. The only job I could get. Other than that, I despise the police with a passion that surprises me. As far as I’m concerned, they’re all a gutless bunch of piss-ants, with way too much arbitrary power.”

“We’re just trying to help you, Chuck.”

"You fuckers screwed up the only job I could get."

“Help me get rid of the Lennox Police Department. As long as we have them bums, every damned one of us is endangered. That asshole Oberon, remember that fuckin’ murder-suicide where the Chinese guy shot his girlfriend in Confederation Park? It was in all the papers. Sergeant Oberon says, and I quote, we have to assume the gun was smuggled in from the U.S.”

Brubaker thought about his point.

“Any cop who walks into a crime scene with a set of assumptions is an idiot. And I’ve seen Oberon’s work.”

“What about the man who bothered you before?”

“I’ve never retaliated against that man in any way, shape or form, and I never will.”

“Would you care to share the reason why?”

“It’s self-evident. He was always trying to push my buttons. If I went over and punched him in the nose, it would have justified everything that went before. I won’t give him, or you, the satisfaction.”

“Well, I think we’ve had a pretty good session. Is there anything else you want to share?”

“You’ll be letting me out of here Saturday or you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

“No need to be rude, Mr. Brubaker.”

“No. Of course not. You take my freedom, my job, and my dignity. My very fucking humanity. You label me paranoid and delusional, and treat me like a bug every chance you get. Perhaps it’s because of my working-class roots, and the fact that I’m on disability, but you just assume that I must be a violent person. Or as Sergeant Oberon wrote in documents submitted to the court, an unexploded bomb waiting for a chance to go off. But there’s no need to be fucking rude, sir.”

The session was obviously over. Brubaker got up and walked out without so much as a by-your-leave.

 

END

 

Chapter One.

Chapter Two.

Chapter Three.

Chapter Four.

Chapter Five.

Chapter Six.

Chapter Seven.

Chapter Eight.

 

Images. Louis.

 

Louis has books and stories in ebook, paperback and audio from Amazon.

 

Thank you for reading.