 DEREK RUTTAN The London Free Press
Wearing his Sunday best, born-again Christian Sylvio Thibeault shares this
room at the York Street Men's Mission with seven other men. |
A lean and gristled man etched with the bronzed and leathery
lines of every bridge he's slept under pulls himself up straight in his seat and leans
forward on his arms over the doughnut shop table.
The chatter of students on break from a nearby high school is deafening and the smoke from
their cigarettes is thick in the room. A young woman sweeps a cloth across the table,
gathering bits of ash.
Sylvio Thibeault -- former drunk, drug abuser, Lysol drinker, thief of old womens' purses
and freshly minted reborn-Christian -- grows determined and intense. The raspy voice of
the 41-year-old bronchial asthmatic hesitates for a moment at a question. He fights back
tears.
He's five years old and back in 1962, in Toronto's now-gentrified but once-notorious
Cabbagetown slum. Home was a semi-detached house off Parliament Street where he lived with
his New |
Brunswick-born parents and two younger sisters,
Linda and Kathy. His dad, a steelworker, was a rough drunk who routinely beat Syl's
mother.
"He always made sure we saw it when he went after our mother."
But this time it was different.
"My mother and father were in a bar somewhere having a few beers," he says.
"He came home and was mad with my mother because some guy was gawking at her breasts.
So what he was going to do was take care of that problem and chop them off."
The rest is remembered mostly as snatches of commotion. Screaming, yelling, cursing, the
police arriving as they often did at the home.
"Home life -- it was pathetic," he says. "I was born into a dysfunctional
family."
It would be another four years before little Sylvio's mother gathered up the courage to
flee. With her three children and their personal belongings they hopped a bus to Montreal.
There, for the first few years, they lived on welfare with an "aunt" and her
family above a store.
But little Sylvio, inheritor of a name his grandmother had wanted for the son she wasn't
able to have, had already learned the fine art of shoplifting. And by age 12 he was
drinking and smoking pot.
He would repeat two grades before He would repeat two grades before dropping out of school
entirely, a Grade 7 graduate. He recalls studying hard and his mother and sisters
struggling to help with homework "but it just wouldn't stay in my head. I must have a
learning disability. My best subject was recess."
For a brief period, the 16-year-old brought home as much as $600 a week from
construction work, but he moved away from home and before long was into drugs and booze.
Then came break-ins, purse snatchings and shoplifting to support his deepening addiction.
"The bottle of booze, the drugs, it is all a ticket to paradise temporarily. I think
it started out as my way of trying to escape reality, trying to escape all the
difficulties and crap going on at home. That way I could be content."
Along the way he had opportunities to dump the addictions for good jobs and a family life
"but I just mucked it up."
"I wonder if I am allergic to the good life" he muses aloud, more statement than
question.
"As soon as things start to go good, I try to screw it up somehow. I always sabotage
my well-being. Not this time, though."
Home for the 5-10, 170-pound Thibeault is Bed 7 in the Slumber Den dorm at the Men's
Mission on York Street in London, a refuge for dozens of men down on their luck.
For men as young as 15 and as old as 85, the Mission provides a clean bed, good meals,
clothing and support to stabilize them long enough to strike out on their own again. Some
may never leave, however.
Thibeault says he arrived here Sept. 23, fresh from a bad drunk that sent him to detox for
drying out. He had been out of jail only a few weeks, having been caught with candy from a
machine -- its door left ajar, he says -- at the Salvation Army hostel where he was
staying. |
 Sylvio Thibault reflects on the days when he used
to drink and sleep at "Camp 2" in a forest behind the Labatt brewery in downtown
London. He has good memories of the time spent there last summer with other men despite
being beaten once. |
"Needless to say, I'm not welcome back," he says
with a disarming and self-deprecating smile. Matter of factly he chalks up a related
conviction for failing to appear on his theft court date to being too drunk to remember
when to go.
Most of the summer was spent in a rough bush camp behind the Labatt brewery in downtown
London. Days were spent panhandling, nights in drinking and old war stories around a camp
fire.
He's sanguine about being a transient, and while admitting it is difficult and wearing, he
says the outdoors, the independence and the comradeship are attractions. The tough moments
are taken in stride -- a long purple scar under his right eye came from a beating this
summer at the camp.
"I saw the guy who did it not too long ago and he apologized. That was nice."
The summer of 1998 reads a lot like his preceding years: evictions, failed rehab programs,
in and out of jail for an endless string of property and related offences. His best guess
is two dozen convictions. "I'm the black sheep of the family." |
On one shoulder blade is a tattoo of hands in
cuffs, middle fingers extended in defiance, rendered from homemade inks and a sharpened
point by a fellow prisoner during a stint in Quebec's Bordeaux Jail in the 1980s.
"Why did I grow up like this -- I can't really say. I have some 'Why me, Lord?' days
but I don't think there's a specific answer. I can't say it was my upbringing entirely
because my mother did her best, alone and on welfare with three kids to raise."
Thibeault is a changed man these days -- he's found God "in a big way."
"I have found the solution to my personal poverty problem," he says with the
smile of a man who has cleverly turned back a pointedly negative question.
In late September during a counselling session at the Mission, the Can-man (as his
Alcoholics Anonymous buddies call him in reference to his former taste for Lysol) had an
old-fashioned, knee-knockin' body blow of a soul-salvation conversion to God that reduced
him to tears.
"I wept for an hour; I was out of control."
People who knew him were shocked, skeptical and ecstatic. But was it serious or just
another of this old rounder's tricks? Thibeault has been in every mission, hostel, detox
and rehab program going, he admits, so they have a right to be suspicious. Just wait, he
says. |
"I hit bottom. I just said, 'Lord, I can't handle it
anymore. Here it is, I'm here. I'm yours to do with as you please. I can't deal with this
anymore, man. Lord, take away the desire of alcoholism and the drugs and the sex and all
that stuff. And boom, just like that I haven't had the desire to use drugs or alcohol
since."
The tobacco addiction remains but Thibeault insists he's been otherwise clean. He has
enrolled in a weekly Bible study class and, last week, was baptized at London Gospel
Temple. For a month and a half, he's been on a spiritual high that has left observers
shaking their heads -- even to the point he has stenciled religious messages on his
briefcase he uses to carry his Bible. A wooden cross hangs on a necklace.
"It has crossed my mind whether this would stick," he admits carefully, as if
not wanting to jinx his luck.
"Life has a lot of ups and downs and sometimes your movie ending will come out as an
up, but sometimes it will be rock hard rock bottom. This feeling is beyond description,
but it is starting to mellow out and I can cope a little better. With help, it will
stick."
Thibeault pulls back and looks around, shaking his head at the kids around him.
One baby-faced teen chasing money for a boyfriend's cigarettes spins around to him:
"Have you got a spare quarter?" she asks.
"Sorry, sweetheart, I haven't a penny."
Thibeault has tried to tell street kids the kind of life they are working on but mostly
they are uninterested. Studies show the vast majority of street kids had early family
lives just like Thibeault's.
"It is worse for these kids, big time. It is so much more dangerous out there than it
was for me," he says.
Many more young people than when he was growing up are in circumstances such as his.
"I wish there was something I could do to make them understand, but the best I can do
is every morning in my prayers."
He snags a memory of an oldtimer with whom he shared a protected doorway and a bottle one
cold night in Toronto. "He started drinking and he started puking. He says I'm gonna
lay down, I can't do it. So he lays down and gives me the rest of the bottle. I drank it
away and then I laid down. The next morning he was cold -- he died right there, that was
his last call.
"You get lonely a lot in this way of life," he says. "I do like sharing
life with somebody else -- not a crowd always, mind you. I do like to have somebody and
'I'm home, dear' and that sort of stuff. It worked for a while."
When Thibeault was 31 he had a job with a cleaning firm in Barrie, compliments of an A.A.
buddy, and he moved in with a 19-year-old woman. They lived together for three years and
he remembers them as the best of his adult life. Among the few things he carries is her
love letters and a lucky penny she found on the street and gave to him. "She has no
idea what she did to me. I messed that up, too, with the booze."
Today, he says he wants a job -- he was once a carpenter --but his health isn't perfect.
Ravages of the road have taken their toll and he carries nitroglycerine because of a heart
condition. A lung infection has hung in for more than a month now and he keeps four
separate puffers at the ready.
In the early days, being on the road was exhilarating.
In his first Christmas away from home at about age 16, he had no place to live. With
several others, all older and more experienced, he took up in a burned-out house.
"The shoplifters who were good at it went to the grocery store and boosted (stole) a
few of those barbecued chickens. Those that had good credit went to the corner store and
they got some beer and wine and stuff. Somebody had a portable radio. We had that place
rocking. We were all a bunch of homeless and we were all alcoholics -- we just took the
circumstances and coloured in some pink."
There followed a brief stint in the military, an attempt at getting a trade that ended
abruptly in court martial, a lucrative but short-lived episode as a male stripper, then
"I became pretty much of a transient."
He arrived in London in 1992, headed for an addiction treatment program at Quintin Warner
House. "I didn't do the whole program." |
 A card Sylvio Thibeault kept in a prison cell in the 1980s is
among the few personal items he carries with him.
Sylvio's weekly budget |
Weekly income |
| Personal needs allowance |
$25.90/week |
| Cleaning/Men's Mission |
$35 |
| Income total |
$60.90/week |
Weekly expenses |
| Tobacco |
$25 |
| Church tithe (10%) |
6 |
| Bible study program |
5 |
| Miscellaneous (coffee, transit, toiletries) |
$24.90 |
| Expense total |
$60.90/week |
|
Thibeault hit low periods in his life when he did things he
can't believe now. "What I am least proud of you are never gonna know because I have
done some bad things. I have done really wicked things and that's between me and Him and
He already knows about it."
Still, he admits to stealing purses from old women for booze and drug money. "I can't
believe I sank that low." And torching a school as a teenager after being blacklisted
from a Valentine's party. "If I'm not allowed to go to the party, nobody's
allowed."
For the first time in memory, Thibeault finds himself thinking about the future, although
not too far ahead. Plans to leave the Mission have been shelved at the urging of a
spiritual adviser. "I am only four weeks old (spiritually) and I need to get myself
on level ground first.
"I am trying to get in the right frame of life. The thing that would help me most
right now would be to have somebody offer me a job, keeping in mind what I can do with my
health. Giving a guy a handout won't help in the end."
He smiles, then laughs.
"I don't know what the solution is to poverty but you know what, I'm going on 42 and
I'm getting too old for all this." |
 Thibeault wonders if he's allergic to the good
life. |
 Wolf,
above, says he lives in a car after forsaking respectability and a family for booze. He
says he hasn't been drunk for about 20 years. |
The lean craggy man with piercing grey eyes is called Wolf.
And as if to pull out a birth certificate, the rough-dressed man with a railway spike in
his hand draws his left paw forward with the letters W-O-L-F tattooed above the knuckles
on his fingers. 'Indian' and 'Scot' are etched there too -- his heritage, he says -- and a
military service number, crest and assorted other words and symbols.
His hands are swollen and scarred, a thumb fused from an accident. His body is tempered
sinew, his age indeterminable -- at first he says he's 87, later it's 61. Either could be
right.
"It's because I'm half dog," he says about his name. "Wolves bite."
Wary, yet reveling in toughness, Wolf toys with those who invade his privacy. The curious
and the malicious often visit street dwellers like him. Over the years, he's been beaten,
stabbed and rolled.
"You know why I look mean -- because that way people won't bother me." |
Wolf has been stooped over the rear entrance at Ark-Aid
Christian Mission on Dundas Street, dragging a railway spike along the sill to clean out
dirt. He says he draws welfare and lives in a nearby car compliments of a business owner.
"It's a pretty good place," he says with the air of a knowledgeable critic.
"I didn't always look like this," he says, gesturing without shame to his
clothes.
Wolf says he was once a welder, had several cars and fine suits. Had a wife and kids, too
-- all of it lost to booze and drugs. Holes in the tops of his running shoes reveal a bare
foot.
But Wolf's face is bright and expressive. His voice has the bold, sing-song narrative of a
Baptist preacher, full of morality plays and metaphor. Struggles between good and evil
rule Wolf's universe. He carries the Bible, recites chapter and verse, assured "the
Man up there" will make his life better in the end.
He says he hasn't been a drunk in almost 20 years, not since waking from a three-week
binge in a town he didn't know.
"I was a boozer and at the end I didn't look 34, I looked 104. I would look in the
mirror and say, 'Who is that?' I never want to see that man in the mirror again."
Today, Wolf is angry.
Punks have trashed his bike, a complex miracle built from at least three machines he
gleaned from others' garbage. It carried the tools he uses for odd jobs. A plate on it
said "Wolf."
"How dare they tell me I don't have the right to make the best of this world? Some
people are so stupid and asinine, if I can use that word, and antediluvian -- which means
antique, stupid, old ideas -- that they look at something and think how dare you be happy
in a world like this."
Wolf counts humans beneath other animals on the civilization scale.
"Did you ever see a wolf pick up a baby and drop it out of an apartment building
window onto the road?"
A storyteller in full flight, he delves into the origins of slavery, touches on Egypt and
Persia, spins a yarn about Gene Autry, recounts the origins of buildings around him. Tears
well up at the memory of his deceased mother and the putting-down of his big, old,
rat-killing childhood dog named Jumbo.
Then it's over. Can we buy him a coffee somewhere?
"Please don't take offence," he says gently, "but I would just as soon go
inside (Ark Aid) and sit down for a while with my friends."
The people inside are his family. "They care about me." |
 Cameron Dawes studies in his cramped, one-room apartment. |
Cameron Dawes never separates the colours from whites when
doing his laundry -- the extra loads would cost too much. A Fanshawe College student
trundling between welfare during the summer and student loans that have ballooned to
$20,000, he's lucky to have $20 a week for food. With that he gets mostly pasta and tinned
foods, and tries to survive long enough to study refrigeration and air-conditioning
technology.
He's 36 years old -- and like one in three Canadians living alone he's poor.
There's no money for entertainment beyond a small television. Cable is out of the
question. Home is a bed-sitting room and bathroom. The fridge is under the sink, the stove
is two burners and a toaster oven. That's where he bakes cookies with his kids on days he
has custody but can't afford to take them anywhere.
It's an existence he learned to cope with at an early age, like most of today's poor. |
Many poor teens fly below public policy radar and social
assistance guidelines. Experts fear the future for a growing number of troubled, unskilled
youth who have had fleeting contact with social agencies but who remain outside their
influence.
And despite public perception of rampant student welfare, one City of London official says
eligibility is so stringent for the youngest that although 3,142 welfare recipients in
London are aged 16 to 24 years -- most are single -- few are 16 or 17 years old.
Beyond that, being poor and single won't necessarily keep you single, but it may keep you
poor. Whether being single is defined as living alone or being unmarried, there's a
greater likelihood of drifting into poverty.
Bottom line: There is certainly a sizable chunk of affluent singles building careers, but
in general singles are not only more likely to be poor, they are likely to be the poorest
of the poor. And during the '90s, a growing percentage of them slipped below poverty
lines.
"There are a lot of single people who are very much isolated and society needs to
think about that," says Bill Avison, a University of Western Ontario sociologist
specializing in the effects of poverty on health.
"When I think of singles," says Jane Roy, London and Area Food Bank's assistant
director, "they are the ones most heavily affected by cuts, they are the ones left
with $3 after the rent and food. They are the group, particularly young, single males,
that everyone picks on the most and has a real prejudice toward."
For example, poor single men lose out on child custody matters, she says, because a male
who gets access after a divorce doesn't get money to go with that, an impossible manoeuvre
on welfare.
"We have a lot of single males who have custody of their kids for the weekend. They
only get $520 (a month on welfare) which is not enough to feed the children. So they come
in here for extra food."
In London and Middlesex County, 38 per cent of unattached persons live in poverty, much
higher than almost any other living arrangement. Among one-person households in London,
more than 15 per cent earned less than $10,000 in 1996. |
Living alone
- singles are more likely to be poor than those in other living arrangements
- 35,780 Londoners live alone, including 12,040 seniors
- Londoners are more likely to live alone (one in nine) than in the rest of Ontario (one
in 12)
- London singles are more likely to be poor than singles in the rest of Ontario
- singles in London earn less ($26,354) than in the rest of Ontario ($27,742)
- one in 6.5 London singles makes less than $10,000 compared to one in 7.5 Ontarians
- the percentage of London singles living below the poverty line increased from 1990 (40
per cent) to 1995 (42 per cent)
- the elderly are more likely to live alone in London than elsewhere
- London seniors are three times more likely to live alone than the rest of the population
- the average household income in London of a two-or-more-person household ($58,245) is
more than 2.2 times greater than the average household income of a one-person household
($26,354)
Source: Middlesex-London health unit, Statistics Canada,
Mayor's Task Force on Poverty |
Among about 2,100 persons who visited the food bank in September, 750 were
single -- close to 36 per cent of those seeking help.
Nearly one in five young Londoners is jobless and missing out on important early
development of basic work skills. Among city welfare recipents, 26 per cent are under 25.
Dawes is his own biggest critic. He grew up undisciplined and unruly. He left home before
finishing Grade 9 and, over the next 15 years, tailspinned through failed jobs, a failed
marriage and brushes with the law.
"Yes I screwed up and I paid for it," he says.
He struggles daily with that legacy -- the humiliation of jail, inability to be bonded for
many jobs and starting from scratch in his 30s.
Still, he went back to school in 1991, starting at Grade 7 and completing high school.
Today he's in the final year of his diploma.
"There are plenty of people out there who are worse off than I am and it is because
of the hopelessness. The squalid conditions you live in can lead to depression and when
you are depressed you just don't care anymore. It is easy to lose hope and hopelessness
leads to criminal activity."
Experts say Dawes is one of the lucky ones -- singles who have been to the brink seldom
come back.
Carol Reid, of the John Howard Society, an agency that works with offenders, sees young
men come from jail with just the clothes on their back and try to go straight on welfare's
$520 a month. Many are poorly skilled.
She's haunted by one man, now 21, who has spent most of the last five years in detention.
"He never has a place to live, he never has clothing, he struggles and sleeps at
other people's houses and when he is out he struggles to get to school every day."
He passed an exam to join the U.S. Marines, but didn't have enough school credits.
"I can't maintain his stability long enough for him to get those credits. He just
goes back to custody because he has a roof over his head and he has food. He is the
poorest of the poor. He has no income. He does well in school but if he hasn't slept for
two nights it is really hard for him to focus, or when he hasn't eaten for a few days it
becomes a problem."
There are just so many potholes -- for example, students without proper gym shorts get
marked absent. But for the few London high-school-aged teens who get welfare because of
abuse or overcrowding in the home, proper gym shorts can be expensive. No shorts, no clean
attendance record. And no clean attendance record, no welfare. Some city high schools even
open shower rooms in the morning because there's no running water at some homes. Cameron
Dawes get $8,100 in student loan money for eight months of school. Although the money is
not given on a monthly basis, this budget shows where the money goes on a monthly basis.
Dawes monthly budget |
| Income |
$1,010 |
Expenses |
| Rent |
$320 |
| Tuition |
250 |
| Books and tools |
100 |
Prescription drugs (heart) |
60 |
| Food |
90 |
| Transportation (court-ordered child access) |
50 |
| Phone |
20 |
| Laundering |
25 |
| Loan (to register for class) |
25 |
| Overpayment (overlapping OSAP and welfare) |
30 |
| Other (legal, clothes, personal, gifts) |
40 |
| Expense total |
$1,010 |
|