|
Social reject biographer >> Author Pat Capponi's version of the greatest country in the world
by JACQUIE CHARLTON
"'I wanted to meet Jesus, so for about a year I swallowed 50 boxes of salt, you know, the regular boxes...'" the salt guy says in her new book, The War at Home: An Intimate Portrait of Canada's Poor. "Then, after my heart attack, I still wanted to meet Jesus. I wanted to ask him to cure my schizophrenia. But, when I saw him, He said, 'I love you just the way you are.' He touched me here, right here on the shoulder. He said, 'Nine more years.' You know the Lotto 6/49? That's what he meant. I'll win it in nine years.'" Not only the salt guy, but tons of other people whom life has heaped so high with troubles you wonder how they get out of bed, or sleeping bags, or off the sidewalk, in the morning. Pat Capponi has lived similar troubles herself. She's been physically and emotionally abused by her father, in mental institutions and on welfare (they're the subjects of her first two books, Upstairs in the Crazy House and Dispatches From the Poverty Line). At fancy press conferences, with well-dressed publicists and members of the media on hand, she admits she still feels odd and isolated. But there's a certain type of journalist who's good at getting society's rejects to talk and Capponi is one. Simply put, in a time when we're all supposed to be reading about mutual fund investments in the greatest country in the world, she goes about her job with the idea that people's problems matter. "There was a kid at [infamous Westmount orphanage] Weredale I knew, he was really embarrassed because of his clothes. They weren't giving him any decent clothes there. So I said, 'Go down, ass-naked, and tell them you don't have any clothes.' Except he got his wires mixed up a bit and went down there and told them he was going to burn his clothes." Imagine if enough people did that at their welfare office. Capponi says she was so tired of hearing stories that made her moan during her cross-country investigation of the urban poor, so revolted by social service agents "dressed to the fucking nines" saying, "We're here to help people to learn job skills" (there are scathing critiques of Canada's social service agencies in the book), she was relieved when the assignment was over. What does she think of the poor people she saw here in Montreal? "I saw a lot of beaten, crouched-looking guys. And the women are in layers. They don't have carts here." It's the street kids, however, who seem to upset her the most. When she was doing her research for the Montreal chapter of the book, she drove around in Pops's van. "These kids are looking for rescue and all they've found out is there isn't any rescue. And, oy, they get hard." She grimaces. "You could rescue them. You could fight for kids. You could get them to believe again. "But instead we give them sleeping bags." |
In the course of her work Pat Capponi has met mayors, members of the Canadian literati and strange guys in psychiatric hospitals who chug boxes of salt.