Outside in the deep freeze

>> How Montreal's homeless cope when the temperature plummets

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

 Gino Laplante spent his last night on earth last week in a warm room separate from the other men at the Old Brewery Mission. He was coughing badly, and staff thought it best to keep him away from the others.

 He died in a sleeping bag shortly after leaving that room, on the pavement outside the nearby Place d'Armes metro station. He apparently sobbed for help from the scores of commuters streaming by, and died in the arms of the one person who stopped to check on him.

 We've inured ourselves to homeless people's requests for spare change. What about when one of them says "I'm cold"?

 In and out
 Raymond Jean, an elderly homeless man on crutches, describes his day like so: at 7 a.m. he leaves the Old Brewery Mission where he sleeps and spends the next 45 minutes at a restaurant on Notre-Dame over a coffee. He panhandles for an hour, then warms himself at another restaurant, this time maybe the Burger King at the corner of St-Laurent and Ste-Catherine, where Whopper Juniors can be had for 99 cents. Then it's on the street again, then a coffee again somewhere, and on and on. He reckons he gets through a winter day with five or six coffee stops a day. On an average day, they cost him about half of the $11 or $12 he makes panhandling, but on a bad day, this sustenance will take every cent he's got.

 And then there are the lineups. Two homeless men, who ask not to be named, describe waiting up to two-and-a-half hours outside of the various men's shelters for a lunch. Then it's on to the next soup kitchen for another wait in line for a supper, and then out again, and yet another wait in a lineup for a bed for the night.

 The Old Brewery Mission lets its clients wait inside when it's very cold (an employee says that could be anywhere between minus 15*C, and minus 10*C when it's damp). At the nearby Accueil Bonneau, men can wait inside: architects of the reconstructed building that replaced the one destroyed by a gas explosion two years ago included an indoor waiting room--something that had been requested for years.

 But, says one of the men, "You're always waiting for something. You can't concentrate on anything else." The two men are understandably disgruntled and fault the shelters for perpetuating what they see as a system of control. "If I give you a sandwich every day, I hold you," explains one. "If I give you a pound of baloney, a loaf of bread and a table to eat it on, I don't hold you anymore."

 Testing their mettle
 Some homeless people have rationalized the cold enough to turn it into a test of toughness. Jordie Yeo, who works as a supervisor at the Old Brewery Mission and has seen cases of frostbite "down to the bone," saw a man on the street one winter day wearing only a light sports jacket and told him to get something warmer on. "It's resistance; I'm body-building," the man told him. But inappropriate clothing is common at the Mission. Yeo says a man once walked all the way from the Douglas Hospital in Verdun to the Mission in Old Montreal wearing only a hospital gown and paper slippers.

 "Some people think their resistance is going to be built up if they stay out long enough on the street," says Pierre, who panhandles in a motorized wheelchair on Ste-Catherine, and ducks into a nearby restaurant serving cheap hamburgers when he's cold. "But they're out here too long and they start losing their feeling and pretty soon they don't know if they're cold or not."

 Denis St-Pierre, who was waiting in the glass passageway outside the Palais des congres for the Old Brewery Mission to open its doors for beds, says as hard as life is, it's harder for the old men. "People older than us need help even more. The younger ones should help the older guys."

 Yeo, at the Mission, has an unexpectedly sweet metaphor for the homeless men he works with, in all their individuality and vulnerability, and it's seasonally appropriate. "I would be willing to bet every single person here is a snowflake," he says. "Here today, and if not taken care of, melted tomorrow." :

 

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