Patty and Joe: `It's so hard to live a normal life here'
“One day, I'd like to live in one of those nice condos down by the beach,” Patty said in 2012.
“Just to be able to feel like we're not in the system anymore. Me and Joe, living in a regular building with regular residents. And, I don't know, maybe then I'd want to go back to school — be able to focus on school and everything? Finish my high school and get my diploma, and then pick a career from there.”
Fast met Patty four years earlier, when she was 19 and her boyfriend, Joe, was 20. They lived in a small camp under a Vancouver bridge. The couple made money any way they could: panhandling, shoplifting, drug dealing, sex work.
Patty was in foster care in Edmonton and moved to Vancouver after the baby she had at age 17 was seized by social services. Joe, who is Cree, is from Saskatchewan.
“It's so hard to live a normal life here,” Patty lamented to Fast.
She lived in a rat-infested, single-room occupancy hotel in the Downtown Eastside, where shared sinks and toilets routinely overflowed. In the summer, “large clouds of insects ascended in flight” when anyone touched Patty's belongings in her messy, stiflingly hot room.
By 2012, the couple moved into a supportive housing building with a program for young people with mental health and addiction problems. Although safe and clean, the austere building felt like a hospital or jail, and their two years there were boring and lonely.
This was a recurring theme for young people: Building rules separated them from friends, “when fragile connections to others were the very thing that might keep them alive in the context of mounting overdoses,” Fast wrote.
Three years later, in 2015, she met Patty at a coffee shop. Patty had returned to sex work and no longer talked about going to treatment because she didn't see it working for anyone. When she said goodbye to Fast that day, she yelled, “Love you!” as she often did.
“I didn't exactly know why, but it broke my heart that time,” Fast wrote.
By 2018, Patty told Fast that her life had been saved twice by naloxone, an overdose-reversing medication. She was tired, Patty said, of people dying all around her, and she felt like everyone — friends, family, service providers — had given up on her.
“I still think I'm a good person, you know? But it seems like less and less people are seeing that in me,” Patty said, weeping. “I just, like, don't know how to make everything in my life work right now. How do I make it all work?”
The last time she saw Patty was opening night of a photography exhibit in downtown Vancouver, a party attended by many youth profiled in the book who took pictures for the project. Patty stood in the doorway, looking overwhelmed, and didn't come inside.
“I went into the street to try to catch her, but she was gone,” Fast wrote.
Patty died of an overdose in her SRO room in 2019.
I still think I'm a good person, you know? But it seems like less and less people are seeing that in me.