Inside Vancouver
The Caretaker
By Marcie Good published Oct 1, 2008
Trevail rings the buzzer at the grated back entrance to the Deluxe Junk Company. “Have you heard the news?” he asks Rod Hubic. “Those dealers came back. That’s why I haven’t been here.”
“I could tell you weren’t here,” says Hubic, “because the alley’s trashed.”
Trevail agrees, surveying the ripped-open garbage bags littering the ground. For two years he has tended this alley near Victory Square. At 43, he is slight but strong, and describes himself as “NFA,” preferring that term to “homeless.” Buffered by the tips, bottles, joints, and food he receives from people who work on this block, Trevail recently took himself off welfare. Things were going well until some drug dealers stopped by.
The first time, a man told him to stay out of this alley. Hubic remembers that day: “He wore a white-and-red tracksuit. They all wear tracksuits, all matchy-matchy.”
Trevail picks up the story. A week later, the same guy returned with four others, and asked Trevail if he’d forgotten what he’d been told. “I said, ‘I didn’t forget a thing. This is my job. It’s not your alley. It belongs to the people who live and work here.’ And he came right at me with a collapsible baton, and tap-tap-tap. On the back, head, wherever I wasn’t covering, he was hitting.” Since then, he’s stayed away. Yesterday he spent his last five bucks.
Why would a drug dealer beat him up? Hubic has a simple answer. “Turf. All Ken’s doing is keeping it clean, but in their minds he’s pissing on their area.”
If the battle is about territory, this block is important. Along the north side is an eclectic collection of clothing boutiques reshaping Gastown into a design destination. The merchants here have no appetite for the brazen selling and using that scourges the Downtown Eastside on the other side of Cambie Street.
