God is an illegal street kid-latest rough draft of an excerpt from “killing justice: the taste of knives"

“Hang with me and be real.” (Keith Endow, Vineyard Westside Fellowship home church co-leader, 3/3/17)

I took a piss outdoors after work tonight. The restroom on our floor is being renovated, and I didn’t have the magic fob that would enable me to travel to other floors after hours in search of a working restroom, and I just had to go. The whole time my piss was streaming down, glowing in the glare of the street lights, I imagined a cop emerging out of the shadows behind me, shining a flashlight on my dick, and trying to arrest me for vagrancy, indecent exposure or both. I then imagined begging him to deport me to Canada instead, but then remembered he couldn’t ‘cause I’d gone and become a naturalized american a couple of decades earlier, back in my early thirties, before this country really started turning into this frightened little kid after 9/11.

But then I flashed back to a couple of decades before that, back in my early teens. Back then my good friend Phil Troop, who ran the Mustard Seed Mission in my hometown of Victoria, Canada, used to sponsor a street kid to go to our summer bible camp up at half moon bay every year. I always felt much closer to those kids Phil sponsored than to any of the other kids there.

I especially loved hanging out with Zachary. One of his favorite activities was to go around and get in the face of all those “party six days, go to church hungover” kids and scream at them: “Are you a Christian?”

To which they’d usually mumble: “Well, yeah, ” and he’d then go on to silence them with “Well then, act like it!” Zachary’s motto might as well have been “hang with me and be real,” and so I used to love hanging out with him for that very reason.

I then flashed back to half a decade later, during my four years at Trinity Western University. Just like when I’d felt so out of my element around most of the kids at summer camp, I found myself sleeping my way though most of my business classes and even most of the chapel services. Aside from my time spent working in the library, the only other time I really felt alive during those four years was when we’d pile into that beat-up white Chevy van with the busted left tail light every Monday night, and head downtown to Granville Street in the heart of Vancouver’s skid row. Then we’d tumble out of the van and pour out onto the streets and get to know the street kids who lived there, and see if any of them wanted to hang out with us and be real either out there on the streets, or down at the Teen Challenge coffeehouse.

I became good friends with a street kid named Derek during my time there, and he even came out with me to church one time at Christian Life Assembly in Langley. My time on the streets of downtown Vancouver, and especially my time spent with Derek, was the realest time I had during my four years at Trinity.

And finally I flashed back to the present. I imagined that I was an illegal street kid, searching for sanctuary in this city of lost angels, and being chased from street corner to street corner by roving gangs of cops and ICE agents. Just as the two gangs caught up with me and were attempting to grab me and haul my ass off to prison, I caught sight of a church across the street, with a sign that read “the silent servants of the used, abused, and utterly screwed up.” I tore myself out of the gangbangers’ grasp, and raced across the street and through the open front door before they could catch up with me. As the pastor welcomed me inside with the words “hang with me and be real”, I knew I’d found my home.

image: In photographer Léon Gimpel directed a gang of street children and created surreal tableaux that mirrored the realities of war raging elsewhere