Do the Dog

WARNING: This novel contains explicit language, violent situations and graphic sexual references throughout.

*****

Raheem Ford, back in his hometown of Ottawa after spending a few years in Calgary, meets the sensual but tough talking Amira Cruz while staying at a homeless shelter in the city. Despite clashing violently when they first meet, they soon embark on a wild and carefree romance, living their lives in a similar fashion.

Raheem eventually discovers there is more to Amira than meets the eye. Her friendship with women from similar troubled and abused backgrounds has ignited a disturbing night-time activity that at first horrifies Raheem and then draws him in.

In the meantime, a series of violent sex attacks are hitting the city.

*****

I banged the locker door in frustration. The resulting boom sounded as if a RPG had been launched. It doesn't take much to alert the staff and send them running down from the office to see what was happening. They react like a spider to a fly struggling on a spider web at any suspicious sounds that could indicate a bout of rowdiness and aggression from the residents, even if the end result was limited.

"It might be in the laundry," said Rob helpfully, one of my dorm mates and one of the more decent guys in the building.

"Nah, that's gone, and those were my best pair of pants too!"

My bed was empty except for the pillow. The sheets and the blanket had been taken up by the cleaning staff, as they did every morning to put into the house laundry. That was a beloved pair of Guess jeans, blue, straight fit, and they matched my dark brown Timberland shoes almost perfectly.

The last I remember was taking them out of the locker in the morning before going into the shower room. I must have left them on the bed when I went over to the Kitchen for breakfast. I was over there for about thirty minutes, munching Bran Flakes, peanut butter and jam toast and watching the sports news on the flat screen TV on the wall.

"Go tell the staff and make 'em search the laundry room," Rob advised.

It sounded hopeful, and I thought he should know, since he had been here longer than me. So I hot stepped it along the hallway, past the shelter managers' offices and the washrooms, to the shelter staff office at the front of the hallway. I told them what happened. One of them, a portly but kind gent called Chris, escorted me promptly to the laundry room. There were two large wheelie type bins in there with all the dirty sheets and blankets they had collected that morning. They were waiting for someone to place them into two large, aging washing machines. I did not fancy the idea of digging my clean hands through all those soiled sheets that guys had rolled in, farted in, rubbed against themselves, blown their noses into, wiped themselves on or even (gulp!) masturbated on. But I wanted those pants. I could not afford to lose them, not now.

I did what I had to do. As Rob looked on, I held my breath and waded into what I did not want to know. I shifted fitted sheets, flat sheets, blankets and pillowcases to the side, making a bigger mess than what was there already. After ten slow minutes my work was done. I left a lovely mess of linen, but no pants.

"Shit!" I cursed. "Some dirty bastard has my pants!"

Chris shrugged his shoulders. "Sorry buddy. We'll keep an eye out for you."

I nodded and left the room without waiting for Chris. I hope the bitch who stole my pants loses his thieving hand in a nasty way.

I was into my second week at The Good Shepherd, one of the four main homeless shelters in Ottawa, with three of them situated within a 1 km radius of each other in the downtown area, off Rideau Street. Ottawa is my home city; I was born and raised here, me and my younger brother. At the age of eleven, my parents divorced. My dad headed to Calgary to try and make some oil money while I stayed with my mom and brother in Ottawa. We moved from a three bedroom house in Orleans into a two bedroom apartment at Merivale and West Hunt Club in the west of the city.

My mom was still an attractive woman and quite young looking for her early thirties. Before long, other men noticed she was single and available; she remarried within two years of divorcing my dad. The new husband was a guy she worked with, he was ten years older and he was white. I could not see how that was going to work; especially when she became pregnant for him at thirty-five. I was thirteen years old; I called him by his first name, Kevin. He was a good guy really but had I reached my teens. I followed my peers and got a bit rebellious. I could not take Kevin scolding me or giving me any punishment. That lead to conflict with my mom, and things came to a head after Grade 12.

After one big bust up where I physically attacked Kevin, I was told to leave. I was run out of the family home, because of that old asshole. I cursed him to the ground. I stayed at a buddy's home for a few months, before finding a batchelor flat rental. I struggled to work and maintain a roof over my head. After a few years of that, I got in contact with my Dad. I was on my way to Alberta before he had to chance to know why I had called. In Calgary, I received a lukewarm reception from my dad at his three bedroom house that he shared with two other guys. He acted as if I was some zit to be erased and fast, if not permanently. He was enjoying freedom from the chains of marriage and had girlfriends coming out of his ears.

Calgary looked better than Ottawa in the summer time so I hung around, finding mostly manual work through a temping agency, then I was working with my Dad. A couple of brutal winters soon sent me running like a gazelle escaping from a lion. That and a fight with my Dad, although not before I begged some money from him, having to practically shove my birth certificate in his face to convince him, the tight asshole. I bought a coach trip to Montreal, where I had family on my mom's side. Here again, I was treated as if I was one of the ten great plagues, and so eventually found myself back in Ottawa.

With a big smile and a few juicy horror stories, I got myself into mom's good books, although Kevin was now just cool towards me and not the street kind of cool either. A month later, I had a big bust up with him and got thrown out the house again. Not even the dignity of allowing myself to leave, they threw me out. I was twenty-six years old now, so there was less guilt from my mom this time. At least it was not winter. I was out on my backside on the bare streets of Ottawa with my backpack and some clothes in a sports holdall. I let with some choice foul words towards the whole of them which insured that any chance of reconciliation was as likely as a heatwave in the Arctic.

So I slept outside, not really knowing where to go, since I had lost contact with most of my old Ottawa buddies. I slept under trees, on park benches, at bus stations and sometimes in shopping malls. It was all good when the weather was nice. It was so crappy when the rain fell and I had to run for cover.

After one night when I got so drenched after security kicked me out of Carlingwood Mall on Baseline Road, I dried off at a local sports centre and then took the bus downtown. I went to the YMCA on Argyle Street, as that was the only place I knew that could take in homeless people. They said they had no space and referred me to the Salvation Army on George Street. I was not too impressed with the Sally's drab, grubby looking building, so I was not too upset when they said they were full too. They called the nearby Good Shepherd, who said that I should call them later, around 7pm, once they had confirmed how many people would be sleeping there that night.

So I hung around downtown, becoming thoroughly bored as there was not much to the area once you had walked out the Rideau Centre shopping mall. I bought a large coffee at Tim Hortons and drunk it very slowly by the front window as I watched the Ottawa female hotty club strolling by. It was very insightful; I never realised that there were that much hot girls in Ottawa as I did on that early summer's day on Rideau Street.

By 7pm, by which time hunger was digging out my insides, I walked the ten minutes it took to get to the Good Shepherd, who thankfully confirmed that they did have a bed available: bed E28. A young, fit looking female member of staff (she had a small jacket on that said ‘'staff' escorted me to my quarters, a small room with three bunk beds and six high school size lockers. Welcome to the jungle! I put the larger of my two backpacks in the locker that was assigned to my bed number, tucked my wallet in my inside jacket pocket, washed my face in the washroom, picked up my other backpack and headed out to the adjacent building on the other side of the road that served as the Good Shepherd's soup kitchen. They had a drop in centre going on in there by this time, so I was able to get some vegetable soup, some bread with butter and a hot coffee while a 32" flat screen TV showed a movie on Showcase. I thought, this shit ain't so bad. There was a fairly large cooking area where the food was prepared and handed to us over a glass counter. We sat in an extensive vinyl floored area with tables and chairs there were fixed to the floor.

The soup kitchen had a mix of grubby looking men, in various states of cleanliness. Some looked like they were straight off the mean streets, in their soiled, creased and ill fitting clothing; others were dressed in manual workfare of jeans and safety shoes and there were a few half-decent guys, who would not look out of place in a line up for Tim Hortons. There were a few dour looking females, and the odd black and Aboriginal face in the mix. At least I was not the sole visible minority in this line up of misery.

Homeless shelters. I never in my life thought I would end up in one of them. I read that they were dangerous, violent, dirty, invaded by bed bugs and polluted with the lowest of the low. I read that many homeless people would rather take their chances on the street than stay in a homeless shelter. That the staff treated you like cattle, pushing and prodding you to move that way, go this way, take that bed, take these blankets, take your possessions elsewhere, take our advice, take our shit and be grateful.

The reality; not so bad, not so good. Maybe I got lucky, but The Good Shepherd was bearable. I was thankful for a bed in a room and not a mat on the floor. The shelter held two washrooms, a shower room, a tub room, a TV room, a lounge area (just another room with a few chairs) with an attached elevated patio area for smokers. The bedding was cleaned daily in their in-house laundry and you could wash your clothes there too once all the sheets and towels were done. And there were filling meals three times a day at the soup kitchen for Good Shepherd residents.

The residents were a mixed bunch of good guys, some A plus dumb-asses, drug addicts and the mentally challenged (the loonie toonies). The shelter was a renovated old school building the size of an average grocery store, with three floors. The building itself was okay; it was the residents who decided whether they wanted to keep it clean or not. And too many times it was not.

Homeless men; hopeless men, angry men. On my second night there were two major arguments between the inmates. The second bust up woke everyone up and caused the police to be called at 1 AM. Hopeless guys; guys walked around indoors, sometimes topless, in shorts or just their underwear. Too many of these dirty fuckers used the toilet and then just left without washing. I ain't shaking none of their hands! Guys stayed up all night in the lounge, chatting, shouting, smoking. Some of them smelled like crap like they had brought the street in with them. There's a frigging shower room for goodness sake! I was cleaning down my ass on a daily basis.

This was a new world, one that you had heard about but never really thought about until Christmas when you hear those adverts asking you to donate a dollar to give a homeless chump a dinner. Within a week I realised I was thankful for the shelter but the longer I stayed here, I would eventually adjust and become one of the these fools. I would be wandering around the hallways in just my boxers and bare feet taking shits without washing afterward.

Why did mom have to marry again? Wasn't one bastard of a man enough for her. Now that pale faced fool is running the house while I, her blood, was out sinking into this human cess pit.

I needed money therefore I needed to work. That was the normal route. However I was essentially sans address. What the fuck do I put on my tattered resume as my address? I left my mom's address on it and would deal with any fallout if and when it happened. Being the slow dickhead that I could be, my driving license still had my current address as my dad's place in Calgary. I had applied for an Ontario Driving License when I was still at my mom's house. I was not too concerned. I was her blood; she would let me know whenever it arrived. I would phone and ask her about it in a week's time. I doubted she would get all nasty about it and decide not to give it to me.

Fucking Ottawa; one thing that I hate about this city. Obtaining a decent job with a good salary is nigh on impossible unless you are either bilingual in English and French and/or you have a degree. My French flaked out after grade 12 and dashing from province to province in my young adult years messed up my post-secondary education plans.

So with the lack of work opportunities, I bummed around for a while, making sure my belly was at least full, with breakfast, lunch and dinner courtesy of The Good Shepherd Kitchen. Beyond that, it was a case of drifting around downtown, trying to look decent and not like a homeless bum, and hoping against hope that you will get lucky somehow.

There was one little glimmer of light amongst all the drudgery; the Good Shepherd housed a male and female shelter in the same building, with separate entrances for the genders on alternate sides of the building. And human nature being what it is, the male and female species will always attract when in close quarters. Men hanging around the female entrance was not encouraged, but a blind eye was given to the odd females chatting around the male entrance. In any case, we would all meet up at the Kitchen.

These women were homeless chicks, so basically a squirmy, messy sample of the female species. There was a higher percentage of Aboriginals among the females than the males for some reason, some wacky ass skinny white girls who were either crackheads or hookers, or both, as well as the odd black kitty.

I saw them all in the Kitchen. They were messy but mostly a decent bunch compared to the men. There were those wacky ass ones who deliberately brought attention to themselves, especially when they were drunk or high. Once, one of them white gals came in with her skinny pants hanging down, revealing the top half of her backside and the hint of a thong. What did she want a thong for with that thin, bony ass? I watched her as she swore at the men, danced with her food, and wailed at her female buddy about some thieving landlord. It was a turn off at first, and then as I watched that jumping, jiving thong, I was thinking, go on, let those pants drop lower and let's see if she would dare expose her snatch. Some guys were telling her to pull her pants up, but then she lowered them further on purpose. I still couldn't see shit but my head was spinning like crazy. I had not seen pussy for a while, and I wanted to see this skanky one right now!

What if she were to pull her pants all the way down, whip that stringy thong one side and offer it up for whoever dared? Would I dare? Would I??

Is this what lack of sex does to you? You think of crazy, whacky shit that would not normally enter your head. What do I want with some skanky hoe? She is most probably hiring out that pussy for her crack fill. Shit, would I care? My dick was throbbing for a wet female hole. Yeah, it had to be wet, hoe!

That was when I declared that this life had got to me. I had officially gone to the other side. I had to get back to the land of the living! Later on that same night, there was a mighty row in my room when one guy from another room accused a roomy called Mac of stealing his baseball cap. Mac says what cap? This Toronto Maple Leafs one? No, I bought this today off a buddy for five bucks. Garbage, says the alleged victim, that is my cap. It's got this oil stain at the back, let me show you. Fuck off, says Mac. That's not an oil stain and I paid for this.

The feds visited yet again when buddy boy threatens to cut off Mac's balls. He is eventually told to leave the shelter for the night. Afterward Mac admits that the cap probably did belong to buddy boy, as the seller was a known crook.

After all that, and the lost pants, I had had enough. I had to get out. Find me a job, someone, please! I was going to walk the streets, or find free wifi for my iPhone and work desperately to find work, regular money and then the shelter can go do one.

That was my aim, until I met Amira.