The other day Debbie called to ask if she could come and spend the night. Debbie’s a woman I met a little over a year ago when I was writing about Victoria Avenue barbershops. I did a photo-essay about her for school (“Debbie’s First of the Month” – I’ll put that up one day), and we always kept in touch after that. When I see her in Mandela Park sometimes, biking from work, she introduces me to her domino partners as her “journalist friend, you know the one I told you wrote an article about me.” They all nod their dread-packed beanie hats and smile. They know exactly the one.

On the phone Debbie sounded tired and nervous. I was happy to hear from her and told her the couch was all hers, if she didn’t mind the risk of being slow-cooked to death in my A/C-less apartment. I hadn’t seen her around at all lately and for a semi-homeless woman, that gets disquieting fast.

“You know me,” Debbie said, “I’m easy.” She said she had a funeral to go to in the morning and that she “just knew” she wouldn’t be getting any rest where she’d currently been crashing. The guy she’d been staying with had brought in a new girlfriend (“a freak,” Debbie said, “and a loud one”), and started “smoking shit again”.

Debbie hates crack even more than a loud freak and she just wouldn’t have that. “It’s that smell, Carolyne,” she says, “it chokes me. It stabs me in my lungs.”

Since we met, little has changed in Debbie’s life. She still doesn’t have a place to stay (she got kicked out of her last pad when she was $20 short for rent because she’d gone and bought herself some cheap winter boots), still survives on a social assistance check and odd jobs she does around the neighbourhood (tending gardens, looking after kids, running errands for old people, painting), and is still the most entertaining storyteller I’ve met in my entire life.

Also, at 42, Debbie is still a fox. She’s got the tiny, rock-hard body of a muay thai fighter and a million times more flavour and style than a lot of people with good-paying jobs and a roof over their heads. “The harassment I deal with in that park Carolyne I tell you”, she says, delighted. “You should really come by more often, you know. Get all them retards off my ass.”

It was already late when Debbie finally showed up that night but I stayed up anyways and drank some of the beer she’d brought (her signature big bottle of Blue Dry, 6%.) She told me she’d been toying with the idea of stripping again (“For myself, Carolyne, you know. Because I still can”), and also that she’d finagled her way into an art-therapy group that meets several time a week in Côte-des-Neiges. “I don’t even have the doctors paper nothing,” Debbie said. “I just started showing up and everybody pretended like they hadn’t noticed.”

She said she had been drawing mandalas a lot.

This is a picture of Debbie I took just before waking her up, the next morning. Sticking out of her purse, at her feet, was her beer bottle (an empty forty gets you at least one cigarette at the Indian dep across the park), and a dozen colouring pencils, half-spilled on the floor.