(Vince sells Megaphone, Vancouver B.C.'s sister paper to Real Change, on Granville Island outside the city's Public Market. Here he recounts some of the craziest things he has seen since he started selling Vancouver's street paper.)
On a warm summer day at Main and Hastings, a middle-aged woman dropped her drawers at one o'clock in the afternoon and proceeded to piss against a fire hydrant like a dog.
A few years ago I met this girl (pretty good-looking) on Christmas Eve. It was about 5 a.m. and she invited me up for a Christmas drink. Obviously, I said yes. So we went up to her room at the Winters Hotel on Abbott Street. She and I had a couple of screwdrivers and talked for a while. I thought for sure I was going to get lucky. But I got unlucky after I went to the washroom. While I was there, she put a very strong pill in my drink. I soon passed out on her bed. A couple of hours later I woke up and my $200 was gone and so was she. These girls down here on the Eastside cannot be trusted, even on Christmas Eve.
A man sitting on a bench at Granville and Pender talking to himself said God was going to marry him in the Supreme Court of Canada.
Some 'a-hole' walked up to me on Granville Street one day while I was selling the paper and dropped a penny right in front of me to see if I would pick it up. I got mad and kicked it halfway across the street.
One day I was selling the paper in front of the Granville Island Public Market. I noticed a girl screaming her head off while walking toward me, telling me how great her kids were. Then she came up to me and asked what I was selling. I told her I was selling Spare Change (the old street paper). She told me she hated the editor and said I should take a f**kin' break. There's a flower shop at the front entrance to the market and all of a sudden she started banging on the window of the flower shop, screaming at the girls in there, calling them a bunch of bitches and whores. Then she took off. A half an hour later she came back to me and said, "Have you taken a f**kin' break yet?" I told her I couldn't afford to. Then she punched me in the head. I told her that I played hockey for 12 years and it didn't hurt. Then she said, "If you take a break, I'll buy a paper off you." She gave me $20 for one copy. After that she headed inside the market to the flower shop, where she'd been calling the girls names, and bought a bouquet of flowers worth $100 and then left the island.