When I was in middle school, I had a friend who lived in Vanier. I would often go to his house late, on a school night. I would have to walk home through the dark streets to grab the 14, or was it the 18? Despite being from centretown and growing up around homeless people and vagrants, I always felt uneasy about my walk from his side street to the bus stop. I had seen the homeless and vagrants from Vanier, but only from a distance - they weren't the same as what we had in centretown. They were at a different level. I feared them.
I brought this up to my friend one night when leaving his house. He insisted that he lived in one of the safe areas of Vanier. I didn't believe him, there were no safe areas in Vanier. Still, we had some good times so I never thought twice about it after that.
One weekend, I hung out there particularly late. I would usually get a drive home on weekends, but the friend who lived in my area had to leave early. So off to the bus stop I went.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think the concept of danger can be so foreign to us when we're young. We know it's out there, but we don't think anything could ever happen to us. Waiting in the dark for the #18 bus, seven very feral crackheads approached me. I didn't know what they were at the time, since I had not been briefed on the crack epidemic, and how it tore through the inner streets of 1980s New York, and early 2000s Vanier. Now that I'm older, I know that I was surrounded by a gang of raving crackheads.
"hey kid, you got two dollars for the bus? i have an...a job interview...i mean i have to get back to montreal and i lost my wallet, and he lost his wallet too, and what are you doing out here at this time, don't you know this is the bad area of Vanier? You're in the jungle baby. You're gonna...."
Just as the crackhead began acting derivative of a famous 80s rock song, I heard loud grunting, in Russian. He flew across the street, as if hit by a bus. The bus wasn't here. It was Ottawa Senator's star defenseman Anton Volchenkov.
For some reason, he was in his complete hockey gear. He also had skates on, and was surprisingly good at walking in them on pavement. Volchenkov made quick work of the other five crackheads while mumbling something about "cleaning up the streets". He tied up the five vagrants in a pile of their own bodies. I don't know if they were dead, incapacitated, or if they just nodded out. One of them ran away. I asked Anton why he didn't get rid of the last one, and Anton said "to clean up the streets of Vanier, someone needs to live to spread the message". Then he flew away.
I almost forgot this story until I walked through Vanier last week. The same dingy streets are now a yuppy paradise. Most people living there don't know quite how the gentrification happened, but I do. Anton Volchenkov cleaned up those streets.