don’t know who he is or the path that led him to Vancouver’s skid row, where he pushes cocaine and slaps around the emaciated women who steal, deal, cheat, or sell cheap oral sex to pay him. Where was he born? What war, what deprivation forced his parents out of their slum or their mountain village to seek a life so far north of the equator? Poverty in Honduras, paramilitaries in Guatemala, death squads in El Salvador? How did he become the Spic, a villain in a story told by the rake-thin, distraught woman in my office who,
