It's a few minutes to midnight as I close up the Youthquest! office for the night. Once on the ground I gain a lean view of the parking lot through the large glass exit doors. I scan the lot before leaving the building. It is active this night: a Camero and several other cars, muscle machines, grace the lot under the glare of streetlights. Long boys strut and boast and vie for the attention of the heavily mascara-ed, underdressed girls urging them on.

For a moment, the briefest remembering, I return to that basement, in a local community college, an army of boots and fists each seeking its own connection with me; then their fury spent, leaving me to regain consciousness draped, like so much shit, over a toilet bowl.

Running again, a seventeen year old drag queen pursued, a mob of young men intent only on venting hate: screaming, begging the blind cars on Burrard Street to please, oh please HELP ME; in time someone does, a white Mustang convertible, and he wants a blow job for his trouble. He has a knife.

And the most painful remembering. Alone, surrounded in a grade nine hallway, my face red with shame, dripping with their spit.

The remembering lasts only a second, and these things were a lifetime ago. But looking at the boys in that lot, I am not strong enough this time to face my fear, my shame. I turn and climb the stairs back to my office. I will work for a while longer, until the parking lot clears.

And ponder the lasting effects of bashing's most powerful legacy: fear.