On the streets with Oshawa’s midnight mom

Melissa Schneider laughs with Jack Mars, a visitor at the drop-in centre she and a friend opened on Simcoe Street in Oshawa three years ago.

Just before midnight on a recent summer night, a big red minivan pulled into the drive-through lane at the Wendy’s in downtown Oshawa. “Twenty-five Frosties,” said the driver.

“Did you say 25 Frosties?” replied the astonished voice on the intercom. A Frosty, for the uninitiated, is something between a milkshake and a soft ice cream, served in a small cup.

The woman placing the unusual order was Melissa Schneider, Oshawa’s midnight mom. A 55-year-old grandmother with an easy laugh and a big heart, she roams the city’s streets into the small hours, handing out treats, bandaging wounds and helping to reverse drug overdoses long after most social workers have clocked out.

Ms. Schneider fills a critical gap in the city’s safety net. The hours after midnight are a lonely, often dangerous time for those who live on Oshawa’s streets – “the witching hour,” she calls it. Security guards have cleared them from the lawns and benches of downtown’s Memorial Park, enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew for the popular gathering place. The soup kitchens that offer them hot meals and shelter have closed.

That leaves Ms. Schneider and her van. Frosties are one of her ways of connecting. She packs them into a big cooler and stops whenever she sees needy people, rolling down the window to offer them one and ask how they are doing.

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“She is like a mom to us on the streets,” says Kyle Scott, 34, known for his street name, Irish, and the bandanas he wears on his forehead. She has given him everything from fresh clothes to bus fare for an appointment with his probation officer.

At the all-night drop-in Ms. Schneider runs on Simcoe Street, the main drag for the city’s homeless population, some regulars address her as just that. “Hi, mom.” “Can I have another coffee, mom.”

In turn, she treats them as family, making them smile when they are down and calling them out when they misbehave.

What she is doing is not unusual in itself. As Canada struggles with a triple-headed crisis of mental illness, homelessness and addiction, hundreds of dedicated street workers across the country spread out every day to tend to its victims.

What sets her apart is her do-it-yourself spirit and her almost superhuman stamina.

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Ms. Schneider was born and raised in Oshawa, the daughter of a single mom who worked at General Motors, a big employer in this growing city of 170,000 just east of Toronto. Unlike some outreach workers, she has not spent time living on the streets herself. Though she was a wild teenager who hung around with bikers and experimented with drink and drugs, she raised two children and ran a successful auto-repair business for three decades. Her only degree is a high school diploma.

But, making it up as she goes along, she has become one of the best-known and best-informed figures on Oshawa’s street scene, with a finger on downtown’s feverish nighttime pulse. She knows who is missing, who just got out of jail, who just had his bike stolen and who just got dumped by her no-good boyfriend.

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Her journey into what she fondly calls “the land of the misfits” began one Christmas Eve when she and some friends went down to Memorial Park to hand out fried chicken and warm clothing to those who were gathered in the cold. “That was it, that day,” she recalls – the day she found her calling.

She went back again and again, learning the stories of the people she met and discovering “what hurt them and why they were there.”

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Inspired to do more, she and a friend started their drop-in centre in an abandoned restaurant three years ago. Called DUO, for Do Unto Others, it opens at 6 p.m. and stays open till 7:30 a.m. Funding comes from private donors and the regional government. Ms. Schneider and her staff stand behind the old restaurant bar, offering coffee, brownies and bananas to those who stop by – as many as five dozen some nights, even more when the winter drives people indoors.

Staff record their names and birthdates when they come in, trying to keep things light. “Did you want the ocean view?” asks Ms. Schneider’s helper Larry Gutt, perched by the door like a maître d’.

Some visitors come for a few minutes to get warm, recharge their phones or use the WiFi. Others stay all night, trading quips with Ms. Schneider, playing cards, putting their heads on a table to sleep or watching movies on the big TV screens. The feature on the night of the Frosties was Mr. Bean.

Ms. Schneider calls DUO a dysfunctional version of Cheers, the bar in the television series of the 1980s and 1990s “where everybody knows your name.” She presides over the place like a brassy saloon-keeper in the Old West, teasing and chiding her visitors, brooking no nonsense.

Visitors must have their name written on their Styrofoam coffee cups. Woe betide those who litter the street with their cups.

Anyone who uses drugs in the bathroom or starts a fight on the sidewalk will find themselves banned, at least until Ms. Schneider relents, as she almost always does if the offender says sorry. Stay on her good side, though, and there is no end to her kindness.

One regular visitor who wears a bushy beard and mismatched shoes often comes in with his collection of small rocks, telling her he believes they possess special healing energy. She gets shiny rocks by the bag at the dollar store and trades them with him across the bar when he stops by.

After her evening stint at DUO, she leaves her helpers in charge and hits the streets in her van, often stopping at a fast-food joint to load up on goodies – 50 cheeseburgers one night.

Then she does her rounds of the usual spots: the park, the Tim Hortons parking lot, a popular laneway. She is out night after night, all year round, staying awake till 2 or 3 in the morning, sometimes seeing the sun rise before she gets home to her tolerant husband Randy.

When she first started DUO and had no stable funding or staff, she often worked 20 hours a day, ducking home only to shower and nap. She came to work even when she got an excruciating case of shingles.

After hundreds of nights on the beat, she knows that a joke often goes farther than a kind word.

On one recent patrol, Ms. Schneider caught sight of a bent woman with a mop of grey hair picking weeds from the foot of a chain-link fence. It was Sheila Jenkins, a 59-year-old with the accent of her native Newfoundland.

She explained she had obsessive compulsive disorder and picked weeds wherever she found them, just to tidy things up. Ms. Schneider said she could come by her place any time. “I’m going to give you my address.” The two shared a laugh.

She can be fierce, too. When a guy rolled up in a car with his friends and asked a group gathered on the sidewalk for Frosties, “Do you know where I can buy a hooker?” she blew up. “Would your family claim you? Disgusting. Get out. Beat it!”

Put in Ms. Schneider’s place, most people would grow discouraged. Many close members of her street family have perished. She often wears a T-shirt bearing the face of Dennis Kovacs, a DUO regular who died of an overdose last September. He used to splash himself with copious amounts of cologne so she keeps a bottle on the shelf to remember him by.

Only this summer she lost another favourite: Kevin Henderson. Known as Hendi, he died of an overdose in her bathroom just after finishing a stint in jail. She grins as she remembers how he once called her on his cell from inside an outdoor donation bin. He found himself trapped there while “binning” – diving for clothes and other stuff. She went and rescued him.

At least two others she knew have died in the past few weeks. One suffered terrible burns after someone set fire to the tent where he was living. Another was hit by a train. He died near a spot by the tracks where people often go to use drugs away from the public eye. From DUO, Ms. Schneider heard the blast of the train’s horn and the shriek of its brakes.

She carries on. For every person she has lost, there is another that survived and recovered. One young woman came home to live with her, shook from her addiction, got custody of her son back and started work as a janitor. She is five years sober.

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Ms. Schneider is famous for going the extra mile to help her people right themselves. She drives them to medical appointments, puts them in touch with temp agencies that need help and passes on messages from their families.

She even buys sneakers one size too big in case she has to take hers off and give them to one of her visitors, most of them men with bigger feet than hers.

A couple she knew lost their apartment and their dog. She went to the shady neighbours who had taken the pet and paid them $300 to get it back – a canine ransom of sorts. She got their stolen air conditioner back, too. The rambunctious dog, Keno, is now a regular visitor at DUO.

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“There’s nobody she won’t help. Nobody,” says her friend Shelley Wright, who lost her son Will to an overdose and does evening shifts at DUO. Whether you are a hard-drug user collapsed on the sidewalk or a teenaged girl who has been kicked out of her family home, “She’ll be out there holding your head and making sure you’re okay and she’ll be in here giving you advice on how to get yourself back on track.”

Ms. Schneider says she almost can’t help herself. Though the long hours are wearing, “I can’t go home and sit there. I need to see them. I need to talk to them. I need to know how their day was.”

If someone has stayed off drugs for even a few hours, she will tell them “how proud I am right now,” even if she knows they might soon suffer a lapse and use again.

In that sense at least, she really is like a mother. Whatever happens, however far they stray, she will always be there for them when the sky grows dark.