Why I Am A Hard Ass

Well, first of all it runs in my family.  All of us, I mean, and I was the nicest of the batch (so I am told) so you can only imagine the others.  My mother also was nice, in her smiling hard ass way.  There are reasons for this, good reasons.  Both my parents grew up poor during the Great Depression.  Struggle was for them the only way of life.  The word lifestyles had not been invented and if they had heard it they would have given you a rather vacant and bewildered look.  My mother was the daughter of German farmers whose parents immigrated from Crimea.  My father's Scottish parents came to this country separately, as small children.  There was no social safety net, no welfare, no public health care and Canada was monoculturally white and British-French.  University education was a privilege for the upper classes and the moneyed, and you had to work hard to survive.  Then came the Second World War which defined my parents' teenage years.  The soldier hero giving up his life for his country against the Germans and the fear of being overrun by them and the Japanese mentored my parents towards young adulthood. Unless it was anger, any emotion that was shown was a sign of weakness and considered verboten so everyone drank.  My father became an alcoholic.
     My brother and I were born during the prosperous fifties and grew up in the more prosperous and socially and politically turbulent sixties.  We were carried away by drugs and rock and roll and I particularly by the hippies, then by the Jesus Freaks.  I was considered highly sensitive and emotional by my family, therefore I was considered weak and genetically inferior.  By my school I was considered highly gifted.  My family environment was abusive and unstable and my conversion to Christianity at fourteen was complete and irreversible. 
     Meanwhile my parents divorced and my brother's beatings subsided as he became more distant from the family and when I was fifteen I already enjoyed total independence.  Like many kids during the early seventies I got around by hitch hiking, which at times did put me at risk and I learned very quickly how to negotiate with weirdoes and perverts and get out of their vehicles alive and untouched.  Heaven on Earth, in the form of the Jesus People fell through within eight months when I was fifteen and became absorbed into a dangerous cult from which I escaped in three days.  At sixteen one of my best friends was a twenty-six year old woman, divorced from her radical left husband, and she herself was a Jesus Freak, former radical leftist and still politically engaged with a tongue and a vicious wit that would make Joan Rivers blush.  I also learned about vegetarian eating and natural and organic food and how to eat well on very little money.  When I was seventeen my father kicked me out after four months because he could not cope with a long haired hippy Jesus Freak with radical leftist values for a son.  I finished high school in a town on Vancouver Island with my mother and her violent alcoholic boyfriend.  Twice I had to get the police over so that he wouldn't beat the shit out of her.  Did I tell you I was seventeen?  Eighteen?
     When school was out I was told by Mom that I had to leave because she was going to be dumping her boyfriend's sorry ass in a month.  I stayed with friends in a very rundown communal house in the Downtown Eastside  of Vancouver while finding work in a leather factory and eventually got my own apartment, the top floor of an old house in the Little Mountain area of Main Street.
     For less than two years I fell into a glamorous and decadent lifestyle, rediscovered my Christian faith, then had to cope with the rigid and self-righteousness of the Christians with whom I aligned myself.  I was told to leave.  I had struggle in order to survive.  At twenty-two I was unable to finish my post secondary education because I had to work to pay the bills and had just been expelled from another Christian community.  Over the following twenty years I became a street involved Christian, seeking to live the gospel of Christ while befriending prostitutes of all genders, drug dealers, addicts, and other marginalized folk, while working caring for the elderly, the disabled and the dying for a low wage and no opportunity for advancement.  I started a Christian community and for a while we lived in absolute poverty and had to trust God to provide even toilet paper for a while, then came into money.  I was taking care of the dying, trying to mentor the people in my community and coping with my own mother's impending death from cancer.
     When I was thirty-five and it was 1991 and my mother was dead I inherited some money and went to Europe for two and a half months, hoping to settle in London.  I was accompanied by a rock star wannabe with a drug addiction and appeared to be in the advanced stages of AIDS.  He was also implicated in an unsolved murder in London and I encouraged him to fly there with me to help clear things up.  After extorting me of several thousand dollars he disappeared back to Canada within just over a week, leaving me hanging in Edinburgh.  A few weeks later in Amsterdam I was robbed at knife point, and the next day I was stalked and followed.   I returned to Canada, changed, hardened and wiser and in a sense somewhat darkened as I stuck it out with what remained of our Christian community trying to keep in line a mature female member with a romantic and erotic penchant for young drug addicts with mental health issues.
     I became an artist and met with some success and procured an agent and ended up travelling to Costa Rica in 1994, just after narrowly escaping the Canucks riot in Vancouver.  The community broke up and I lived alone unable to make ends meet while continuing to paint and write and participate in public poetry slams.  I was soon cracking at the seams and in 1998 became homeless with full-fledged post traumatic stress disorder.  I stayed between my emotionally abusive father in Robert's Creek and various friends in Vancouver.  Most of my friends eventually became abusive and exploitive and turned against me.  I ended up back in Vancouver in a shared living situation and was on welfare.  My living situations were unsafe and with some helpful connections ended up living in BC Housing and have now worked as a mental health peer support worker for ten years.
     I'm going to leave it there but for those of you who have wanted to know why I am a hard ass I'm sure you'll have here all the information you need and more.  There is a lot that I haven't said and probably won't because, you know, every hard ass has his secrets, or to put it another way, It's none of yer goddamn fuckin' business!