In January, 1990 Dopey donated all the equity of the sale of her condo to the four of us in the community. Promptly she found with Dippy a rental house in East Vancouver where they would carry out their ministry of hospitality and care. Dippy was eager to heal people. She thought that the best way to cure homosexual men was by her having sex with them. (I am not making this up!) Fortunately no one accepted her services.
The house went off with a bang and soon their open door and the open hearts of Dippy and Dopey made them the most popular marks on the block. Everyone availed themselves of and exploited them and their hospitality. Things were constantly getting stolen from the house and there were drug deals happening around the place that the poor women were unable to control or prevent. They were innocents, complete novices, like lambs to the slaughter. I was unable to support or help them much: I was emotionally exhausted and very troubled while caring for my mother as she prepared for her final journey. Also I was so burnt-out and fed up with their refusal to accept my counsel or input, having had way more experience with street people, I realized that they were going to have to learn the hard way: by the seat of their pants.
I spent four months working again as a home support worker, but the community was completely against this and I allowed them to bully me into resigning, thus remaining vulnerable and financially dependent on the community.
More people we had grown close to were dying from AIDS and other causes. We seemed to be in a state of perpetual bereavement.
We were befriended by a practicing Satanic priest, a very attractive and charismatic individual who invoked a series of curses against us. As we fought amongst ourselves and became increasingly mutually embittered we lost the Lord's protection and became vulnerable to Satanic attacks. I know for a fact that a death curse was put on me and that when the same Satanic priest, some ten years later, encountered me, he expressed great surprise that I was still alive. I told him as little as possible and took great care to lose him.
We had no support from the church. They found us to be too radical, too evangelical, too charismatic, and worst of all too openly critical of their hypocrisy to merit any help from them. I for one did everything I could to soft pedal things but Flippy and Dippy were very strident, embarrassing and antagonistic. Naturally I got tarred with the same brush.
My mother got sicker and sicker. I took an apartment to be away from the idiots in the community and be more available to her. I was stupid enough to give them my whereabouts and soon was unable to get rid of them. Flippy and I saw little of each other. He had found an SRO in the Downtown Eastide. My mother was in palliative care and I still had to suffer criticism from Flippy, Dippy and Dopey for caring for her when I should be supporting them in "The Lord's Work." This did nothing of course but really alienate me from them. More people were dying around us.
At the same time I was doing a ministry of presence with street punks, befriending them, taking them for local restaurant meals, hanging out with them. Three of them, two males and a female, were sex trade workers, which connected me to that whole industry. Most of my friends outside of the community it seemed were punks and whores. On occasion Dippy and I would hold vigil in an all night café with individuals whose lives were being threatened by angry drug lords. They survived okay and it seems certain that we were able to channel for these poor wretches something of the Lord's protection.
I don't know how I got through that awful year. Writing about this I am less surprised that eventually I contracted full-blown PTSD.
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