I was kind of expecting to meet her. After I left the house of the Bucolic One, I stayed with my mother for the balance of April 1977 then moved into a very cheap one bedroom apartment in an old building in East Vancouver. I enjoyed this place. It was spacious and had a certain charm. I somehow knew I wouldn't be there very long. I balanced unemployment insurance benefits with earnings from short term jobs while looking for stable employment. But I also enjoyed myself, treating myself to interminably long walks in scenic neighbourhoods throughout the city and visiting friends.
In September I gave my notice and began seeking new accommodations. I was not unhappy where I was, but felt restless, like it was really time to move on. I only began to start looking when I came across a fat, modestly dimensioned rundown mansion on Fourteenth and Oak with a housekeeping room for rent sign. I wrote down the phone number. I moved in at the end of September.
It wasn't a bad little place, simply a room with a kitchen and a bathroom shared with three other tenants, all for the whopping amount of $145 a month. On my second day the Radical Lesbian Feminist moved in across the hall. We said hi to each other in the hall. She introduced me to some of her friends, particularly her lover. We quickly became friends.
A couple of days later RLF confided that she had just been raped. She was calm about it but for a few days I hardly left her side, so concerned I was that she was okay. She wanted me there despite my being a male and expressed appreciation for the time we spent over coffee and visiting together in the house.
She was twenty then, a year younger than me, very thin but carried an unpretentious elegance. She had been in a mental institution in another province but didn't seem ill to me. A young woman with a ferocious intellect and almost unimpeachable integrity. I found it interesting that just two weeks before we met I had been praying for the opportunity to meet lesbians.
We became a kind of team or unit together and together we saw that two very troublesome tenants were evicted. One was a young man of twenty or so whom she called "Body Beautiful." They shared the same kitchen. He was a good looking pest, but still a pest. He would wander back and forth between our respective rooms garbed only in skimpy jean cut-offs. He did have a marvellous physique. He would bug us to rub lotion on his back and in my case would linger as though expecting something extra. He never got lucky with me. He also allegedly tried to poison RLF's little dog. RLF discovered rubbing alcohol in a vitamin supplement for her miniature Schnauzer. We reported him and he left. Likewise a young eighteen year old downstairs who loved playing his stereo very loud very late in the evening. We simply complained to the landlady together. It was like magic.
She stayed only for two months then moved out. I took her room which was nicer than mine, but cheaper, just $100 a month and contained a beautiful antique fireplace that worked complete with an ornate brass shield. The one drawback was the shared kitchen. The cheaper rent was a boon for when in January I quit my warehouse job and began my studies in a community college.
Life kept on happening, I ended up moving three times including six weeks with my mother, and in March, 1979 (I was a freshly minted twenty-three) RLF and I again became next door neighbours in a rooming house in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. It was a beautiful street full of mansion sized elegant houses and big trees. This was when she had actually become a Radical Lesbian Feminist, a member of a collective working to support rape survivors and to bring down the patriarchy.
We had not seen each other in almost a year and a half and again we seemed inseparable, but for our strong mutual need for solitude. She never quite figured out that I had at least as strong a need for alone time as she did. We were both aspiring writers.
She often thanked me for not permitting her to spiral down into a mindless irrational hatred of men. She respected my resistance whenever she would male bash around me. I also learned from her, seeing as much through her eyes as I could, just what it is like living as a woman in a world still dominated by men. My friend helped me transform into a strong feminist. Even when we fell out of contact less than two years later as we both moved and went our separate ways, to this day I am grateful to her for what she has taught me and also how we both helped each other embrace our authentic androgynous selves.
She also thanked me for giving her a new angle on Christianity and Christians. Through the woven fabric of our friendship we in many ways laid our souls bare to each other. Apparently she saw something of my spiritual experience and life in Christ that gave her pause and developed in her a new and unexpected appreciation and respect, if not for my religious faith, then at least for my stumbling efforts to live it out and for the one who came to us in human form as the God of love made manifest.
No comments:
Post a Comment