Places Where I've Lived: The Magical Rooms (My Second Acid Trip, Or, Kids, Don't Try This On The Street!)

I had two Magic Postage Stamps remaining.  I thought of doing them both at once then came quickly to my senses.  I would do one for sure but it would be nice this time to have company.  I thought of two important people in my life: S and K.  S I had already known for a couple of years.  I phoned S.

S came over for dinner then we sat in the living room where I tore off one hit of Window Pane and we each swallowed the acid.  We sat, chatted and ate oranges while I watched the palm leaves in my dark green rug begin to flow and sway in a warm breeze I couldn't feel.  I thought it would be fun for us to go out nightclubbing on acid.  S agreed and we bussed downtown.  I cannot remember all the places we went to.  It is mostly a blur but we were enjoying ourselves.  S was hallucinating, seeing the face of a normal looking stranger suddenly ooze with blood.  I felt a strange and peculiar oneness with everyone.  Dancing was lovely in the clubs, we were in the middle of the floor among others and they all looked peculiarly beautiful.

S became worried that one hungry looking model-type was going to use his perfect white teeth to tear the flesh from my bones so we left.  We came across another club at closing time and people I knew were on their way out the door.  We were invited to spend the night with them.

We ended up seated on a couch in a basement apartment of a fancy looking dandy who was hunched at the end.  He was a university student writing his thesis on William Blake.  He asked S for S's name, saying "Do you have a name?"  S replied "Yes."  The dandy said "and what would that be?"  S said that S had forgotten S's name.  The dandy said "Well, what did your parents say about you the day you were born?"  S replied, "They probably would have said 'Shit!  Another kid!'"

I was going through my own existential despair.  I confided to my friends that I felt like I was stranded at the bottom of a mine shaft with no way up or out, only the tormenting sight of a grated entrance at the very top.

The following evening I went to a party in a wealthy neighbourhood and the Dandy came with me.

Places Where I've Lived: The First Of My Three Acid Trips (Or, Kids, Don't Try This At Home!)

My lack of boundaries got me into a lot of trouble at times.  One day I was seated in the Naam Restaurant at the communal table.  I met four young men on a kind of new age pilgrimage from Oregon and ended up inviting them to spend the night in my little apartment.  What was I thinking?  Or should I phrase it as "What!  Was I thinking?"  One of them acquired an inordinately intense affection for me and ended up giving me three little hits of LSD, or as I called it back then, Magic Postage Stamps.  Hey, I just did a quick Google search and the term Magic Postage Stamps, for blotter acid, was nowhere to be found.  It isn't even in Urban Dictionary.  I am disappointed that it didn't stick.

The four young men left and I was only too glad to have my place back.  It was mid April and nature was already celebrating the new life of Spring.  I reached for one of my little tabs of acid, my magic postage stamps.  I looked at it.  I had just eaten dinner, some vegetarian casserole probably full of cheese and beans and I looked at the little green paper square with the Masonic Eye printed on one side (eye inside a triangle) and thought, hmm...dessert?

I swallowed it.  Then I ate an orange.  I sat on my bed and waited.  Soon I felt a weird unpleasant churning in my stomach and then the palm leaves in my green rug were all waving in synchrony like in a tropic breeze.  I knew I was getting off and decided on a sunset walk.  Down the street a little girl of six or seven dressed in an intensely turquoise cardigan approached me with her palm up and said "Do you like worms?"  I stood and stared grinning like an idiot at the little worm wriggling slowly in her outstretched hand.  I stopped by some friends for a couple of minutes then boarded a bus.  By the time the bus had reached the end of its route it was already dark.  I walked down to Fourth Avenue where I hitch hiked.  A young man of around my age picked me up.  I mentioned that I was high on acid and we had a rather intriguing and pleasant chat about it though he also thought my plan to go walking in the woods at night a bit hare-brained, to say the least.  At my request he dropped me off at a trail entrance in the University Endowment Lands, now called Pacific Spirit Park.  I wandered along the trail, then climbed down through the bush to the bottom of a ravine.  I felt lost and unable to make my way back up.  I heard some people from up above.  I called out to them for help and they vocally guided me as I climbed up to the top.  They were three youths out for a night ramble.  They escorted me to the road and I thanked them for their kindness.

As I walked back towards the city I was overwhelmed by a sudden regret for what I had done and was overcome by an intense fear of my mother, of what she would do and say if she found out that I had taken LSD? I continued walking a considerable distance till I got to Broadway and Alma where I boarded a bus.  It was an old-fashioned trolley bus



and soon it was boarded by a swarm of little girls all dressed up like brownies.  Well, I guess they were brownies but I was still whacked out of my little gourd on acid so to me they were dressed up like brownies.  I didn't really know what they were underneath the uniforms because in my state it wouldn't have mattered if they were little girls or seven foot trannies.  They had a very funny way of moving, I thought, as though they were little machines moving at an electronically controlled rhythm and pace.  Then it was that I understood that these children were not free, and that likely none of us was free.  We were all oppressed by controlling forces we knew nothing about.

When I arrived home K was there already for a visit (K had a key) and I was still obsessed about my mother finding out that I was stoned on acid.  I fell down on the floor weeping.  I got over it after a while (and the next day apologized about the racket I made to my neighbour downstairs who was in equal parts compassionate and understanding)  I came out of it then other friends phoned and dropped over to visit.  I was peacefully coming down at two in the morning while the five of us sat around together in an all night diner stuffing ourselves on cheap pie and coffee.

Places Where I've Lived: The Magic Rooms 3

I left my job in mid November after just less than four months.  I hated it, it was boring, the supervisor was nasty and some of the coworkers were twits.  I didn't care if I needed to survive.  In those days Unemployment Enjoyment (unemployment insurance, or employment insurance) was very easy to get.  I would be penalized for six weeks but I didn't care.  My father, still feeling the guilt (if not the love) for his treatment of me gladly shoved out some money I could survive on while waiting for my claim to get processed.

I was determined to enjoy myself.  The day I resigned I walked some three miles or so to English Bay and in the cold November wind I exulted in my new freedom.  I felt like a child let out for summer holidays.  But it wasn't summer.  And I was no longer a child.

Even on my reduced income I was able to make ends meet.  I still got up early, at around eight in the morning, began my day with a long walk and then breakfast.  I listened to the radio station where my brother worked but never heard him on the air.  The popular songs all penetrated me, especially by Phoebe Snow, Al Stewart, Maria Muldaur and Bonnie Rait.  I became entranced with the music of Philip Glass.  Outside I could hear the ranting and swearing of this sad fat miserable looking woman who would rail at her alleged husband like a rabid pig.  They ran a bottle deposit and every single day she would let fly at him.  I painted the small gothic shaped panes on the top half of my windows alternating hues of yellow and green. For a while I visited once or twice a week the Christian house but was asked to not come around any more.  They disapproved of some of the people I associated with and some of the places I visited.  I have since long been cured of this very toxic form of Christianity.  I would take long walks across the city, stopping always in front of one house to pet a friendly cat then to continue on my way to Kitsilano.  I would visit Big Bird or head straight to Willow's place where she stayed in a friend's apartment.  Her roommates and friends were of various sexualities, one of them sold pot and they all fascinated me.  I would stop in the Naam, before they expanded and before they were open twenty-four/seven and drink herbal tea while reading a book or meeting and making new friends at the communal table.  From one person there I learned about Dostoevsky and following his example bought my own copy of the Brothers Karamazov, a particularly inspiring and influential book in my life that has marked me for years.

In February I joined a Food Co-op, made up of all kinds of lefty progressive folk, the kind of people I was aspiring to be.  (I was also at that time a devout disciple of Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet For a Small Planet.) It considerably reduced my food costs and in exchange I worked there one Saturday a month for four hours.  I would gladly walk from my old house a distance of three or four miles, cutting across pleasant parks and quiet neighbourhoods full of vintage houses on my weekly grocery trek.  I would carry with me a large white canvas newspaper bag--I haven't a clue where I got it--that would carry my bounty home with me.  I was a founding member of this co-op and helped work on the site to make it ready.  It is still open at a different location on Commercial Drive.

I will conclude this post with a retelling of five distinct dreams I had when I was living inside the Magic Rooms: 1. It was a sudden and early springtime and I was walking on a hill on a road lined with flowering cherry and plum trees, 2. I opened a glass case full of green oranges, picked one and pealed it.  The fruit inside was orange, juicy and sweet. 3. I was in my new apartment and I was shrinking to the size of a mouse.  I think I was calling out for my mother. 4: I saw a white long hair cat and I was also looking at a selection of grapefruits.  All had skin colour of ultramarine blue. 5: I was lying awake in bed with a friend and I suddenly heard someone knocking on my door.  I knew that if I opened the door and let this person in something terrible would happen.

Places Where I've Lived: The Magical Rooms 2

This little apartment was a kind of springboard for me where I could really get my life started.  So I believed and I think there is some truth to this, uh, truism.  The first few months were very routine.  I would be up at six thirty in the morning, breakfast on home made granola and fruit then get on the Main Street bus that would take me as far as Union  Street.  From there I walked along Union Street in the vintage Strathcona neighbourhood, a nearly twenty minute stroll surrounded by Victorian era houses, to the leather factory.  It was a stultifying dull job involving standing at a machine with a handle that would punch shapes into pieces of leather and suede.  Monotonous and boring.  I quickly lost interest in the work.  The horrible old man supervising me was not helpful either.  The staff was an eclectic mix of people who would never mix anywhere except on a public bus: there was the South Asian family guy, the not quite working class hippy gal, and then there was the fat middle aged hard assed woman with a slightly sour attitude and not much in the way of an IQ with her nose in a Harlequin romance while stuffing herself with junk food during breaks.

My social life was only a little lacklustre.  As I mentioned my boundaries were nonexistent and I tended to attract a whole range of  bizarre and unusual or not particularly nice people and sometimes my apartment became a testing ground for how much I could take from others.  There was also a Christian household in the neighbourhood.  They were people associated with St. Margaret's the charismatic church I had been involved in.  A young couple with two toddlers and three other young adults occupying different bedrooms.  I was frequently invited for dinner.  They thought of me as a kind of lost boy even though I was actually doing very well.  I was working, eating well (for them being vegetarian and eating well were a contradiction in terms) looking after myself and pursuing friendships if not necessarily healthy relationships.  They also seemed to have an unhealthy fascination with my dubious sexuality.  I really wanted their friendship more than their pity.  Instead I got pity disguised as friendship.

I would sometimes while the weather was still warm during our very prolonged summer in autumn enjoy a walk downtown and into the West End following work.  I seemed to be always meeting people.  Being both friendly and attractive seemed to make me particularly alluring.  I was suddenly, at English Bay Beach, befriended by an attractive hippy couple.  The young man rather disappeared but the young woman, whom I will call Willow, became a fast and close friend, for a few months anyway.

I was in this stage of life trying to figure out what I should be reading.  I was working on two very gripping books, one was Sybil, the book about the famous multiple personality case.  The other was The Primal Scream which was about primal therapy.  I cannot deny that both books had a strong influence on me in my vulnerable stage of life.  I was also seeing a lot of foreign, vintage and art house movies at the famous City Nights Cinema on Hastings and Main.  I became quite hooked on Ingmar Bergman and the Marx Brothers (now there's a collaboration!)

In October I got my ear pierced.  A mistake.  I was under slept that Saturday following a rather regrettable night out that ended up following me home.  I went downtown and into the back room of a curio shop named Persian Arts and Crafts where a mature Iranian gentleman did the piercing for me.  Feeling tired I wandered into the chapel of St. Andrews-Wesley Church, which was usually open in those days.  I approached the altar then lay down on the soft moss-green carpet where I fell asleep for an hour.  No one walked in or saw me.  I woke up, feeling rested, and somehow knowing that my piercing would get infected (it did, eventually swelling up like a red flame grape.  I tossed out the ring and let it heal naturally.)

Places Where I've lived: The Magical Rooms 1

What made these two rooms magical was the wonder of living for the first time in my own place, alone.  I was still eighteen and I found it without help, through my own search and effort.  I found the ad in the paper, I phoned the landlord, then met him in his house in the Douglas Park area of Vancouver.  He was a rather pleasant and affable, fattish Jewish man in his thirties.  When I rang the doorbell an old woman, his mother, appeared in the upper window and yelled in a strong Yiddish accent, "What you want!"  I felt like I was in a movie.  He drove me to the house that would harbour me for the next year, on Twenty-Eighth near Main.

I was still living in the Communal Black Hole when I found this place in early August.  I was working in a leather factory, a job that didn't exactly suit me, but it was fairly easy and walking distance, though it wouldn't be once I moved.  The pay was minimum but survivable.  In the middle of August I was all set to move with some help from both my father and older brother.  I think when they each saw the horrible circumstances I was living in they blamed themselves for their absolute neglect towards me.  I didn't feel the love and once I was in my new place we resumed our habitual hostile distance.

I left the Communal Black Hole on not the friendliest of terms.  The wife of the leatherworking couple, a short, pudgy sour and slightly miserable woman, demanded rent from me, which I didn't have to pay.  We had agreed on nothing previously and really, I was just crashing there and eating occasionally.  She tried to insist.  I told her that whatever she should consider owed by me could be deducted in lieu of maid's wages, given that I was the only person there who ever seemed to clean.  Suffice it to say, I was very glad to be out of there and we never saw one another again.  The sound of the midnight train rumbling by to create the simulation of a major earthquake, the stench of cat shit and baby urine, the skinny silent and frightened young man in the other bed, and the husband leatherworker's unwanted touching would all recede as a distant and acrid memory.

I liked my new digs.  I was on the top floor of a tall old turn of the century house, occupying two rooms.  I shared the bathroom downstairs with two other tenants.  I liked the amount of space and the rent was right, $135 a month, even in 1974 a bargain.  It was already furnished, more or less.  There was a comfy red post-deco armchair in the corner with an end table and a beautiful coffee table covered in mosaic tiles.  There was a double bed in an alcove with a blue wardrobe closet beside it.  The floor was covered with a kind of straw carpet.  There was a triple pane window commanding a view of the mountains in the north and a closet door covered with a mirror deliberately broken and repieced together.  The kitchen and dining area had mauve purple walls with slightly darker purple cupboards and square linoleum tiles.  There was a chrome and arborite table with chairs and on the floor a dark green carpet with palm leaves. 

I did a lot of redecorating during my first couple of weeks.  Enchanted with living as near to the floor as possible, I removed the legs from the bed and from the coffee table.  I wanted the mattress to be flush on the floor and I took out the box spring which I leaned up against the wardrobe.  I hung an Indian bedspread to cover the ugly sight and add colour to the place.  Another Indian bedspread (I had bought three very cheap on a recent visit to Victoria) I used as a bedspread.  Instead of a couch I positioned a foam mattress I bought against the perpendicular wall.  I found six bricks in a demolition site and fumbled them by bus back to my new place and used them, three on each side to support the coffee table.  I traded rugs, putting the dark green one with the palm leaves in the bedroom/living room and the straw carpet under the kitchen table.  I had also put the chrome and arborite table in the closet, bringing out a white round wooden table that I chose to eat off of instead.  For wall décor I obtained various prints and posters, among them:



and Edward Burne Jones' the Beguiling of Merlin:



I bought various items in a second hand store a half block away on Main Street called C and D's Trash and Treasure Shop, where among other things I bought wine glasses, a toaster and a deco table lamp with a red beehive base.

When I think of what eighteen year old boys were like when I was young, and even worse, what they are like now (large children with hair growing in strange places), I would say that I was already doing very well.

My one big issue of maturity lay in this: my lack of boundaries.

Places Where I've Lived: The Communal Black Hole

The news of the untimely death of eighteen year old Alex Gervais does strike a chord with me.  For those of you who are not glued to the all-important news events of the Centre Of The Universe where I live on the West Coast of Canada let me tell you who this kid is.  He was placed in a cheap hotel in Abbotsford (one of the most horrible towns this side of the Rockies.  It has been said that if you are bad and you die you will end up in Abbotsford.)  by the provincial family and youth services.  He was a ward of the province, a survivor of many foster home placements.  After four months in this hotel he fell from his fourth floor window, a suspected suicide.

He was not able to look after himself.  He did not buy food, or cook and likely ate sporadically and unhealthily.  He was lonely and depressed.  He had mental health issues and little or no supportive family.  What I find particularly notable is that, while eighteen years old when he died, he is always referred to as a child.

I compare myself to this kid for the simple reason that age eighteen was my year of independence.  I had no choice but to move out on my own when I finished grade twelve.  My mother was in a disastrous relationship with a criminal and my father hated me.  I had no option but to test my wings.

Like Alex I was emotionally fragile, with already likely but undiagnosed mental health issues.  Like Alex I had very little family support.  We were both eighteen.  That's where the similarities appear to end.  I was not a ward of the government and as far as I was concerned I was no longer a child.  I was an adult, a young man.  Despite my challenges I was considered mature and responsible for my age.  I knew how to cook and had excellent knowledge about good nutrition.  I was able to live on a budget.  I was curious, fearless and resourceful.  I was friendly and outgoing and made friends easily.  I was determined to survive.

I also lived in a different time.  We were expected, in the Seventies, to grow up fast.  It was almost like a competition.  Helicopter parenting did not exist and would have been a topic of excoriating scorn.  We were not sissified by our parents and being an independent and self-directed hard-ass bad-ass was always considered a point of pride.

I also had the good fortune of positive mentors and role models during my years with the Jesus People and the Christian Charismatics at St. Margaret's Reformed Episcopal Church (later St. Margaret's Community Church).  I learned about nutrition and budget vegetarian eating from Big Bird (from my Pantheon of Remarkable People) and from others the importance of living responsibly and proactively.  I knew many people, all young enough to have been still in their parents' basements if they were young people today, living in their own rented houses and apartments.  I learned by osmosis and by observation.

My first two months of independence were both difficult and inauspicious.  A young married couple I knew, leather workers who sold their crafts on the street agreed to let me stay in their communal house.  The place could be charitably described as a dump, a rundown house that should have been backhoed out of its misery and it stank of cat shit and baby urine.  They had an infant daughter who was not well cared for and a cat whose litter box was seldom changed.  I shared a bedroom with a skinny unhealthy looking young man who refused to talk to me. We were situated just on the wrong side of the tracks in the now gentrified Strathcona neighbourhood.

I was seldom there.  I had friends everywhere and tended to wander around Vancouver when I wasn't looking for work.  I was not on welfare and had next to no pocket money.  To this day I really do not know how I survived.  I survived.  In three weeks I found a job in a leather factory.  Eventually I had enough money for a deposit on an apartment. 

I lived on this high fine wire of rarefied tension.  The imperative urgency of survival kept my thinking in order and I lived moment to moment absorbing everything, perpetually fascinated, perpetually engaged, as though playing a part in a surrealist movie.  It was that unbearable lightness of being that is as intolerable as it is exquisite.  I knew I would need to land, and land I did.  I found an apartment on the top floor of an old house.  I was incredibly thin, but somehow hauntingly beautiful, with shoulder length tangled tawny hair bleached by the sun and penetrating turquoise eyes.  I was relentlessly curious, at times putting myself in danger if only to gain some new experience.  I trusted almost everyone yet always managed to escape or come out on top when backed into a corner.  I will never repeat that experience, that time of in your face intoxicating and perpetual walking off the earth sense of experience. 

Thank God.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Housing Saint

This person is very well-known and locally famous and I should probably be careful how I write about her.  I used to see her around downtown and always felt a little suspicious of her without really knowing why.  For a while I even suspected her to be a covert Satanist.  I had never so much as said how do you do to her and already I was ready to make the sign of the cross whenever I encountered her.  I was quite surprised to learn that she was a professed Christian completely dedicated to alleviating the misery of our local homeless population and a keen advocate for affordable housing.

P Perfect introduced us during the reception that followed her ordination.  She suggested to the Housing Saint that we could work together and HS roundly disregarded the idea.  We were again introduced, under what circumstances I have forgotten but still no impressions were made, positive or negative.

I was only just recovering from my own ordeal of homelessness and was also coming to terms with my PTSD condition.  It was the year 2000 and I was living in a tiny room surrounded by windows on top of a tall leaning brown house in East Vancouver.  On the bus HS and I began to chat.  She asked me my age and then more questions about my housing situation.  She told me to make an appointment to meet her in her office.

We seemed to hit it off famously.  She produced me a number of waiting lists for affordable housing and my name was added to five or more.  I tried to stay in touch with her but somehow lost momentum.  Nearly a year passed before it occurred to me to renew our contact.  My housing situation was becoming unsafe and hazardous.  The Pakistani slumlord was becoming a problem, especially given his indifference about the problems being created in the shared house I lived in by a young crack head with weird and unsettling sexual habits.  It didn't matter to him that I had to live next door to him, nor that he had already physically threatened another resident.

HS brought out the housing lists and added my name to new ones.  We also agreed to meet about once a week for coffee to discuss my housing situation and options.  She was also very keen on getting me on antidepressants and applying for a government disability pension.  I only figured out later on that she was working in cahoots with P Perfect and the rector of the Anglican church I was attending in order to silence me.  I was making inconvenient comments in the church about the looming danger of mass homelessness that would soon be facing our city as well as suggesting that we not allow the debate about same sex marriage to eclipse a larger and much graver need.  The man-hating woman who led this church decided that I was a nuisance and she was employing HS's efforts to silence me or get rid of me, whichever was easier.  I have mentioned in a previous post that P Perfect also admitted to her complicity and that this ended our friendship.

Somehow I allowed HS to convince me that I was sicker than I really was.  I began to manifest symptoms of anxiety and depression that I had not previously exhibited.  I consulted my physician who at first seemed keen about putting me on antidepressants.  When we had a follow-up visit he decided against it though he did put me in touch with a psychiatrist, already written about in my Magnificent Pantheon.

I phoned HS to tell her the good news.  She was not impressed.  She wanted me to get on antidepressants and a disability pension come hell or high water.  She did not want to see me get strong or well or I would continue to be a threat and a nuisance to the Anglican established order.  She barked from her end of the line that I have depression and that I have to go on disability.  I replied that many of the things she wrote about my condition on the application form were not only exaggerations but patent lies and untruths.  She screamed at me to never try to threaten her again and slammed down the phone.

I had already found housing by the way: a recently built facility in the Downtown Eastside more or less run by Snooty Church.  Four months later I moved to the building where I currently live.  For years HS would not give me the time of day and even spread slander about me.

We have since more or less reconciled.  She is retired now and sometimes I come across her while she is walking her little dog.  We are friendly with each other and often stop to chat a bit.  She seems enormously pleased with the huge advances I have made both in my life and recovery.  We are not exactly friends but we have both sheathed our swords and this certainly is better than nothing.

HS did unwittingly help me move forward in my vocational direction.  I did some work for her helping with the annual homelessness count and we met at the church on their shelter night.  I was so moved and impressed by the way things were being done there for some of our local homeless that I came on board as a volunteer.  The experience I accrued there certainly helped prepare me for the year I spent working at Lookout Emergency Aid Society, and later, where I currently work after eleven years in mental health peer support work.

During one of our coffee visits HS gave me a rather interesting back-handed compliment.  When I told her about my method of dealing with the crappy hand that life seemed to be continually handing me and always finding some way to either rise above it or at least thrive within my limitations, she remarked that I am very much like a male Colette.  I bought some of her books and after reading a few pages I only began to appreciate how true this was.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Idealist

The Idealist married Bright-Eyes in 1983.  I first met him in 1978 when we were both involved in the House of Missionary Fanatics.  I moved there out of a desire and need to recreate the miraculous wonder and power of my adolescent involvement with the Jesus People and the Charismatics.  I hoped that by moving in with them and engaging in local Christian missionary work and ministry that my life would somehow get back on track where God really wanted me to be.  I couldn't have been more mistaken.

I had been there almost two months when the Idealist moved in.  He had spent the previous year in Afghanistan ministering to white twenty-something North American and European hippies and other wanderers on the so-called Hippy Trail to Kathmandu.  I found him wise and learned and very inspiring even if at twenty-five he was but three years my senior.  He was an ardent peace and anti-nuclear activist and at his feet I learned.

He was a theology student and moved out of the House of Missionary Fanatics. He said that he wanted to be closer to the university.  He also admitted that he did not like the direction the house was taking, that the narrow minded fundamentalism of the leaders was abhorrent to him.  Unlike me he got out in time.  By the time I was ready to leave it was too late.  They had already found time to designate me a dangerous heretic and I was thrown out on the street late on a Saturday night.  Fortunately my mother took me in. 

The Idealist gave me access through his card to the University library.  I took out a book of essays about the presence of Christ in secular literature.  I began to read, seriously, and discovered that Christ was indeed present in the novels of Margaret Lawrence, DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and many others.

He also introduced me to the radical Mennonite House Church where I met the Famous Canadian Artist and others who did much to move my life in a thinking and thoughtful direction.  While we were both with the Missionary Fanatics we talked together and often ministered together in a drop-in centre.

I gradually became aware of how much the Idealist lived inside his head and that he never really appeared to connect with the people to whom we were ministering in a visceral or honest way.  He always behaved like a bit of a Brahman, as though he was not simply unconscious of his bondage to his upper class origins, but how he unconsciously lived out of this sense of natural superiority.  He was not at all arrogant, very kind and very affable.  But somehow untouched and untouchable to the naked writhing humanity of others.

I have not seen him since his wedding day.  I may never see him again.  I cannot say that I ever really missed him.  He never reciprocated the human connection that I have always maintained open to others, that same raw connection that has done much to wound and ruin me and even more to heal and restore me to life, strength and wholeness.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Bright-Eyes

She was named after a precious stone and her eyes and her face shone with the light, love and joy of Christ.  I met her the first time when I was twenty-two and a college student.  I was acquainted with her then husband who introduced us on the bus.  I mentioned that I was on my way to a film, "Nasty Habits", a satire about a scandal in a nunnery.  Her husband quipped "nice Christian theme" and Bright-Eyes said nothing though I suspect she was probably embarrassed by hubby.

Two years later we met again in church.  She was divorced and... no, things did not take that kind of turn between us, gentle reader.  We are not in the movies you know.  We did become friends.  Very good friends.  I don't know what she saw in me as a friend though she insisted that I was full of God.  I thought that if she is as close to God as she appears to be she would either be challenged to see much of any of Christ's presence in me, or for the very love that was filling her heart recognize only Jesus and not only in me but in everyone.

She would tell me of how she found herself living in absolute poverty for a while and not knowing what or when her next meal would be.  She said she joyfully abandoned herself to the love and care of God and that ever since that time she lived a life full of grace and glory.  I must add here that she is one of the most inspiring people I have ever known and been privileged to have as a friend.

To this day I cannot remember what she did for a living.  Where or whether she worked, or if she was on a disability pension, or... I myself was working sporadically at the time, like many people I knew and I imagine so was she. She was in her late twenties, intelligent, kind and very considerate of others.  I could not imagine her as unemployable.  I don't think she intentionally held secrets and perhaps she just had nothing to reveal.

This lovely, kind, gentle and loving woman took interest in the rather strange direction I was taking in terms of Christian ministry.  Increasingly I was feeling called to visit gay bars, not to participate in anything, or drink or meet anyone or get picked up, but simply to be present and to pray.  During this time in 1981 gay and lesbian persons were particularly marginalized, persecuted and stigmatized in society.  The churches had failed them miserably.  Even though I still hadn't got my head around the idea of same-sex marriage I was aware that a non-judgmental and loving Christian presence was needed and especially in situations where Christians, especially while praying and waiting on God, would not be expected to be present.

For several weeks she joined me as we visited places, sometimes chatted with people, and then would leave praying for various persons.  It all seemed good. 

I got a phone call from one of the pastors of her church.  I had by then begun attending a different place, a Four Square fellowship along with the Great One.  I was surprised to hear from this pastor given that we had parted, not on unfriendly terms, but neither specially friendly.  He invited me to dinner with him and his wife.  I accepted, not suspecting that I was walking into a trap.  Just following dinner the pastor began to castigate and rudely lambaste me for bringing their precious angel into such deadly dark sinful and dangerous places.  I replied that she had volunteered to come, she did well there and there was absolutely no danger.  I proceeded to say that she was an adult, capable of making her own decisions and also reasonably sophisticated.  He became angry and verbally abusive.  I swore at him and left.

Two years later she married another dear friend of mine, whom I will probably also include in my Remarkable Pantheon.  Then they moved away to another part of the country.  We wrote each other for a year or two.  I think just when she became pregnant she stopped corresponding.  I love both these people dearly and hope that one day we can be reunited.

Remarkable People I have Known: The Comedian

He actually was very funny and like most people who are funny something of an anomaly.  I was twenty-three when we first met, one evening downtown.  He wore a clerical collar and claimed to be a minister.  He also had at the time a wife, a young quiet mousy woman somewhere in her twenties. I think the Comedian would have been moving towards his forties.  He was very genial, kind, hilariously funny, with a quiet deadpan delivery.  One night very late he phoned me asking if he and his wife could spend the night being suddenly without a roof.  I only wished I could help them and claiming as an excuse my tiny housekeeping room with only a narrow foamy to sleep on I felt awful about turning them down.

I saw him again two years later in a Foursquare Pentecostal church we were both attending sans young wife, along with the Great One.  I began to harbour doubts about him when another Remarkable Person about whom I shall write next post complained about the way he agressively sexually hit on her one day.  He also mentioned cavalierly about his way of coping with the orgasmic screams of a woman in his building that involved a jar of Vaseline on his bedside table.

We continued to run into each other.  I found him to be a very ungrateful dinner guest, theatrically gagging himself with his forefinger when I offered him a stir fry with soybeans.  (if you must know, gentle reader, I do happen to be an excellent cook!  But don't respond to my dinner invitations expecting steak or Chateau Briand!).  During the same visit he also proceeded to lash out against homosexuals as being broken, warped and immoral and that the only reason so many are found working in health care and other helping professions is that it's their way of dealing with their self-hatred.  Yes, he actually did say that, he who could not be trusted with unescorted young women.  Thus ended the friendship, such as it was.

There was still a lot of fun and laughter when we previously visited.  He had a crass way of trying to impress others about all the celebrities he knew when he was doing stand up gigs in Las Vegas. I asked him please to spare us his name-droppings.  He also told me a lot of great jokes.  Here are two:

Did you hear about the prayer meeting that included Catholics and Jews?
Oy Vey, Maria!

What do you call a Jewish baby that hasn't been circumcised?
A girl.

Remarkable People I Have Known

I first met her in 1983 in a local coffee shop.  The Great One had spoken highly of her and suggested that I meet her sometime.  When I saw her there I approached her table and introduced myself.  It was a late autumn morning.  I was unemployed and spending a lot of my time downtown in the local scene attempting Christian ministry of presence.

She was a mother on welfare, divorced, with five children ages fourteen to twenty-two, three daughters and two sons.  She was a lovely, engaging, friendly and very intelligent and sensitive person.  She clearly loved much and cared much.  She was enormously fat.

She was greatly loved by the local gay male community.  She also hated the term "fag hag" and whether the moniker really fit her or not I will leave for others to decide.  I saw her as a potential comrade in arms and was zealous to cultivate her friendship.  

The Fat Lady, the Great One and I passed many vigils together inside Benjamin's Café on Davie Street where we were befriended by sex workers, drug dealers and users, transsexuals, transvestites and transgendered persons and various local folk of every age, shape, size and gender.  We would sit for hours, or do split shifts together.  It was in parts exhilarating, frustrating, gratifying, boring, enjoyable and frightening.  This woman's capacity to love and accept others no matter who they were or where they were in their lives was a constant source of inspiration.

Only a bit later did I learn about the thick dark shadow that obscured her and her family.  From a mutual friend I heard that her ex-husband had chronically sexually abused every one of their three daughters and impregnated one of them.  I was naturally shocked, tearful, and also angry that she had trusted others with this personal pain of hers but did not deem me trustworthy.

We still remained in contact though we never spoke once of the issues of incest.  I don't think she ever guessed that I knew.  As it became clear that she didn't really consider me as a friend, but rather as a kind of auxiliary or spare I began to distance myself.  We eventually lost contact.  She died around eight years ago.  I didn't attend her funeral.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Bill

I am not faking this person's name.  He died some time ago, in the early nineties.  I will not mention here his last name and will also take care not to give him away, not because I have anything to write that would be embarrassing to his memory but simply to honour and protect his privacy.

I had heard of Bill three years before I knew him.  He had rented an apartment in the basement of the Famous Canadian Artist. He had a sweet little dog named, well, something like "Cookie".  I cannot remember whether or not Great Canadian Artist spoke well of him or not.  With her it was always hard to tell since she tended to err on the sardonic even if expressing in the sweetest tone.  Creepy, rather.

I actually met Bill when I began to attend Snooty Church.  He was already a sweet little old man, in his sixties.  I found him on first sight enormously kind and gentle.  A man who cared deeply about others.  I soon learned that he was gay and somewhat vulnerable to unscrupulous rent boys.  He also liked to drink.  Being relatively fresh from evangelical Christianity I did find myself judging him rather harshly, given his strong religious and spiritual profession and how this didn't appear to square well with some of his lifestyle habits.  But I tried to let it go, seeing what an incredibly kind man he was, and very devout.

He was a perennial good sport.  He played a role for a play in Snooty Church's annual festival.  He was a little girl dressed in a pinafore and long flaxen braids, and was named "Little Nell."  Imagine a sixty-five year old man dressed in late Victorian era drag as a sweet little girl.  He pulled it off very well.

A friendship blossomed between us and we periodically met for a meal or a coffee or both.  He seemed to have a crush on me and after a few beers he would wax on tiresomely about my seductive beautiful eyes (okay, gentle reader, you can pull your head out of the sickness bag now!)

He became a faithful advocate for abused and abandoned children and dedicated much of his time and resources to developing the SOS Children's Village.  He kept trying to compel me to join him in his charitable endeavours but I never heard the call.  He did find these kinds of replies coming from me perplexing since I really didn't deal with the traditional Anglican notions of duty and obligation.  Still don't.

He fell ill.  I didn't know what afflicted him.  It might have been HIV-AIDS.  He was very discreet and very circumspect and I will probably never know what killed him.  He did have a difficult and traumatic childhood.  An orphan in England, in the twenties he was shipped off to Canada to live and work on one of the Bernardo Farms, a notorious slave industry disguised as a charitable institution.  Growing up without love, yes, he was wounded, but from his wounds flowed love, the most wonderful unconditional love, the memory of which inspires me still.  He was a wounded healer.  I was summoned to his hospital bed.  He had lost all his hair and had a blank stare.  He didn't seem to know me.  I sat with him for a while, then took his hand and kissed his forehead as I said "Goodbye Bill."  He died the next day.

I hope this little essay will help preserve the memory of this truly remarkable man.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Shrinky-Poo

I guess it's only inevitable that I would include my shrink in this little remarkable little pantheon.  Shrinky-Poo and I met together for four years minus one month.  I was referred to him by my family GP since I knew I had mental health issues and was needing someone to help walk me through them.  Outside of his office I can't say I ever had a real opportunity to know him as a person, apart from the small hints that he would occasionally drop during my therapy sessions.

I have to say that I really didn't think much of him at first: a short, intense Jewish man, sixty-ish with a cocky attitude and strong body odour.  I felt a little repelled at first, but I made every effort to trust his credentials if not him.  It was 2002, July and the weather was hot and sunny and glorious.  I was forty-six at the time and living in a subsidized apartment in the Downtown Eastside.  I had recently taken to wearing white, following nearly a decade of black clothing and I almost always was wearing one of my several white button down shirts and a faded pair of blue jeans.  Before you read anything into this that doesn't exist, gentle reader, black was the colour for the nineties.  It was already 2002 and time for change.

We met for fifty minutes every other week.  He diagnosed me as suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from early childhood abuse.  I appeared to be doing rather well despite the odds so we agreed to try talk therapy without relying on medications.  It worked.  However his idea of talk therapy seemed to involve him doing the talking and me listening to his exalted wisdom about my illness.  I soon turned the tables several months or a year later when I blurted "Will you please shut the fuck up for a while and give me a little bit of air time?  It's my therapy, not yours!"  I still couldn't get him to shut up long enough for me to get a word in edgewise so I declared that from now on, when I arrived for my appointment, I would be spending the first ten minutes talking and he would do the listening.  It took a few weeks.  He would try to break in or interrupt and I would point to the clock and remind him that I still had another eight minutes and then I would talk over him and go on talking about my experience of the two weeks since our last visit till precisely 1:40 and then I would give the mike over to him.

He thought I was a control freak and I retorted that he had already mentioned that I have impeccable boundaries.  He couldn't argue.  When he wondered if I found his approach a little too Freudian I replied, "Of course.  I'm Jung at heart." 

I found him a little bit creepy at times.  He seemed at times a little obsessed with asking me personal questions about sex.  He also told me on a few occasions that I was a very attractive man and a couple of times he put his hand on my shoulder.  I think when he sensed my discomfort he became a little more circumspect.

His office consisted of a couch and an arm chair.  I spent our sessions seated in the chair.  My psychiatrist was always lying on the couch.

I had a dream about him which he found uncannily accurate and realized that I had some experience of the paranormal which we did discuss at length.  He came to respect and even admire my spiritual life, my Christian faith and my strong integrity and moral compass.  He also mentored me as I began to work in mental health peer support, often giving me excellent feedback, advice and wisdom about working well with my clients.

Our sessions came to an end four years later when he announced that he was retiring.  This was a bit scary for me because it would mean flying on my own.  I rose to the occasion.  It was difficult for a few months and for a while I feared relapsing but I always managed to get through it.  He had given me some excellent counsel about reframing my situations and crises so that I should no longer feel like a victim but a victor.  I learned much about reclaiming my life.  I also became convinced with his support that my relationship with surviving family, in this case my father and brother, was not reparable, that further contact with them would be toxic to me and I had best cut my losses and move on.  I never heard from either one of them, not since before my therapy, nor during nor after.  My father has since died from Alzheimer's.  I found out almost three years later through a chance encounter with an aged aunt.

That my shrink saw fit to treat me without meds was for me a tremendous boon.  That he also taught me to stand up for myself and walk in my own integrity has done much to reshape and alter my life.  I have remained securely housed for the last thirteen years, and working in the mental health field for the last eleven.  I have grown and flourished as an artist, become fluent in Spanish and acquired a wide circle of some very good and very enjoyable friends: people who love me, respect me and encourage me.  I have also become something of a world traveller, in Latin American countries at least, and thanks to Skype and the internet have cultivated friendships with people in many different countries.  I have also found a faith community that fits well for me and have since reaffirmed my commitment to the Anglican Church.

Life isn't always easy and there will always be challenges and I will at times always have to stand up and fight for what I believe in.  Easy, not always.  Exciting and inspiring, yes.

Shrinky-Poo and I still run into each other from time to time.  On at least two of our most recent encounters I have been with a client in a coffee shop.  I still love the little smile that he gave us before he went on his way. 

Remarkable People I Have Known: Junior, The Star Tenant

He is the son of the pastor of Fundy Church, that sect of Christian fundamentalists I was involved with in the early 2000's.  The Fair-Haired Boy.  Kind of like how we would imagine Bart Simpson just on the threshold of puberty, though he was already in his twenties.  He was a Christian Skateboarder.  You know, that brand of fundamentalist-evangelicalism that endeavours to stay true to every single word, letter, jot and tittle in both the Old and New Testament while glossing over or feigning ignorance of some of the verses that mention the word "love."  They twist themselves like origami in their efforts to look hip, cool and not ridiculous.  So he was a "Christian" Skateboarder.  Like a "Christian" Artist, or a "Christian" rapper.  (Are you finished throwing up now, gentle reader?)

I met his parents and his older sister a year before I began to attend.  They were volunteering with me serving meals to homeless and street youth Saturday nights at the Baptist coffee house.  I really liked them, finding them to be nice, kind and gracious as well as very attractive people.

Junior was a kind of big brother to a clique of lost boys, all skate boarders.  He housed them, fed them, skateboarded with them, advocated for public skateboarding, apparently unaware or unconcerned about the dangers to seniors and others sharing the sidewalks.  He converted some of them and brought them to his church.  He took a liking towards me, then became irrationally suspicious.  Twice he invited me for coffee for the express purpose about grilling me about my sexuality.  I didn't bite.  He said he was concerned about the safety and well being of his lost boys as though I were some pervert or marauding predator.  I already suspected him to be a closet case, maybe a jealous closet case and simply replied that whatever assumptions he wanted to make about me that these same assumptions said more about him than me, I was no threat to anyone and to please mind his own business.

The fact of the matter is when someone asks you if you're gay, that is the game changer for any friendship and usually means that the friendship is over and likely never existed.  No matter how you answer you will from henceforth carrying the stain of stigma as far as they're concerned.

Junior moved into my building, more or less as I was getting ready to leave his sect of homophobic bigots.  He lived almost across the hall from me.  Our friendship continued more or less.  When I left fundy church and Fundy Minister ended our friendship he naturally took the side of his friend and mentor F M.  Another death blow to the friendship.  At times we prayed together.  When he learned that I don't share his take on the Bible, but referred to it as a flawed document that should not be taken literally but still honoured and revered for its divine inspiration he decided he no longer wanted to pray with me. 

By this time it was clear to me that he was a plant in my building.  A strong presence of Fundy Church, they and his pastor daddy were using him in order to maintain their influence and dominance in my building.  He also was, given his provenance, the star tenant.  I was already feeling disenchanted with Junior and allowed our friendship to slip away like sand through my fingers.  He moved out.  I certainly did not miss him.  Before he moved I did allow him and a fellow student from his university to spend the day with me and interview me for one of his classes concerning my childhood and upbringing, taking us to the house in Richmond where I grew up.  We stood in front of the old split level where I was filmed and interviewed about my upbringing there.  The owner, a middle aged Chinese gentleman came out to inquire about us.  We had a pleasant chat and he seemed quite delighted that I had spent a good part of my childhood in his house.  Later I asked Junior to delete the whole thing.  I felt used and exploited and that I had permitted him to take liberties with me in order to preserve our friendship.  I also kicked my ass good and hard for being so needy.  To cut myself a little bit of slack, I believe I was still in, or had just completed, my psychotherapy and was still feeling a little vulnerable.

Junior moved back into the building a few years later, older and fatter.  He one day asked about going for coffee with me.  I consented.  It was a pleasant visit and I thought that perhaps this would rekindle our friendship.  A month later I asked him out for another coffee visit.  He declined claiming that he didn`t feel ready to see me on a regular basis.  I felt naturally insulted and ended the friendship.  He remonstrated and tried to visit me.  I refused to see him.

We did have a kind of rapprochement a year later when he tried to fix my computer and I took him for dinner to reward him.  He has since asked me a couple of times about a coffee visit.  I have been noncommittal.  To cut him a little slack, he is not a bad person.  He cares about people and I think he has a genuine humility.  He has not gone into details but has indicated to me in the recent past that he has been through some real mental health issues.  I don't want to condemn him.  I wonder if this might be generating some of his fear towards me.  I feel that there is a shadow between us, maybe from his youthful immaturity and some of his irrational fears that he projected onto me and for this I do want to forgive him. 

My need to preserve my own wellbeing and integrity still makes me doubtful about renewing our friendship.  I do not trust his ongoing connection to Fundy Church and I really want to distance myself from the bigotry that comes with it.  On the other hand, maybe trust that he is on a journey that I know nothing about.  Time will tell.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Fundamentalist Minister

He did not like being called a fundamentalist. But he was.  I actually didn't like him at first.  I was participating in one of the Bible studies in my building.  I only started attending these Bible studies out of a mixture of curiosity and feeling a little bit of pressure from the fundamentalist Christians running my social housing apartment building.  Fundamentalist Minister, who facilitated the BS seemed a little bit ingratiating and I sensed him to be a talented manipulator.  I really didn't feel he could be trusted.

I only later learned that he was one of the new ministers in the fundamentalist church I attended for two and a half years.  They didn't run my building but the manager was a member there with influence.  When they asked to show some of my art in their church, and I consented, I thought to check them out.  I have to admit that I was drawn in by the warmth and friendliness.  Only later did I learn that they were overwhelmingly right wing conservative homophobic bigots.

Fundy M was going to plant a new church in East Vancouver and he wanted me to help him.  I foolishly said yes.  We frequently had coffee together and he quickly learned that my views on same sex love and marriage were taking a disturbingly liberal turn.  I by that time had come to accept gay marriage as good and necessary and a matter of human rights and good Christian ethics.  I had not come to this understanding overnight but through a process of prayerful thought and consideration that took years.  Fundy M was not willing to see this, but usually kept quiet about it and even tried to show that he could agree with me up to a point.  And of course he was relying on me to help him plant his new church.

He suffered a stroke that held him back as he tried to recover.  In the meantime I offered almost all my spare time scouting around in various eastside neighbourhoods looking at houses for sale since as an obligation of his church he was seeking to buy a house in one of those neighbourhoods.  They found a place, evidently without my help, and a location for the new church: the borrowed premises of a Russian Baptist church, every bit as rigid and intolerant as Fundy M and his bigoted little sect.

With others from my building I was attending for a while services at this church, on the other side of town.  There was in my building all kinds of subtle proselytization going on.  Given the imbalance of power between tenants and management and our vulnerability, for them it was really like shooting fish in a barrel.

In the meantime I noticed that I appeared to be the only one in his circle who wasn't really welcome in his home.  I was only invited for Thanksgiving dinner there (having no family I generally have nowhere to go on holidays) at the pressure and behest of his wife, and within an hour after dinner he asked me and the other guest (like me, present only for charity) to leave, while closer friends of the family were allowed to stay on.  This was the first major death blow in our friendship.

Our discussions about equal rights for gays and same sex marriage became increasingly heated and hostile.  When I challenged him to imagine what it might be like if every aspect of his sexual orientation, including the existence of his wife and children, should cause his persecution and rejection by society, as an exercise in empathy about what LBGTQ people have had to suffer for centuries, he dropped me like a live grenade.  The following Sunday I paid my final visit in his church.  Same sex marriage had just been legalized in Canada and Fundy M decided to preach against it.  Midway through his diatribe I walked out and never returned.

I have since run into Fundy M maybe twice in the ten years since the death of our alleged friendship.  He will not give me the time of day.  Such Christian love, but I really do not miss him and I think I am doing rather well without his friendship.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Shutterbug

I met Shutterbug through an interesting labyrinth of experiences and situations.  Thang had been trying to sell me on a special series of marketing classes for artists who want to be able to live off their art.  I was reluctant at first but following a wonderful screening interview I was all for it.  When I attended my first and only session I found that I had stepped in something rather different. Really stepped in it.  The facilitator had a huge background in marketing and knew not a thing about art or artists.  She has to be one of the nastiest, most humourless excuses of a human being I have ever met.  So mean-spirited was she that, knowing that we were all on low or virtually nonexistent incomes, told us that we had to pay for our own coffee that was served on the premises as she wanted to encourage self-sufficiency.  I only wanted to get as far away from her as possible.  Thang tagged along with me during the lunch break and made things only worse with his neurotic nonstop stream of consciousness yammering.  I met in the class someone I will name Pantaloon Girl who became a short term friend.  She was actually a controlling self-righteous bully and when a few months later over a cup of coffee in a café I called her on it she broke down weeping.  We never saw each other again.  It was Pantaloon Girl who told me about Shutterbug, who lived in his photography studio in an old downtown building on the fringe of Gastown.  She was doing an art show on his premises and she promised to tell him all about me.

I attended her opening where she introduced us.  We hit it off rather well and I did feel a bit uncomfortable with the degree of interest and attraction he had towards me even though I was reassured that he was "straight."  Shutterbug liked my paintings and we agreed to do a show the following spring.  In the meantime our friendship developed.  I became a regular visitor in his studio and he appeared quite intrigued by my radical politics and activism and I suppose my spirituality.

He had a seemingly endless stream of girlfriends, being quite the ladies' man.  I found it interesting that I got on well generally with all his girlfriends, but his male friends and I (fewer than his girlfriends) seemed not to connect really.  I found them all rather boring.  Shutterbug turned out to be incredibly kind and generous and gave (not lent) me some money to help pay for my rent during my final month before I became homeless.

I did have a good opening for my art show in his place with a very decent turn out of visitors. I even sold a couple of paintings.  Within three weeks I was homeless.  Shutterbug allowed me to stay at his place for a few days then I went to stay part time with my father in a small coastal town where he lived.  I alternated each week, four days with my father in the coastal town and three days with friends in Vancouver.  Sometimes I stayed with Shutterbug.  His studio became almost like home.

We stayed in contact after I found housing and from time to time I would take care of his cat, sometimes staying overnight during his frequent road trips.  Then I began my journey of recovery and we lost sight of each other.  All the time, energy and attention I had previously given to others I was now lavishing on myself.  I was taking back my life and suddenly none of my friends (who usually took way more than they gave) had time for me.  And vice versa.

I didn't see Shutterbug for another five years or so.  He was already in his forties and showing it.  He actually chased after me for a couple of blocks when he saw me downtown.  I didn't really want to see him, feeling only a huge and empty disappointment whenever I thought of him.  We exchanged contact information.  We were going to go for coffee after work.  He never showed up.  We since ran into each other a couple of times, long enough for him to see that my life was moving at full cylinders and suddenly there was nothing there for him, only a self-sufficient being who wasn't about to be emotionally exploited again.

He is now a father, a bit on the late side since now he is fifty.  As far as I know he has recovered from his various drug addictions.  I don't think we'll ever see each other again.  I long ago stopped caring.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Thang

He was an habitué of the Café S'il Vous Plait, one of Vancouver's legendary warmed over hot spots.  It began as a woefully precious café squatting on the premises of a former greasy-spoon previously known as Teddy's Café in a semi-detached heritage commercial space on the corner of Robson and Richards.  The building face was adorned with vintage tile: black polished ceramic squares with small green tiles running a horizontal row near the top.  S'il Vous Plait died a few years ago.  It is now a sushi joint, the interior is soulless and the vintage exterior tile has been removed.  I never go in and I don't like sushi anyway.

When I became a near daily presence in S'il Vous Plait it was already owned by a Korean couple who promised the staff and regulars to do nothing to change it.  Aside from filling the space with lush tropical plants.

Thang almost lived there, along with some of his friends.  They were all rather burnt-out warmed over punks, or should I say art punks, or painfully creative souls with brilliant minds, adult survivors of the gifted child syndrome who simply cannot do anything practical or useful and are by default doomed to lives of poverty and underachievement.  (I resemble that remark) 

I quite didn't like him at first and felt very suspicious of him.  We never spoke to each other but I was often eavesdropping as he sat at one of the swivel stools at the counter chatting up the staff about his latest sparks of creative genius.  Not really a loud talker, but relentlessly chatty and chronically entertaining, like dancing shoes that never stopped.  He was also an illustrator and writer of graphic novels and I found his vampiric illustrations off-putting to say the least as well as his aesthetic necrophilia (he was fascinated by bones and skulls, animal and human). I suspected him to be a Satanist, which was actually a projection of my own dark side.  I had by then become so suspicious during this brutal period of extreme spiritual warfare during the eighties and nineties that I often erred on the side of paranoia.

Thang and I, and some of his following, eventually became friends.  He couldn't stop talking to me and was amazed and nonplussed that a devout Christian such as myself could also be intelligent, creatively and verbally gifted and open-minded.  And an artist of quality. We soon became a kind of default community.  We were often visiting each other's homes, going for coffee, walks, but not really attending events given that we are all desperately poor.

Really there are quite a few remarkable people who were enmeshed here but I have chosen Thang as one to focus on in order to simplify things a bit.  He did at times really wear on my nerves with his nonstop neurotic jabbering and when I brought it to his attention one day he became so upset that he walked out of the café.

Eventually he harboured me during my final three months of being homeless.  Part time I stayed in his communal house full of burnt out and dysfunctional punks.  It was a difficult and tense situation and might I add a bit challenging in some ways with the smoking, the drugs, the alcohol, the noise, the household soap operas and some of the sexual tensions (one of the young men staying there had a thing for me and I was not about to rise to the occasion).  Following a confrontation I was asked to leave, which I did, only to founder on the threshold of another friend waiting in the wings.

Our friendship never returned to what it was.  Thang made a few missteps and himself ended up homeless.  I felt too sorry for him to enjoy any schadenfreud.  He has since been diagnosed with a mental health condition, is on calming medications, and receives a disability pension.  He is in his fifties now.  We still never see each other.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Tallulah: 1991

She was beautiful.  Twenty-one years old and poured into a clinging strapless black mini-dress, her short auburn hair worn like a Roaring Twenties flapper transitioning to a gang moll of the Dirty Thirties.  She didn't simply suggest a young Tallulah Bankhead, she incarnated her.  But she wasn't an incandescently beautiful stage and film actress with a razor wit and tongue to match.  But still she was beautiful, with a wit and tongue and filthy mouth that would have made her an equal to the infamous Tallulah.

She was a sex worker.  We often sat together in a late night corner coffee shop just half a block from where I live now, flanked by her many friends and admirers: a gender balance of female and male hookers with a generous contingent of drug dealers.  One night at one in the morning she burst in upon our table and loudly proclaimed, "My C--- (sounds like runt) is BROKEN!"  This following a couple days of frenzied sex with her fancy man de jour, one of the neighbourhood rent boys.

She was a girl with a dragon tattoo, a bat-winged sky devil straddled just above her breasts, descending in fire-tongued wrath upon her right breast.  On her left wrist there was a tattooed bracelet of human skulls: one for each person she loved who had died.  She was a mother whose two year old child was in foster care.  Her eyes, such incredibly lovely dark wells  with bottoms of black granite, became moist when she spoke of him, the only time she betrayed emotion.  I read some of her poetry, about life on the street, and wondered why she wasn't already famous.

She was of course an addict, though she didn't mention this much, and a scam artist.  I don't know why she liked me, if the word is indeed "like".  I at first found her spell-binding, then frightening, beautiful, and eventually rather pathetic.  We didn't stay in contact and really our socializing never went far beyond the all night coffee shop.  I felt for her, I prayed for her, and hoped I might be some redemptive, nonjudgmental and caring presence to her, someone who didn't want anything from her.  This likely was part of the problem: I don't think she could understand that anyone could care for her without wanting anything.  I still at times have trouble wrapping my head around the concept.

The last time I saw her she was sharing a table with her disreputable dark side friends in a notorious café on Davie Street.  They were all tattoos, highly-coloured or strangely cut hair, piercings, black leather and bondage and fetish gear and exposed white skin and they all smelled of drugs, stale beer and sex.  Even as they became for me a pathetic side show they still were alluring.  To preserve my self-possession I quietly slipped out of the notorious café and while walking away on the sidewalk outside composed in my mind this song that I still sing almost every day:

"Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He is our heart's desire, he is the consuming fire.

Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.

His sceptre the rod of peace, his kingdom shall never cease.

Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He washes his servants' feet, our master and servant complete.

Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He poured out his blood for you and me, setting us at liberty.

Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world.

He bids us to walk in the light, our lamps burning in the night.

Walk like you're ruled by God, and you shall walk as one who rules the world."

I was carrying between my fingers a leaf of lemon balm as I was walking and composing this sacred anthem.  To this day the sight and fragrance of lemon balm summons to mind the words of this anthem and my memory of the younger Tallulah and then I begin to sing it again as a prayer for her and our broken, beautiful and anguished world.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Lili M

She has to be the most memorable transwomen I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.  Even though she didn't look particularly female or feminine she more than "passed".  She was authentically female regardless of her born gender status.  She had been previously married, with children, had worn a beard and driven a truck for a living. 

We met somehow in Benjamin's Café, during its third and final incarnation, this one on Granville Street near Davie, one block from where I have been currently living for the past thirteen years.  Like the previous two Benjamin's it was uniquely decorated with funk, antiques, bric-a-brac and suchlike that it always came off looking like a fin-de-siècle bordello en San Francisco whose decorator must have been under the influence of a variety of illegal and controlled substances.  I at first didn't quite know what to make of her.  I thought she might be an androgynous man or an androgynous woman.  As an androgynous man, myself, I did enjoy with her an instant affinity.)

She was an incredibly sane, incredibly gentle, intelligent and forward-looking presence.  She was also a hooker (okay, sex worker, #%@#!! politically correct thought police)  She felt that sex work was her only option as is still too often the case for transpeople.  I can't say that she loved her job but she really did what she could to appreciate and find value in what she did, primarily in her every attempt to humanize her johns.  She also looked out for and looked after many of the younger sex workers.  She was the local den mother.  I did not, and still do not, approve of sex work by the way, but let's contextualize, eh?

I did everything I could to spare Lili M my personal judgements and opinions about her career choice and she did appreciate this and was generous with her friendship.  I lost contact with her when she went to England for her full operation.  A young man friend was going with her, presumably as she said to help her test run the new equipment.

Lili M, during one of our many evening rendezvous en Benjamin's Café were talking one night about community and places of refuge and sanctuary.  This is when she told me in detail of what she envisioned: a place that she called "Sanctuary", where people of all ages, races, genders and backgrounds would feel welcome, especially those wounded by life; a place of creativity, music, fellowship and refuge.  a place where everyone belonged and everyone could contribute of their gifts and offerings of their lives and substance.  I wish I could remember more accurately and with greater clarity but she inspired me with her words and I went on to try to help form this very kind of community the following year, 1988, when the Community of the Transfiguration had its birth in the farmhouse in Richmond.

I have never seen or heard of Lili M since 1987.  I only hope that she finally found her sanctuary.  In the meantime I am still working at building my own.

Remarkable People I Have Known: Rock Star

This marks one of the stupidest things I ever did in my life.  Taking a drug addicted failed rock musician with AIDS to London to be questioned by Scotland Yard about the murder of his ex-boyfriend while letting him extort from me thousands of dollars.  Remember what I said about me being a sucker for sad souls with tragic tails of endless woe?

I had encountered him in the past on occasion and we stopped and talked a bit.  We seemed to hit it off.  Late one evening at around 11:30 I saw him on Granville Street downtown, just ahead of me.  I called him and we walked together.  He appeared to be very distraught and mentioned he was grieving the death of a member of his band.  We went to a pub together where we talked a bit more.  He got very drunk and it was late.  He invited me back to his apartment.  The buses had already stopped running (I was living in Richmond then) so I accepted his offer of a place to sleep for the night.  He did make a move on me so I moved away to the couch, then I disappeared in the morning.  Unfortunately I was stupid enough to leave him a note with my phone number on it.  I really didn't expect that he would call.

We began to hang out and he was such a mess that I stayed with him for a couple of weeks basically looking after him, seeing that he was eating okay, walking his dog.  I got swallowed into this fetid toxic whirlpool of squalor, moral decay and failed charisma.  I did not do anything that compromised any of my values, Christian or otherwise, but I still allowed this miserable sociopath take ownership of me and lie about his need for financial assistance in order to extort drug money from me while weeping without ceasing about having AIDS and the murder of his ex-lover.  I was enjoying the largess of an inheritance from my recently deceased mother and he was eating into it like a swarm of bedbugs vacationing in a nudist fat farm.

He was British, had recently lived in London and received news of the brutal murder of his ex-lover.  Then came a letter from Scotland Yard asking him to travel there to answer a few questions.  I was already planning to go to London, perhaps to try to settle there.  On my invitation he joined me.

In London we shared a hotel room which he strew with his personal effects.  Then he brought back a Parisian man with a nasty attitude to smoke dope and hopefully have sex with him in our room.  I effectively vetoed it and kicked the asshole out.  Then he brought in another pathetic soul and again I had to get rid of both of them.  I was happy to have the room to myself.  I generally tried to otherwise avoid him since all he wanted to do was get drunk in pubs, use drugs and pick up men.  We did make it Scotland Yard and while he was questioned there (in Highgate) I took a walk in the overgrown cemetery that contains the grave of Karl Marx.

We went to Edinburgh together where I lost him.  He wanted more money, I said no and that was the last I saw of him.  I do not know what happened to him but my craving for rock star glamour was very much cured thanks to one failed rock star in post-Thatcher London in the summer of 1991.

Remarkable People I Have Known: P Perfect

Well, I don't really know if she did indeed pee perfect and I don't think I ever want to find out.  I first met her at Snooty Church.  Oh, she was to the manner born, from the moneyed West Side of Vancouver and with priestly aspirations.  The priesthood was not going to be a reality for her as long as she remained within the religious Jurassic Park which was Snooty Church in those days.  Snooty Church did not welcome female clergy (and I understand that now they have progressed to the first half of the Twentieth Century!). 

We liked each other and within a couple of years reconnected in another parish where she had been placed for her theological preparation.  It couldn't have been a better situation for a woman preparing for the priesthood.  The rector was herself a strong feminist and even something of a man hater. Dopey, the Very Nice Young Man and I were all that remained of our Community of the Transfiguration and we spent a few months attending services there since it was almost our local parish church.

P Perfect became our friend and was soon a regular feature in our home for Sunday lunch.  She worked part time as a librarian and I would sometimes run into her in our spanking new Roman Coliseum house of books, learning and community resources.  As our Community was in its death throes we were soon having coffee or lunch together in the local warmed over hot spot café that used to be the hippest joint in the hood.

Eventually the shit really started to hit the fan with me and P Perfect became a very present and supportive friend.  She bought some of my paintings, and commissioned a few.  Mostly, she listened to me as I tried to make sense of this difficult and traumatic transition I was going through.

Her patience had its limits and she would almost fly into a rage at me at times for some of my less intelligent life choices.  She was almost hyper-sensitive and also with a keen bourgeois sensibility.  She didn't see me as fitting well with her various friends and associates because I was too punk or "spikey" for their refined senses.  She seemed to find my honesty and transparency as infuriating as appealing but she was definitely a graduate with honours from the School of Nice.

She did more than she had to as I went from poor, to desperate to homeless.  Towards the end of my odyssey without a fixed roof over my head she let me stay at her place for five days then got me in touch with a friend of hers who harboured me for two weeks before I found a place to live.

She was ordained and spent time as a fill-in at a parish in a wealthy neighbourhood.  When I suggested that I drop in and visit some Sunday she was horrified telling me I was not the kind of people who would be welcome there.  That was the first major blow to our friendship.

I eventually did the math and realized that P Perfect had been part of a group of high ranking Anglicans from Snooty Church and elsewhere who really wanted to keep me down and innocuous.  I was considered a grave threat to the Anglican Church, or so it seemed, and they were determined to do everything they could to disempower me and keep me disempowered.  Snooty Church has a lot to answer for since they played a pivotal role in worsening my mental health condition. 

The last visit I had with P Perfect I tried over lunch to extort from her a confession.  She admitted that I was right but begged me not to press her for details.  So ended our friendship.  She did find a church in the northern part of the province where she became rector.  I have not heard from her or of her since.  I still can't say whether or not I miss her.

Remarkable People I Have Known: The Little Prince

I guess I am being a little bit cruel here.  Especially given what an easy target he is.  We first met in 1992 by introductions from Dippy.  She was visiting the fundamentalist charismatic church that would eventually swallow her alive and where she met this sad pathetic young goth.  She cheerfully introduced him as a Christian which he never really claimed nor professed to be.  He was twenty-two and absolutely miserable.

He did take a strong liking to us, to Dippy, Dopey and me and even invited us all over to his apartment for tea.  We would also meet one to one and he would pour out his tale of woe, that he was depressed, miserable and felt like the most unloved piece of humanity on earth.  I do have a history, by the way, of getting suckered into overwhelming friendships by tales of tears and woe and this was no exception.

He was gay, but wrestling with his orientation.  He was the adopted son of wealthy parents.  There was a lot he never told me.  I found it interesting that even with his father footing much of the bill for him that he could afford some of the luxuries that he enjoyed by sense of entitlement.

Within a couple of years he fully came out of the closet and became extremely promiscuous.  Despite his solemn veneer of goth glamour he was really incredibly shallow and not terribly intelligent, yet very talented in the art of survival and of survival on his terms so perhaps he wasn't a dummy after all.

One night he was savagely beaten and required hospitalization, respite and protection.  I think he lied about what really happened.  I suspect that he owed his extra luxuries to other work he was involved in and that he had somehow really offended his bosses.

His father bought him a luxury condo for which he paid but a courtesy for rent.  He acquired two exotic cats of a very expensive breed.  He also turned into one of the nastiest racists I had ever known. 

Other friends of mine would ask me why I would want someone like him for a friend.  And I agreed that there must be something a bit askew with him.  But there was something so irresistibly pathetic about him.  And he was faithful and forgiving, two qualities that have always endeared me.

Eventually even I couldn't stand any more.  I had also been through a very successful psychotherapy which had somehow changed me.  I no longer felt desperate for friendship at any cost if only to assuage my festering sense of being unwanted.  I was not going to be further outraged by his ridiculous and hateful comments about visible minorities and I certainly was not going to go on being emotionally blackmailed.

His reaction was fierce and vicious.  He wrote me a particularly nasty and hurtful email.  The friendship was over and the little prince was dethroned.

We have had a little contact since, only by email.  We seem to be on better terms.  I do not think we will see each other again.

Autumn Crocuses

AUTUMN CROCUSES

 

 Jake and his colleague Mike turned from Davie Street then continued along Pendrell, a quiet parallel street of apartment high-rises, old houses and gardens. The wind blowing off the water was cold, though the sun still held its warmth. The two men kicked aside coloured fallen leaves and idly watched the horse chestnuts that scattered the pavement like the lost souls of the dead. They were both mental health workers. They had worked together almost three years, having been hired simultaneously.
 “We got hired at the same time, right?” Jake said.
 “Three years today.”
 “How did you get to be friends with Amy?” He almost finished with, and I’m not, but knew better and held his peace.
 “I don’t think anyone’s friends with Amy, or at least not in the mental health system. Her boundaries are flawless.”
 Jake had no time for professional jargon off duty, not even from a coworker. He spared Mike his opinion. For him the word "Boundaries" as it is used in the mental health system had a nearly magical resonance. One need only utter the word boundaries and like a magic shield it could repel arrows, bullets, neediness and entitlement. Likewise the word "Miscommunication." As long as it was a miscommunication no one need ever accept responsibility, no one would be found to be wrong. He was as intrigued as appalled by the professional jargon used at work, and horrified that now he was using it too. Even during his off time. Jake wanted to tell him this but dutifully held his tongue. He was one of Amy's friends. He couldn't trust him. Amy was their manager.
 “Didn't she invite you out for drinks with her last week?”
 “We went out for coffee, and it was strictly to discuss a couple of clients. This is the only time we have been anywhere together outside of the office. If I didn't work here I would not be seeing her for anything.”
 Turning into his building, Jake heard Mike say, "Tomorrow at the meeting you will understand why.”
 While turning the key in the lock it occurred to Jake that till now he had assumed that Mike was a good friend but they really knew very little about each other. Occasionally they went for lunch together, sometimes stopped for a beer or coffee after work, and usually took the same bus since they lived within one block of each other. They got along well, but it had already occurred to Jake that they really knew nothing about each other. He had never mentioned to Mike that he had a kid, only that he had been previously married. Mike hadn't asked. He asked him almost nothing and somehow they managed to keep the conversation inpersonal but amusing and sometimes fascinating for Mike always had opinions and questions and observations about the human condition, the world, society and politics. Of his own life he remained tight-lipped as though carrying in his mouth a shameful secret. Yet Mike did not appear as one who would have any sense of shame neither anything to be ashamed about. Opening the door and stepping into his sad little apartment Jake found himself wondering if he had ever in his life had any real friends.
 Early in the morning he woke and climbed out of bed. It was still dark and the clock said 5:10. Jake knew he should go back to sleep, but a dream he was unable to remember had disturbed his sleep and he might have to make do on less than six hours. He hated not feeling rested and fresh, especially for a morning meeting. He still had a couple of hours and thought of taking a nap before leaving. After showering and washing last night’s supper dishes he put on the coffee then went to his computer. There was an e-mail from Heidi asking him to take their little son next weekend for Thanksgiving. She didn't say why but he knew already. She would be going away with her rich boyfriend to some seaside haven. “Shit,” he muttered half under his breath. He would have to cancel his golf game with Paul. Or fit it in somehow? Not with his kid around, who would demand his full and complete attention over the forty-eight hours they would be together. He thought about getting a bigger apartment. Living in a bachelor was not conducive to child custody visits. But he wasn’t expecting a raise soon. He heard the coffee machine force the aromatic morning brew through its sputtering finale, jumped up and poured his first cup of the day.
 The thirty-minute nap revived him, and Jake left his apartment feeling rested and buoyant. What is this thing called joy, he mused as he passed the shining brass mailboxes that gleamed this morning like autumn gold, for today, suddenly he felt joy. He had felt it once, perhaps twice in recent memory. Certainly on the day of his marriage, and most certainly at the birth of his little boy. Otherwise he had lived out his life as a series of trade-offs and compromises. He noticed the autumn crocuses on the lawn next door, bowed down to the inevitability of the soil to which they soon must return. It was Heidi, an avid gardener, who had first alerted Jake to autumn crocuses, and to copper beech trees and rhododendron bushes. She especially loved autumn crocuses, for the way they carpeted the dirt in a solid sheet of lavender pink, her favourite colour she would often say. They had lasted almost seven years together, both of them clinging as though to a disintegrating life raft to the increasingly remote possibility of surviving together. Outside of an emotional and physical attraction that still held between them an alarming intensity, they really had nothing in common. She loved the earth, nature and beautiful art objects, and Jake, a graduate in philosophy had always lived in the realm of ideas. The two year training course he had taken as a mental health worker he had undertaken primarily out of practical concerns, the need to earn a living and support his son, since Heidi’s career as an interior designer was at best inconsistently lucrative, especially given the two years she had taken off for Daniel their son. Six months into his new job, they both realized that they would not be married for much longer. To this day he still didn't know who first had suggested they file for divorce. It had not been a particularly emotional moment for either of them, he was sure of that, though still they had both grieved the death of their marriage, the loss of their love, but each in their silent enclosed solitude, each in that place they alone occupied where they had never allowed the other to enter and share.
The warm sun covered like a thermal blanket the cold morning as though promising another beautiful day of denial that summer was over, and Jake ignored the bus stop, then walked past another. He had left early enough to walk the entire distance to work. He loved walking. He had a bike, but it got him places too fast and traffic often terrified him. He preferred to move slowly, to actually see, hear and smell his surroundings. He felt beckoned by the Burrard Bridge with its generous sidewalk and sweeping view of the ocean and sky. He felt a spring in his step today, a buoyancy in his pace. He looked out on the distant forest of Pacific Spirit Park and the nearer buildings on the far shore. At the bottom of the forest beneath the university was the famous Wreck Beach where Jake had fled for escape and solitude for the summer following the end of his marriage. For the first time in his life he had gone naked in public, for this was a clothing-optional beach, hence its fame, and being publicly naked was a state to which he never quite became accustomed. A bald eagle flew swooping over the bridge just in front of him, flying towards the water, and he thought this might be an omen. Jake was not in the habit of reading omens into eagles or anything else. He wondered why now, this morning, he would even notice this. He arrived at the office five minutes late for the meeting.
Amy and Mike sat side by side, as though to facilitate the small group together. Amy was dressed in a flowing red caftan, flaming scarlet with gold embroidery. It was eye-stopping. She usually wore modest, dapper and well-tailored suits and chunky costume jewelry. Her only jewelry today was a thin gold chain on her neck and a thin gold bracelet. She never wore rings. She was in her fifties, a large, edging on fat Jewish woman with short bleach-blond hair and rimless glasses that seemed always about to fall from her nose. Her round, strong face wore a sphinx-smile, which was not unusual, but today there appeared to be laughter concealed behind the corners of her mouth. She looked majestic and hilarious. Jake felt his shoulders hunch involuntarily as he mumbled a half-hearted apology for arriving late. As an after-thought he noticed Mike, dressed today all in black. Save for the purple collar of his shirt peeking out of his collarless black pullover he would have looked like he was auditioning for Hamlet. He was paler than usual, his face shining like polished alabaster in the harsh office light. His dark eyes appeared large and solemn. They were bright as always but for a change they did not appear to dance across his face.
“Good morning, Jake.” Amy said cheerfully. Usually a little frightened of her today he found her terrifying and had to fight the desire to run out of the room. “And welcome. We are just about to begin.” Jake interpreted her as meaning, “you've been keeping us waiting and now we can finally get on with our meeting.” He poured himself a coffee, and took a seat near the back of the room. There were at least twenty colleagues and coworkers: social workers, psychiatrists, case managers such as himself and Mike, occupational and recreational therapists, all gathered together with nice salaries and benefits to heal the troubled minds and reintegrate into the social fabric those whose lives had been shipwrecked by mental illness. Jake and Mike, still newbies, were still near the bottom of the pay scale, but for the two peer support workers present who were scandalously underpaid at not much over minimum wage. Jake and Mike both particularly liked the peer support workers, who still were recipients but for one of mental health services, who still but for one took their daily medication. The single exception, a fifty-ish man named Harold, sat near the door at the chair on his right. One would have sworn he had never been mentally ill and his skill set and ability to work well with their patients had made him almost a local legend. Jake was already working with him with one client. They were seldom in contact, but he wished they could talk more, certainly about their client, but also so he could learn more of his story.
“Well,” said Amy, “It looks like everyone is here.” Jake couldn’t help wondering why they were sitting side by side dressed so…formally? Were they about to announce their engagement? Mike was hardly thirty, but more and more young men seemed to be going for older women these days. He did look distinctly nervous, as though he did not want to be in this meeting.
“Before we get on with the clinical details of the day,” Amy said, “Mike and I both have an announcement we would like to make.”
Here it comes, Jake thought.
“Would you like to begin?” she said to Mike. He cleared his throat. Not once had Mike looked in Jake’s direction. But why should he? They were at work. He was more a colleague than his friend.
“After three years here,” Mike began “It’s become evident that there are some things that I probably might have mentioned some time ago, at the beginning…I guess the best way to say it is…simply…” he cleared his throat and reached for his coffee. After taking a cautious sip, as though inoculating himself against something lethal, he said. “I have a mental illness.” The silence was palpable. No one seemed even to breathe. Amy glanced at him and offered him the full benefit of her serene sphinx smile.
“I am more or less recovered. You see, five years ago I was hospitalized with bipolar disorder. I was in the middle of writing exams, it was not a good time in my life for other, more personal reasons that I needn't go into here. But with good psychiatric support and the right combination of medications, I have been stable now for well over three years.”
Amy chimed in, “Mike and I have been discussing this at length, and we have both come to the conclusion that these things need to be openly discussed here. I should also like to add for the sake of transparency that I also have a mental illness.” What seemed like a genuine and very relieved smile suddenly cracked through her mask and she took a full deep breath that caused her ample bosom to positively heave. Jake, when he had first gone naked at Wreck Beach had realized then for the first time that being naked among the naked was possibly not such a bad thing after all.
“Twenty years ago I was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder,"Amy said. " Five years ago I suffered my first relapse. Those of you who were here then must have known that I was on holiday. Well, it was in the hospital where I spent my vacation. This is where Mike and I met each other for the first time."
The unexpected disclosure was followed by a brief discussion in which Amy and Mike both emphasized that not only were they recovered but more than ever felt empowered to provide quality care to their clients as more than anyone other than a peer support worker they could empathize with the experience of mental illness and recovery. That they were not simply clinical abstracts for them to ponder and resolve with the right combination of medications, the right hospitalisation and the right rehabilitation programs and recreational activities. When it became clear that no one in the room knew what else to say, that they might want to have time to recover from the shock, they began to race through the clinical details and client concerns of the day as though nothing else had been said. For Jake it was a blur, a sonorous hum of white noise. He got through the rest of the morning quickly enough. He had two home visits to do and one service assessment to perform. There was nothing out of the ordinary for him to worry about today. The first client had just been released from hospital and wanted ongoing support from the team. The second was struggling with a relapse and asking to be readmitted. The service assessment involved an elderly woman suffering from severe depression. She reminded him of his maternal grandmother. In the corridor he saw Mike leaving the washroom.
“Are you busy for lunch?” he asked Jake, his look almost pleading.
“Yeah, sure. Usual place?”
“Yeah.”
“See you in fifteen.” Jake just then felt on the cusp of mentioning to Mike that their style of communication was almost identical to that of two fifteen year olds in grade nine together. Amy was just stepping out of her office.
“Hey Amy,” Mike said, “want to join us for lunch?”
They sat together in the usual Indian restaurant where Jake and Mike had lunch every week or so. Amy had just returned from the buffet, her plate laden with rice, vegetables and highly spiced sauces.
“I’d like to thank both of you for your courage today,” Jake said, between mouthfuls of butter chicken.
Amy replied, glancing at Mike, “We both felt it was time.”
“I find you both exceptionally good at what you do. Does personal experience factor in here?
“Without doubt,” Mike said. “But I also feel stifled because we don’t have the freedom to disclose anything about our experience of illness and recovery with any of our clients. That’s what peer support workers are for.”
“They’re twice as good as we are at assisting clients through the recovery process for less than half the pay,” said Jake.
"And no benefits,” Amy said. Jake had almost invited Howard the peer support worker to have lunch with them. Now he regretted that he hadn't. The afternoon passed in a quiet unfocussed blur as Jake looked after clients, phone calls and paperwork. He felt as though he were doing everything in his sleep. On the way home with Mike on the bus he learned that they used public transit for rather different reasons. Jake after the divorce sold his suv out of financial necessity, since on his low wages he knew that he would have to sacrifice something in order to not default on child support payments. Mike proudly confessed that he had never learned how to drive. With an automechanic for a father he decided there were already enough polluters on the road. This was when he admitted to never liking his cars or his father.
They never visited each other. Jake was not one to have guests in his apartment. Even the occasional woman he had hooked up with since the divorce had never seen his place. Mike on occasion had appeared on the verge of inviting him to his apartment and Jake felt greatly relieved that he still hadn't worked up the courage and hoped that he never would.
Jake noticed the prostrate autumn crocuses, now dying and bowed down to the cold damp earth. Heidi had told him how similar these are to the flowers from which saffron is obtained, the only difference being that these autumn crocuses were poisonous and eating even one of their stamens could result in death. From his mailbox he pulled a brightly coloured postcard. For the first time in months he felt appalled at the mess in his apartment. He wanted it to be neat and clean for his son's visit and now it looked just like the bedroom of an adolescent boy. He was not going to employ a cleaning service. His paycheck, following the inflated rent, and child support, left him very little discretion money. He also needed the exercise, since he obstinately refused to join a gym. He already swam and jogged twice and three times a week though he supposed he could still improve on his fitness. He hated the near proximity and smell of grunting and sweating strangers and had always felt awkward in public showers. He wasn't particularly modest, and still sometimes bared everything at the famous Wreck Beach. although he found it creepy and sinister standing naked together at close quarters with men he didn't know.
He sometimes wondered if his average physique was Heidi’s real reason for losing interest in the marriage, especially after seeing his rival, a personal trainer with the body and looks of a personal trainer. He still didn’t really know why she wanted to end it, even after they’d been divorced for three years and even after she had several times told him that she was no longer attracted to him, that they were emotionally incompatible. He also felt sure she was lying. They never really fought, not even once. But one day she didn't come home, leaving him with the full care of their infant son. Four days later he got an e-mail from her sister, who instructed him to get a lawyer. Heidi had moved in with her personal trainer.
He washed the breakfast dishes, then wiped down the kitchen, cleaned the bathroom and ran the vacuum cleaner everywhere. There was still that mess of books that never seemed to let up. He couldn’t help it. Not even the Internet could cure Jake of his compulsive book buying. He guessed that of a personal library of some five hundred volumes he had read perhaps fifty. He lay back on his bed and reached for the TV remote. Supper could wait till he actually felt hungry. He watched the news and it was nothing but the usual scary, frightening, horrifying and sad. He turned it off and thought about the leftover Chinese take-out in the fridge. He supposed he could nuke it in the microwave. Jake didn’t mind cooking but his imagination always went suddenly dormant whenever he found himself in the kitchen. He still missed his wife’s cooking. His wife. They had been divorced for three years. He missed Heidi’s excellent cooking. He still missed Heidi.
He returned to the bed with a steaming plate full of rice, chow mien, vegetables and dumplings and remembered the postcard. It featured a bright green and gold rice paddy against a backdrop of blue and purple mountains from anywhere in Southeast Asia. “Hey Jake: Here I am in Cambodia of all places. I just saw the temples at Angkor Wat yesterday. Amazing does not describe them. I only wish you were here to see them for yourself. I’m just winding down six weeks of travel here. I started in Thailand, then I crossed over into Cambodia, Laos, then Vietnam, and now I’m back in Cambodia. I’m back this coming Saturday. Let’s do a meal together sometime soon and I’ll tell you everything. Love, Anne”.
He switched on the TV and channel surfed till he could bear it no longer. He knew he was avoiding the Internet. He did not want to read e-mail, though he didn’t know why. He still didn't have a smart phone. He didn't want one, neither could he afford one. He reached for his laptop, turned it on and waited. Three e-mails: one from his Mom, reminding him of dinner at her place for thanksgiving and asking if he would be bringing her grandson, another from Heidi, reminding him about taking their son for the weekend, and spam advertising the latest penis-enhancer. He picked up the postcard. He met Anne in the college where he had taken the mental health course. She now worked in the same field but elsewhere in the city. They had never been intimate, neither had romance ever been suggested between them. It was rather like his friendship with Mike: often coffee or a beer or the occasional meal together, talking about almost everything and nothing with no real depth and no hidden agendas being suggested and above all no embarrssing self-revelations. He almost wanted to believe that she was a lesbian, or that she was asexual, the thought of which he found formidable. She was beautiful, more beautiful than Heid. But there was nothing there, and she appeared to know it as well as he. His palms had gone suddenly moist and his breathing shallow. They were having dinner together next week.
He slid open the little drawer in his night table where all his post cards and letters inevitably ended up. He still hadn't cleaned out the drawer, not since his marriage ended. He picked up his cell phone. There were no messages. He thought suddenly of calling, or texting Mike, but they’d already seen plenty of each other today. Besides, what would they talk about that wasn’t strictly work related, and this was his time off? Had he been anyone else, Jake would have suggested that what he really needed was a woman. He had lost interest in dating. After burning himself out on two websites and meeting a half dozen candidates, two of which he had more or less successfully bedded, he gave up the chase. He simply still wasn’t ready. Then when would he be ready? He felt suddenly surprised that he had never had this conversation with Mike, whom to his knowledge was single and who gave nothing away about his personal life, given that he even had one. Paul, his only real long-term friend was older, over fifty, and already securely married with college age children. They had been friends since university where Paul registered as a mature student. He was too discreet and mature to offer unasked advice and Jake had never been one to ask anything of anyone. He didn't knowwhy, but had always assumed that no one would know what to tell him, nor that he would even know how or even what to ask. He had not even proposed to his wife. She simply suggested, during a romantic dinner in a French restaurant that maybe they were going to be married one day and Jake didn’t see why not. Whatever he had needed or wanted in life had been what he had stumbled across. What did he want? Go out and get drunk? He didn’t want to come to work with a hangover. What did he want? He looked at the clock as he put away his final mouthfuls of takeout Chinese. It wasn’t seven yet. He might have time to catch a movie? He didn’t feel like it. He was tired. Maybe he should just go around the corner and rent a video? But the video store was closed and the twenty something girl who worked there who always smiled at him so sweetly was forever gone. do. He left his dirty plate on the night table, next to the bed, put on his shoes and threw on a sweater.
Heidi once yelled at him, “You always expect someone else to do all the driving. You never initiate. Anything. This is driving me crazy!” He honestly didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. He had packed along a small paperback novel, an Agatha Christie mystery he was about to begin. No one knew about this quaint, utterly unmasculine preference of his in literature. It was like a secret vice, perhaps like enjoying gourmet chocolates but only when wearing women's underwear, or a discreet porn addiction. In the café he occupied the table of his preference, in the back,
a sequestered upholstered nook on a pedestal, where he placed conspicuously his sweater on the seat and his Agatha Christie on the table while ordering his tea and biscotti. They still hadn’t changed the art on the wall, which again was all photographs. They were rather interesting but he preferred paintings. It was one of her earlier mysteries, featuring Hercule Poirot, set in a tropical resort in the early thirties. The music was softer than usual, and as he listened more carefully realized that it was classical, Mozart he thought. It wasn’t crowded for a change. Mike came in still all in black, and straight to his table. “I’ve never seen you in here before”, said Mike. “Busy?”
“Have a seat.”
He placed his latte on the table then put himself behind it.
“Come here a lot?”
“Every other day maybe.”
“Beats Starbucks, anyway.”
"What’re you reading?”
Mike snatched the novel away before Jake could conceal it.
“Agatha Christie! Sweet! I love her work!”
“Tell me you’re being ironic.”
“She is still the master of mystery.”
“Well, mistress.”
“Please don’t quibble. I have almost all her books and some of them I still like to read.”
“You’re going to tell me that I’m not the only male Agatha Christie geek under forty on the planet?”
“Your claim to uniqueness is over, my friend.”
“What claim to uniqueness!” The remark had hurled from his mouth like a badly aimed bullet.
Mike looked at him, slightly slack-jawed.
“Sorry. I guess that sounded harsh.”
“No worries.” He quietly drank his latte for a while then asked, “Have you ever suffered from depression?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Something I’ve wondered about sometimes, that’s all.”
“I’ll think about it.” He shoved the book gently aside. “What have you been up to this evening?”
“I just returned from having dinner with my ex.”
“I didn’t know you were married.”

“We lived together on and off for a few years, then he left me and I had a breakdown over it. That’s what
landed me in hospital five years ago. Mind you, a lot of my behaviour then alienated him anyway. I was in full
denial about my illness. He’s just been amazing for his support and friendship over the last few years. Both he
and his wife.”
“She doesn’t mind—"
“They’re both amazing.” He finished his latte. “You look like you want to read for a while.” He was
getting up to leave.
“It’s just a book.”
“Time with Agatha is sacred,” Mike said, smiling. He suddenly reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a
purple, or rather pinkish-mauve piece of paper that he handed to Jake. “If you’re not busy Friday we’re
doing a concert at the church across the street from your building.”
“Concert?”
“Didn’t I tell you about the choir that I direct?” Jake stared stupidly at the piece of paper, coloured
identically to the petals of the autumn crocuses. He recognized the name of the choir, and had read favorable
reviews.
“I didn’t know—“
“I have a lot of secrets,” Mike said, grinning. “Or, I had a lot of secrets. See you tomorrow.”
“Hey, let’s get drunk.”
“Tonight?”
“Soon.”
“Yeah, why not?”
He sat and read he didn’t know how many pages in the back of the café. He wished Mike had stayed, he
wished they could see more of each other, and he wished he'd told him the name of the man he had been lovers
with as well as the name of the woman he married once it was finished between him and Mike. He had so many
questions about this, but such questions as he could not begin to put words to. Jake suppressed as though
chopping off the emerging heads of a Hydra the many questions that would beg to be asked had he allowed them
to take shape or form. He hadn’t bothered to go running today and thought of walking on the beach. It was early,
not eight-thirty.
Jake was the only person on the beach. Like the slow stentorian
heartbeat of the Great Mother the surf pounded the wet sand. In three days he would see his little son,
scarcely four years old. Heidi had
mentioned how fond her new boyfriend was of the boy but Jake already knew this. They had never met but just a
few weeks ago he saw them all, together, inside a local restaurant that he was walking by. They did not see him,
they were seated further back from the window. While pretending to tie his shoe Jake looked up at the chiseled
face of Heidi's personal trainer, and his boy Daniel climbing onto this stranger’s lap, and he had to quell the urge
to run inside and snatch his child away and run outside with him. He quickly walked home, swore loudly at a
driver who nearly ran him over on a right hand turn then nearly ran to his apartment. He searched through the
fridge and cupboards. There was not a drop of alcohol in the place. He did not feel like going back outside to
buy something. He would have to suffer. Jake lay on his bed under the bright ceiling light of his sad little
bachelor apartment, trying not to hyperventilate, trying to breath deeply, slowly and rhythmically. He tried to
imitate the sound of the surf that still played on in his head. But he wanted to do only one thing and with all his
might he resisted, until the dam broke with the first tears’ appearing. Not even able to call or summon his wife’s
name, Jake wept like a girl, like a baby, like a small little boy on top of his lonely narrow bed and paid no heed
to the dirty plate next to him on the night table. When he was finished he got up, left the soiled dinner plate in the
sink and went to bed.
He woke not knowing where he was or the time of day. Brilliant red lines and shapes glared at him in the
dark. Gradually they assumed the form of a number, a colon and two more numbers. The clock radio said 6:30
and he assumed it was morning. He had slept profoundly without dreaming. He lay there in the quiet protective
dark waiting for the weight of sleep to slide off of him. His breathing was deep, steady and assured, like the
heartbeat of the Great Mother. He was suddenly thinking of his little boy, Daniel, and his ready and unfettered
laughter ringing and tinkling in his ears. A delicious warmth began to flood Jake’s being as the joy of soon
seeing his son crowded out every anxious worry and every selfish fret of having to give up his precious alone
time. He only saw Daniel every other week. He wanted it to be more, and Heidi was beginning to see the logic
of this. He had yet to formally meet her personal trainer boyfriend and he was going to be damned if he was
going to permit this chiseled gym-god to steal from him his little son’s affection. He needed a bigger apartment,
he needed a bigger paycheque. His eyes closed momentarily, but he had already slept enough. The new day was
awaiting.
The autumn crocuses save for one had vanished into the earth as though by the insidious magic of nature.
From his pocket he pulled out the flyer for Mike’s choir. They were almost exactly the same colour, the same
shade of pinkish-mauve. There was a subtle difference that he couldn't identify. Perhaps, he thought, a vibrant
vestige of life shining from the dying petals that could not be reproduced in paper, ink or paint. He had time
to walk. He would be early. On his left like a golden sacrificial disk shone the newly risen sun
already warming the chill air. On his right the water of English Bay shone gleaming turquoise. Joy was filling
his mind, his soul and his body. Each step that echoed lightly on the pavement ahead was a tread of joy. In the
rhythm of the dance Jake strode forward tasting already the the gift of the new day, the frustrations and
distractions of his job, his anticipated discomfort with Amy and her confession yesterday, and towards Mike
with whom his friendship had just moved into a new and perhaps alarming realm and depth. The colours of the
day spread out before him summoned to mind the highly coloured postcard he received yesterday from Anne.
In two days she would be back from Southeast Asia. She made his palms sweat but he would see her, they
would dine together in the Thai restaurant around the corner from where he lived. They would meet and have
dinner and over red and yellow curry or Pad Thai they would chat about her trip, her adventures, the
ancient temples she visited, Jake’s work, and his child and many countless things they would speak together of,
such things as but only hinted of their existence.
He looked for the eagle, but she did not appear again. He always thought of eagles as being female. The
message had already been made manifest, and now he must decipher it, now he must decode it even as the
message of the eagle was now deciphering and decoding him. He heard a raven’s sonorous croak and Jake knew
that he was being warned, he knew not of what, but today as he shone like a newly minted coin he knew
he must take heed. So much depended on this today, and he said this aloud “So much depends on this today,” as
he stepped off the bridge and waited before a stream of car traffic for the pedestrian light to change, and to take
his next faltering step in the dance.