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.