Places Where I've Lived: The Boys' House

This is the worst place I have ever lived.  I was in a house run by the church and filled with four young single homophobic Christian males.  I was the fifth one.  I didn't know this was waiting for me, otherwise I would never have considered living there.  They were fundamentalist fascists, every one of them.  I was the cook and cleaner.

My room was okay for a basement.  They gave me the worst room of the house, not only because it was the only one available at the time but because of their irrational fear and loathing of me.  I got to work at making it beautiful.  There was already a vintage armchair in the corner.  So far, so good.  I put art prints on the fake wood paneled wall:

  They were lovely images that provoked a lot of innocent fantasy.  The nasty jailhouse closet case who lived in the house thought they were both perverted images.  He also yelled at me for wearing a T shirt that came from the days when I worked briefly at an espresso bar on Davie Street.  The place was called Iggy's and it was a red T shirt with the logo tastefully located on the upper left side of the shirt.  He railed that the place was a homosexual hangout (it wasn't, but really why would I care?), and I had no right displaying its sordid logo in a Christian houselhold. What didn't help matters was he was infatuated with me, in complete denial and became all the more hostile, especially given that I didn't reciprocate the affections.

I covered a wall with an Indian bedspread and against another wall assembled a bookcase with boards, bricks and of course books.  I adorned it with ornamental squash and candles.  The overhead lightbulb I covered with a vintage scarf with parrots on it and I covered the window with an Indonesian batik print.  There was no door so I covered the doorway with a vintage curtain covered in deco era palm leaves and flowers.  My bedroom was an aesthetic retreat from a very drab house inhabited by hostile roommates.

I dd the cooking and cleaning.  They did love my cooking.  I had a Joy of Cooking and for the fun of it and to test my creative forces turned out an impressive Duck a l'Orange and other goodies.  I also did a lot of the grocery shopping often crisscrossing the city to get the right cheese at the right price.  They put me under a lot of pressure to get a fulltime job, not because we needed the money (the rent was very cheap) but because this fit their backward and conservative image of manhood.  I had during this stage in my life tremendous difficulty landing decent employment.  Later in life a couple of employment counsellors informed me that I was too intelligent and too original a thinker to be tolerable to a lot of employers and that I should not blame myself for being a victim of publicly sanctioned mediocrity.

The house had a new leader, another closet case, in love with me, and more or less admitting it.  Talk about creepy!  His discomfort with his sexuality and with me made him at times comical, otherwise frightening.  I never knew what he would try to do to me next.  Fortunately he never laid a finger on me.  When I could find only temporary part-time work (for the summer a downtown food truck, for the autumn a bussing position in a steakhouse from where I was fired only for not having "enough zip.") I was told to leave, immediately. 

Fortunately, my mother took me in again.  The day after I was kicked out of the Boys' House I received a phone call from a shoe warehouse in Gastown.  They liked me and wanted to hire me.  I accepted the job.

While I don't hold a grudge against the Boys' House I can't say that I've actually forgiven them nor that I ever intend to.  They are worth neither grudge nor absolution and I have been very happy to move on.  The closet case leader did track me down more than a year later to apologize for the way I was treated.  I sort of accepted and have been very glad to see or hear absolutely nothing of any of those clowns in all the almost forty years that have since passed.

I continued to produce sumptuous meals and kept the house spic-and-span.  Not good enough.  The pastor's wife, an absolutely horrid British woman let herself in one afternoon.  I was tired from job-hunting and housework, and was on the couch for a half hour nap.  She saw me there and reported me to the house leader.  I really got shit for that one.  Then a hundred dollars went missing from the household kitty.  Even though my honesty and integrity were flawless I was still blamed for it and only half-heartedly exonerated.

During that summer the snotty British pastor and his horrid British wife took me shopping for clothes.  They detested my "Bohemian