I moved from my first one bedroom apartment after five and a half months occupancy. It felt like time to move and I believed then as I do now that God was leading me. I was also wondering how effectively I would heat it, given there was an oil heater in the living room and nothing else. I wasn't confident I would be able to get it to work well and even if it worked okay I wasn't sure about an even distribution of heat throughout the apartment. More than that I felt deeply that it was time to move. I began pounding the pavement and within a couple of days I walked by the Faded Pink House.
It was kind of a smallish dumbed-down mansion that had clearly seen better days. There was a house-keeping room for rent sign on the door. I wrote down the phone number. A small Asian woman of ambiguous provenance met me at the door with her large Caucasian male partner. I looked at the room and kitchen and liked them right away. It was situated on Fourteenth near Oak Street, a "nice" neighbourhood and the rent was affordable. I would be sharing the bathroom with three other tenants.
I have already recorded in these pages that I had been praying for an opportunity to meet and befriend some lesbian women. I didn't know why I had this desire but it seemed to be the next direction I would be going in. I met C, a young woman a year younger than me who moved into one of the rooms across the hall. We became instant friends. She was vulnerable, frightened and angry, given that she was raped the first day she moved in. She was also formidably intelligent and witty. I found her perhaps a little bit frightening but I felt honoured to have her friendship. Her lover, a teenage punk girl and I, also connected well and thus began a new friendship. My fondest memory of her is the evenings we would hang out together in the local greasy spoon diner munching on cheap coffee and cut-rate pie.
During this time I worked in a florist warehouse and I was saving money for college. At the end of November C moved and returned to Ontario (or maybe Manitoba?). I inherited her room which had a beautiful working fireplace that I lit almost every cold night. The young body builder who was a nuisance and subtly hitting on both of us moved out. He apparently tried to poison C's Schnauzer (whose high-pitched squeaky bark understandably drove him to extremes) and was evicted. A boy my age, but unused to living alone replaced him. He was nice, but a slob in our shared kitchen, but we did try to befriend each other and he unsuccessfully tried to teach me chess (a game I still seem to have no real aptitude for, perhaps because in order to play chess well it helps to be naturally competitive and this is something I'm not)
I think he was negotiating depression, and he moved back with his parents in White Rock. He was succeeded by a tall athletically built inarticulate young working class lout, freshly divorced, though he wasn't older than twenty-four (I suspect that he probably beat his wife) and I simply made every effort not to be in the kitchen when he was. He moved out shortly after I gave notice and a very ordinary looking pudgy young woman, possibly a lesbian, moved in. I rather liked her but within two weeks I was already moving into my new home, a room in a shared house, in March 1978, already opening a new era in my life.
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