Stranger than Fiction, 6

1986 for me was a watershed year, as I'm sure it was for others.  This was the year of Expo 86 in Vancouver, and it was the year of the nuclear power plant meltdown in Chernobyl as it was the year of peaceful revolution in the Philippines that saw the expulsion of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and all her three thousand pairs of shoes. and it was the year I turned thirty.  Living downtown was noisy and intense and the sound of foot traffic on my ceiling from upstairs neighbours was almost as bad as the manic stomping from toddlers playing upstairs from my basement apartment.  In the spring at work I was assigned to take care of an elderly man dying from cancer.

I was working twelve to sixteen hour days in split shifts taking care of this man while harbouring a very madcap alcoholic who felt strangely drawn to me.  I tried to be available to provide emotional support to a juvenile and self-destructive idiot (though a very clever and highly cultured idiot, nonetheless an idiot) while providing my dying client the best care I could.  He died in June and soon after the cultured idiot left, having grown tired of my demands that he try to be a little bit responsible.

Everything else continued as usual, including that maddening sense of spiritual ecstasy that seemed to infuse every facet of my life at the time.  It seemed at times as though I were being driven onward by a manic genie though at the time I thought it was the Holy Spirit.  Now I think it was a bit of both.

In October began my Thirteen Year Nightmare.  I was kneeling before the high altar on a Sunday morning at snooty church while waiting to receive the sacrament when I had a distinct impression of a crown of thorns dripping with blood suspended over my head.  I sensed that I was being told to prepare to suffer.

Days later a particularly difficult and obnoxious client falsely accused me of sexually abusing him.  I was exonerated of course but the stigma held and the quality of my work began to slide downhill.  Then a very punky young couple moved into the apartment upstairs.  Their noise was constant and very loud and the landlords (they did not live in the building and there was no onsite caretaker) were in no hurry to get rid of them.  I gradually learned that they were Satanists and in retribution for my complaints about them soon put a series of curses on me and life became very difficult.  In one day I encountered three near-accidents along with being threatened by an aggressive German shepherd dog.  Then I was suffering grievously from an abscessed tooth and developed puss exuding boils on the back of my neck, the bottom of my spine and the back of one of my heels.  I was also harbouring yet another treacherous young idiot who, resenting me for spurning his romantic advances, befriended the punk Satanists upstairs and then the shit really began to hit the fan.  It was with great difficulty that I got him out of my place.  I gave notice to my landlords and moved in January.

The manic genie was out of the bottle and now he pursued me relentlessly.