I saw the ad on the community bulletin board at Life Stream natural and organic food store on Fourth and Burrard. This store is long gone and was a hub, mainstay and meeting point for all the local hippies and other progressive folk during the Seventies and Eighties. The location now is occupied by a furniture store. I had given notice in February and was eager to get out of the faded pink mansion. There was something about sharing a kitchen with a succession of strangers that did not sit well with me and if I was going to share facilities it would have to be with people whom I knew, liked and trusted.
The ad was for a Christian shared house on Twentieth and Yukon. I bit. It was a beautiful house, Edwardian vintage and full of wooden ceiling beams, wainscoting, stain glass and one of the most elegant dining room fireplaces I had ever seen. My room was on the second or top floor. The closet had a window and there was a door opening on to a balcony. I was only able to claim the room after two weeks spent in a basement bedroom and at times couldn't help feeling whenever I slept down there that I was being held for ransom.
The house was shared by a single father with a noisy five year old son, a rather witty and engaging Englishman in his twenties and a young woman self-employed in the oldest profession. She was a paid escort, my age, twenty-one and if not especially beautiful was still more voluptuous than a young Mae West. It was her room that I inherited when she moved out at the end of March. She was one saucy flirt prancing around wrapped in a clinging small bath towel or asking me to zip up her little black dress as she prepared for one of her dates. I found her in equal portions ravishing, frightening, intelligent, witty and ridiculous. I was not sad when she left.
A lovely hippy couple had also just moved in with their three year old daughter. They had been living on one of the Gulf Islands in a commune and the wife was six months pregnant. I really enjoyed them and they were lots of fun to hang out with. They moved out a little too soon and were succeeded by a pleasant young woman living with a mental illness. She was attractive with short red hair but looked so vulnerable and mistreated that sometimes I just wanted to wrap my arms around her and protect her from the same horrible cruel world from which I was also seeking refuge. Her boyfriend, another mental health sufferer soon moved in with her. This man was decidedly surly and unpleasant. We met together, the single father, the Englishman and I to decide on what to do and we were unanimous. Girlfriend could stay but boyfriend had to go.
No one else would do it so, as has been often the case, I was stuck with having to perform the unpleasant task, or, kind of like how I ended up being the one left stranded and alone scattering my mother's ashes from the stern of a BC Ferry, but here I digress. I broke him the news, told him he had to go since he was not a tenant in our house nor doing anything to contribute, except perhaps his DNA in various parts of the house but we won't get any grosser than that. He challenged me to a fight and I just told him to get out now and stop arguing. He left. The Englishman afterward, while I was recounting the situation to someone on the phone, was sarcastically flexing his bicep towards me with the cheesiest smirk on his face.
I did not all but a lot of the cooking. They seemed to like whatever I was able to whip up for them, and really for a twenty-one year old guy I was really a very good and well-organized cook. While childcare was not my purview, one Saturday I did get the son of the single father out of the house before he drove him nuts. We went to a park a few blocks away, hung out for a while and then returned home to his much calmer and oh-so-grateful daddy.
I do recall only one evening there when I did feel somewhat creeped out. I had just arrived home, I think from an evening class at college nearby and a walk in the April dusk. When I came home the atmosphere seemed decidedly strange. The hall was dark and there was a lurid glow of candlelight coming from the adjoining living room where the single dad was massaging his topless girlfriend, lying on her back on the floor. We'll say I hurried very fast and very quietly up those stairs.
The single father and the young Englishman were members of rather a weird quasi-Christian cult, the Holy Order of Mans. It's on Wikipedia if you want to look it up, gentle reader. I couldn't quite relate to them, they seemed just too New Agey and pompous for my more conservative Christian leanings. I attended one of their meetings and decided that there would be no need to return.
I fondly remember one Saturday afternoon when I had the house to myself and the young Englishman. Three of my friends, including C., my lesbian friend who had just moved back to Vancouver, and we had a marvellous game of tag throughout the big lovely Edwardian home: five rangy young adults unable to hold still.
The house did close down rather quickly and suddenly. Everyone move in different directions. It was the end of May. I was the last one to leave. I brought my foam mattress and bedding down to the dining room where I slept my last night in front of the fireplace. The next day I sat on the front steps nursing a bottle of Guinness while waiting for my ride and moving truck to transport me and my few earthly possessions to my next dwelling place.
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