The house is wooden and dark brown. It is tall, the subject of a few bad renovations and situated on East Seventh Ave. just down the hill from Clark Drive. The bottom floor contains an apartment, as does the second. The third and fourth floors were where the five lost men were living. There was the Economist, as I call him, an uber-conservative, older than me and apparently living with a mental health disorder. He appeared to run the house and was already living there for a good ten years or longer. The other fellow is the Recovering Alcoholic, there equally as long as the Economist. They hated each other and only spoke when absolutely necessary. He was generally affable, reasonable, friendly and had the unfortunate tendency of tying up the only bathroom for an hour and a half at a time. The other bedroom on the third floor was occupied by four successive tenants, beginning with the Grease Monkey, who yelled at me on my first morning for asking him to please hurry in the bathroom (I had been waiting twenty minutes and nearly peed myself). On the fourth floor, on the other side from my little room was an even tinier room occupied by a recluse with mental health issues.
I learned very quickly to keep to myself. The Economist owned the living room furniture and the TV. He did not like to be disturbed while channel surfing. He in fact seemed so scary at the time (I was suffering at the time from very bad complex PTSD) that I opted to come downstairs only when absolutely necessary: to use the bathroom, shower, cook and wash my dishes. Every one of my meals I took upstairs to the sanctity of my beautiful little room where also I had a coffee maker.
I painted, rested, prayed, walked for miles, met friends for coffee. I was on social assistance and it was very difficult for me to find suitable work. I knew that I was still too tired and ill to work. I also spent a lot of time in the library downtown and taking long walks in Stanley Park. I applied myself diligently to learning and studying Spanish and began attending very cheap classes in the evenings. I made interesting friends and was sometimes commissioned to paint portraits. I was showing my paintings in several different venues, so much the better for dealing with storage difficulties. I lived frugally, simply but in a way beautifully. My sense of myself as a Christian had simplified and I just thought of myself as a small spark of light in the universe, a feather on the breath of God. I joined Amnesty International and wrote hectoring letters to delinquent government ministers practicing corruption and human rights abuses in developing countries. I also wrote the final draft of my novel, serialized on this blog as The Thirteen Crucifixions, for your reading pleasure, Gentle Reader.
I also suffered from the last two of my seven nervous breakdowns. Knowing that my family's repudiation of me was absolute I went through a prolonged and agonized grieving. I suppose this was also complicated by 9-11 when the World Trade Centre in New York City was destroyed in 2001. It seems that a certain sense of wholeness that I felt that I and the rest of the world were moving towards together was suddenly interrupted, disrupted, destroyed and disembowelled. The Recluse in the next room disappeared and was replaced by a nasty young drug addict. Fortunately I was already about to find a way out.
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