Even with my limited resources I still enjoyed having friends over to visit for coffee, for dinner, to enjoy the view. I have long enjoyed and done well with the challenges of my life situations. Unable to upgrade to a more affluent or better appointed way of life I have come to celebrate the power of imagination and creativity. Every place where I've lived I have sought and always succeeded in making it beautiful as well as celebrating and drawing out the beauty that was already there. I cannot imagine living any other way.
Generally the other men in the house and I maintained a careful distance from one another. This was actually a very sad and pathetic way of cohabiting: this each tenant being picked without input by the others by an ethically challenged slumlord more interested in collecting rent than facilitating a liveable environment. We lived each in his own miserable solitude. The idea of sharing a meal was of course verboten. Shortly after the young crack head moved into the room next to mine the grease monkey moved out. He was succeeded by a young man, a hairdresser separated from his wife. He took an immediate and rather scary liking for me. He wanted to go out for coffee with me. We had really a very enjoyable visit in Café Waazubee. When we got back to the house Young Hairdresser (so sue me Earl!) wanted to know if I was gay. I mumbled something noncommittal and he decided that I was and then he really wanted to hang out with me in my room. I reluctantly invited him up but was somehow too naïve to weigh the consequences. Earl was a Christian struggling with his faith and by his admission with his own sexuality. I didn't know what to do or say but we were soon spending many evenings in my room or out for coffee, talking and praying together. I did his portrait and gave him a large painting, thinking that I really didn't need it. In those days I was recklessly generous with my paintings and soon saw a disturbing pattern: the surest way to end a friendship, sooner or later, was by giving any of my friends one of my original paintings, no strings attached. Says a lot about my friends, eh?
During that time a young man who was a barista at a café on Main Street where I also hung out befriended me and agreed to model for a portrait with the proviso that once I showed it he could have it for free. Earl saw him going up to my room with me. He wanted to know who he was. I told him. The next day he turned viciously against me. I was woken earlier than seven in the morning by his knock on my door and his demand that I return to him immediately my key to his room. I had reluctantly accepted his key a couple of weeks before, never used it and never intended to, though he insisted I keep it. One of the symptoms of the complex PTSD that I exhibited and suffered from at that time was an almost toxic passivity, a proclivity for letting people get away with murder with me, a tragic failure to set boundaries. I slipped the key under the door. I soon discerned that he was in a jealous rage and had ended the friendship based on my alleged whatever with the other young man.
I never bothered to demand the painting back. He had already paid for his portrait. He soon after moved out, allegedly back with his wife. I learned quite an interesting set of lessons here but I trust greatly in your refined intelligence, Gentle Reader, and I am sure you will not have to labour to read between the lines.
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