Surviving The Fire, 5

I spent two years and four months in the bachelor unit on Pender and Victoria in East Vancouver.  A wood frame building, I was often being serenaded with all kinds of noise: foot stomping, unwanted music and TV, domestic quarrels.  It seemed that every single tenant who moved into the unit upstairs from me (Five during my tenancy of  little more than two years) seemed to really want to alienate me and I did not make a lot friends there.  One, a young punky male, became particularly hostile and began to spit on my window (not mere saliva, by the way, if you must know, Gentle Reader!) and started calling me Faggot and threatening me, and all because I had at times politely asked him to keep the noise down.  The building manager told me that I had a problem with noise, making it of course my problem and no one else`s.  That was when I discovered the essentials of earplugs and the kitchen exhaust fan as the best way to block out unwanted sound for a decent night`s sleep.  Still I wasn`t sleeping well.  My mental health was taking a nose dive and I was sort of aware of it.

Then came the marathon tooth-aches and my employer`s intransigent stubbornness about not giving me enough hours to qualify for dental coverage.  Every time my hours got perilously near to the magical twenty a week there would be a mysterious claw back.  I have never in my life known such intense pain, often being kept awake all night in agony and not having any funds other than my scant earnings to go to the dentist, which I could not afford.  This nightmare lasted for four months, from May 1996 to August.  I never did get dental treatment.  I was so broke that I actually quit taking the bus and often found myself walking six miles or more to get to the homes of my various clients (I was a tragically underemployed home support worker)

In 1997 the mental health breakdown began to manifest and I was at times despondent, suicidal and usually had trouble sleeping.  I was at war with a very evil and corrupt priest in my church who did everything possible to defame me and hobble me, thus worsening my mental health condition.  I made a whole batch of young sexy Generation X friends several of whom also found me sexy as well as intriguing and just too interesting.  Of course I didn`t bed anybody.  I was an asexual in denial and besides, there was no way I was going to let even the most alluring of those young idiots to get the better of me and there is nothing like getting someone in between the bedsheets for getting the better of them.

I quit my job in absolute disgust and tried to live by faith and art sales.  Help always seemed to come, often from the most unexpected sources, and even though the rent was often late I know that God was providing for me.  Until almost a year later when he slipped the rug out from me, no further help was coming, and I finally fell completely into the hands of God, homeless for the first time in my life.