The Peacock127

 "Doug's fake rentboy charm did get a lot of the ladies interested in what we were doing.  At that time we were wrestling with the most absolute poverty.  Harold still refused to find any kind of income.  He would neither seek employment nor get welfare.  To him, what we were doing was work and God would have to provide. The fact of the matter was that Harold hated working, at least in the real job sense, had never done well at it, and would simply just as soon lay there and let the whole world wipe his toned ass for him.  

"We were often behind in rent.  We didn't even have money for bus fare or laundry, so we washed our clothes by hand in the sink and hung them to dry in the kitchen.  We walked everywhere, even downtown which was only a stroll of ten miles or so, because we felt called by God to continue our presence downtown, especially with people dying from AIDS, as well as at St. Jude's Church, where we also felt a growing call of presence, and where none of those high Anglican hypocrites lifted so much as a single manicured finger to help us, that's how much we were loved there.  Various people, mostly from the church in Richmond, and some friends, helped us with food, sometimes a bit of money, sometimes a good bit of money for rent and heating oil.  But that was a rarity. Still, the rescues always seemed to come at the eleventh hour.  Because food was sometimes hard to source, in the spring, I was picking various wild herbs and plants for food.  We managed to get a lot of bulk food very cheap at the local Save-On.  One of our friends with AIDS had been a particularly close friend of mine over the years, since I was twenty or so.  We visited him often in his apartment in the West End where we helped out in various ways.  He was becoming very weak.  In June, 89, he invited us to dinner at his home.  There was no telling when he would die.  That was the same day as my brother's wedding.  Ken was more important, and also much more a brother to me than the sibling who used to daily beat me up and then when we became adults shunned and ignored me.  I don't think he ever forgave me for boycotting his wedding, especially to have dinner with a homosexual dying from AIDS, and Ken actually did pass away just two months after he had us over for dinner.

"Meanwhile, there were the ladies in the Richmond parish, and the big salad buffet we held in our garden that summer..."