What the wise teach can only be learned by those willing to listen.

Rain in Vancouver and large-scale plumbing problems in my building occur almost as frequently as one another.  I’m lying awake in the early hours of the morning wondering which one I am listening to.  Straining for sleep, my thoughts move briskly along paths that many other people must wander.  It is the kind of brain activity that often leads to vivid, long-winded dreams—dreams fueled by moments in my day that seem commonplace – but return when I lie down to pick at my edges.  As if dreams were intent on removing me from my sealed packaging, the thin invisible barrier that is my only chance for sleep.

Staring up at the sloped ceiling my attention jumps around the room. The furniture here is a motley crew: the bed, a single, an Ikea hand-me-down with an old chrome frame; a three-drawer dresser that holds up a hot plate; a mini fridge has been covered in stickers; a bookcase with books.  On the desk crouches a lamp with nothing left to lose.  Outside my door falls a steep and narrow stairwell.  Halfway down, it takes a left to the second floor, arriving at the hallway only slightly wider than the staircase itself.

At one end of the hall stands the door to the house’s only bathroom.  To the right the staircase descends again and another stairwell presents two doors, staring at one another as if each is quietly hoping that the other will be the first to descend the rickety steps to the front door.  These two doors lead to my two roommates.  On the left lives George and on the right a young woman named Mackenzie.

The washroom is in a sorry state, much like the rest of the place; however, it is more a case of deterioration brought about from disuse.  The rest of the house, while still suffering greatly from the passage of time, bares signs of active destruction.  It’s like a model of some Hindu belief, that the world is being destroyed and created all the time in the same moment and  life cannot exist without its counterpart.

From what I can see of the bathroom I am the only one using it.  It certainly lacks any semblance of a feminine touch and I am pretty sure George doesn’t leave his room.  He has his meals delivered to him.  I bring them to his room and then out to the washroom for him.  He never remembers who I am.  Today was particularly memorable and left me in a mind to know him better.  George’s room is very cluttered but has few visible possessions of value.  As far as I can tell his life revolves around four objects.  In order of importance they are: his fish, his recliner, his TV, and his TV tray.  Today’s visit began when he noticed I was in his room.

The General

“Stop feeding cocaine to my fish!”  He was screaming at me, fog condensing on the inside of his army surplus eyewear.

“George” I sighed.  “This is fish food.  I got it for you and you opened it yourself.”

“That’s General to you, you insubordinate little prick!   God damn Meals on Wheels think they can send just anyone over, turn my fish into junkies.”

This last part seemed to be directed away from me as if the hiring policies of Meals on Wheels were way out of my depth.  I began to unwrap his segmented Tupperware.  I would have loved this stuff as a kid.  It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I was willing to have any of my food touch.  George was in his comfy chair; the whole thing a mass of tartan and duct tape.  He and the chair sat facing away from me; I could see that he was hunched over, doing something.  His left hand was steady and his right made sharp movements away from his body.  I would have been afraid that he was cutting a switch to beat me with except that the only sound that came from the chair was the regular popping of some random arthritic joint.

“What ya doin’ there General?” I said as I rounded the chair and walked face first into an odor as tangible and unappealing as a cloud of insects.

“Air widdelin’ wanna see?”

“Uh… sure” The moment I replied he lunged at me with his invisible pocketknife.  I stepped out of the way to preserve the lukewarm pre-masticated meal.  In that moment our eyes met and I saw a glint of life in his penetrating beady stare.  He wore the grin of an old swordsman who sat for years in meditation awaiting his last worthy adversary.

“Hum… might be somthin’ to you yet,” He said and then took the tray from me and spat his dentures into a glass of water.  The trick was extremely grotesque and equally as skillful.  It was at this moment that I decided that I would make a point of spending more time with the General.

The Guru

Across the hall lives Mackenzie, who doesn’t like her name.  In fact she insists on being called Mac.  Although she never seems to use our suite’s bathroom, she does appear to be relatively well groomed.  She dresses in such a way to suggest she is poor enough to need thrift stores.  Not the pseudo cheap ones either.  The kind frequented by welfare mothers with eight kids, or people who have a fitness regime dictated by a shopping cart.  The problem with this assertion is that her manner of dress has been adopted by a class of people who are affluent enough to shop elsewhere. So I have a hard time pigeon holing Mac’s lifestyle outside of the house.  Her activities in her room are enough to make me think that she might be renting the place as a studio, or knitting hut, or clothing swap club.

Her door is often open, and the view is always amazing.  Sometimes pretty young women dominate the vista.  Mac runs a weekly support group that she calls “Art and Estrogen”;  however, even when it’s not pretty young faces drawing my attention, the room itself is alive with colour and an impression of constant movement.  There is no furniture, just rising swells of fabric. The only other things in the room are a couple of sewing machines, some other large machine (presumably for sewing also), an assortment of wicker baskets piled high with yarn and an electric kettle.   The ceiling is crisscrossed with Tibetan prayer flags.  Although she has the most to lose from water damage she seems to be the least vocal about it when it starts pouring through the ceiling.

As I was leaving George’s room, Mac’s door was open and she invited me in for tea.  She wore a black pencil skirt and a t-shirt that bore the logo of some long extinct Eastern European airline.  Her short brown hair was pulled back on her head by a thick pink hair band of the grade school variety.  I sat on the floor while our tea steeped.  She was crouching over a basket of wool sorting it into an orderly pile.  As her knees bent her hemline slid up to her thigh revealing a fresh patch of road rash on her upper shin.

“What happened there?”  I asked pointing with my chin.

“I got run off the sidewalk by a bloody senior citizen!”

“Someone pushed you?”  I was imagining what George might be like if I ever saw him outside.  She smiled.  My throat got dry.

“No, they were on one of those electric carts.  I had headphones on and apparently couldn’t hear the horn.  The woman clipped me mid-stride and when I fell my shin hit the edge of the curb. She didn’t even stop. I got this too…”  She showed me the heel of her right hand.  It was congealed with blood in the pattern of loose gravel.  I took a sip of tea.

“That’s got to be assault or something?” I said.

“It’s hard to say.  I’ve been looking into it all afternoon.” She said.

I instinctively looked around the room, wondering how it was that she looked in to these kinds of things.  Clearly I betrayed my thoughts because she smiled with the left side of her lips and said:  “On the internet, not here.  Anyway it turns out that this very thing has been happening a lot in the city lately. And it’s a problem.  Not just for the obvious reasons either.  You know, I like to walk on the sidewalk.  Those things don’t really belong on the streets, but you see them there and people are dying riding them in traffic.  Like, the speed limit on sidewalks right now is 15km.  That seems really fast to me but whatever.  So anyway, they make these carts go up to 14km so that they can’t break the limit.  But the things are the size of bloody bumper cars, and driven by people who are angry because they just lost their drivers license because they can’t bloody see any more.  It’s just a foul cocktail no matter how you look at it.”

I made a thinking face and said, “Well what is there to do?  I mean many of the people riding them need them legitimately, and don’t run you over.”

“I dunno, for the time being I’m just gonna wear safety gear when I roam the streets. Check these out.”  She rummaged through one of the smaller piles and pulled out four fuzzy black wool tubes with random spots of colour throughout them.  She pulled the smaller two over her arms, the other two went on her legs.  Running from wrist to bicep, ankle to thigh, they covered most of the exposed skin on her body.  In a short skirt and tank top only the most suggestive bits would be showing.

“I know the look is a bit last year, but this stuff is pretty hardy and ought to protect me from most superficial injuries.  Besides the legwarmers fit surprisingly well considering the shoddy workmanship and questionable yarn.”

We were both looking at her legs, but then she stopped and I was left doing it alone, I felt awkward and needed to say something.

“Uh, you didn’t make them?”  She gave me a look to make it clear that suggesting she had anything to do with questionable workmanship was more inappropriate than admiring her appearance.

“No, I got them at some clothing swap or another.  They have been hiding around here for a long time.”

After this the conversation slowed and the tea bottomed out.  I got up and retreated to my room.

Propped up by this grey house

Why do I feel so drawn to my roommates?  Each of them, people I would pass by, noticing only their ugly or arousing features.  Yet now, seeing them against the grey backdrop of this house, I can’t shake my conviction that they have something to show me; that they both embody a lesson I am sorely craving.

Sleep is lost to me now so I pull back my packaging, sit up, and wrap myself in layers.  Shuffling down the stairs I make a detour into the washroom, both for its intended use and to see if the floor is flooding.  Both things go well and I head for the next staircase, smacking a pack of cigarettes against the heel of my left hand, pausing at the doors along the way just in case one of them would like to go first.

I can hear George’s TV.  There must be something that man would rather be doing with his life.  Shaking my head I make my way down to the front door. Although rarely seen, I know the main floor of the house to be empty.  It is a floor of bare framing, all the walls made only of two-by-fours and plastic vapor barrier, gutted of its pink insulation. It gives the place the feeling of being balanced on toothpicks. Stepping outside I see that we are safe from our plumbing for now.  The rain has started to hit hard and to a man in a bathrobe this city is an uninviting place.

Good God, there really isn’t any thing else that George would rather be doing!  He is a man living his dream. This is the quality that George shares with Mac – they are two people that know what they want from life when they get out of bed in the morning, and then spend their days going and getting it for themselves.  Two people whose personal success has been overlooked by the outside world because of the ease with which they have found what they want; George, the hermit; Mac the Guru with her many followers, all of the young women who see what they want for themselves in her, vainly mimicking her external life.

I lean back into the door, closing it and laughing under my breath. The house is large enough that it takes up the whole lot, leaving no space for a yard.  There is only a small covered deck in front, adorned with cans full of lipstick stained cigarette buts, the refuse of Mac and her followers.

I stand here, propped up by this grey house and take a fresh look at my life.  I look at the ways that I have been chasing the qualities I see in my roommates, engaging in their lives superficially, hoping that some of their satisfaction will rub off.  My time in this house has been indicative of my whole life spent eating the menu, so to speak.  A lifetime of imitating the actions of others as they follow their dreams and ending up baffled when I don’t arrive at my own.  Still smiling I step back inside, only to trade my bathrobe and slippers for some gumboots and gortex. It’s time to get some air.