One Man Against the World

“That’s fine then! I just won’t sleep in the house anymore! You’re right!”

“That’s not what I meant…” It’s really not what she meant.

“No, you said you don’t want me sleeping in the spare room anymore, so I just won’t sleep inside at all.” This was really not what she meant.

“All I said was that you shouldn’t sleep in that room if you can’t clean up after yourself. You just can’t leave half-empty food containers everywhere…That’s all.”

“Well you won’t have to worry about that anymore because I’ll just be sleeping outdoors from now on. Like a dog!”

This was an actual discussion my parents had with each other while they were both adults. I have to confess the fight was at least partially my fault. After I moved out my parents converted my old room into a combined spare room and office. Which really just meant an office with a futon in the corner that my dad would regularly pass out on after doing paperwork. The fifteen second walk across the house to his actual bedroom suddenly seemed overwhelming when there was a perfectly good bed just behind his office chair. Last summer I found myself temporarily homeless for a few days between subletting my place in Toronto and heading out West to start my job tree-planting, so I went to my parent’s house and stayed in the spare room. The first night I tried to shift the pillow over a bit on the futon and found it was stuck there. Glued somehow. I yanked on it until it finally ripped up from the bed. It turned out that a spoon with the congealed remains of what looked like chocolate pudding on it had been adhering the pillow to the futon. I don’t know how long ago my dad had left it there but it was stuck hard enough that it had nearly torn the fabric of the couch coming up.

                I tried to just wash the pillow myself but my mom noticed it and the argument above soon ensued. Naturally my dad blamed me. If I had just slept on the pudding cushion and let him deal with it later everything would have been fine. Unlike some parents my dad has never shied away from pointing out just how many of the fights he gets into with my mom are mine or my siblings’ fault. This might have been more traumatic in my childhood except that the kinds of arguments my parents regularly got into were so absurd as to border on the cartoonish.

There was, for example, the time my mom had to spend twenty minutes on the phone talking my dad down from buying a car load of what he swore were “real Armani suits” off a guy in a gas station parking lot. He called back three times. The price started off at $1500 and gradually worked down to just under $1000 when my mom finally made him stay on the phone while he got in the car and drove home. He walked in the door visibly shaking and sat down at the table with the kind of sombre expression usually reserved for funerals. “Kids” he addressed all of us, eyes downcast. “I want you to know, you could all. . . all . . . have been wearing brand new Armani suits right now. Each of you. But your mother just would not let me.” I don’t think he ever quite forgave himself for giving up on that deal and may still hold a bit of resentment towards my mother all these years later. The point is that these are actually the kinds of arguments my parents get into on a regular basis. While being adults. So the pudding incident wasn’t that out of the ordinary.

What was a little shocking was that my dad decided to actually follow through with his threat to move out. That same evening he set to work dismantling the futon (It was one of those annoying pieces of Ikea furniture) and moving it out of the house. It’s revealing of some of the intricacies of my father’s mental processes that he decided the garage did not constitute part of the house. Maybe he saw sleeping in the garage as a clever loophole that would allow him to save face without risking a raccoon attack. In his defense it does get a bit drafty in there and opposums have been known to wander in when the door isn’t properly shut, but most people would say if you’re surrounded by four walls and a roof you can’t really claim to be sleeping outside.

Whatever point he may have been trying to make grew increasingly obscure as he moved most of his worldly possessions into the garage. Setting up the futon seemed reasonable enough. Even the space heater was somewhat understandable. But if the idea was to inspire some sense of shame in my mother for forcing him outdoors at the tail end of a harsh Canadian winter he probably should have stopped shy of a full entertainment system. By the time he had set himself up he not only had his desk and futon out there, but a laptop, speakers, television, DVD player and radio alarm clock. There was only one outlet in the garage and so he’d had to plug a couple power bars into each other to get everything working. By the time night came on he was ready. He would stay out here in the garage and my mother would be made sick with regret over asking him to pick up after himself.

It took about two hours for everything to go horribly wrong. At around one in the morning all the power went out in the garage. His set-up had blown a fuse. He could have just bundled up with some more blankets and gone to bed. He could even have replaced the fuse and gotten by with just the space heater plugged in. But in that moment I like to think that, like the great Greek tragic heroes, he realised he was being punished for his hubris. He had wanted too much. Rather than test his luck with the Gods further he gave in. Or maybe the thought of staying in the garage with anything less than three forms of simultaneous entertainment just seemed unbearable. In any case, he immediately set about dismantling the futon by flashlight. I know about this whole process because my brother’s room backs onto the garage. He was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of my father swearing and throwing parts of the futon around the room. As he moved each part back into the house he carefully opened my brother’s door with as little noise as possible and walked gingerly through the room, then immediately started yelling, swearing and banging things around as soon as he got back into the garage, as though the door were some sort of soundproof barrier. Dismantling and re-assembling the futon by flashlight took over an hour. Then he had to move everything else back inside and set it up. By the end of it all he probably got a worse night’s sleep than he would have if he had actually just set himself up in a tent on the front lawn.

He never mentioned moving out again.

A Trip to Remember

“Okay, what in the fuck just happened?”

Everyone makes stupid decisions when they’re drunk.

“Don’t worry about it.”

This is in fact one of the major appeals of alcohol. Rationality is always stopping us from doing the really fun things in life.

“I was nearly just crushed to death. Why shouldn’t I worry?”

The problem with most people is that they fail to follow through on those drunken decisions when the awful, blinding light of sobriety returns.

“Oh, that. Yeah, Andrew almost missed an exit and had to make a quick lane change. Sorry. Shouldn’t happen again. I figured you were talking about the vague sense of hopelessness in the air. That’s just us passing through Oshawa.”

This was the series of messages back and forth between me and Andrew. I was in the back of the U-haul we were driving across the country, trying to figure out why him and Greg were trying to kill me. It was the winter of 2010 and Greg had just gotten a promotion requiring him to move from Toronto to Halifax. Offering a free trip to Halifax is a great way to get help moving. Originally there were to be three of us on the trip; exactly enough to fill the cab of a U-haul. Then, for Greg’s going away party, a bunch of us pitched in and bought a keg. Somewhere between tapping the keg and waking up in the bathroom the next morning, I’m told that me, Greg and Andrew decided our friend John had to come with us. I don’t remember many of the details of the conversation but I’m pretty sure there was a girl sitting in a large fish tank next to us at the time. It’s all a bit hazy. John had only been out East once, at a time when he was too young to remember, and we decided he needed to see the coast again. It would be great. Just the four of us on an old-fashioned road trip. What the Hell did it matter if there weren’t enough seats? Greg didn’t have that much furniture. There’d be plenty of extra room in the back of the truck. We could even take turns switching up so each of us would get a chance to actually see part of the country we were driving through.

                Most people would wake up the next morning to the cold touch of porcelain, and take the advice of their rotting insides and pounding heads telling them this was a terrible, terrible idea.

Most people who made it beyond that would still have turned back at the moment we lifted the rear gate of the U-haul, revealing a giant red and white sign telling us that carrying passengers in the back was illegal, voided all insurance on the vehicle and carried a serious risk of injury or death.

The few fool-hardy enough to continue on, pack the truck, and climb in would almost definitely have changed their minds after that first disastrous test run.

Because Greg’s job had him more or less constantly on the road, he still hadn’t moved out of his parents’ house at that point. His mom tends to worry far too much about things like ‘safety’ and ‘the law’, so we decided it was best not to let her know what we had planned. We told her John was just there to say goodbye and that we were gonna drop him off down the road at the bus station. So all four of us crammed into the front seat, waved goodbye, and immediately pulled into the gas station parking lot across the street where we went about re-arranging. For seating, we tied an office chair and an old armchair to the wall of the truck with some thin rope. We decided the safest way to test the arrangement before getting on the road was to do a few loops around the parking lot and then see if the guys in back were still alive. We bought some cheap walkie-talkies so that whoever was in back could quickly let the guys in front know if anything started to shift, and, well, crush them to death. The walkie talkies barely worked at all, but they had pictures of Buzz Lightyear on them and I think his presence watching over us gave us all a sense of comfort.

                I think we might have played rock paper scissors to see who had to take the role of Guinea Pig. Me and John might also have been forced into it on the grounds that we would probably be the least missed if anything happened. Again, the details are a little hazy. In any case, the two of us ended up in back for that first trial. The office chair, being on wheels, immediately started rolling back and forth as far as the rope securing it would allow, and John soon tumbled to the floor. A few loose items threatened to jump into us as the truck rumbled along. I had been prepared for things to slide. I hadn’t anticipated the violent shaking, the fact that occasionally a good portion of the trucks contents would become temporarily airborne when we hit a slight bump. I think all that flew forward was one heavy box I managed to stop just before it could crush my head against the door of the truck. Greg’s mom had helped us pack up, assuming, not unreasonably, that we weren’t going to stick two people in front of the giant pile of furniture. As such things weren’t quite as secure as they probably should have been. Really, given how reckless even that first, slow spin around the parking lot was, being thrown to the ground and nearly taking a box to the head was getting off pretty easy. In addition to that we hadn’t realised when planning the trip that the back of the truck was unheated and the thin walls provided very little insulation. It was the middle of winter and even the few minutes that first ride took were almost painfully cold. There were also no lights built into the back, and the door could only be opened from the outside. It also had to be locked with a padlock while the truck was moving or else it would fly up. This meant that if anything did happen we had no way out, and I doubt many people would have thought to look for stow-aways in back while clearing the wreckage.

                This had clearly gone beyond a fun story about following through on a drunken decision. Driving across the country like this carried a very real risk of arrest or serious injury. There were a few moments of silence in the parking lot staring at our Buzz Lightyear walkie talkies while we considered this. We knew what the responsible thing to do was. We bought more rope.

                I know you’re thinking we should have given in, but it wasn’t really an option that point. It wasn’t just a matter of stubbornness. John lived a solid twenty-five minutes in the wrong direction, so dropping him off would have meant an extra hour on the road, and traveling any farther than we absolutely had to in this reckless and dangerous manner would have been completely irresponsible. Also, the front of the truck was really uncomfortable with three people up there, and having a person riding in the back alone would have been stupid. The buddy system was the safest way to go.

                So, we tied down everything we could, doubled the rope on both chairs to keep them in place, and left a poking stick next to the office chair to push back any stray items that looked like they might be a hazard. We also had a huge pile of sweaters, sleeping bags, and blankets to keep the passengers in back warm and a smaller pile of drugs to keep them distracted from how horrible being locked in the back of a dark, cold, windowless moving truck was going to be. We were ready to go.

                I wish the rest of the story was more exciting, but from there it was actually a pretty typical road trip. We did get some odd looks in parking lots from anyone who saw pretty much any part of what we were doing. There was also that time Andrew nearly killed me and Greg by swerving violently across two lanes of traffic and off the highway when he realised he had missed an exit and was about to cross the border into America. And the time Andrew kept me and John locked in the back for five hours while he drove around a small town in Quebec trying to find his way back to the highway because he didn’t want to have to admit that he’d gotten us lost (We had agreed to switch out every three hours max because it was actually dangerous to be in back any longer with the cold). Really if you factor out Andrew’s incompetence it was all fairly routine. If anything, everyone probably drove much more cautiously than they otherwise would have. Part of this was because we didn’t want anyone to get hurt. Most of it was because we weren’t entirely sure at any given point just how many laws we were breaking, but we didn’t think any cops who opened the back of the truck would take it easy on us.

                We got Greg moved in safely and had a fun couple days seeing him off in Halifax. Even after the conditions in the truck, the two-day Greyhound trip back to Ontario still managed to be less comfortable.

Fucking Bus People.  

John

“Well, first thing’s first, we’ve got to get you laid!” He smiled, revealing a mouth full of rotten yellow teeth. His name was John, and somehow I had ended up wandering around an unfamiliar town in the Okanagan Valley just after sunrise with him as my guide. John was a Bus Person. I had spent the last few weeks traveling around the West coast on Greyhound after finishing my first season of tree-planting. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of riding on a Greyhound bus, you should know that their vehicles function primarily as mobile asylums for the mentally ill and socially maladjusted. Most of these people don’t really have anywhere to go. Greyhound just happens to be the cheapest and easiest way to get Anywhere-But-Here. They’re not bad people and for the most part you just end up feeling sorry for them. 

Then there are The Others. The Bus People. There was the guy who called a fellow passenger a retard, then rolled himself a huge joint and got everyone delayed for half an hour while the driver kicked him off the bus for trying to smoke in the bathroom. Then there was the guy who switched into the seat next to me to let me know that the woman who had just gotten off the bus was a ‘working girl’ and had given him a ten-dollar blow-job five feet away from me. Finding myself regularly in the company of people for whom this is not only socially acceptable but brag-worthy behaviour led to one of those moments of self-reflection about the life choices I’d been making (If you actually keep up with what I write on here you’ll notice this has been a recurring theme in my life the past few years). The Blowjob Guy also offered me a copy of Playboy to replace the novel I was reading, which he thought looked really boring.

“Sorry if I’m buggin’ ya. I’m just such a people-person ya know? Can’t stand to sit there by myself.” He got kicked off the bus about twenty minutes later after trying to smoke a cigarette in the bathroom. This is a surprisingly common event on the Greyhound. I could probably fill an incredibly disturbing book with Bus People anecdotes, but the point is that John was one with this clan.

I first met John at three thirty in the morning, wandering through the streets of Salmon Arm. I had caught a late bus between Kamloops and Kelowna, thinking I would sleep on the ride or in the station when I got there. Had I checked the schedule more closely and realised there was a four hour stop-over in Salmon Arm in the middle of the night, and that the bus station there would be closed I probably would have found somewhere to stay in Kamloops. It was about five degrees Celsius when we arrived, and I was in a t-shirt and shorts, having packed all my warm clothing away into a bag that was locked up under the bus. I paced around the city trying to keep warm. That was when I met John. John had also been on the bus and had elected to spend the duration of the stopover drinking alone in a 7-11 parking lot. We recognised each other from the bus as I walked by. Naturally, I pretended I hadn’t seen him and immediately turned around and headed back to the bus station, figuring sitting outside alone in the cold was a better option than being forced into a conversation with a guy I could only assume was a mentally unstable alcoholic. As lonely Bus People tend to do though, he decided to follow me, looking for some company until we got going again.

When we got back to the bus station I immediately pulled out a book, hoping this would be enough to deter any conversation. It was an introductory philosophy book a friend of mine from the planting camp had given me.

            "Philosophy eh?” John started, bending over to read the title of the book. “I used to have a philosophy.” I nodded and smiled, hoping he wouldn’t feel a need to explain. “It was . . . Weed . . .” And here, he looked up into the sky, and became quiet, as though making a truly profound statement “. . .Is everything.” He paused for a few moments. “I don’t really believe that anymore though. Can’t smoke too much. Gotta be responsible for my kids.” John looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, and like I said, I had found him drinking alone in a convenience store parking lot in the middle of the night, so the talk of responsibility and children (plural) came as a bit of a surprise. I would learn later that he had two children by two different women. He had been in Kamloops visiting the mother of his first child, and was trying to persuade her to move with him to Kelowna, but it was a difficult process because she didn’t understand that he needed to be a good husband to the mother of his other child as well. He had started wearing a condom now when hooking up with women at the bar, he explained, so at least he wouldn’t have to worry about getting stuck taking care of a third family. I thought I had escaped him when we got back on the bus and he left me to hit on a woman who seemed, from what little of their conversation I picked up, to be unhealthily obsessed with the Twilight book series. I was more than happy to leave them with each other, though I hoped for his children’s sake that John didn’t get her pregnant.

              When the bus stopped in Kelowna, John waited for me. He stood at the front of the bus and when I stepped off he grabbed one of my bags.
“Well, where to now?” he asked. I wasn’t sure how to react.

“Uh, well, I was actually planning on heading out to the cherry orchards, trying to find a job picking for a couple weeks. . .Thanks for the help, but I can really handle the bags myself.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I don’t really have anything else going on today anyway. You know where you’re going?” I had to admit I didn’t. “I know this town and all the bus routes by heart. I’ll get you going in the right direction. You know which orchard ya want?”

“Yeah, but…Well, I’m probably gonna try to find an internet café or something first anyway. I’ve been kind of out of touch and need to send some emails. I can probably find directions online.”

“Oh, well there ain’t any internet cafes around here but I’ll take you to the library. You can use the internet there free.”

“Thanks man, but really, I can find my way myself. I don’t want to waste your day making you help me around.”

“Nah, man, its cool. I got nothing else goin’ today and I can use the internet too anyway.” I wasn’t getting away from him, and he wasn’t giving up my duffel bag. “Oh,” he added, “the library doesn’t open till ten today though, so we’ll have to find something else to do for the next few hours.” I had no idea where I was going, and while John was a bit strange, he seemed otherwise harmless, and since he wasn’t going anywhere anyway I figured I might as well take his offer to help me around. We grabbed a coffee and walked to the waterfront near the library. He asked to borrow the guitar I was traveling with. He thrashed on it while clustering his fingers randomly around the fretboard in a bizarre manner that made me think he had never actually played a guitar before. He mistook my confusion, and, frankly, fear about what he was doing to the instrument, for admiration, perhaps even intimidation at his level of skill.

“Yeah, man, my friends are always amazed at the shit I come up with. I’m just always making up killer shit like that. I don’t even know where the shit comes from. You’ll probably pick it up one day man. I’ve been playing for years.”

                He kept playing and I looked out over the water, doing my best to ignore the horrible sounds he was making. The Okanagan Valley is beautiful and the sun was just beginning to rise over the water as we sat there. Even the cacophony next to me was imbued with a sort of beauty from the sight, and the feeling of freedom that goes along with giving up the few things you didn’t want to lose.

“Oh shit!” John suddenly stopped playing. “I don’t know where my phone is! Could I borrow yours to call it?” I didn’t think much of it, and handed my cell over. “Yeah, sure.” I would later regret this. He called himself and fished his phone out of his backpack while it rang. “There it is.” He started typing something in while he handed my phone back.

“So, what else is on the agenda for today after the library and orchard?”

“That’s pretty much it. As long as I get a job I’ll be camping out in the Valley tonight and hopefully start work tomorrow.”

“Cool man, cool. But ya gotta come back into the city for at least a bit tonight. There’s nothing going on out in the orchards. I’ll take you out.” And here he smiled, and said the terrifying words that started this story. “We’ve got to get you laid! Man, three months in the woods! I bet you’re dyin’ to get some pussy!” I had to get away from this man. I didn’t even want to think about the kind of women John probably hung around with. Based on the stories he’d been telling me, I had the horrible thought that his overwhelming hospitality might endear him to try sharing one of his girlfriends with me. We went to the library, and then he escorted me to the bus loop where I would meet a connecting bus out to Westbank, where the orchard I was looking for was. He showed no sign of having anywhere else to be and I thought for a moment that he was going to follow me all the way out to the orchard and maybe even apply for jobs with me. When we got to the bus loop though he finally handed over my bags.

“Well, this is where I get off. Gonna spend the day huntin’ for an apartment for the other wife to move into. I’ve got your number though. . .” (He had stored it when I let him call himself earlier to help find his phone . . .Shit) “So I’ll give you a call and we’ll go out later. Get ya some action” It wasn’t a question. This man was determined to get me laid. “And hey, if its easier you can just meet me back here around six. I’ll be around.” The thought of John trying to help me pick up women terrified me, so I made a mental note to be anywhere in the country by six o’clock besides that bus loop.

                The orchard I was looking for had been recommended by one of my tree-planting friends. Her directions included about a 2km uphill hike from the nearest bus stop. It was August and as afternoon came on, it got unbearably hot. I hadn’t brought any water and by the time I crested the hill I was completely dehydrated and feeling dizzy. When I found the orchard I was invited in for juice, but they told me there were no jobs to be had. The weather had been terrible and the season had ended unusually early. So early in fact that it barely even got started. The orchard had taken a huge hit in sales. They offered to let me set up my tent on their property for a couple nights if I wanted, but also mentioned that there might be work in a few towns farther south in the Okanagan. After getting contact information for a few other orchards and chatting with one of the workers for a bit about some mutual friends we had through planting camps, I decided to head out and try my luck elsewhere.

I realised after hiking back to the bus stop though that I had no idea where I was going. I couldn’t remember which bus I had taken out, or even which direction it had been moving in. I couldn’t remember any significant landmarks or buildings around the bus loop I had left John at. I was completely lost and “the place I left John” surprisingly wasn’t an area of town most of the bus drivers were familiar with, so asking for directions proved a bit useless. I tried asking how to get to the library, but of course I didn’t know which library. There were even two Greyhound stations and I would have just gone to the closest one but I had left some things in a locker at the one I arrived at. I was dehydrated, tired, and lost, but I had a daily bus pass, so I went by trial and error, riding around the entirety of two routes before I picked the right one the third time and made it back to the bus loop . . . at six o’clock. Shit. After getting lost so many times what should have been a twenty minute ride had turned into an almost two-hour journey. John was there waiting.

Now, I realise I could probably have made some excuse to get out of hanging out with him that night. He gave me the impression of being very persistent, but realistically if I had just said I wasn’t interested in going out anywhere there wasn’t much he could have done. It might have been a mildly uncomfortable encounter, but a normal person could have handled it. My socially awkward brain[1] told me my best course of action was to put my head down and make a b-line as fast as I could in the opposite direction of where I saw John standing. I had looked in his direction just long enough that I knew he had clearly seen me. I was  kind of hard to miss at that point, with the muddy, beat-up guitar case, ratty clothes and generally dishevelled appearance. I realised that if he caught up to me now and I had to explain why I was running away from him as though he had been hunting me the situation would be far more uncomfortable than it would have been had I just stopped and talked to him. The faster and farther I went the more awkward I was aware it would be if he did decide to try and catch me, which led to me going faster and farther to make sure that didn’t happen. I know. I have problems. I’m working on it. The point is, I was in a town I didn’t recognise, and was deliberately getting myself lost in it by moving as fast as I could in a completely erratic pattern. By the time my brain calmed down enough to realise how insane and stupid what I was doing was I had been wandering for about ten minutes, didn’t recognise anything around me and had no idea how to get back to where I’d started.

If it wasn’t apparent already, I should mention here that after three months of living in the woods, I probably looked crazier than most of the Bus People I was talking about earlier. Hell, after three months of living in the woods, there’s a good chance that I was as crazy as most of them. Life in tree-planting camps could not be more removed from life in the city, or even in small towns. All social decorum gradually erodes when you’re living constantly in such close quarters with other people. Planting camps have their own vocabulary and culture, unrecognizable to outsiders. The point being, the people giving me strange looks and crossing the street as I wandered through the city were probably right to do so. Wandering wild-eyed and confused through a strange town, covered in sweat, grime and shame, I had become one of the Bus People. I finally found someone willing to talk to me, who guided me back to the Greyhound station and thankfully chose not to follow me there. I caught the first bus south because this experience had taught me nothing. John called and texted me weekly for about three months afterwards. All of his messages consisted solely of two words: “what’s up?”

Fucking Bus People.

---

[1] I know this doesn’t make my behaviour seem much more rational, but remember I had been living in the woods for three months at that point and had experienced basically no human contact outside of the forty or so people living in camp, so my sense of ‘stranger danger’ had been severely exacerbated. Even I’m not normally this crazy about dealing with other humans.

Introduction

So at the recommendation of a couple friends I decided to try this blogging thing. I want something to force me to write regularly and from living as something of a social delinquent I've built up a wealth of stories that I hope some people might find entertaining.

If you enjoy anything you read here, or at least don't hate it enough to leave the page and do something more productive it'd be great if you could tell me so I know I'm not just talking to myself.

Names will be changed in every story I post on here and sometimes small details may be changed to protect identities, but if you think you recognize yourself and don't want people to know about the horrible, horrible things you've done talk to me and I can either remove the story, edit you out of it, or turn you into a much more honorable and attractive version of yourself.

If you are an officer of the law or concerned citizen worried about any of the potentially illegal activities detailed in these stories, rest assured that they are probably all grossly exaggerated.

Thank you.