Chapter Fifteen
I moved into the single men’s shelter, keeping tabs on my brother by reading the sky and interpreting what I read in the newspapers. I had no money and no means of getting any, except holding out my hand and hoping for the best. I knew that if I found a job the shelter would pay the first two weeks of my rent and supply two weeks’ worth of food. I began to look for employment.
The people in charge of hiring where I tried to find work must have thought that I was a real head case. I’d ramble on about the end of the earth and the rising up of the citizens of Edmonton to fight against the termination of mankind. I wasn’t shy in telling a potential employer that my success in spiritual warfare depended more than they could know on them hiring me to flip burgers, make pizzas, pump gas and so on. Some would laugh before they showed me the door. Others, wearing straight faces, firmly showed me the exit.
Thinking was a frustrating, fruitless endeavor. If I came up with a reasonable idea my mouth would be sure to misrepresent me. Some men at the shelter had realized this and liked to pick away at me. One guy enjoyed having me roll him a cigarette after each meal, that is, if I had tobacco. If I didn’t have the weed he would bawl me out. He wasn’t really amusing anyone but himself as far as I could tell. He, for example, was the only one who pissed himself laughing when he called me Fruit Loops, which he did often. Sometimes, when I was daydreaming, I would think to myself that when I was crowned with an ornately etched, sparkling crown for being a great friend of heaven and earth, I would teach him what being a man was by forgiving him completely.
I started to think about trying my hand at the carwash again. They were always advertising for people in the newspaper. If you could use a rag or a hose you were a shoe-in, you had a job for life if you could stand it that long. Stay there long enough and someday you’d be sure to be made supervisor or marry the owner’s daughter.
So, with great effort I managed to keep most all of my strange thoughts to myself and grapple gamely with the application that sat on the table in front of me. Some of my answers, I knew, contained my own secret code. I shook my head – if anybody knew the information I was putting on this so called application, if they could but break the code they could make themselves a mint. I didn’t pretend to know exactly what the mission, assignment or secret operation was that had need of my secret language and me. That was something that I didn’t concern myself with. I did my part and the rest took care of itself.
“Do you like scrubbing?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“And you don’t mind getting wet - you’re not a sissy that way are you?”
“No sir.”
“See you tomorrow, 9 a.m. Sharp.”
“So you mean that I have a job.”
“That’s right Einstein, See ya’ tomorrow.”
I walked away and later realized that I hadn’t thanked the guy or even said so long. I had a feeling that I should go back and express just how deeply I was indebted to him, for, as well as giving me a job, he had filled out a form for welfare stating that he had hired me. I could now leave the hostel. Welfare would pay two weeks rent by voucher to any landlord who would take me in.
I forgot about my new employer when I thought of having a place of my own and being away from all those sweaty bodies, lolling around on their beds, talking in their sleep, farting shamelessly, coughing and hacking, always on the lookout for an easy score. I wouldn’t miss the place. I was fast becoming a mark there, viewed as a chump and I was growing tired of it.
That afternoon I ate lunch quickly and ignored the bellowing of my scourge who was looking for a cigarette as usual. I went outside and hung around smoking one butt after another until I saw a friendly face and stopped it.
“Hey there ‘” I said, “Where can a guy get a room around here?”
“Well,” he answered, all smiles, “a bed doesn’t come much cheaper than where you’re standing right now. But if you want a room of your own then I’d recommend Edson Rooms down on 96th or maybe 97th street, I forget which. They’re cheap, but you know, you get what you pay for. My cousin stayed there. He liked it.”
My room was small and by no means bug-free. I had a bed with piss stains all over it. I had a sink and a table. The bathroom was down the hall. I wondered why anyone would wet the bed with a washroom so close and then figured he or she must have been drunk and passed out. Many of the other tenants seemed the type who would do just about anything for a bottle whose contents packed a punch.
I worked at the carwash for four days and then quit, telling my supervisor that I had a bad back and important business to take care of. She berated me, calling me a user among other defamatory names and then told me I’d have to wait a week for my pay.
“Now I take offense at the word user,” I began and was cut off.
“Get the hell out of here before I have someone throw you out. Damned lunatic.”
I thought better of taking offence to the word lunatic and left on my own steam.
With the two weeks rent the hostel had sprung for and the pay cheque I had coming, I figured I could stay about two and a half weeks longer at Edson Rooms. That’s okay; I thought, from what I read in the papers all is well with my brother. I wasn’t planning on staying all that long anyways; it was just somewhere that I was hanging my hat.
I started walking without destination, wandering and meeting people. I would babble about the end of the world. The odd individual, usually a senior as lonely as I was, would listen and politely pretend to follow my train of thought, but the majority would push me aside like cold peas on their plate at supper.
Now that I had left the carwash I remembered it fondly, how my thoughts had ebbed and flowed in harmony with the sound of soap meeting metal, lulling me into a pleasant state. Now that the carwash was gone, my schizophrenia seemed to intensify, becoming an ogre that horrified me in my room.
One day towards the end of my stay at Edson Rooms I sought to escape the hallucinations in my room. They followed me though, out the door to the grimy street where they were alive and breathed the same air I did. I hadn’t gone far when I found myself being berated by the alarming audio hallucinations that dogged me. I wasn’t surprised when eventually I was directed to lie face downwards on the sidewalk by the same voices. People stepped over me and walked around me. Eventually I found myself enjoying the view. It was so cool and comforting on the cement.
Sometimes during those days absurd visions and thoughts took my breath away, making me laugh hard and then harder. This hilarity I believed to be divine, coming directly from God’s throne and floating awhile in the Sea of Love and Mercy before it found me. Conversely, the fears I dealt with, I believed, could come from nowhere but the molten pit of hell. I could hear the tortured lament of the damned and I took to carrying a pocket size Bible.
With just a couple of days left to live in my sometimes cozy, oft distressing, skid row room, I had enough money to go to a local bar and drink for the afternoon. I met a man who was looking to exchange prescription drugs for money so that he could keep on drinking. I exchanged a bit of money for some pills, and finished my beer before making my wobbly way home. I went to bed forgetting all about the dope.
When I woke I rolled over and, while remembering where I was, felt the pill container digging into my leg. My head was throbbing so I took two of the tablets that the barfly had claimed were potent painkillers. I brought my chair to the open window and sat.
After awhile I gave my head a shake. The people on the street looked shiny, all the streetlights glared at me and passing cars were a blur of cold metal. I started to feel paranoid and mildly nauseous. I leapt from my chair by the window, turned off the light and lay down. It struck me that I could easily be watched through my window, that the technology existed that would allow anyone to observe me at any time they wished to. I started to shiver, either from the sudden cold I felt blowing into my room or the fear I experienced when I thought of being kept under scrutiny. It wasn’t long until I made my way back into slumber in spite of the vibration that I’d become. I was just another man having a bad trip in his room, in the slums of Edmonton.
Satan had it in for me. I had, to his chagrin and at long last, figured out that I could only save one person at a time. With kindness, love and assorted other virtues as tools and weapons I was to dismantle the devil’s work, doing my best to banish him from the lives of those I met. I was a godly door-to-door salesman with a special offer - to rid you and yours of bad spirits, and to do so, miraculously, free of charge.I worked soul-by-soul, a modern day faith healer. In my arsenal, I had the ability to affect other people’s emotions. I could let them feel what I was feeling and this I did, in small doses. I would convey how strongly I felt about getting the evil out of their lives, let them know that I was willing to go the extra mile if they were interested. So, Satan had it in for me, his adversary.
I was developing a desire to turn people on to God, a yearning. Whenever I saved someone by using telepathy, another one of my powers, it was a punishable affront. I had transgressed against the devil who would then hurt my head with his own type of mind control, which was substantially more powerful than mine. So, I believed that I was attacked telepathically by the devil when I helped in a small way to put people right with God, and further, I believed with all my fiber it was worth the pain the serpent inflicted on me if only to help one human find the path.
On my last night at Edson Rooms, I lay on the bed I’d become used to and looked at the drab walls. I was, in spite of everything, going to miss my room, my hole in the wall. I wasn’t sure where I was going to go. As I was drifting into slumber I was thinking,
“Yes, God, let me be what you want me to be.”
I was but scant seconds from losing myself in sleep when a voice came from thin air, saying,
“You are my angel.”
Euphoria replaced the blood in my veins for a swift second and was gone. When I woke I filled my suitcase and then I left.