The Homeless Millionaire

Detective Moore was glaring at me again when I woke up the next morning. It wasn't as funny as it had been the previous day, and I decided to take him down.

I did that right away. I jumped out of bed and unstuck the drawing from the wall - I'd used two-sided tape - and rolled it up and put it away in my tube. I was feeling extremely energetic. I had over twenty-four hundred dollars in the bank, and contrary to Chaz's predictions, I hadn't spent a single dollar on booze the previous day. I'd caught a cab back to the Royal Bank branch where Robinson & Klein had an account and banked the check and then walked out and around for a bit in spite of the snow. It didn't bother me, and I felt warm.

After a while the snow melting on my head sent a trickle of cold water down my neck. A change of strategy was necessary. I brushed myself off and walked into the nearest store. I got lucky, it was a bookstore, and I spent nearly two hours in there and ended up buying half a dozen paperbacks.

The snow had almost stopped by the time I left the bookstore, and I walked to a steakhouse and pigged out and then walked home, visiting a convenience store along the way. It was dark by the time I got home but the Noyces hadn't returned yet and I had a clean run to my cave upstairs.

I undressed and unpacked my shopping and lay down on the bed and slept until just after three in the morning, meaning the middle of one of the longest nights in the entire year. I got up and made myself a couple of sandwiches - I'd bought a package of sliced ham - and ate them with a bottle of Toby from my beer stash.

I allowed myself a single fucking beer, and it didn't taste too good either. But I drank it to the last drop anyway and then went back to bed and slept again and woke up to Detective Moore's presence and like I'd mentioned it wasn't funny any more.

The Noyces decamped to breakfast in the kitchen while I was dealing with Detective Moore. I took this opportunity for a successful bathroom run. I stayed in the bathroom until they'd all left the house and then went back upstairs and made coffee and lit a cigarette and reviewed my situation.

It looked pretty good, better than it had in a long time. I had money and Detective Moore had been rolled up and stuffed into a tube. I could do what I wanted, and what I wanted most was to find a new place to live.

I'd bought a newspaper on the way home the previous day and I went through the rental classifieds, and added two more phone numbers to my growing list. It had five phone numbers by now and was time to make some phone calls if I was serious about moving out.

They would all be local calls, but I didn't want to use the Noyces' phone. It was funny but I felt a little like a traitor, wanting to move out of their house. They'd really tried to be nice to me and gave me a break with the money and I'd be moving out after just a couple of months. Using their phone to arrange my move was like adding insult to injury.

My paranoid pal took this opportunity to remind me that it would be nice if I showed the same consideration to other people too, close people, people to whom I was related by blood. I told him I'd put that on my list of New Year resolutions. I told him to shut up and fuck off. I had over twenty four hundred dollars in the bank. I'd only been in Vancouver for three months, and had put away well over two thousand dollars. It was as if I'd been working full time at a well-paid job from day one. It felt fucking great and my pal was totally powerless.

I told him to crawl back under his stone and stay there. Then I got dressed and put the list with the phone numbers in my pocket and left the house. It wasn't snowing, it wasn't raining, the sun was actually peeking out timidly now and then. The snow hadn't melted - it was cold enough - and the world looked beautiful under its soft white blanket. It sparkled with a hundred colors whenever the sun showed, and it made me feel euphoric.

I went to the park and walked until the park ended and turned around and walked all the way back. On the way, I saw at least five or six scenes that would make kickass drawings. Black tree trunks and naked branches, snow, sun, no sun, moving shade - there was enough material for a whole series, right there. If I stuck to charcoal I could dash them all off in a single afternoon and have a few pieces done in the collection that I had to assemble for Chaz.

I'd gotten hungry by then so after my third run through the park I went to the infamous Park Pub. I bought a pint of Toby and got a fistful of change. The pub was empty, there was just one other guy sitting at a window table with a half-empty pint glass, staring at the world outside in a disappointed way. I sat down as far away from him as possible and had a sip of my beer and again, it didn't taste good, not as good as I'd remembered it. I lit a cigarette and smoked it and sipped the not-so-good beer until I had the thought I was acting exactly like the other guy in the pub, staring sadly at the world outside and on the verge of being sucked into one of those downward spirals that can happen regardless of how much money you've got in the bank.

I put out my cigarette and got up and went to the payphone by the entrance and started dialing. Just two of my calls were answered, funnily enough the ones on the top of my list, from ads a couple of days old. In both cases the places they'd advertised had already been rented to someone. I called again the two busy signals and they were still busy. I called the number where no one had picked up the phone and there still wasn't anyone there to pick it up.

I went up to the bar counter and ordered a burger with fries and then went back to the payphone. I finally got through to one of the busy numbers and the woman on the other end told me I was late, the charming studio with private shower/WC and a kitchenette in the annex was gone. That left me with just two numbers to call and I returned to my table and offered a short prayer to Mr Chance and smoked a cigarette and drank a little beer. My burger came and I ate slowly, it tasted great, and I didn't understand why I'd attributed my stomach upset a few days earlier to the Park Pub.

It was obvious that my prayer had gotten through to Mr Chance. The first of my two calls was answered on the second ring. A hoarse male voice said:

"Yes?"

"I'm calling about the studio," I said. "Is it still available?"

"Right now, yes. There's been a lot of interest."

"Can I look at it today?"

"If you're here right away. I'm booked solid for the rest of the day."

"I can do that. What's the address?"

He gave me the street address and when he recited the number, one-three-four, I felt a shiver run down my spine. I said:

"Oh. I'm sorry, I've just remembered I do have something to attend to, right now. Can I call you back in five minutes?"

He said I could. His voice was full of doubt.

I put away the receiver and lit a cigarette and attempted to administer some self-therapy. I'd read somewhere that there was this saying: Once is a coincidence, twice happenstance, the third time around it's enemy action. I kept running into that 4-3-1 business way too often. It couldn't be just Mr Chance, could it?

It had to be. There was no other reasonable option. All the other options opened up avenues I definitely didn't want to explore. They led straight to madness and howling at the full moon. I felt like that sometimes anyway; it could be a refreshing experience provided it didn't happen too often. I had no desire to make it happen more often. It would be fucking awful. It would end up with me kneeling in the middle of a muddy field at night over a body of someone I'd just killed, prior to ripping out the heart and eating it raw.

And it's not like you're new to it, said my paranoid pal. Remember Schmidt?

I told myself to pack those thoughts in and get them out when I was working on the park drawings. I called the last number on the list. And right away, it was clear Mr Chance had given me a good one.

Yes, it was free. Yes, I could see it right away. It was the entire top floor of a house, a big room with a kitchen annex and a private bathroom: toilet, basin, shower stall. And it had more than just the basic furniture, it had TV and a large closet and bookshelves and a desk as well as a table and it was just fucking perfect, from the sound of it. I said I'd be catching a cab and would be over right away. The guy that had answered the phone said okay to that, and then I told him I'd be a few minutes later because I'd stop at my bank on the way so that I could give him the deposit right away. He laughed at that and I asked for the address and it was 1431 Fulton Avenue, way across town, in an area known as West Vancouver.

There was just no way to avoid it, no matter what I did that number was kept being thrown in my face anyway. We fixed the time at two in the afternoon and I hung up and paid my bill and rushed out of the pub, looking for a cab.

It took me a while to find one, and another while to get five hundred in cash. The guy told me he would require that much as a deposit - two months' worth of rent. Utilities were extra, he'd told me they usually worked out at twenty to thirty dollars.

It was a quarter past two when I finally arrived at 1431 Fulton Avenue after dropping ten bucks on the cab with next to no tip. My arrival was noted by the landlord. He was a middle-aged guy a bit shorter than I was, with dark brown hair slowly disappearing from the top of his head and dark brown eyes that were full of real warmth. His name was Tony Woods and we clicked right away and I was in very high spirits when I climbed the stairs to look at what I was already sure was my future home.

It was perfect. It was a very similar setup to the Noyces' house, the entire top floor converted into a separate living space, but this time around the living space was much bigger and included a bathroom and a couple of kitchen counters with a sink and a hotplate. It was more expensive, and I didn't like the location as much: I'd really come to like Burnaby Heights. But there still was a seaside park within walking distance and my flat had a skylight and I told the guy I was ready to put down the deposit right away.

He was glad to hear that, but he wouldn't take it. He told me he had two more people coming around to have a look right after me, and that he owed them his consideration.

"When are you going to decide?" I asked him.

"Couple of hours. Right after I'd seen the second guy."

"What time can I call you to find out? Four, four thirty?"

"Look," he said. "Right now, you're the guy. Give me until five because I need to eat something, sometimes."

I promised to call at five and we actually kidded around a little when he was seeing me out. I found out that he'd been divorced recently and his wife, no kids, had moved out and in with the guy that was fucking her, a divorce lawyer of all things. That's how quickly Tony and I became friends. It was an instant connection. He liked my being an artist a lot, too. He said he liked artists because they were the only people left who still had the courage to thumb their noses at the world. He said that he sometimes suspected life was just a long process of grinding everything down until nothing but a pinch of powder remained.

As we went down the stairs, I had the thought my new landlord might be someone who smoked a lot of pot. That was okay. I liked that.

The door bell rang just as we were approaching the front door.

"Oh," Tony said. "That's the next guy. He's a little early. Funny, he's out of town, I expected him to be late. Anyway, give me a call around five."

"I'll be around in the neighborhood," I said. "I've got to eat something so I'll linger a little and give you a call and if everything clicks, I can be around with the money within fifteen minutes."

He grinned and patted my arm and said:

"Sure. We'll talk then."

He opened the front door and the guy standing behind that door, the guy staring at me with eyes like saucers, was the store security guard I'd met in Salmon Arms.