The Homeless Millionaire

I got down to work right after breakfast the next day.

Maybe the breakfast was the problem. It was my standard fare, sliced bread and corned beef and an apple. Maybe it would have gone down better if accompanied by a slug of booze. I made countless speculations on that subject while I tried to draw, and then paint something good. I couldn't do it. I was fucked. Each new attempt was such a failure that I felt ashamed.

It went on like this until the early afternoon—I was very determined to get something good done—it was fucking painful. I gave up around two o'clock, when I began to feel hungry.

I was also feeling very much like a change of scene, so I went out. Once again, the weather wasn't too bad. It would drizzle occasionally, but the god of wind was taking a day off.

This time, I went straight to the Park Pub. If I could have a meal there without inhaling several pints I was truly the blue-eyed man of steel.

The payphone by the entrance reminded me that I was supposed to call my parents with the customary Happy New Year bullshit. I didn't feel up to it; my repeated failure to produce a half-decent picture had really depressed me.

As I ate my fish and chips, thirsting after a beer, it hit me again how closely my creativity was related to my booze-and-drugs intake. But it hadn't always been that way! I was straight when assembling the portfolio that had gotten me a place at the Ecole in Montreal. Back then, I believed that getting high might actually make things worse. I made sure I was completely clear-headed when drawing and painting.

Why did this change? What had happened? I finished eating and left the pub, angry because I hadn't had a drink. I decided I'd take a stroll in the park and walk it off. But the moment I got there and lit a cigarette it started to rain and also began to get dark fast, and I went home feeling defeated.

The Noyces weren't home yet. I was surprised to discover that I was sorry they weren't; they would have provided a distraction. I filled my kettle and made myself a three-teabag mug of tea and picked up The Bucharest Transfer. It was a crock of shit but I'd already read more than half and thought I might as well find out what happened to Stewart Grange, or Stew to friends.

Reading about Stew without the assistance of alcohol was hell. He was unbelievably stupid. He and Anna drove towards the Yugoslavian border in the secret police car whose registration number, by then, had to be known to every cop and soldier in Romania. It was a fucking long drive, over 600 kilometres: they had to cross almost the entire country from east to west. The border was much closer if they turned south, but it ran along the Danube river there and Stew didn't have his swimming trunks.

So he drove west, blithely disregarding the fact that he didn't have enough gas to get to his goal. Buying some was out of the question: it was sure to be reported to the authorities, revealing Stew's escape route. If I were in Stew's shoes, I would've gone crazy trying to think how to solve that problem. But Stew was made of sterner stuff: as he drove, he was busy falling in love with Ana. He kept thinking about how much he liked her and how much he'd like to fuck her.

They ran out of gas halfway to the border, which was good. They'd barely walked a hundred steps before they spotted a roadblock in the distance. So they dove into the bushes and spent the next twenty pages walking through the countryside while falling more and more in love with each other. For there were numerous indications Ana was busy falling in love with Stew, too.

When he took her hand to help her over some obstacle she held onto it longer than was necessary. She smiled with downcast eyes when talking to him, and when she did look him in the eye she would instantly blush, and look away. Well, maybe that was the way women were in Romania, what the hell did I know.

Stew was about to kiss Ana for the first time when they heard a helicopter. They hid under a convenient tree—luckily, the tree was abundantly leafy. Then they had another stroke of luck because a summer storm arrived and it began to rain like hell and lightning flashed and the helicopter flew away, presumably back to base.

Stew had a triple stroke of luck, because the rain made Ana's wet shirt cling to her bosom. Her nipples were showing! Good old Stew got a big charge out of that and continued to lead them toward the border at double speed in spite of the fact that they were both hungry and getting tired.

They came across a village and Ana bravely volunteered to go to the village store and buy some food. Stew couldn't do that, because he'd have really stuck out as a superior Western specimen among the throwbacks that were living in the village. Of course Ana would also excite attention in her city clothes, the wet shirt sticking to her tits. But at least she was Romanian.

Ana accomplished her mission successfully, returning with a loaf of bread and some crumbly white cheese and a jug of wine. Fed and feeling refreshed, they resumed their journey on foot through the Romanian countryside. I couldn't believe that. The border was still hundreds of kilometers away and anyone with an ounce of brains would be looking around for a means of transport.

They kept walking for the next fifty pages. In those pages, they firmly and irrevocably fell in love. Ana told Stew plenty about her aristocratic pedigree and Stew told Ana plenty about how rich he was and it was obvious this was a match made in heaven.

They had to cross some mountains along the way and there were helicopters around again, but that didn't stop them from throwing each other longing glances whenever they'd taken a few steps. I skimmed over that part, it really was getting unbearable, and returned to reading properly again when they finally got to the border and found out it was marked by several high fences, some barbed wire, some electrified, some barbed and electrified wire, with a minefield or two thrown in between.

It was clear that trying to get across all that on foot would be a bad idea. So, they retraced their steps to the town of Timisoara. Timisoara had an airport and it also had an aeroclub. Ana explained to Stew that aeroclubs were the favoured Romanian way of identifying people who could make good military pilots. Upon demonstrating natural talent, they would be drafted into the mighty Romanian air force ready to destroy the cities of the corrupt West.

Stew was talented at many things; among others, he was an accomplished pilot, able to fly anything that had wings or a rotor even when denied an operating manual. So he and Ana stole a small plane—a biplane! That's how backward things were in Communist Romania. He piloted it expertly into Austria instead of Yugoslavia, thus fulfilling his earlier promise of taking Ana to a Viennese restaurant.

It wasn't entirely trouble-free; a Romanian Air Force fighter, possibly piloted by a former Timisoara aeroclub member, attempted to intercept them. But he was just a ham-fisted Romanian plane driver, while Stew had been flying planes and helicopters from the age of five and had even been considered at one point by the NASA. He'd told them to fuck off, he was enjoying his life on Earth and had no need to go to the Moon or anywhere else in outer space.

The MiG-21 of the mighty Romanian Air Force had no chance against Stew in his beat-up biplane. Stew gracefully executed a brilliant manoeuvre at low altitude just as the jet was lining up for a firing pass, making it crash into a mountain. There was another bit of tricky business when they were flying over the border with Austria and thus over the infamous Iron Curtain. But Stew was as adept at dodging missiles and bullets as he was at making hostile pilots crash, and soon enough he and Ana were in Vienna.

The final ten pages were mostly repetition of earlier stuff about Ana being a very aristocratic piece of ass and extremely desirable in every respect. It all ended with them deciding to rent a room at the best hotel in town and looking into each other's eyes over their food.

Predictably, this was followed by an ad for the next paperback featuring Stewart Grange. Ana was being hunted by Romanian secret service thugs while Stew was away rescuing someone or something else. I made a mental note to steer clear of Stewart Grange in the future.

The Noyces had returned home around the time Stew was stealing the biplane. I put the book away and opened my door and listened and judged they were about to finish dinner. I wanted to ambush Dave on the stairs, and give him the monkey for Julie.

I had decided that I'd name him James. James was better than Juju, it was a royal name just like Charles. It also carried associations with James Bond and anything associated with James Bond was ultra-cool.

I didn't want to give James to Julie myself because that could lead her to assume I was a pal who would like to listen to her sing a song to James. She did that to her Charles, they both did that to their Charleses, it was excruciating. I'd listened to them announce their Bonnie lay over the ocean a few times too many, already. Julie would probably switch to Baa-baa Black Sheep for James, but I didn't want to listen to that either.

But as it turned out, after dinner they all went into the front room to watch TV. There was no way I would be making an entrance in there.

I put James on the table, carefully arranging his flexible limbs into a position that enabled him to stay seated. Then without any conscious thought at all I got my pad and charcoal and began to draw him. Maybe this was a subconscious action meant to impress my paranoid pal: see, that's what I really do when I let go, when I relinquish control.

I nailed James in maybe ten minutes. He was more alive on the page than he was in reality. He was fucking good, good enough to show to Chaz. He was just a clockwork monkey, but his eyes had the primeval wisdom that humans had lost when they evolved from apes. No, that wasn't true, they hadn't lost it, they just learned how to hide it really well, so well that they often couldn't access it when needed.

But the James in my picture was honest. He was basically a happy guy, eager to have a good time with other apes regardless of their evolutionary level. He loved children and would climb palms to bring them bananas or coconuts or whatever. But if he thought it was to his advantage to kill them all and eat them, then he would do that too.

He'd do that without any malice or viciousness. He'd simply do what he thought was the right thing to do. He wouldn't fuck around because of morals, and invent reasons or causes or whatever.

I liked James. We had a bond.

I put him on my night table as I was going to bed.