The Homeless Millionaire

We drank another toast to hell before Tony unexpectedly excused himself to hit the can.

"Refresh your drink if you want to," he threw over his shoulder before passing through the door.

I didn't. As advertised earlier, Tony didn't pour toy drinks. I was also out of training and already felt slightly drunk.

While Tony was gone, I ruminated on my luck with landlords. The last two were basically party guys who liked the same whisky I did. Mr. Chance gave me two really good rolls there.

But maybe this wasn't due exclusively to chance? Maybe there was a subconscious radar at work? There was this saying: like draws like. Birds of a feather hung together.

Tony was gone for a long time. I heard him flush the toilet on the ground floor and I expected him to enter shortly. But instead he went to the kitchen and activated the whistling kettle. I was gradually getting used to the alcohol in my system and began feeling like having another drink. I wanted Tony to pour it, though. I didn't want to handle his bottle.

I did the blue-eyed-man-of-steel act, nibbled on peanuts and chips, and waited for Tony to return. When he finally did, he was bearing a fucking tray. It featured a vaguely oriental teapot with a bamboo handle and two matching vessels that were neither cups or mugs. They were shaped like mugs, but had no handles.

"My wife left that behind," he said, when he'd noticed I was eyeing this ensemble. "We had a proper tea set, Wedgwood. A wedding gift. She took that."

"It's a nice teapot," I lied. "And those, uh, cups, are really original."

"Yeah. I thought we might like a spot of tea with the sandwiches. You ready for the speech on what's what? We might as well get that out of the way."

I said I was ready. Tony put the tray on the table and sat down across from me and poured us fresh drinks. I offered him a cigarette and he accepted it. Then, puffing smoke diabolically, he gave me the lowdown.

Basically, while I was renting a flat from him there were just two rules to follow. Rule number one was not to damage the property. Rule number two, equally if not more important, was not to upset Tony. Tony made it clear he wasn't easily upset, but that once he was, he turned into a fire-breathing dragon. I was getting some insight into why his wife had left him.

Otherwise, I could do whatever I liked. I could also use the backyard, provided Tony wasn't there with a guest or guests.

"I'll personally invite you to join when it's okay, and most of the time it will be okay," he said, giving me the hard eye. "But sometimes I'll have people around to discuss business. And I intend to invite numerous chicks to barbecue once the warm weather starts."

"Feed them and fuck them?" I said, and immediately regretted it. It crossed the line. The scotch had made me a little too flippant.

Tony didn't mind. He grinned from ear to ear. He said:

"That's the general idea."

Following that, he gave me the rundown on North Vancouver. He made it clear that that I'd have to go south if I was big on big city entertainment.

"It's basically a little town across the water from the city," he said. "You want to pick up a girl, your choice's limited to The Black Dog. It's??????

"I know what it is and where it is," I cut in. "I had a drink there while you were showing the flat to the guy that viewed it after me."

I surprised myself when I said that. I hadn't thought at all about that Salmon Arm store security dickhead in the last couple of days. I didn't want to think about him at all. I wanted to enjoy my new place.

Tony didn't notice something was off. He said:

"Hey, seems like you've scouted out the place already. You want me to go on?"

"Of course I do. Sorry."

So he went on, and did reveal that the best place to shop wasn't the supermarket I'd found. I also established that if I wanted any art supplies or indeed anything remotely connected with art, I'd have to go downtown. The movie house that I'd noticed during my daytime stroll only ran movies that had premiered a good while earlier. No classics, just a lot of second-grade shit that included plenty of westerns.

We went on like that for a while and Tony told me about a couple of adventures he'd had while living in the wilderness that was North Vancouver and I reciprocated with a couple of mine. We ate the sandwiches and had tea and then chatted until the bottle was empty.

I didn't have a hangover at all when I woke up the next day, maybe because prior to going to bed I took a long walk. It hadn't been raining and inspired by the booze, I launched an expedition to find the supermarket Tony told me about. It was located practically on the bank of the river that flowed into the bay a good mile to the east. It was a big supermarket, it occupied most of the small shopping mall that had sprung up beside the river.

It was already late and dark and everything was closed but the specials advertised in the windows told me prices were indeed better than in the supermarket I'd found earlier. The first thing that caught my eye was the deal on canned corned beef. By the time I got back home I'd calculated that I would be able to get a beer with the money saved weekly on corned beef.

I contemplated that fact while eating breakfast which featured corned beef prominently. Tony was up and around. I was tracking his progress from the moment he'd emerged from his bedroom and belched so loudly it nearly made my window pane tinkle. He spent a long time in the bathroom, picking up all the constituent pieces and getting them clean. Then he moved to the ground floor and before long that fucking kettle was whistling again. It was beginning to get on my nerves.

Following a careful appraisal of my supplies, I treated myself to two small scotches and smoked a toothpick-sized joint. Then I spent the rest of the day and most of the evening painting.

I painted a picture based on the scene I'd seen the other day: the open field and the forest and the mountains behind a freshly built road. Its black surface gleamed with newness, there wasn't a single blemish. To the right, a house was being built; further on, another house was practically completed.

There was a group of three guys gathered in front of that second house. They were little more than stick figures at that distance but it was clear some serious negotiating was going on. The nearest guy was raising his briefcase almost as if he was about to throw it in the face of the guy in front of him. The threatened guy was raising a protective arm. The third guy stood to the side, his hands hidden in the side pockets of his pants. But you could tell from the way he stood that they were clenched into fists.

After a while, I added a rodent running across the road. It could be a big mouse or a rat or whatever. It didn't matter. It was running across the newly laid border, escaping to the open country that lay beyond. It was going to build itself a new home, too. Somewhere safe and far away from those fucking humans.

Whenever and wherever humans discovered a nice place, they moved in and instantly made it less nice. That was why there was this constant search for new nice places. There were never enough nice places because they ceased being nice once they'd been discovered.

That was the viewpoint of that mouse or rat, and I shared it in a way. Of course if I came across a rat in Tony's house I'd give it a kick up the backside that would send it to the moon. But I could appreciate its point of view.

I smoked a cigarette looking at what I'd painted, imagining what would happen next. That rat was no ordinary rat. It would build a nest out there and seduce a couple of other rats and they'd multiply like crazy. The offspring would all go through standard schooling and then receive top-grade commando training.

And then, one day, after the happy humans had moved into their new homes, the rat army would mount an invasion. They'd pillage the food supplies and a special kamikaze unit would chew through electric wiring, starting fires that would destroy the houses and possibly produce a couple of dead humans.

Intoxicated by their victory, the rats would hang around long enough to be punished by the returning humans. Nearly all of them would be killed. But the survivors would escape and build new nests in the fields and the forest and breed like crazy and???

It would go on and on the way it always went on. There was no life without death. For something to live, something else had to die. Even plants needed other dead plants and leaves and twigs and so on fertilizing the soil.

My supper consisted of beans (seeds or embryos of bean plants), bread (seeds of wheat), corned beef (meat from an animal corpse), and tea (leaves pulled off a dead plant or even worse, torn from a plant that was still alive). I added sugar (made from sugar cane or sugar beet blood). While eating and smoking the post-meal cigarette (more dead plants), I likely killed a few thousand microbes who had been hoping for a prosperous existence.

That was just the way it went. It was best to forget about all that, and enjoy the experience, the taste. That was simply how things were. There was no life without death.