The Homeless Millionaire

My paranoid pal was still with me when I woke up the next morning.

He wasn't saying much. He was kind of hanging around with an expectant look on his face. His attitude told me he was waiting for me to commit a monumental blunder of some sort, and then set about kicking the shit out of me. I'd seen that look on his face before, and I invariably fucked up in a major way shortly thereafter.

I was about to fuck up something in a major way! That was why my pal had returned. Things just hadn't been interesting enough in the meantime.

To stay safe, I skipped taking a shower—I still felt clean after the scrubbing I'd given myself the previous day, and taking a shower in that fucking coffin meant coming into painful contact with hard, sharp-edged inanimate matter.

I also skipped shaving, and brushed my teeth while focusing on the drain in the sink. It wasn't wise, looking into that drain hole was as unpleasant as looking at my own face. That was where everything ultimately went, down the fucking drain.

I ate my standard corned beef-and-bread-and-apple breakfast, and it got me thinking about my time at Robinson & Klein, and I missed those times so badly I was close to blubbing by the time I finished eating. I smoked a couple of cigarettes by the back windows: it wasn't raining, but it was kind of misty outside and I couldn't see the mountains in the distance. The branch I'd chosen to hang myself from was clearly visible, though.

I listened hard for signs of life from Tony, but didn't hear anything. I had the thought that maybe he'd gone to work after all, even though he still had a day's sick leave. It would give him the opportunity to disembowel someone with his sharp tongue during a meeting, and thus feel a little better about himself, and maybe stop brooding about his wife's visit the previous day.

Tony had claimed his wife was one of the beautiful people. From what I'd seen, that wasn't exactly right. She definitely had an outstanding pair of peepers—very big and very blue—and she had a finely chiseled face.

But that mouth of hers destroyed any chance of her being beautiful. It was thin and pinched like a miser's. Tony had spent too much time looking into her eyes, and not enough looking at her mouth. Maybe he wouldn't have proposed marriage had he done so.

But who knew? Maybe she gave exceptional head, and every time he looked at those thin lips he saw them wrapped around his cock. Maybe her lips drove him crazy.

You never really knew, with other people. They were like you in many respects—everyone had to eat, sleep, piss and shit, and make love, everyone wanted to be happy—but then they were also totally unlike you in even more respects. You never really knew what was going on in another person's head.

I gave up on trying to work out what went on in Tony's balding head. I had my hands full trying to figure out what went on in mine, thank you very much. I really needed to work. Otherwise, in just a week's time Chaz would be telling me to go fuck myself and preferably die so that I'd never show my face to him again.

I went through the routine of setting things up, dragging it out as much as I could because I had no fucking idea for my next picture. Nothing seemed appealing. But then I thought about Chaz's pet cockroach, Timmy. I wondered if he was still around: Chaz had said he'd kill Timmy soon, to prevent him from breeding a hundred other Timmies. Bingo!

I drew Timmy climbing out from his hideaway from the mug on Chaz's desk. He was on full alert, his antennae stretched to capture signals from his little cockroach universe.

But his universe didn't stretch far enough to reveal the hand raised to deal death upon him, thus squashing any chance of Timmy's becoming a father. That hand cast a menacing shadow right next to Timmy's coffee-mug home; unfortunately, Timmy didn't understand shadows. He didn't realize a shadow was frequently a sign of things to come.

It was half past one by the time I was done, and I spent half an hour smoking cigarettes and masturbating over my talent, because that drawing turned out pretty good. I was sure Chaz would love it. It contained a piece of his own reality.

Then I thought that he might actually feel guilty about killing Timmy, and smoked another cigarette fretting that my picture would amplify his guilty feelings. It would bring them to the surface, and he would hate my picture when that happened.

One thing was beyond question: that picture was good. So I thought fuck Chaz, and the moment I thought that the sun came out, and the world outside became beautiful.

The sun had come to say goodbye—it was already pretty low down in the sky, it being past two o'clock on a winter afternoon—and being low, it cast plenty of shadows. The one cast by the tree I chose to hang myself from was shaped like the profile of a human face. I smoked and looked at that shadow, taking in the details, and I noticed that the shadow cast by my hanging branch resembled a fuck-you sign: that branch ended with an upturned fork.

My hand hurt too much for me to attempt another picture, so I decided to take advantage of the sun, and get out of the house. As I was dressing, I wondered again about Tony's whereabouts. Did he really go to work?

I had the disconcerting thought that maybe Tony had taken a long walk into the woods, and hanged himself. That would really fuck up things for me. I'd have to look for a new place to live.

It made me feel like a shit, that thought. If Tony was suicidal, the right reaction was to encourage and buck him up in every way possible, thus convincing him to continuing with the misery of his life. After all, there was always a chance things would get better. And a successful suicide—not one of those half-assed efforts meant to dramatize one's own feelings—a successful suicide meant no second chances.

Death was final. The only afterlife that existed, existed solely in the imaginations of people who couldn't cope with the finality of death. That was my view, anyway.

It was a good view, a positive view. It spurred me into action where what I'd like best was to lie on a comfortable bed, being fed cocktails and cigarettes and joints and occasionally food by attractive hands, and maybe also getting my cock sucked by a very attractive mouth.

Because that was what everyone really wanted, deep down: to do nothing and get everything, including good entertainment. And why not? Lazy people lived longer, happier lives—as long as they didn't work hard at abusing various substances. That could cut your life expectancy to nothing in a blink of an eye.

But lying on a bed meant missing out on everything that went on outside. And I only had one life to live. And as I stepped out of the house and onto the sidewalk blanketed with rotting dead leaves, I felt very lucky to be alive.

It was the sun that did it. Without that late, winter-afternoon sunlight, I'd have been miserable. If there ever was one god that truly deserved to be called a god, it was the sun. That was the idea conceived as soon as humans stopped being apes, and it was the right idea.

But then, as time went on, it got all fucked up because it was human nature to invent new notions and ideas, even when the very first idea had been the right idea. Sun got relegated behind various guys with outstanding oratory talent. It was preordained, because people loved bullshit, and there was no bullshit whatsoever about the sun.

It made life on Earth possible. It would also make it impossible at some point in the distant future, when it began to expand and eat up the surrounding planets one by one. That was why the sun, for all its wondrous qualities, couldn't really be a god either. Gods were immortal by definition, and the sun would die just like everything and everyone else.

There were no gods at all. Or maybe there were as many gods as there were people who believed in God. Everyone's god had a personal slant. Some personal gods applauded stealing and slaughter, others frowned when you didn't wash your hands after hitting the can.

Either there were no gods at all, or there were as many gods as there were people. It was the only possible explanation for what was going on.

I was so deeply into this philosophical shit that it was a surprise to find myself walking past The Black Dog. I had walked all the way to North Vancouver's waterfront on automatic!

I actually very nearly knocked over the sandwich board outside the entrance, that was what made me stop. The sandwich board I'd luckily not knocked down was advertising Happy Hours from two pm till six, meaning cut-price booze and meaning that I was in a perfect position to take advantage of those happy Happy Hours.

I had no money, but I just couldn't resist the promise of Happy Hours. My paranoid pal grinned at me, and I grinned right back.

"I need to be happy just like you do," I told him.

Then I went in.