The Homeless Millionaire

Roch had good news for me. His father had been much affected by the sight of the broken banister, and the bandage Roch was wearing around his wrist. Roch had exploited that by embarking on some passionate propaganda on my behalf.

I was an artistic genius, Roch told his old man; I had just been accepted by the prestigious Ecole des beaux-artes de Montreal. Some years from now, Roch told his father, they would be proud to have known me when I was still a Mr. Nobody, a young man just starting on the road to fame.

Roch had told his old man he had a business plan: he'd ask me for a couple of my pictures to keep as souvenirs of my stay. Years later, those paintings would be worth thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars! Letting me stay at the house wasn't just a charitable act: it was a wise business decision.

Roch's old man wasn't so sure of that, but he was impressed by the fact I had been accepted by the Ecole; it wasn't easy to get in there. He agreed to let me stay at the house for a couple more days, until I found another place. And Roch had already found another place where I could stay: his parents' summer cottage, about an hour's drive away from Montreal. Roch proposed driving me out there the coming Sunday.

"The old man wants to me check it out, and get it ready for the Labour Day weekend in September," Roch told me, with a devilish gleam in his eye. "That means you can stay there all August. I'll be coming a day before the family fete to set things up, and that's when I'll ask the old man if I can take you along. I'll say I need your help to get the place shipshape, I'm sure he'll agree, and this way no one will be surprised to see you there. You'll have to meet and mingle with my family, but you can deal with that, eh? They'll all be drunk Saturday, and we'll leave early Sunday morning. I have stuff to attend to on Labour Day weekend."

"But where will I stay when I get back?" I asked. Roch waved a dismissive hand, and said:

"Don't worry. By that time, we’ll have something worked out."

I reviewed all that as I lay on my mattress the next morning. We'd followed that conversation with a lot of beer and several joints, and maybe this was why I felt discomfort when I thought about it. Getting hammered and stoned when I had no money and no job made me feel guilty. I suspected that was brought about by my fucking Protestant Anglo upbringing. As Roch had once pointed out, all Protestant Anglos constantly felt guilty about something.

"Protestants eat well but sleep badly," he'd said. "Catholics may eat badly, but sleep well." Of course he'd say something like that, he was a French Catholic. Neither me nor Roch believed in God, but religion wasn’t really about God, it was about the way one was brought up.

That was how I tried to explain the unease I felt that rainy Friday morning in Montreal. But it persisted, and couldn't be explained by my hangover, either. I had a feeling Roch was hiding something from me. He was being very generous, helping me out with money and everything, but then I wasn't stupid, and I knew people were always extra nice to the people they were cheating. A husband that suddenly had started bringing flowers and little presents for his wife was the husband that was sleeping around with other women.

I lay on that mattress for a long, long time. I heard Roch get up, use the bathroom next door, and go downstairs. He left the house soon after that. Where did he go? I wondered about that, listening to the patter of raindrops on the window pane.

The rain stopped about midday. By then I'd gotten up, washed, and breakfasted on my remaining bread and apples and a solitary beer that had survived the previous evening. Then I spent several hours writing a long letter to my parents. I wrote it, read it, and tore it up several times before I had a satisfactory version.

My letter stated that I'd found a job, and had to start immediately. I couldn't return home before the academic year began, I had to stay in Montreal to keep that job. There was no phone in the place I'd found for myself, but not to worry, I had a nice room with a beautiful view and all my housemates were nice and friendly, everything was just fine. I hesitated for a while before putting the address of Roch's house on the back flap of the envelope.

It took me over an hour to find the post office, buy a stamp, and post that letter. I could have dropped it into a postal box, but I went to the post office because I toyed with the idea of calling them, after all. There were long–distance telephone booths in every post office, and I could place the call with a clerk, to pay at the counter when I was done. That meant I could slip out without paying, and save some dough. I definitely didn't want to call my parents collect. I wasn't the Ryman kid any more, I was independent, and independence had its price.

I did not call them. I just couldn't stand the thought of hearing their angry, disappointed voices. They had another son they could beat up on: my older brother.

My brother was four years older than me, and in his final year at Yale. That's right, fucking Yale. Of course, he didn’t get in there thanks to his brilliant intellect: he was a fucking brick. He got in there because he was really good at American football, and Yale wanted him on their team.

Yale was expensive, but my father was determined to send him there. He wanted his anointed heir to have a Yale diploma so that he could walk all over the people who did not have one. Yes, if my parents wanted to beat up on one of their kids, they could beat up on my brother Josh. He was over six feet tall and built like a house, he could take it.

I was actually over six feet too (by an inch), but I was very skinny. When I undressed, I looked a little like a guy freshly rescued from a concentration camp. I seemed to be able to eat any amount of food, and never put on any weight. If I ever got into a fight with Josh, he would swat me down with one hand the way one swatted an annoying insect.

I'd tried exercising with weights and so on, but it didn't help. My muscles didn't grow, they actually seemed to shrink while becoming harder: I looked as if I were made of knotted rope. I wasn’t weak, I could lift a hundred pounds no problem, but I was skinny, and that was what mattered. A girl told me once that putting her arms around me felt like embracing a chair.

I was hungry after the post office, so I found a McDonalds and had the dollar combo: hamburger, fries, Coke. Roch had given me the money he'd promised me the previous evening, but it had to last me for a whole month. I was told there was food at the cottage—canned stuff like beans with pork and luncheon meat, spaghetti sauce and so on—but I didn't want to eat him out of house and home, and anyway I needed to buy at least a couple of cartons of cigarettes, plus other stuff. I couldn't hope to survive for two weeks on beans with pork. The pork usually consisted of a couple of pieces of fat, with skin attached if you got lucky.

When I left the McDonalds, I passed by a colporteur a couple of doors down the block. There was a sign in French and English in the window that said they paid daily. So I walked in and had a short talk with a fat, unshaven guy who smelled of beer. Maybe he smelled beer on me too, because he was very sympathetic even though he was French, and I was an Anglo.

It turned out I could have a job distributing advertising leaflets. I would have to come in between six and seven in the morning, and get a thousand leaflets to put in people's mailboxes and mail slots in a predefined area. No cheating, they made random calls to find out whether people got the leaflet and whether they got just one, or a whole bunch. When I got back, the remaining leaflets would be counted—they came in cellophane-wrapped packs of a hundred each—and I’d get paid right away. The pay was far from great: five bucks for every thousand leaflets that had been actually distributed, or half a cent per leaflet. It was fucking slave labour, but I agreed to show up the next day.

It was late in the afternoon by then, and I felt exhausted. On the way home, I bought eggs and a package of bacon as well as bread, tomatoes, butter, and a small jar of jam with very red strawberries featured on the label. I mainly bought the jam because of that picture: whoever did it was a really talented guy. I thought about the painter that gave that talk at my school: maybe he was the guy who did those strawberries? There was something profound about them, something existential, as if the strawberries knew a whole lot more about life than most people did.

When I got home I practiced the art of serving a decent plate of eggs and bacon, as required by Henry Houghton-Briggs of the Montrose Hotel. I forgot to buy tomatoes, but I knew they went in the pan after the bacon and the eggs, and couldn’t be fried too hard because otherwise the tomato juice would run all over the eggs. Roch’s kitchen didn't have a toaster, but I fried some bread in the fat left in the pan. I didn't have any jam, even though I kept looking at the strawberries painted on the jam jar label throughout my meal. Those strawberries really knew a thing or two about the way the world was put together.

I washed the dishes and then tried reading the paperback I'd bought right before I left Toronto. It was unbelievably stupid. It featured a guy who talked out of the corner of his mouth; the other corner was always occupied by a cigarette, or optionally a toothpick. When he wasn't busy talking out of the corner of his mouth, he was sitting at home and drinking bourbon while handling a variety of telephone calls, all of which contained some important information of one kind or another. That's where I stopped reading, I just couldn't go on any more, even the most retarded kid knew most phone calls were bullshit and a waste of time.

Rock was still out when I went to sleep. I told myself it was Friday night after all, but it still seemed odd. Maybe I was feeling hurt at being left all alone. Maybe it was just the usual worrying mode that I got into whenever I was straight and sober.

But something definitely wasn't right.