The Homeless Millionaire

I woke up just after seven and spent a shitty hour trying to get warm sitting on the sofa huddled under a blanket, with a mug of hot coffee to warm my hands. I had to brace myself and wander outside to collect some firewood. Problem was, it was f.u.c.k.i.n.g raining again. I had the premonition it would rain most of the time I'd spend on that f.u.c.k.i.n.g island. Call me psychic.

I was on my third mug of coffee and fourth cigarette when I remembered I still had a half-bottle of scotch in my bag. I dug it out and drank half the contents in about half a minute. Then I went into the kitchen for breakfast: squashed hamburger buns and greasy beans, pardon me, beans with pork, straight out of the can. I drank the rest of the scotch after that and I felt fine and all ready to face the elements outside.

I put on two T-shirts and my jumper under the jean jacket but it still didn't seem enough. I smoked a cigarette, standing by the window: I could feel the wind blow through the cracks with every fresh gust. It wasn't raining much any more, but it was still raining. I didn't have anything to put on my head. There was an old umbrella in the house, but I wasn't going to take that along if I was to gather firewood. I nearly gave up on the whole idea but halfway through my second cigarette by the window I suddenly thought, f.u.c.k it, and turned round and walked out of the house.

The rain was so fine it felt like sea spray carried by the wind. After about ten steps I realized my brave decision to venture forth came around the time the second batch of scotch hit my stomach. That's how it goes with all those big, important decisions you make in life.

For example, you're sitting down with your wife and kid at the dinner table and it's no worse than it usually is but suddenly you think, this is it, f.u.c.k it, I'm leaving this sad bitch and that little retard, and you decide to get a divorce.

You might think that it's a rational decision, the logical ending to years of quiet discontent. But that's really bullshit, what's really happened was that something you ate or drank or inhaled a while earlier has at that moment fired off a couple of neurons in your brain. It could be something as random and stupid as a whiff of car exhaust fumes when you stepped outside to put out the garbage before dinner.

And it's just your bad luck that the neurons in your brain that began firing are the complaining neurons, the ones that bitch and m.o.a.n every time they come awake.

I started to analyze my own life from this new, exciting viewpoint and got so caught up in this bullshit that I was in the middle of the woods before I knew it. I became aware of the fact that I was already in the woods because suddenly the ground gave way under my foot and I smelled shit. It seemed I had stepped into one of Harry's dumps. I had to spend a while wiping my boot clean and in that time looked around and definitely, positively didn't see any dead branches that looked as if they might have lain over the spot. Harry didn't practice what he preached, but maybe the forest goblins or something had moved the branch that marked his shit.

I began keeping an eye out, with the result that within a couple of minutes I had a whole armful of firewood. It was then that I realized I'd forgotten to take the rope Harry had pointed out to me as the official firewood-tying device. So I went back to the house, deposited the wood, got the rope and was on my way out again - it had completely stopped raining - when I saw there was a boat headed my way. It was too far away to tell what was what but I had the feeling it would be Harry.

It wasn't. The motorboat veered away from the island. It seemed to be headed out of the bay and into the Pacific. It seemed to be a really small boat for going out onto the open water, into the ocean. It was a f.u.c.k.i.n.g long way to Japan, that was for sure. But maybe the guy steering that boat was one of those guys that crack nuts and open beer bottles with their teeth and challenge people to arm-wrestling contests after a couple of beers. His purpose in life would be to make other people feel weak.

I hoped he had a hole in the hull and would go down with his stupid boat. It was painted yellow and red. A boat painted yellow and red in a landscape of islands, bays, mountains, and never-ending forest is the sure mark of a grade-A asshole. When you see a boat like that, hide.

I checked the time and it was just past eleven, much too early for Harry to be coming home. He'd said he had stuff to do in the city. He was a busy man. He might have also made the acquaintance of a couple of new female arrivals at the Gastown warehouse. A guy with the initiative to keep a pot plantation was definitely a guy capable of many things.

I spent the next three hours fetching firewood from the forest. I brought in as lot because it was apparent everything I'd carried in would need to dry for a while before it could be used to start a fire. I also found and ate a couple of handfuls of wild blackberries. Most of those were both waterlogged and semi-dried-out, but they still tasted wonderful.

I also came across some mushrooms that I didn't recognize; I let them be. A small cl.u.s.ter that I found at the edge of a small clearing looked like psylocibyn, but I wasn't sure. I made a mental note to point them out to Harry once he'd agreed to let me keep the find. Of course I'd give him some, once he'd confirmed they were the local variety of magic mushrooms. But there was no way I'd go for a 50-50 split.

Truth was, that as I carried in all that firewood, I began having thought that maybe agreeing to five hundred bucks for helping Harry with the harvest wasn't wise. He'd said he had three fields going. It wouldn't be worth his while to cultivate a field that did not have at least a couple of dozen plants. The cola, the cl.u.s.ter of flowers on a plant could weigh a little, and it could weigh a lot. True, he was giving me bed and board: a sofa and shitty packaged food, if I wanted to eat anything nice I'd likely have to kill it myself.

I'd need to take a good, long look at those plants when Harry took me on a tour prior to the harvest, as promised. If it looked like over half a pound of dried product per plant - I had what union leaders called grounds to ask for a raise.

By early afternoon, the sun started to peek out from between the clouds and it had gotten warmer. I was starting to sweat a lot in my double-T-shirt getup. I didn't want that - taking a shower in that place was sure to be a horrorshow - so I quit carrying in firewood, and sat down and had a semi-warm Kokanee True Ale that tasted awful.

There were a few eggs in the fridge and Harry was sure to bring a fresh carton or two, so I made myself a plate of scrambled eggs and beans with pork, i.e. one thumbnail-sized piece of lard, plus a quarter-cupful of artificial maple syrup thrown in to screw up the taste. I finished off the package of hamburger buns with that and it actually all tasted good. I was really hungry after all those hours of walking through the woods, staying vigilant for unmarked shit dumps.

The sun was beginning to set by the time I was done with the dishes. The sky was almost cloudless, which felt like a f.u.c.k.i.n.g miracle. I smoked a couple of cigarettes, looking at the sun slide behind the hairy island to the west.

It looked much bigger than my own island, Anvil Island, but maybe this was an illusion. Islands in the distance have this tendency to appear bigger than they really are. A lot of people have drowned trying to swim to islands that looked so close, so promising. It's good to be suspicious when it comes to islands. All this water around just can't be good for the land.

Harry finally showed up just after dark. I didn't hear him come, I didn't hear his boat. I guess I was made comatose by the thick blue smoke that filled the room after I'd got a fire going in the fireplace. It didn't help that I was chain-smoking cigarettes while reading The Young Lions. Any smoker will chain-smoke while reading this book, and all non-smokers will wish they smoked cigarettes.

Anyway, I was deeply into the story and into the images in my head when the door banged open and Harry shouted:

"Jesus Mary f.u.c.k.i.n.g Christ. It's a like a fish smoker in here. Hey! You! Move your a.s.s and open that window."

A very busy fifteen minutes followed. We had to carry in stuff Harry had brought, and he'd brought plenty. The three twenty-fours of Kokanee True Ale were a particularly distasteful burden. I asked Harry why he drank such shitty beer.

"Hey," he said. "That's not beer. You want a beer, you go to a good pub where they have imported on tap. This is just beer-flavored water with alcoholic content. Because that's what matters, bud. Water and alcohol. Two liquids key to survival. Physical and mental."

"You sound like a guy that knows how to argue," I said.

"You'd better f.u.c.k.i.n.g bet on it. I was head of the varsity debating team."

"You were at university?"

"Hey. Do I look like a f.u.c.k.i.n.g moron to you? Of course I went to university. Got to find out where thinking's at, that kind of thing. I got some more of that blond hash. You dig?"

I did. A long while later, I asked:

"What did you study at the university?"

"Law, man."

"You're shitting me."

"No, man. Law. My old man is a f.u.c.k.i.n.g cop."

"You ARE shitting me."

"No. He's a f.u.c.k.i.n.g captain. He doesn't do any cop work, he's more like a company vice-president responsible for all the shitty work. Town hall, public relations, press, budget bullshit. He's got a belly like a house from the lunches he has to eat with all those assholes. They're all fat, man. I met them a lot when I was still a kid living at my parents' place. It's all the food and the booze."

"Physical and mental survival," I said.

"What?"

"Nothing. So you serious, you studied law?"

"Sure. First I studied criminal law. Then I switched to corporate law. Then I dropped out. You know why? There are just two kinds of people. People who respect and enforce the law, and people who break the law. It's more fun to break the law."

"Fight much with your old man?"

"No way. We're the best of friends. Real buddies, man."

I just didn't know what to say to that. If I'd liked my own family more, I might have said it's the blood ties that count. Because they do. But if you don't like an idea, you just don't talk about it.

"We gotta get up early tomorrow," Harry said, after two more joints and more Kokanee True Ale. "It's going to be a sunny day. We'll check on the plants and I'll tell you what's what."

I nodded to that, and we turned in.

He definitely was a guy who knew what's what, at least that evening.