The Homeless Millionaire

The first thing I thought about when I woke up the next day was my birthday. It was just four days away. I probably thought about it because I felt like shit. I had this instant association because I always felt shitty on my birthday.

There are two ways you can look at your birthday. That you've lived another year, or that you're one year closer to death. Of course, both are true. You look at the credit, or you look at the debit. It's difficult to look at both at the same time.

But me and my paranoia, we managed to pull it off. Me and my paranoia made a great working team. The problem was, my paranoid partner always had a contrary, negative take on things.

I would be looking at the credit side, and my paranoid partner would sneer and point out all the opportunities I'd missed, and all the times that I'd been an asshole over that past year. I would be looking at the debit side, and my paranoid partner would be consoling me, advising me to enjoy my misfortune because it was nothing yet compared to what was still to come.

I would tell myself that it was normal to gather a bunch of black marks and stains like that in any given year. It was called life: life was like that, it had its ups and downs. But wasn't I supposed to be better than normal? At the very least, above average?

That morning in the cabin on Anvil Island, I felt way below average. I sat up on the sofa I'd been sleeping on and rubbed my face and established it was neither rainy or sunny at that moment. It didn't mean much: I'd already seen the local weather change from one extreme to another in the space of a couple of hours.

Captain Morgan was still grinning at me from the label on the bottle, but he had few goods to sell. There was maybe an inch of rum left. I drank it together with my first coffee and gritted my teeth and decided to have a cold shower. I'd already verified that the gas water heater was out of gas.

It was a f.u.c.k.i.n.g horrorshow, I actually screamed out loud a few times. I punished myself by washing very thoroughly, cleaning every orifice and soaping myself twice. It worked the way punishment always works: I felt happy when it was over.

While toweling myself dry, I discovered that I practically had no d.i.c.k any more. My balls were doing their best to disappear, too. That was okay. I wasn't interested in s.e.x, didn't even want to think about s.e.x after that Peter Schmidt business. Thinking about s.e.x made me wish s.e.x didn't exist.

I went to the kitchen feeling better after my shower. A shower always makes things better. If it is a nice shower then it's nice, and if it's horrible your whole worldview improves the moment it is over. It also improves your appetite.

I spent nearly an hour in the kitchen eating myself stupid. Harry had left the aspirin on the kitchen table. He didn't leave any speed. I had a couple of aspirins halfway through my gargantuan meal, then spent ten minutes and half a dollar's worth of detergent doing the dishes. There was no hot water, and everything was greasy.

I went to sit on the sofa and smoke a cigarette and barely managed to finish it before falling asleep.

When I woke up, it was already late afternoon. I was totally ghosted out after my long sleep. I spent the rest of the day drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes in an attempt to reconnect with myself. I was unsuccessful. Even my paranoid partner was gone. I just had no one to talk to.

I tried reading, but the words were written by someone from another planet. They had no meaning, they just were a bunch of marks on the page. I tried thinking, and it was like groping my way through a thick fog. I tried doing nothing at all except for smoking and became aware of my tired heartbeat. My heart felt like a weary horse pulling an overloaded cart. There was a soft wheeze each time I exhaled smoke. A tiny nerve in my left hand was jumpy about something.

When darkness fell, I lit the lamp and spent the evening looking at the small flame. Occasionally, it would flicker and release a thin ribbon of sooty smoke. It quickly evolved into a game: I tried to predict those smoke signals. I was almost always wrong. My timing was completely off. Timing was everything. You could make the best move in the world, but if you made it at the wrong time you still ended face down in shit.

Unfortunately things didn't work that way in reverse. If you made a bad move it stayed a bad move, good timing just meant the punishment wasn't as harsh. Having a birthday soon was very bad timing. Of course, my paranoid partner thought it was great timing. I could almost feel him rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation. That guy really enjoyed kicking the shit out of me.

I made myself tea and treated myself to a plate of Scottish shortbread - Harry had bought a couple of big tins. They were different. One tin was round and enameled dark navy blue and featured a couple of crossed anchors lying below a an ill.u.s.tration of a sailing ship. To my eye, it looked like one of those ultra-fast clippers on the tea run from Asia to Europe.

The other, square tin was a horrible red tartan. It had a picture on the top as well, a guy playing with his two dogs somewhere in the presumably Scottish countryside. I guessed the three of them were high on shortbread.

Shortbread packs quite a punch. It hits you right in the gut, but from the inside. At one of my European schools, there had been this girl who was into shortbread. She was nibbling at one on every break, sometimes during a class. She was so fat she could hardly walk, and had a round pale face sprinkled with red pimples.

It was nice to think of someone more f.u.c.k.e.d up than me. It relaxed and soothed. The nerve in my left hand finally went to sleep.

A while later, so did I.

I woke up the next day feeling much better, even though it was raining. I used the chemical toilet - I wasn't going for a shit in the woods in the rain. I washed myself at the kitchen sink, and had a breakfast of shortbread and coffee. Powerful stuff, if there was a dog around I'd have probably played with it.

But there was no dog around, and all I could do was play with myself. I got all my painting and drawing gear out of my bag and spread it out on the coffee table. My sketchpad was a dog's breakfast, bent every which way and stained. My charcoal sticks had broken into a mess of stumps. The paint tubes were all dented and it was lucky none of them had burst.

But the pencils were in fine shape, and so was a notebook with blank pages and good, semi-glossy paper. Rembrandt did some of his finest stuff on palm-sized pieces of paper.

A few hours later, it was painfully apparent I was no Rembrandt. My first few attempts were awful beyond description. I had hopes for a moody study of the shotgun and the box of shells lying on the coffee table, but just as I was applying the final touches I saw I had made the stock too big. And the box of shells looked like a box of aspirin or some other tame shit. I'd wanted it to radiate danger.

My paranoid partner rubbed his hands and got in some practice before I made myself a big plate of fish fingers and rice mixed with canned vegetables. That shut him up. Food always did. Food and booze sometimes had him purring with contentment. However, I kept away from the Kokanee True Ale. I was sure that once I'd started drinking, I wouldn't stop until the last drop of booze was gone.

I had another go at drawing something and failed spectacularly and spent half an hour going through all the books on the bookshelf, reading a page when something seemed promising and instantly dismissing it as shit. The words still had no real meaning, they were just black marks on the page.

I spent the rest of the day sitting and smoking and drinking tea and nibbling a shortbread from time to time. Each time I did that, I thought about that girl I'd met. She'd been so fat and ugly. I couldn't remember her name, wasn't even sure which school we'd attended together - was it Paris or London? Was she alive? Was she enjoying life?

Maybe she'd changed her diet. Maybe she'd metamorphosed into a beautiful woman. Ugly ducklings turn into swans surprisingly often. Maybe she was much happier than I'd ever been.

There are three things to look at when reading a person: eyes, mouth, hands. But I'd never really looked at her eyes, just at her thick glasses. I'd never looked at her hands. And her mouth had been always busy: working on a shortbread, on the skin next to her fingernails, on the end of a pen, on a strand of dark hair that had escaped from the tie at the back of her head.

We'd met six times a week and spent hundreds of hours together in the same room and inevitably shared hundreds of experiences. I didn't know anything about her, just that her portrait could have been used to turn people off shortbread for life.

Before I fell asleep, I also wondered what she'd thought about me, if anything at all. By the time I'd met her, I had already started wearing my scowl. Most likely she'd thought I was an asshole.

With this comforting thought, I finally fell asleep.

The third day of my lonely vigil in the cabin on Anvil Island was one of those days TV and radio weathermen sum up as sunny with scattered showers. When I was rubbing my face awake, I found out I really needed a shave.

I spent a long time at the kitchen sink, shaving by touch. Then I ate breakfast and smoked a couple of cigarettes with my third coffee of the day. It looked as if there would be a long interval between the advertised scattered showers, so I went out for a walk.

I walked along the southern shore of the island, or at least as close to it as I could: at times, I was forced to make a dogleg deep into the woods. There were tons of mushrooms around. I wished I knew which ones to pick. A plate of mushrooms fried with chopped bacon and onions! That's what I wanted to eat. I decided I'd get an ill.u.s.trated guide to mushrooms at the earliest opportunity.

That led me to think about Harry: I really didn't want to have to struggle with those knots he'd tied. I had never piloted a boat with an outboard motor, too. I'd sat in one often enough, and knew that steering involved the handle attached to the motor. That was about it. I didn't know how to handle cross-waves, or how to stop the whole f.u.c.k.i.n.g thing in a hurry.

It had already been a couple of days since Harry had left, and that implied things weren't going too well for his dad. I wondered whether he knew his son was a drug grower and dealer. Maybe he did, and didn't give a f.u.c.k. Maybe his time in the war and subsequently in the police made him believe there were far, far worse things than smoking a joint.

I was maybe halfway to the western shore of my island when I heard voices.

The voices belonged to a couple of teens, young guys with freshly broken voices: they skipped an octave now and then. As I stood frozen to the spot, they moved away. One of the kids laughed.

When I could barely hear them at all, I followed in their tracks.

Maybe ten minutes later, I stopped behind a tree and stared with disbelieving eyes.

There was a f.u.c.k.i.n.g resort on the island. Well, maybe it was a bit small to be called a resort. But it had a long docking pier and several buildings, and the biggest building had a busily smoking chimney. Harry was growing pot on an island frequented by holidaymakers! And he didn't tell me anything about their presence, either.

There were a few people walking around. A silver-haired couple huddled together on the pier, looking at the water. A couple of kids were playing catch nearby. As I watched, a bunch of people filed out of the big building with the smoking chimney. I guessed that was where meals were served.

I turned round, and started on the way back home.