The Homeless Millionaire

Have you ever received bad news immediately followed by good news, back to back? Bad news cast a long shadow; even as you're rejoicing at the good news that came next, there is a lingering feeling of unease, a sense that something's wrong. Roch had nothing but good news for me when I returned from the store. His father was much affected by the sight of the broken banister, and the bandage Roch was weaving around his wrist. Roch capitalized on 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 that would surely follow. Roch had a business plan, too: he'd ask me for a couple of my paintings or drawings to keep as souvenirs. Years later, those paintings would be worth thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions 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 someplace else to stay. And I already had someplace else to stay: on Sunday, Roch would drive me to his parents' summer cottage, about an hour's drive from Montreal.

"The old man wants to me check it out, and get it ready for the Labor Day weekend," Roch told me, with a devilish gleam in his eye. "I'll take you up there, and you can stay until the family fete. I'll be coming a day early to clean it before everyone arrives, 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 sh.i.p.shape, I'm sure he'll agree. 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 that weekend."

"But where will I stay when I get back?" I asked. Roch waved a dismissive hand, looking away from me. He said:

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

As I lay in bed the next morning, I reviewed the conversation we'd had the previous night. We'd drunk a lot of beer and smoked several joints, and maybe that was why I felt discomfort when thinking about it. Getting hammered and stoned when I had no money and no job made me feel guilty. I suspected that was brought was my f.u.c.k.i.n.g 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 isn't really about God, it's about the way you've been brought up.

That was the way I tried to explain my unease as I lay on my mattress 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 are always extra nice to the people they are cheating. A husband that suddenly starts bringing flowers and little presents to his wife is the husband that has started to sleep 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 all that, listening to the patter of raindrops on the window pane.

The rain stopped about midday. By that time I'd gotten up, washed, and breakfasted on my remaining bread and apples and a beer that survived from the previous evening. Then I spent several hours writing a long letter to my parents. I wrote it, read it, and tore it up a couple of times before I had a satisfactory version. I told them 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 going to be 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 posted it anywhere, but to tell you the truth I toyed with the idea of calling them, after all. There are long-distance telephone booths in a post office, you can order a call from a clerk and don't have to fumble with coins while you're talking: you pay at the counter when you're done. You can also slip out without paying if you're mean enough. I definitely didn't want to call them collect. I wasn't the Ryman kid any more, I was independent, and independence has its price.

I did not call them, in the end. I just couldn't stand the thought of hearing their angry, disappointed voices. They had another son they could beat up on. Yes, I have an older brother. I haven't told you about him because I hate him, and he hates me back. He was the one who started all that hate, it happened the moment I showed up and he was no longer the center of attention. He's four years older than me, and in his final year at Yale. That's right, f.u.c.k.i.n.g Yale. But don't think he got there because he's brilliant: he's a f.u.c.k.i.n.g brick. It's because he's good at American football, and also because 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 Josh (short for Joseph). He was over six feet tall and built like a house, he could take it.

I'm actually over six feet too (by an inch), but I'm very skinny. When I undress, I look a little like those guys freshly rescued from a concentration camp. I seem 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 probably swat me down with one hand like you swat a fly. I've tried exercising with weights and so on, but it didn't help. My muscles didn't grow any, they actually shrank while becoming harder, I look as if I were made of knotted rope. I'm not weak, I can lift a hundred pounds no problem, but I am skinny, and that's what counts. One girl I'd fooled around with told me that putting her arms around me felt like embracing a chair.

I was hungry when I left 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, and other stuff as well. I couldn't hope to survive for two weeks on beans with pork, the pork usually consisted of two pieces of fat, with skin attached if you got lucky.

When I left the McDonalds, I noticed that there was 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. I could have a job distributing advertising leaflets if I wanted to. I would have to come in between six and seven in the morning with my own bag, 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 per household, and not a whole bunch. When I got back, they would count the undistributed leaflets - they came in cellophane-wrapped packs of a hundred each - and pay me, five bucks per thousand or half a cent per leaflet. It was f.u.c.k.i.n.g slave labor, 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 a talk to future Fine Arts students at my school - maybe he was the one who did the ill.u.s.tration for the label? There was something profound about it, something existential, as if the strawberries knew a whole lot more about life than people did.

When I got home I put in some practice in 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 guessed you put them in the pan after the bacon and the eggs, and don't fry them too hard so that you don't get tomato juice running all over the eggs. The 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 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 this 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 knows over half of the calls you take are 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 suspicious. 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, I don't know.

But something definitely wasn't right.