The Homeless Millionaire

Harry left again the very next day, which was a surprise. From what he'd said, I assumed he'd stay until Sunday. But over breakfast on Friday he told me that he had a girlfriend in Vancouver that he wanted to stay with for a day, in order to recover from all the recent stresses. He hadn't ever mentioned anything about a girlfriend, maybe with the exception of our first evening on the island during which I'd gotten so pissed I couldn't remember things - such as him telling me about the summer camp on the southern shore of the island. So maybe, just maybe, he had mentioned a girlfriend and it got rubbed out by smoke and alcohol.

It was cold but reasonably sunny when he told me about that, and raining like hell half an hour later. I could either drive the boat in the rain to Lion's Bay or resign myself to remaining on the island, completely cut off until Harry returned. He told me the summer camp would definitely be closing up that weekend, and that he would be back next Wednesday. That meant five days of full hermit mode.

I decided I would take him down to Lion's Bay. Harry thought that was a good idea, even though this meant he'd have to find someone to take him to the cottage on his way back. But he told me that he'd never had a problem getting a boat ride to the island; it was under half an hour there and back, and he knew tons of people in Lion's Bay.

I guess I just didn't fancy having the thoughts I'd have, once I smoked some of that pot we'd brought in - I was entitled to an ounce a week. I knew that if I didn't have the boat, I'd wander around stoned and go off on paranoid trips about being marooned on that island forever, or something like that.

The trip down to Lion's Bay was f.u.c.k.i.n.g hell. Harry had dug up an old cracked oilskin for me that was far too small; I suspected it had originally belonged to his mother. The sleeves ended well short of my wrists and when I tried to put up the hood I tore its binding. I ended up steering the boat with my head b.a.r.e and wet and cold.

I got off the boat with Harry and he drove me to the store in his Volkswagen and then left for Vancouver. I didn't exactly have a ton of money to spend, so I just bought a carton of Rothmans, some snacks, and a couple of newspapers. Then I smoked cigarettes under the awning over the store entrance, waiting for the rain to pass or at least lighten a bit. It magically stopped raining after about forty minutes. It truly seemed like magic: rain one moment, sunshine the next.

I took off that stupid oilskin and walked down to the marina and the boat, passing under the highway. I thought of Peter Schmidt when I did that. I had the feeling that for the rest of my life, whenever I walked under a highway bridge or ramp, I'd think of that asshole. I really hated him for f.u.c.k.i.n.g my life up like that, and the fact that I had f.u.c.k.e.d up his pretty permanently didn't make me feel any better.

I had difficulty starting the motor, and for a moment I thought I was stuck. When it fired up I was so relieved I almost started thanking it. There was no way I could have paddled that boat to the island, it would have fallen dark before I got there. Harry had told me it could be done, but I wasn't Harry.

I got home all right and even managed to get the mooring knots right first try. My hair had dried, but I had a headache. I carried everything I'd bought into the house and then went round to the tool shed at the back. That was where all the pot we'd harvested was drying. Of course, it was much too moist to smoke but I took the smallest bud I could find, about half an ounce, and plucked some flowers off it into a preheated pan. I put the pan on the counter away from the stove and made myself a coffee, and decided it was time to create a couple of masterpieces that would capture someone's fancy strongly enough to make them reach for their wallet.

I began by having a go at the shotgun and the box of shells once again. This time around, I got all the proportions exactly right, but the box of shells still looked tame. I was working with a pencil so I broke my own rule and used the big soft eraser that I kept, in spite of my belief that if a drawing needed an eraser, it made as much sense to dump it and start anew.

I opened the box of cartridges and put a couple on the coffee table right next to the box, leaving the box open. I also broke the shotgun open, very slightly. That meant no cheating with the eraser; I had to start from scratch. But I knew that the new drawing would be much better, because I'd forgotten about a cardinal rule when doing the first one.

A drawing or a painting has to create the impression something had just happened, and also that something is about to happen. This holds true for everything: portraits, still life, landscapes, whatever. Everything shown in any picture is static by definition, but it has to ill.u.s.trate the flow of time. Otherwise it seems lifeless, and that doesn't work. You can be drawing a piece of rock or a stone, but it must have life. It has to show the story of that stone.

While I was drawing, it struck me that Harry, Harry's father and I were all somehow connected through Peter Schmidt. A mathematician or someone like that has calculated that everyone anywhere on Earth is separated by at most six other people from everyone else. Seven person-to-person contacts are all that separate you from connecting with anyone, anywhere.

An Eskimo who has never left Greenland can be connected that way to a Zulu in South Africa: say, one of the sailors on ma boat the Eskimo sees once every two years has a sister. That sister works as a nurse in hospital, and another nurse she's friendly with has a brother who has visited South Africa some time earlier, and had a long talk with a local black guy, partly because he wanted to show his contempt for the apartheid laws. That black guy, in turn, has a Zulu friend - you get the picture. And that makes just five person-to-person connections between the Eskimo and the Zulu.

I was aware of all that, but I was still spooked by the Schmidt connection. Of course Schmidt and Harry had never met, but as Harry had told me the other day, his father had met Schmidt. He was interrogated together with a bunch of other truckers who were regulars on the Trans-Canada highway between Vancouver and Calgary. There were a lot of them, and likely all of them were guilty of doing something illegal because people that never, ever broke the law just didn't exist. So they would all be shifty during the police interview, and Schmidt wouldn't have been so easy to pick out from that crowd.

After I'd finished drawing the shotgun, I had a go at drawing Roch out of memory. I had to do that because I kept thinking about Roch. I had thought about calling him while I was in Lion's Bay, standing under the awning and smoking and waiting for the weather to clear. The post office was right next door to the store, but I had left my notebook with the phone number on the island. It was just as well, I would have probably felt such great relief talking to him that I'd have blurted out something stupid.

I drew Roch leaning against the beam of a wooden railing. I drew him three-quarters front, hands clasped on the beam, one buttock slightly lifted off the beam as if Roch was about to walk away. He was looking at something to his left, and his profile suggested he didn't like what he saw. I had no idea why I had portrayed him like that, and I really had to comb my mind before I realized I had seen him strike a pose like that when we were staying at his family cottage by the lake.

I kept making breaks to make myself a coffee or some tea and munch on a shortbread and smoke a cigarette, so it was getting dark by the time I'd finished drawing Roch. I made myself a plate of sausage fried with onions and a side of boiled potatoes, and drank a beer to my meal. Then I read about the battle of Jutland for a while before the food and the beer knocked me out for the night.

I woke up before dawn and had to take the lamp into the kitchen to make myself a coffee. I stayed in the kitchen for two more coffees, I was too lazy to go back and forth with the lamp in one hand and the coffee mug in the other. Anyway, it was warmer in the kitchen than in the front room. It was raining again, the drops pitter-pattering on the kitchen windows. I hoped the weather would change when the sun came up, because I wanted to draw and paint a whole series that day. I needed good light for that.

But it kept raining, and after breakfast I stretched out on the sofa and tried to have a nap. I couldn't, I kept thinking about my parents and Toronto in general. My life there had been very comfortable, and I found myself wondering why the hell I had found it so unpleasant. I didn't feel so hostile towards my parents and Josh any more, and at one point even began to regret I had left Toronto. I could have studied at the University of Toronto while living in a big, comfortable house with a big, beautiful garden in the back, eating and drinking far better than I was presently.

It was a relief to fall asleep and stop thinking about all this bullshit. It was bullshit because the moment I returned to Toronto with the teary-eyed hope of a warm reunion, there would be a couple of fights with my parents and Josh would find a way to demonstrate why he was ranked the top asshole in the city, and I would be staring at a branch of a tree in that lovely back garden wishing I had the guts to just hang myself and end it all.

It was still raining when I woke up. The light was too bad to draw, so I attempted a watercolor of the view through the window and f.u.c.k.e.d it up so badly it was just incredible. After I'd ripped that picture up and stopped cursing, I had another go and it was just as bad. All the colors were wrong, it seemed I'd completely lost my touch for mixing and diluting paint to give me the effect I wanted.

I took a break and went into the kitchen and checked on the pot I'd left to dry. I had put it in the smaller frying pan and placed the pan on the counter as far from the stove as possible, but some of the vapor from the cooking had settled on it anyway. When I held a fat pinch of pot to my nose and sniffed, I thought I could detect a faint hint of fried sausage and onions. But at least some of it was dry enough to smoke.

I rolled myself a big joint and smoked it and it was a big mistake.

I got absolutely no more work done that day. I spent it smoking joints every couple of hours and wandering around the house without purpose and sitting on the sofa and staring at that second, ugly, f.u.c.k.e.d up watercolor. Of course I saw great merit in it now that I was stoned. I even regretted tearing up the first one for a while. Pot could make me really stupid if I didn't watch out, it could make a turd seem profound. And that was happened to me that day, I saw great meaning in everything, and signs of a great design or plan in the way everything was turning out for me.

Later on, I reached for the good old battle of Jutland and spent a lot of time examining all the grainy, black and white photographs. I concentrated on the portraits of all the naval officers involved and it seemed to me they were all full of shit. They seemed self-righteous and confident to the point of arrogance, and I actually felt evil satisfaction when the caption under the picture stated that the guy I was looking at got killed during the battle.

It was a largely wasted day, and when I was turning in I really hoped the weather, and thus the light, would be better the next day.