The Homeless Millionaire

My palms and fingers were coated with dried pus when I woke up the next day. I had been too busy cooking and eating and falling asleep to look for a bandage; Harry had told me there was some and where it was, but I'd forgotten. I had a box of Band-Aid in my bag, but sticking half a dozen of these on each hand seemed silly.

I washed my hands while I was making myself coffee, and it hurt. My hands hurt when I was drinking coffee, when I was smoking a cigarette, when I was holding a pencil. There was no way I would be doing any work that day. Anything I drew or painted would look like a crashed car whose bodywork had been repaired with a sledgehammer.

I made myself breakfast and caught myself hissing theatrically, my hands weren't hurting that much. It was a piece of stupid acting meant to convince a lurking, watching spirit that my hands hurt too much for me to do any work. That spirit, that guy inhabited my own self. He was the brother of my paranoid pal, just not as talkative. He preferred to watch and sneer silently.

After breakfast I picked up the newspapers I'd bought when I was dropping Harry off in Lion's Bay. They were a couple of days old by then. Both had articles about Peter Schmidt's murder, and the murders he'd committed earlier. They were maybe a column long, and there were no pictures.

People were losing interest in Peter Schmidt; there'd been a fresh murder. This time, an Indian hooker got stabbed in Gastown, where I had slept that first night in Vancouver. It was quite possible that she had been sleeping there, too. From the sound of it, she wasn't a high-class hooker, and her age was given as forty five. She'd probably been reduced to giving handjobs for a buck and blowjobs for five. What a life! But it was the only life she'd had, and I thought it would be nice if someone did to her killer what I had done to Peter Schmidt.

The Bella Notte bed & breakfast was still looking for a night receptionist, light housekeeping duties. They seemed to be having hard time finding the right guy. If they were what I thought they were, they needed a tall, presentable guy - someone who didn't turn people off s.e.x when they looked at him - and he had to be prepared to deal with sheets sticky with male and female juice. It wasn't easy to find someone like that. There was a shortage of crazy art school students on the job market.

I put the papers away and smoked for a while and wondered what it would be like, working there. I definitely had to check that place out when I was back in Vancouver, even if the job had been taken. Especially if it had been taken, in fact; it was better that I wait until it had been taken. Otherwise I'd probably take it myself, and end up neck-deep in unsavory shit of some kind.

It was one of those cloudy-with-sunny-breaks days outside, with the occasional drizzle from a heavier cloud: there were two during my time with the papers on the sofa. One lasted all of a couple of minutes. I suddenly remembered there was a ton of mushrooms all cleaned and ready for cooking. So I ran a check and it was like I suspected, they were beginning to turn dark and mushy. It was the last possible moment to cook them.

I dropped the idea of bandaging my hands - I would have to change the bandage after handling those mushrooms - and set about cooking the lot. This involved chopping a ton of onions, and my raw hands really got a workout from onion juice. I told myself this would have a beneficial effect on the healing process. But then I remembered that hardcore Mafia guys dipped their bullets in garlic juice so that a wounded victim would die of blood poisoning. I was rinsing my hands every two seconds after I'd thought that.

It was apparent I'd spend a good hour or more over the f.u.c.k.i.n.g stove, so I got myself a beer and rolled a joint from the bud I'd brought in a couple of days earlier. I had just smoked a small part of it, there was enough left to keep me stoned for three days and nights. The joint and the beer worked wonders, my hands almost stopped hurting. I was starting to like Kokanee True Ale, that was how far I'd fallen.

I had the bright idea to slice some sausage into mushroom-and-onion mess in the frying pan. There was a serious sausage shortage developing. I hoped Harry would have the foresight to bring some more when he returned. I hoped Harry would return, period. He was a very likeable guy. I had the thought that having three sisters trained him to be that way. Otherwise his life at home with them would have been sheer hell, with his one-against-three situation.

The mushroom stew I produced actually smelled really good, but I lost any appetite I had doing all that cooking. So I left it covered on the stove over a tiny flame; it would be even better after it had simmered gently for a while. Then I got myself another beer and rolled another joint and went to continue my day on the sofa.

Pot affects different people in different ways. It made me aware of every tiny detail of everything around me, and everything happening inside my head. My memory took on superhuman powers. I'd remember something that happened years and years earlier, and I could recall where it happened and with whom and what everyone had been wearing, what everyone said and did and even the thoughts I'd had at that time.

Many people I knew got paranoid because of pot-induced sensitivity, but my paranoid pal actually seemed to like that stuff. He relaxed, and frequently went off for a nap when I got stoned, especially when I was also drinking booze. I guess he calculated that when I got drunk and stoned, I was going to provide him with plenty of useful material anyway. He didn't have to stay vigilant, he could slack off a little. There would be plenty of fresh ammo waiting for him when he woke up.

I decided that I'd have another beer and went to get it leaving my cigarette in the ashtray, and it quickly turned out these were the smartest two moves I could have possibly made. The mushroom stew in the pan had boiled, and the watery froth that had escaped from under the cover had put out the flame. The kitchen reeked of gas. I turned off the stove and threw the windows open and then stood shivering and drinking beer until the kitchen was properly aired out.

My palms were beginning to itch, and they were leaking sticky serum. I rinsed my hands with cold water and got another beer and rolled another joint and went back to the sofa. All this activity woke up my paranoid pal: he got up from his snooze and got busy making notes for future reference, underlining the words 'gas explosion' twice. But I knocked him off his stride with that second joint, he couldn't tell his a.s.s from his head and he gave up and went back to sleep.

I couldn't tell my a.s.s from my head either. I lolled around the sofa for the rest of that day, mouth open and waiting for another sip of beer and another hit from the cigarette. I remembered exactly the first time Josh hit me. I was four years old at that time. I had been standing beside his leg while he was looking through something on his desk in his room, and I suddenly had this crazy impulse to bite his leg. I remembered that I'd thought it would be fun.

So I tried to growl like the tiger I'd seen on TV the other day, and grabbed his leg with my arms and bit his calf as hard as I could. It was summer and he was wearing shorts and it must have really hurt. He shouted and smacked my head with an open hand, and the shock of that blow was so big I instantly let go and sat down on the floor and started to cry. That earned me another smack, and the admonition that if I didn't stop bawling right away he'd beat me to a pulp. He also promised me the same treatment if I said anything about the incident to my parents.

That was the first time anyone hit me in my life, and from that time onward I feared Josh and hated him in equal measure.

It started raining full-time around three in the afternoon, and I spent at least an hour watching the patterns made by the water on the window panes. I swore to myself I'd have to paint exactly that, capturing the fluidity with which they constantly changed. Watercolor was ideal for that purpose, I could use more water than usual and let it move the paint when I tilted the page instead of doing everything with the brush.

Sadly, it had gotten too dark in the meantime for any painting, because I was so excited I was ready to give it a try right away. The wounds on my hands wouldn't matter so much with that approach, too. Of course they never were serious enough to prevent me from holding a slim paintbrush, but I was bound to jerk it around a little when the pain hit. I was so wary of painting because my ego had taken a heavy battering the previous time I'd tried to paint something, and I wasn't eager for an encore.

As I stood watching all this waterplay on the window pane, I suddenly had the thought that Harry knew I'd killed Schmidt. I was virtually certain that he did. My paranoid pal had woken up much refreshed and full of beans and he was busy making up for lost time. He reminded me that one of the cops told the papers Peter Schmidt had been killed by a small to medium knife with a one-sided blade, such as a folding switchblade or a Finnish knife. Then he reminded me that I had been using my knife when I was harvesting pot with Harry. He'd even commented that it was a nice knife, and admired the metal wolf's head on the handle.

Just a moment earlier, I had been congratulating myself for inventing a revolutionary new technique for painting water sliding down a pane of glass. But my paranoid pal tripped me up while I was strutting around proudly, and I landed with my face in shit. It was very bad shit. I got full-time paranoid, and the only thought that kept me sane was that Harry wouldn't be such an asshole as to shop me to the police. He had known Peter Schmidt was a major asshole for a long, long time, thanks to his dad. And he wouldn't risk cops finding out about his little pot operation, which they could from me.

This went on for a while and only ended when I realized I was hungry. I went to the kitchen and pigged out on the mushroom and sausage stew. I ate a lot of bread with it and drank two more beers and that knocked my paranoid friend into submission, he just couldn't think straight any more.

He staggered off to have some sleep, and so did I.