When I was eighteen I lived for a time in a basement suite in North Vancouver. It was my second rental after leaving home and I was sharing the space with a room-mate. Our suite was the bottom floor of an old house that was owned by a South American woman. She was a single Mom with three children ranging in age from about nine to twelve. Her daughter was the eldest by a couple of years and her two boys were a year apart. She was about thirty-eight years old and had originally come from Ecuador. She had one of those names that require a paragraph to write down.
My room-mate was doing a lot of travelling in those days, usually on book buying forays to San Francisco, Portland or Los Angeles. I was cooking in a restaurant and my hours were from 4 PM until closing and I usually got wound down enough to sleep by 3 or 4 AM. Once, the landlady knocked on the basement door around five o clock in the afternoon on my day off and asked me if I would like to have supper with her and her brood.
I had been smelling the intoxicating aromas emanating from her South American kitchen for months and so, I happily acquiesced. I gussied up a bit and went up the wooden stairs into the kitchen of the big house. We had a lovely meal of rice, green beans and eye of the round, sliced thin and rubbed with cumin, black pepper and chili. After being soaked in lime juice for awhile, the meat was quickly seared in a cast iron skillet with a bit of olive oil. There was a jar of paper-thin sliced purple onions which had been soaked in salt and lime juice to spoon over our rice along with the pot liquor from the skillet. It was sublime!
Her phone rang and the cook curled up in her chair and chattered away in Spanish, which I understood about three-quarters of. There was lots of talk about their church, some gossip about other relatives and I was able to discern that she was speaking to a cousin who lived in another part of town. While she chatted, I went to see all the many things that children like to show to their visitors. The boys had previously heard me playing my guitar and asked me if I could teach them. The little girl showed me her room and her stuffed animal collection. Presently their Mum called us all back to the kitchen for dessert.
Her and I sipped coffee while the children watched TV in her living room. The Señora noticed that my jeans had two holes, one in each knee. She asked me if she could fix them. I said she sure could, thanked her very kindly and went downstairs to change. When I returned, she poured herself a beer, lit a cigarette and began making the finest hand-sewn patches I had ever seen in my life.
When I was a young child in Louisiana, my father bought my allotment of clothes for the year at the end of each Summer. I wasn't allowed to choose any part of it. I was a tree climbing, snake catching, outdoors boy and usually cowboyed my pants and shoes within days. To teach me a lesson whenever a hole appeared in the knee of my jeans, my father made my mother iron on large fire engine red, oversized round patches on which he cut ugly zigzag edges with pinking shears, so they looked like blazing suns on a clown's outfit. This shaming always invited teasing, insults, comments and fights at school and on the street wherein I would come home some days with half my shirt ripped away.
So, the sight of her professionally done, small, smooth-edged, faded denim patches really warmed my heart. They were made of denim faded to the same degree as the cloth they were sewn onto and were as small as could possible. The ends were tucked under all around exactly three millimetres and the corners were reinforced with turquoise coloured thread. I couldn't wait to get more holes in my pants!
I was invited on several other occasions to join the family upstairs for supper and I began to spend my time off work with the two boys catching garter snakes and playing guitar. I was called upon to do little repairs in the big house and gladly did so. I was warned by my room-mate, whose parents had warned him, that the lady was known to be problematic. I have never consciously allowed other people to make my own mind up. Thus, the warnings went unheeded and the more time I spent with the family, the more I liked them.
I learned from the woman that her ex-husband was a Pastor and an Elder of some Christian denomination down in Washington State and that although they were divorced, she still attended the Vancouver chapter of his church. One evening, I was asked to accompany her to the church. It was a vibrant, dynamic service with people prophesying, speaking in tongues and praising the Lord until I am sure his Holy ears turned red. A word about my early religious exposure, indoctrination and influences is in order before continuing this tale.
To that end, my father, a German/Welsh/Irish Canadian had been a Junior Hockey playing alter boy as a child in 1930s Toronto and he ran away to sea at the age of fifteen. He subsequently became a lapsed Catholic and was a self proclaimed atheist by the time I was born. When he was asked what his religion was by a stranger, he would tell them with a grin that he was a Zoroastrian and that he worshipped fire.
As a baby in Texas, I was baptized and I also attended a Unitarian church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where I learned about Jesus in a study group led by my Mother. I was sent to a Christian Vacation Bible School before starting Grade One, in Houston, Texas and I had further religious programming in that institution. I went to a Baptist church with my Texas Cherokee Grandmother in Beaumont, Texas whenever I was staying there with her. She always sat in the front pew, put the most money in the pot, sang the loudest and was the most off key.
After the service we would return to her porch and her girlfriends would appear as soon as they had changed out of their Church clothes. Then, they would drink beer and gossip as I played guitar for them and kept watch for the Preacher. He was always trying to catch them having fun and was never once successful. I would give a sign, the beer would disappear and a jug of iced tea would appear. He would be given a glass and entertained by my guitar until he left of his own accord.
My Grandfather, when he was ashore from his ship engineer’s life at sea, used to lecture me for hours on end about his own unique understanding of the Bible. He read and meditated on it for many hours a day and had been doing so for most of his life. He attended no Church but I never met a more devout reader of the Bible up to this day.
He kept a jug of Bourbon whisky in a brown paper bag under the kitchen sink and poured a big shot into his coffee each morning before taking a handful of natural Swiss vitamin supplements. He got by on Grandma's second hand smoke for his nicotine. Under his big leather-bound Bible was a magazine from his native Sweden with a home-made, brown paper cover. Inside those pages were pictures of some buxom blonde nurses doing things far beyond the call of duty.
When I was about twelve years old, my elder sister heard about a Christian Revival Tent Meeting in Lynn Valley in North Vancouver. We had just moved there from Louisiana and we both had no friends to play with, so we went to it. The Preacher was from Texas and the familiar sound of his honey smoked twang and thundering brimstone baritone, shook something loose in me. I welled up with an acute awful shame, as if I had kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, coached Hitler, instructed Attila and Genghis on warfare, woven the crown of thorns, dropped the atom bomb and robbed the Wells Fargo Stage Coach.
I cried so damned hard that I nearly choked to death. The Preacher asked if anybody in the crowd felt like they had been "touched by His Hand.” I went up to the front of that tent and conveyed in words appropriate to a child that I felt like I had been bitch-slapped, absolutely and thoroughly, tied to the whipping post and threshed as goddamned silly as a shit-house rat by His Big Holy Hand and that I was sorry and ashamed twice to death and back again for every rotten, horrible, underhanded, disgusting, evil thing I had ever done since growing my baby teeth.
It never occurred to me then, that in my twelve years on the planet, I had done little more in life other than obey adults. The Preacher put his hands on me, smacked me on the forehead and told me I was Born Again and that I was also now Forgiven. Then, we learned a little Eskimo kayak rowing song in a little room he had set up for kids. I still remember and can sing that song in Inuktitut today.
Six years later, at the second service that I attended at my landlady's Vancouver church, I found myself walking up to the front. I was filled to the brim with the same burden of unspeakable horror as when I had been twelve years old in the Lynn Valley Revival Tent. I placed my cigarettes on the alter and gave them over to Jesus. I was smacked again on the forehead and told by the Pastor that I was Born Again. I didn't tell him that it was my Second Spiritual Birth.
I began to attend three times a week to my landlady’s church and in between those services, we both went to Bible study meetings in various private homes. Within a short time, my days consisted of 24 hours of Praising the Lord. I went to a local North Vancouver bookstore and bought myself a venerable Bible with an exhaustive concordance. Being an autist, I read that puppy from cover to cover, twice and carefully so.
Most of my acquaintances in those days shrank away from me as if I had wet leprosy. I took it as a sign and a confirmation that I was indeed on the right road and that they were all dancing into the jaws of Hell. Within a few weeks, I was leading a Bible study group, because no one else had read and pondered the Bible as a whole. They all, however, could flip through it and grab a quote out of context to win an argument; much like a lawyer can article over old cases to find a precedent with which to win a case that otherwise shouldn't be won.
Over seven intense weeks this activity went on. So much time was spent seeking signs and confirmations and endlessly discussing the intentions of God, that we began to neglect both our nourishment and our sleep. The deprivation made us crazy as Summertime squirrels. I couldn't see it because all of the congregation was doing the same abuse to themselves. I was eventually introduced to the Elders and to my landlady’s ex-husband. The Pastor told me that I was very spiritual and that he could feel it when in my presence. He said that I was to await a sign and that soon God would tell me where in the world I was to go and what I was to do.
At that time, my ego was slightly puffed by being praised by a Pastor. Near the end of the seventh week of these holy doings, my landlady told me that she didn't think Jesus would mind if we smoked again. Jesus, duly gave me back the nicotine habit that I had given him only weeks before. I was next told that my landlady didn't think that Jesus would mind if her and I had a beer from time to time. Our eyes started to take on a hollow glow from lack of sleep and undernourishment.
One evening, we were listening to record albums in the living room upstairs and my landlady told me that she knew that Jesus wouldn't mind if we went to her bed, being as how we were now spiritually evolved and all. We did just that and Nature prevailed. During our short, awkward liaison our emotions were heightened to an equal degree opposite the conceptual abyss of self-inflicted, shame-driven Biblical sin.
As we were getting dressed, her children, who had been asleep in their own beds began pounding on their Mother's locked bedroom door wailing and shrieking, “Not again, Mommy! Not, again!”
The woman didn't bat an eyelash but I experienced a sadness that I hadn’t the words to articulate. After a few more days of sleep deprivation she told me that God had given her clear instructions. We were to get married forthwith, proceed to Ecuador and await further instructions.
Meanwhile, my abandoned room-mate had planned and cooked a great Thanksgiving Day feast for our combined families and friends. The landlady and I decided to announce our upcoming wedding at the gathering. When we did so, most everyone cleared out of the house, food untouched.
My room-mate swore at us and my family pleaded and threatened to no avail. It was God's will we be married and the fact that they couldn't abide by it was proof. Once exhausted, everyone went home. I went upstairs with the landlady and she began to pace back and forth in a disturbing way. By three AM that morning, she had been told by God to take the title to her house, sign it over to a neighbour, purchase two tickets to Ecuador and leave immediately.
I had started to emerge from the seven week spell and I asked her what God had said about her children. When she looked at me, I saw something that wasn't human behind her eyes. The hollow thing using her voice said that God would take care of them and insisted that we leave immediately. Upon that pronouncement and my realization that a mother was planning to abandon her offspring, I was hurtled back into my normal reality and cognition.
I took her hand and did not show her that anything was wrong. I locked the house and told her God had just told me that we must stop at the home of some mutual Ecuadorian friends to give them her keys and her property title. She complied and I drove us over.
I rang the bell to wake the family up. I knew that the woman of that house was a kind, strong, practical and practising Christian. I had to communicate most everything to her without words. The landlady was possessed by something terrible and was poised to mentally snap asunder at any moment.
The clever woman told me in front of the landlady, to go outside and await a sign from God as to whether or not I was to marry and go to Guayaquil. She pulled down a huge Spanish Bible and began flipping through it on the kitchen table. I came back in after a half hour and reported the sign that I had seen, which told me that we were not to marry and not to go away, either.
After a heated discourse in Spanish, the landlady, crestfallen and crumpled, shrugged her shoulders, took back her house title and her house keys and drove us home. We didn't speak on the way.
The realization came to me then like a bucket of cold sea water that the church was using everyone’s money in order to run a large permanent compound and to fund ventures all over the world. The congregation, once thoroughly brain-washed, were sent hither and thither to do the bidding of the shadowy Elders.
As I lay in my room downstairs, listening to my room-mate talking with some of our friends, I became aware of a wind like a tornado. I was sucked away and seemingly attached to some kind of cord. When I reached the end of the tether, I was jerked to an abrupt halt like a calf that has been roped on the run and hitched off to the pommel of a saddle on a stopped horse.
An awful pain gripped my heart. I can only describe it by saying it was as if a silver cord was attached to the root of my heart and if it broke, I would be swept away into the wind to fetch up on some distant place. I gripped the cord with both fists and wrapped it around my hands like Spencer Tracey in The Old Man and The Sea when he hooks the marlin on a hand-line. The cord bit into my flesh and I gripped tighter. The pressure on my heart was relieved and I began to slowly reel myself in. The wind abated. My decision had been made for life and the taking of responsibility and I knew it.
I rose up and apologized to every single person who had attended the Thanksgiving party. It took me two full days. I told each person what I had learned from the experience. I started to eat like a man and sleep like a man again. Someone phoned the Pastor who came and took the poor children. I moved away but remained friends with the kindly Ecuadorian family, who had assisted in breaking the spell. After some time, I was good as gold and after some years, I was working as a gas-fitter, installing furnaces and water heaters.
One morning, I was dispatched to install some new natural gas appliances at a house in a posh part of North Vancouver. I arrived and measured up the job after setting up my pipe-threading equipment and removing the new appliances from their crates. I met the woman of the house and she looked vaguely familiar. She led me into another room which stands out in my memory for its blatant Masonic décor. It was inhabited by her husband, who sat at an expensive little table, hand-painting tiny pewter soldiers and referring to a large book of illustrations to assure historical accuracy down to the colour of their clayed puttees and suspenders.
The floor was black and white hard linoleum squares laid perfectly so there were no trimmed off tiles at the ends. The walls were of painted plaster and the windows were exceedingly small and barred with heavy iron. The man looked to me like a child happily working on a colouring book. His table and chair had been placed in a small pool of natural light for his work. He looked up and acknowledged me and bent again to his task. It was like a chessboard whereon the Bishop was re-painting the Pawns.
I was shown where to install the new appliances and then the woman disappeared. I worked away, singing in Spanish to myself. After I had started to put away my pipe vise and cutting oil, the woman of the house appeared at her doorway and asked me if I would come inside her kitchen. I figured she was going to give me a coffee or a biscuit. I cleaned my boots, dusted off my boiler suit, walked in and sat down.
She said that she wanted to talk to me and asked if I would enjoy a sandwich. I said yes I would enjoy that, if it was no trouble for her. To my amazement, she whipped up a gourmet tuna fish sandwich on excellent bread and poured me a big glass of ice cold milk. It was really a nice treat. She sat down opposite and studied my face for a moment before speaking.
“I have seen you around for quite awhile. I know who you are.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I have seen you frequently inside my bookstore and I know that you went to High School with my son and most of his friends.”
“Yeah? Which bookstore, Ma'am? I frequent lots of them.”
“On Lower Lonsdale. I own a Christian bookstore. You bought a nice Kenneth Copeland Bible and some other materials a few years back.”
“Oh wow! Now, I remember you too. We had some good talks in your store. I thought you looked familiar when I got here, but I couldn't place you.”
She smiled a beatific smile and blessed me. Then I asked her son’s name to make sure he was who I thought he was. She confirmed his identity and waited for me to finish my delicious sandwich. I did not like her son, but saw no point in telling her that. My reasons were, firstly, that he and I had never socialized, although we knew many people in common. Ours was a difference of personalities with no bad blood. My other reason was much more recent.
My hostess gave a short speech detailing how I was very different from the others of my generation and how our world was sliding into Tartarus. Soon, she branched into asking me if I would try to speak with her son and to his friends. Maybe, she said, they would take spiritual tuition more readily from a long-hair like myself than from stuffy old Preachers and their parents. It touched me to see her concern for her son and for his friend’s spiritual well-being. It impressed me to see her broach the subject in such a determined manner.
I told her that most assuredly, if the opportunity ever came up in a natural way and I was solicited by her son to give vent on matters spiritual, that I would be happy and proud to speak my heart to him and to anyone else. I made it clear that I was not a proselytizer, not a recruiter of souls, nor was I in possession of any greater understanding of reality than her or anyone else. Spiritual growth is a permanent work in progress, I told her.
Her expression was like that of a realtor who is pleased with the direction of negotiations but is far from celebrating the desired final outcome. It was a toe in the door for her and she was happy about that, I could tell. After she cleared my dish and poured us some coffee, she sat back down. She told me that there was a Second matter that she wanted to address and it was of even greater importance. She straightened a stray lock of coiffed hair and adjusted her collar.
Full of albacore, milk, rye bread and curiosity; I listened intrigued, as she related to me family news that her beloved son had recently taken to dating a certain girl. This particular girl, she said, was far beneath the calibre of person her son should be mixing with and it greatly worried her. She said that this matter actually took precedence over what she had requested earlier.
She continued to elaborate and to underscore the severity of the problem she intimated to me in passionate, hushed tones, an assemblage of words that could have been used in the most delicate of company, but which conveyed unequivocally that her son’s girlfriend was from a terrible, broken family of lost souls. A band of awful misfits who were wholly given over to every species of irredeemable mortal sin and noxious wasting vice in an inter-generational hell-broth of crepuscular Stygian decay; all of which was exacerbated by poverty, poor breeding and a lack of higher education.
"They are not like us, Michael... not Christian like you and I," she said with gravity.
She resolved her brindled emotions into tears while writing out a cheque to the heating company for the gas-fitting work I had done. She soundly blew her nose and adjusted her hair again. In a moment or two, with a few deep breaths, she was again centred and composed.
I thanked her for the cheque and for the wonderful sandwich. I rose to leave and shook her soft hand, intimating that I could immediately assist with the Second Matter of her concern; for the girl in question was my own, very much beloved baby sister. You could have landed a plane in a fog using only her illuminated expression as a beacon.
fin