Part 1

I worked as a packer in a picture factory, a hardwood floor installer, and a house painter. I lived in three different apartments, and I moved in and out of two relationships. In January, I found myself living in a room with a shared kitchen and shared toilet over a Dionysus’ burger bar joint across the street from McDonald’s in a rundown neighbourhood on Lakeshore Boulevard.

I sit in my filthy room with a broken hospital bed. The mattress is stained by urine, vomit, blood… and other things. I go out one evening to buy orange sheets and a blue blanket for fifteen dollars at the Salvation Army. I walk on wet, freezing sidewalks to the laundromat. I’m cold and ice and salt crunch under my feet. I put six dollars in quarters into the washer, and then another six dollars into the dryer to clean the Salvation Army linens. As they tumble in the dryer, I go to the Dollar Store next door and buy a clock with a snowman, and a bottle of green shampoo, all for a dollar. The snowman wears tails and a chipped top hat. At a dirty little grocery store I pick up a box of salt.

After the linens dry, I lug them in an oversized plastic bag to my room where I smoke and drink tap water and stare out the open window and smoke more. I sit on the orange sheets that separate me from the stained mattress: my feet under me, the blue blanket over my shoulders – a tribesman of the doomed. I look around the room and listen to the coughing of old, lonely men behind the dirty, darkened walls. Wallpaper peels. I hear rumbling from the fridge in the kitchen at the end of a long, narrow hallway. A padlock secures the fridge door. Scared to set my bare feet on the floor, I smoke more. The cry of Muddy Waters’s guitar seeps up from the bar below. I stand up and open the window. The freezing draft hits me in the chest, drops to my feet, blows through the pages of the ESL books on the wobbly brown coffee table, bangs against the locked door and disappears. Snow quietly drifts inside.

I sit on the bed. I dip my finger into the salt. I lick it. I pour salt into my palm and observe its purity. I throw the salt onto the filthy carpet to disinfect the poverty. It doesn’t work.

I didn’t go to work today. This is my paid holiday at the end of January. I don’t want to see anybody. I won’t call my parents today. I smoke and drink and look out the window. I forget myself for a while and then my body shakes. I sweat a cold sweat. I want to crawl into bed. Not this bed, the other bed, the bed with the warm body now sleeping. She’s gone. She’s gone and I’m out. I shouldn’t have been soft. I should have been harder. Now I sit alone, and hardness surrounds me. I cry on the orange sheets under the blue blanket in this dirty, lonely place.