Playing with garbage.

1998, Campbell River Trailer Pack

Ryan Dewing, a south African with a big burn scar on his left arm. His mom supposedly bumped into him and spilled boiling water all over the kid, and now there were burn scars up and down his arm and chest. He was a funny looking kid. I think his mother was a gypsy. Jeff Swim dated her briefly. Sharn Dewing was her name. Her room was an eclectic mix of south African art, paintings, little knick nacks and details from different cultures. She also had a daughter, Raquel, a young blonde girl who avoided us most of the time. She used to fight a lot with her brother. He was often mean to her, and would hit her to the point of making her cry. I used to hang out at Ryan's trailer. We played sega games on his old tube tv. It had been heavily magnetized to where the picture was all funky shades of purple and green. I remember playing some basketball game, Rambo, and others. He also had a model train set, complete with Styrofoam terrain. That was the first thing I noticed when we met. It seemed so out of place. We worked on it for hours. One night, Ryan got all weird, started talking about god and god's love, Jesus, etc. Bible stories. That's when he really started to weird me out. I kept my distance.

One random night, his mother, who often biked in the forest, came home from freezing weather conditions. She put her feet in plastic bags to... prevent hypothermia?

One time, Ryan and I began delivering small trial bottles of Sunny D to the other trailers in the neighborhood. I think at one point we ended up drinking more than we delivered.

Fast forward to 2007. I'm working at the Vancouver Sandman hotel on Davie street. I'd moved there over the summer after refusing to continue working at Staples Soul sucking death job. I spent a few weeks after leaving the job just sleeping all day, eating, and playing WoW, trying to avoid the world as much as possible. This went on till I couldn't pay my rent anymore, and Char Aimers decided it was time for me to move to Vancouver with my sister. Immediately I got in with my sister Emery's work crowd. A shady bunch of white people and urban gays. One of the gays followed me to the cybercafe and began playing WoW near me. Creeped me out. My sister would invite them over for Coronas and we'd go out places, even on New Years and on some boat together to get hammered. I remember puking off the side of the boat and passing out for the night. Had to work the next day. Who were these people? It always sat uneasily with me that it seemed so difficult to get a bead on who these people were. Out came the mask again. Was it my way of replying to their fake acting? On at least 3 occasions random dudes came up to me on the streets after i'd smoked weed in public. One of them said I looked like elvis. Another sat with me on the bench and we talked about halo before I got weirded out and walked away. Yet another came up to me on Canada day and started talking about people, the government, and all these other things. Something about these people just didn't add up. For the most part, i'd pick up a few key words or expressions from these folks, and determined that it was time for me to leave.

I remember walking to work at 6 am, locking the door behind me, and seeing Vancouver as it woke up. The old school building where I took night classes in creative writing, smoking joints on benches under old trees and near the beach after work at sunset. Passing the Hypatia sex shop on the way to work, wondering about all the sex toys. I read about Hypatia and often thought of her when I passed the shop in the morning. To me her name felt a lot like saying Labia. There was another sex shop right beside work, filled with bondage equipment showing right out the front window. It was an interesting contrast to be right beside a hotel. One of my favourite things to do was sweep the front entrance outside in the morning chill, right around sunrise. Often in the morning, I'd see a giant walrus of a man, homeless, wondering around outside Mac's convenience store carrying a stained white blanket. He'd usually be hollering about something, waiting for free leftovers from the store. Sometimes he was just staring blankly into space. He semi-reminded me of the alcoholic englishman who often peeked out of his apartment room window in a back alley behind my work. He had a thick accent and would go on and on about different things, sometimes talking to nobody at all. One day, in the poring rain, a suspicious vehicle came up to the window and exchanged a large package with the man. The package looked like a loaf of bread, but it might as well have been a brick of hash. Strange people would show up in the alley looking for redeemable recyclables. Scott Johnson, the dangerously fat hotel manager, often stood in the back parking lot smoking cigarettes with the Iranian maintenance man whose name I can't recall.

How had I even been hired at that job? Sloba Milosovich.... she hired me one random October day after i'd already been interviewed at a downtown Chapters. And then I'd already been hired at another hotel as a maintenance man. I only showed up for one shift before being hired on at the Sandman. It was a thoughtless job. Eventually a gay hotel serviceman took Slobas spot, and I now started reporting to him. Can't remember his name. I came to work stoned driving shampoo machines up and down the hallway for hours, then cleaning the pool, and pouring Eucalyptus shampoo on the walls in the spa room. One time I found suspiciously placed porn magazines on top of a vending machine. Even though the porn was filled with naked girls, I felt certain the gay guy had planted them there. I took the porn home and put it in the same drawer I kept all my weed materials.

Every morning I brought apples to the front desk in a glass bowl, making sure to clean them and shine them before hand. Got a lot of calls to unplug clogged, shitty toilets. On more than one occasion, some Brazilian kids clogged up the sink with weed resin from their bong. I plunged and it all belched out like black tar and the sink spilled over. They left joints all over the place. Sometimes i'd find unsmoked joints that had fell from the balcony. Rustom, the old east Indian who worked the houseman job before I'd been hired, joked that I spent all day playing with garbage.

I went on a date once with my redheaded coworker named Ashley. She told me about her gay dad. We talked about Star Trek voyager and took shots in some small mexican food place. Something was off about her. She kept wanting to take me home, but it didn't feel right. Soon after, I pretended to want to join up with the Navy to get back to Ottawa, but really I went to play computer games and redo a semester in grade 12. I ended up graduating with awards and went to an extremely awkward prom wearing a hot polyester suit from Moores. We had a great time. I'll never forget Mr Sinha's english class or Ms Bryans history class. I wrote good essays for her high on adderall. She docked marks once for using Mein Kampf as a source.