The Paintjob

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Sometimes technology brings about things that, for all their convenience and sophistication, create a completely new niche for enterprising lifeforms.

For example: toilets (or water closets as people so euphemistically termed them at one time) were big improvement on shitting in a pit or a bucket; and of course toilet paper was a big improvement on sharing a couple of grubby towels between a few people. I've heard that people used to use corn husks for that purpose, but it's the kind of detail that no one really talked about at the time, let alone wrote about, so it's mostly speculation as these trivial things get lost to history quickly.

It hasn't been until the late twentieth century that people discovered how to cook food without having to heat a whole oven up; the good thing about heating an oven to cook is that it naturally sterilizes itself with every use. Microwave ovens do not share this property.

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In my early 20's I met a guy named Jean-Paul downtown at the popular cafe that was located out front of our rehearsal space. We hit it off and got to talking about this and that. Jean-Paul had just moved out from Montreal and was surfing a friend's sofa temporarily, but needed a place for him and his girlfriend Marie to stay for at least the summer. I said that one of my roommates was moving out so they could take the spare room. He was thrilled and we made arrangements for the next week after we'd cleaned up the room.

Well, Jean-Paul and Marie moved in, and I couldn't believe how much stuff they had, for people who were just 'out from Montreal for a while' in a VW van. They had a mountain of clothes that wouldn't fit in the bedroom so they made a pile in the basement about ten feet across and three feet high. Between the two of them they used more than a full roll of toilet paper every day. Before they moved in, it took the three roomies and all their guests and sleepovers a few days to kill a roll. It became apparent after a while that it was Marie who used a giant wad just to dab after a pee, and if she crapped, well, there goes two thirds of a roll. I got to plunge that old toilet clear about every third day. I guess some people just think that it's normal. I guess it is normal in the life of a renter when the real estate market forces people to live in semi-domestic commune, three or five to a house.

As a little digression here, I should explain why I was living like this:

The 'rock-n-roll' band I was involved with needed a space where we could rehearse in our typically boisterous way, and also a place to freely party after late night gigs. The four of us sort of split up from the house we had been renting together for almost three years and rendezvoused regularily at a communally acquired place downtown. The group of us managed to find a couple of good sized rooms on street level down on Hastings, only a block from the Hotel whose Beverage Room has sustained Vancouver's much coveted Beer Selling Record for over twenty years in a row. The rent was cheap, and the location was perfect.

When I moved out of the band house (what we called the 'Hefty House') I got myself a place that had more yin than yang: with two lovely females of the same species, three felines, and two canines, among the more reputable occupants. Things seemed good.

Our business collective also had to do commerce from somewhere other than the house we had been living in for the past two and a half years: J__, our drummer, had begun selling a gram or two of fine local herb to a few friends, and within a year, the few friends turned into a steady parade of people pulling up in front of the house in a quiet residential neighbourhood. The band was using the basement to jam, and we weren't exactly quiet. The neighbours had begun complaining, and a couple of incidents had brought the police to the house. The obvious solution was to invest the profits in a 'proper' place of business, right in the downtown core near Victory Square, and right beside Hemp BC, the activist centre.

The rooms, what we called 'The Joint', were behind a cafe, you got to it by walking down a 97 foot hallway that was full of obscene graffiti, ugly chicken scratches authored by uninspired mean people. My friend Milo was a commercial painter by trade and an enthusiastic graffiti artist by night. Over the years he had developed a huge collection of miscellaineous gallons of nicely coloured paint, and donated them to our cause. The idea was to paint the gawdawful intimidating hallway in such a way that it would appear shorter than it actually was, and brighten the ambience that seemed to encourage a lot of nasty behaviour by misguided people.

We proceeded to haul the fifty gallons of paint down there, along with all the gear to go with them: sprayers, rollers, brushes, buckets, rags, and a pile of other stuff that may or may not be of actual use. We put it all in milkcrates and stored it in the corner of the secondary room that was the main lounge and rehearsal den.

The next afternoon when I got back down there to begin the paint job, I noticed that some of the stuff was missing(?!). A litre of paint thinner, a crappy brush, and a slot screwdriver had vanished in the twelve hours I was gone. The high caliber of customer that came through the place obviously perceived used painting supplies as a hot black market item, or a cool new addition to their hot-plate welfare special on the third floor of the Golden Crown Hotel. I had to hide the supplies under a tarp and pile a bunch of heavy things on top to keep the klepto-fingers out.

I tried painting during the day but stopped due to the incessant whining from the people using the washroom down the end of the hallway. So, I had to wait until after about eleven at night, when the place quieted down. I'd boot down on my motorcycle, park it on the sidewalk right in front of the glass doors, break out the paint etc, be at work by about midnight, and go until six in the morning. Every night I had to get rid of drunk people who were bored enough to want to help me, or guys who stood around babbling doped up nonsense, expecting some kind of mutual dialogue, until I made some impatient and irritated comment that sent them away. I noticed that the easiest way to double the length of time required to do something was to have a drunk person help.

The third night painting, my motorcycle got vandalized. This is a popular pastime for losers worldwide: take a fist-sized chunk of something stone-like and smash the exposed sparkplugs on a motorcycle engine. Apparently, a certain variety of greasy shitstain has some use for the little bits of porcelain that break off. Needless to say, the bike doesn't run too fucking well after that.

I was surprised that someone would do it while the bike was in plain view, I parked the thing right outside the glass doors to the hallway, risking a seventy five dollar ticket for driving on the sidewalk, just so I could see it. I guess someone waited for me to turn my back and then they started hammering away with a rock or brick.

In order to get home that morning, I had to remove the boots from the plug wires, and jam the wire over what was left of the copper conductor of the smashed plug. To keep it running I cranked the idle so the engine never dropped below 6000rpm, and just used the clutch or coasted. After that I started carrying spare sparkplugs.

On the fifth night I very nearly got into a fight with some big knucklehead who thought the colourful paintjob was 'gay'. Fortunately, some friends stepped in and there was no actual brawling. I've never been one for a casual brawl. By the time I'm angry enough to fight, I'm angry enough to kill. The vast majority of the fights I've been involved with, I was trying to save a friend from getting a nasty pummeling, and never really had to get angry, it was mostly yelling, pushing, and wrestling, then winding down for a couple of hours.

Many times I've been glad to live in Canada where there isn't a proliferation of cheap handguns, because if I carried one I would have used it on more than one occasion. Then I'd be writing this from prison, and I'm not, thankfully.

On the seventh night, my $350 (1991 Canadian dollars) lamb skin leather jacket got stolen by this dipshit named Yuri, who was one of the annoying people that stood around babbling nonsense at me, and was on the receiving end of a few irritated remarks. He's probably the same dicksore who liked to smash my plugs.

Fortunately, my 'business partners' let the jacket disappear right from under their noses, felt pretty bad about it and coughed up some money for a new one from their ready cash-flow. This time I got a really cool oilskin from Australia that worked even better on a motorcycle in the rain than the leather one.

On the tenth night I got a ticket for parking on the sidewalk, so on the eleventh night my bike got vandalized again because it wasn't parked it plain view. By now the cooling fins on both sides of the engine were chipped, thrashed, and bent from the weekly hammering, and even though the bike only used two sparkplugs, I bought them six at a time.

By now the basic paintjob was pretty much done: a sloping horizon starting near the ceiling at the doors and ending near the floor at the end of the 97 foot run. Below the horizon was a lovely aquamarine that gave the impression of water, and above it was all the colours of the sunrise and sky: white for the sun, yellow, orange, red, violet, deep purple, indigo. I painted rustic stone archways over all the doors, and called in Milo to do an exotic spraybomb piece near the entrance. That really got people whining, even at three in the morning with the doors wide open and fans blowing.

I stretched the finishing touches out over the next month because they all involved smelly spraybomb pieces and miserable remarks from unappreciative dwellers of the night.

The only thing I ever got paid was a small bag of herb once in a while, but the owner of the cafe gave me breakfast occasionally if I was still around long enough in the morning when the grill got going. People who liked art really liked the hallway.

The rather neat paintjob lasted for almost three years until we moved into a new and much bigger place across the street.

The Joint got taken over by violent goons. They painted the hallway a consistent dis-heartening black and kicked a young man to death after he attempted to spiff a patch of the wall with a nice airbrush piece. As far as I know the small work is still there, with a scrawled epithet underneath it: "In memory of M__ B__." I'm kind of sorry I never knew the kid.

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Anyway, back to the misunderstood qualities of modern technology:

Jean-Paul and Marie brought this reasonably new-fashioned microwave oven with them: it had a very large, pasty white albino cockroach living inside the display panel. The creature was almost transparent from lack of light and constant irradiation. Sometimes (if you dared use it) you had to bang on the clear part to get it to move so you could read the timer. They rarely cleaned the thing, and I speculated daily about 'making it disappear', maybe hauling it down the lane and pitching it in one of the dumpsters when the two of them were out somewhere.

Now, throwing your room-mates appliances in the dumpster is most definately not the kind of behavior that improves a domestic situation, and things were a bit tense already, so I shrugged and hoped that the thing wouldn't infect the whole house with cockroaches or some nasty and chronic dysentery-like stomach ailment.

I had just gotten rid of one roomy that left food open on the counter all night, and then covered it up and put it in the fridge the next morning for unsuspecting hungry people to eat (and blow, about 8 or 12 hours later).

I never saw so many stomach complaints as when I lived with her. The only reason I even tolerated her for the six months she lived there was that I had been sort of infatuated with her feisty attitude, dark hair and lovely brown eyes for about three years. Now she was expecting a baby from a half-wit drummer named Burt who was in a rather unambitious grind-core band, so I think I was exercising some kind of paternal thing, maybe trying to teach her some kitchen etiquette also. She was a fairly inspired cook in a vegetarian kind of way in her better moments.

The microwave oven kept getting more and more foul. After they finally cleaned it, it still smelled like rotten chicken parts, and even Jean-Paul and Marie stopped using the thing, yet it still sat there spreading it's small lifeforms about the immediate environment. The odor was obviously coming from inside the workings of it, but even I wouldn't take the screws off the back to see what was in there. I started noticing 'roaches once in a while, and you know the saying about roaches: if you see one, there's a thousand, especially in those crappy old world war II houses. I tried talking to them about it on numerous occasions, but Marie had some sentimental fondness for her portable roach farm and Jean-Paul felt he had to indulge her little-girl whims in order to continue getting laid, so it sat there day after day.

I was using the basement to grow tall weedy herbs in a semi-legitimate business venture as part of my self-employment strategy and it precluded calling service personnel over to fix the furnace, or exterminate the roaches, or clean the chimney, without moving the whole operation out to the garage for a few days, significantly more difficult to do than to say, as anyone in the business can tell you.

Well, Jean-Paul and Marie moved out after a few months and went travelling through the interior. They ditched the microwave and one stack of their crap at another friends place, left a good pile of junk in the basement of my place, and spread the big albino roach's rotten-chicken-smelling offspring to another corner of the city. I stayed in that house for another year, eventually shut the grow op down, and left the roaches for the next tenants.

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