Sonata for Detritus
It may have finally happened.
I read these words in an email from my ex-roommate in Vancouver. Nothing else was written. Attached was a picture with a letter in it. The top left of the letter had the recognizable red and blue RE/MAX logo. I knew exactly what this meant the moment I opened it. The house is about to be sold.
Greg and I lived there for six years. It was a house with cheap stucco and roof tiles nailed to the front steps, and it had been divided into four apartment units in 1983 by our Chinese landlord. Lum wore sunglasses and a hat, day or night, spoke very little English (especially when we needed something from him) and collected rent from us every month, in cash. There were rats and squirrels living in the walls as well as an on-again-off-again relationship with cockroaches. For two winters, the heat wasn’t turned on. And the electrical panel in the basement was like everything else in house – temperamental and not up to code. We lived on the top floor, which would be drenched in natural light on a sunny day. We paid very little rent. We called it ‘The Palace.’
I left this house five months ago, to move to Toronto. And it wasn’t until the email from Greg that I began considering the significance of The Palace. It was my home. And like a petri dish, it was a vessel for my growth. The six years I spent there felt like a germination period. It was during this time that the seed of my current identity was planted, and eventually flourished.
Now my home of more than half a decade is soon to be rubble and debris, lost in the municipal disposal system. It makes me think of how this has happened twice before. And I think of who I have become because of these homes, and who I might have been had I lived elsewhere.
“Are you moving in next week?” I read on my phone. The text was from Krista Weber, my soon-to-be roommate in 2011. “August rent will be due and I need to know if I should find someone else.” Krista was a German architect who moved to Canada to re-evaluate her life. After a few months in Vancouver, she gave up her design career to pursue her newfound dream of opening a yoga studio. She had discovered this apartment through couchsurfing.com, and after crashing for a few days, she ended up renting the couch on a weekly basis. She slept there for six months. Then, when the second of the two bedrooms became vacant she changed from sofa to mattress. Krista was there for five months before I arrived.
The first room would be mine. I was taking it over from Alexander Mikhailov, a Russian adventurer who had the spirit of an eleven-year-old. He was leaving, indefinitely, to backpack through Europe with his girlfriend. He said he might be back, but that I could take the room for as long as I needed it. If he returned, and I was still in his room, he said he’d be happy to sleep on the couch. That was the way things were – fluid, relaxed and unpredictable.
“Yes!” I wrote back to Krista, “I’ll be there on Tuesday.”
When Lum would pick up our rent money he would come and cut the lawn. The cedar shrubbery lining the sidewalk was heavily overgrown. The branches arched off the trunk and were supported by silvery, bent one-by-twos. The fence was so rotten that the only way it was still standing was because of the support given by the English ivy that weaved through the chain-link. Hung off one of the rotting posts, on rusted hinges, was the hefty metal gate. You had to lift it up as you opened it, otherwise it dragged along the cracked concrete of the walkway. A few steps past the gate and you were at a set of stairs up to our apartment door, which opened to another set of stairs that led to our living room. On the way, you would be met with the faint smell of cigarettes from Bob Schumacher’s apartment below.
As he smoked, Bob tended to listen to Infowars, loudly. He moved into his apartment seventeen years ago from Winnipeg and hasn’t lived anywhere else since. For several decades he supported himself as a sign painter. His specialty was seasonal murals on grocery store windows – cartoonish elves dancing and holly boughs wrapping around the words MERRY CHRISTMAS is what I imagined when he told me this. However, he slowly phased out his painting and began buying electronics (radios, amplifiers, generators, etc.), and selling them at the Vancouver Flea Market. Like the rest of the tenants, Bob is a traditional hustler and lives a meekly subterranean life. Wafts of stale cigarettes would linger in his apartment, like from the fabric seats of your chain-smoking aunt’s car, and the aroma would inevitably maneuver its way through the house ventilation into our hallways.
The walls in The Palace were made of lath and plaster, and had running cracks from general aging and lack of upkeep. Some areas where the damage was particularly bad, the plaster had chipped off, exposing the horizontal fir strips. Half a year after I took Alexander’s room, Greg moved in and Krista moved back to the couch. She was working less and happy to have fewer expenses. Greg and I proudly took on the duty of painting the apartment. With our recent idolization of Wayne White, we bought bold colors, like baby blue, carnation pink, mint green and Crayola yellow. On more than one occasion, our kitchen was aptly compared to Pee-Wee’s Playhouse.
Beyond the corky aesthetic, the new paint was a hinging period for the apartment. One month later, Krista took a bus to the Yukon to experience the Northern Lights. Other than the occasional visit, she had moved out. We also received word from Alexander that he got married and was living in a van with his new bride in Slovenia. Now it was just Greg and I. And of course Philip, Greg’s one-year-old Jack Russell-Whippet mutt from Des Moines. With a feeling of new ownership, we stripped the existing furniture and miscellaneous ephemera from the apartment’s previous renters and squatters, creating a blank space for us to curate. The closet, which was filled with musty suitcases and bent coat hangers, was gutted and became our darkroom. We set a Leitz Focomat enlarger on a piece of cut up plywood and placed the chemical baths on one of the shelves. The room was so small that when the door was closed, you could only take one short step in either direction. After a week of experimental failures, our prints started to turn out, and soon the wall’s plaster holes started to disappear behind black-and-white nudes and portraits of our friends.
My phone rang one day. It was from my grandparents in Hope. They have lived there for twenty years, in a quaint house canopied by fir trees. Curving through their front yard there’s a creek, which is protected by the Ministry of Environment’s Fish Protection Act due to the salmon that spawn up it every year. Charlie Witherspoon, my grandfather whose name I bear, is a retired United Church minister – though he still fills in for occasional services at the local church. He’s said you’re never truly retired when you work for God.
“You play piano, right?” he asked on the phone. He told me the congregation was about to give away their Heintzman upright. I was at the top of the list to receive it. Evelyn, my grandmother, told me that her choir friends thought I was a “respectable young man”; mostly, I believe, because of my recent appearance at the post-church coffee hour. I smiled and carried on a conversation, so I suppose I’m respectable. “I’ll come to pick it up next week!” I told my namesake. He replied that he’d have a group of strapping young men to load the mini-beast into my truck. The following Sunday afternoon I rolled up to the church and found him waiting on the lawn with a small group of gentlemen from the tenor section in their early seventies.
After much sweat and swearing, the Heintzman sat regally in the southwest corner of our living room. And now, from the paint to the piano, The Palace felt like home. We’d lived there for a year and every room felt like our own. We were proud to have people over, though most of the time it was just the three of us. Philip would walk from room to room checking in on us throughout the day. Greg played in bands, wrote and put on plays, paced from the kitchen to the living room preparing for auditions, and would regularly sit in the bathtub for hours. I wrote and recorded music, built furniture, wrote about nothing and would lay out picture frames on the floor to visualize upcoming exhibitions. We both printed pictures like mad and watched movies and smoked on the front steps, talking and smoking or sitting in silence and thinking about whatever seemed important. We felt comfortable to be there and comfortable to be ourselves.
For some years before ending up here I had bounced around a few residences. They were mostly just containers for my stuff and myself. A coldness tends to linger in places where you can’t completely be yourself, where you think before you act and where you feel it necessary to leave on part of the armor that you wear out in the world. However, I’m lucky enough to have had the warmth of the home where I grew up. This is in large part due to my mother, who has always taken great care to create this feeling of comfort.
The first house was blue. I lived there for eleven years. It had three floors and sat on just less than an acre of grass and dirt. I remember a garden wrapping around the property, half of which was a partially-tended-to sprawl of rhododendrons, sword ferns and miscellaneous species of trees; the other half was overgrown with impenetrable thorny blackberry bushes. The memories there are sparse and, in all honesty, mostly unreliable, although there is a rooted feeling of security, spread like a groundcover over these years. Who I am now is largely influenced by this first formative decade of my life. And if I reverse-engineer my mind – taking my current disposition, mixing it with my memories and projecting it onto my past – I see a happy home.
Throughout these early years, my neighborhood became more desirable to live in. Because of the zoning, you could build large estates and still live within the city limits. And as Vancouver gained more wealth and population density, affluence trickled into my childhood streets. The Stevensons, our neighbors to the south, wanted to buy our little blue house so they could demolish it and groom the land for an equestrian ring. My mom said no. So they bought the more valuable property across the street from us and offered her a trade. Six months later, I watched the blue wood splinter and turn into a pile of useless and unwanted trash.
For the move, we walked most of our belongings across the street and slowly started to settle in. Talking about it recently, my mom says it was the most difficult move she’s ever had. It sure felt like an adventure at eleven years old. But the excitement of the new situation soon evaporated as I felt the chill of a new and unfamiliar place to live. And watching the safest place I’d known until that point disappear in front of me was haunting. It was like my memories were being dragged through cold water. However, at some point things began to change. Distress was replaced by nostalgia, and my relationship to the new place began to grow. The transition was not memorable – probably because it was too gradual to be recognized – but at some point, I began to warm up to the new house. It started to feel more like home than the blue house ever did.
It was a horseshoe-shaped bungalow with a sprawling backyard and a one-hundred-year-old weeping willow in the northeast corner of the property. My brother and I inhabited the south wing of the house and it felt like freedom; we had our own rooms, our own space, and what felt like our own lives. If the blue house represented my formative years, the bungalow certainly represents my experimental years. Eleven to twenty is a short amount of time, but a significant period in one’s life. Thinking about the number of different people I tried to be is dizzying. And through all of this shape-shifting, my room was my refuge, which was necessary. I changed the layout almost monthly. My bed, desk, and ever-changing personal possessions were like pawns in a chess game against myself, moving around the floor with precise strategy and true insignificance – though the simple act of doing it was meaningful enough.
I had moved away and would return to my south wing refuge for summers, eventually leaving the bungalow for good. A few years later I got news of the house. The word of the sale came with celebration. The modest dwellings that once dominated the neighborhood’s landscape had quickly become mere speckled accents among the new mansions. As a result, the neighborhood’s market value had soared. And with the offer my mom received for the house, she could retire comfortably at the age of fifty-three. The selling was also a symbolic moment: the bungalow was an anchor for the family, and as it was pulled up we could all go our separate ways without resistance. My brother, sister, mother and I could weightlessly move on to the next phase of our lives.
One year later I drove by the property and saw nothing. The bungalow was gone. The property was just a patch of leveled gravel, preparing to hold the incoming estate. Even the weeping willow had vanished. Then I turned around to see an Andalusian horse galloping in circles on a patch of finer, more eloquently groomed gravel. As I stood on the street, I realized I was standing in the middle of my past. On both sides of me were pieces of land that had at one time held my two childhood homes. Eighty meters in either direction was where I spent the majority of my youth. Knowing that I was supposed to feel a wave of sentiment I told myself that I was sad. But, in all honesty, I wasn’t. More than anything I felt kinda hungry and just wanted to go home for dinner.
“False alarm,” Greg told me on the phone the next day. “Lum says he’s not selling.” The RE/MAX letter was nothing more than a directly addressed promotional flyer. For the moment, Lum seems to still be happy collecting an envelope of cash every month. Yet, as I think about it I realize it may be more than that. I recently found out that his wife died almost a decade ago. Cutting the lawn and picking up the rent is what he knows. Without this, he likely would feel lost and more alone. Nevertheless, I know that it’s only a matter of time before he either changes his mind or is reunited with his wife, and with that, The Palace will quickly join the ever-growing heap of demolished buildings in Vancouver. To me though, it has already happened. The Palace’s roofing tiles and smoke-stained lath has already joined the debris of the blue house and the bungalow. And they all lie there together, in pieces and stillness.