There were a couple of songs that still stand out from my youth.
It wasn’t until my father fled from Alberta to Ontario in April of 1983 to avoid my apprehension by Alberta Social Services that I started to become exposed to popular music outside of what my uncle Doug would buy for me.
Up until we arrived at Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario I had never gone to a public school. My education up to the point was at schools for military dependents on base.
My grandmother had the stereo system glued to 790 CFCW. Richard was much the same. He really only listened to country music.
My first taste of music that wasn’t country and western was the kid’s disco that used to be put on every Sunday at the Lamplighter Pub on CFB Namao for the military kids that lived on Lancaster Park on CFB Namao.
When we arrived in Toronto this was the first time that I had been exposed to music that wasn’t country.
There was Pop, Rock and Roll, Heavy Metal, New Age, Progressive Rock, Hip-hop, Rap, Reggae, Top 40, you name it and the kids at Sheppard Public School listened to it.
It was also at this time that I began to realize that songs could tell stories. And more than just about rusty pickup trucks, dead dogs, and cheatin’ wives.
Whenever I hear the opening saxophone on “Overkill” by Men At Work I can visualize myself looking over the ravine out of the bedroom window of our PMQ at 94 Sunfield Road where we lived prior to moving to 223F Stanley Greene Park. I can also kinda smell and feel the humidity of that first summer living in Toronto.
Another song that will take me to back is “Come Dancing” by the Kinks. My brother absolutely hated the line “It’s only natural”. “Our House” by Madness is another one that would drive him bonkers if I sang along with it.
One of the first songs that I noticed that kinda spoke to me about what things were like at home was “Where is this love?” by the Payolas.
As psychologically damaged as my grandmother was, my father was even worse. My father had his anger, his depression, his PTSD, his alcoholism, and his physical strength. Under no circumstance did you ever want Richard upset with you. Living with him was like walking on egg shells.
If things had gone to shit at work for Richard you didn’t want to bother him. If he had too much to drink at the mess he wasn’t too bad when he was pissed drunk, but the next day when he was having his hangover you just steered the fuck clear of him. Sometimes when Richard was a little too pissed drunk for Sue’s liking she’d kick him out of bed and banish Richard to the living room to sleep. Usually not on the couch though. He’d usually be on the floor, rolling around stark naked and screaming at the top of his lungs. Even when we’d try to take Richard a blanket or try to calm him down Sue would come down and tell us to leave him alone, that he had to learn his lesson. So, it would usually be a sleepless night listening ti him yell and howl from the living room.
It was a few years after this that I heard another song that kinda spoke to me. It was “Luka” by Suzanne Vega.
The third song that I had heard of was actually introduced to me by someone else. I didn’t hear this song on my own as it was slightly before my time.
I was working for Ed Blaha, Bruce Beveridge, and Dirk Verdoold at Rainbow Games. Ed worked for the Metropolitan Toronto Police at Central Traffic. Dirk was an officer at 14th Division. Bruce was Ed’s childhood friend from when they grew up together in Montreal.
The three of them had purchased a pool hall at Keele and Sheppard on the North East corner of the base. Initially there was a fourth partner, Gary Mountjoy, but he sold his interest in the business very early on. I started working there in late ’87 – early ’88.
One of the things that Ed noticed right off the bat is that even though I was 16. Richard really didn’t seem to give a fuck where I was or how late I was out to. I would frequently sleep overnight in the work shop. And not once would Richard come looking for me.
And things were getting rough at home for other reasons as well.
Rainbow Games provided video games, pinball machines, and juke boxes to bars and donut shops across the Greater Toronto region.
One day Ed came back from the records wholesaler with an assortment of records for the various juke boxes.
He handed me one 45 and told me to put it in the juke box and play it.
Ed told me to sit down and listen to it.
So I lit up a smoke and drank my coffee and listened to the song as it came on.
It was “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin.
This song, as touching as it was, only kinda touched on my family life at home.
See “Cat’s in the Cradle” is about a father who is so tied up in his work that he doesn’t have time to spend with his son like his son wishes that he would, and then when his son has grown up and the father wants to spend time with him, it’s now his son that is to busy to be there for his father. The song doesn’t seem to be about physical or mental abuse.
When the song was over Ed said that as a police officer he had worked with street kids before, and street kids don’t go there because they want to be there, they go there because there’s no one to guide them away from the streets.
Ed said that if his son was ever working for someone and his son wasn’t home for bed before 21:00 that there’d be hell to pay. The fact that my father didn’t give a shit if I didn’t return home for days on end told Ed that something wasn’t right at home.
Ed said that I was bright, that I was smart, and it was my smarts that were keeping me off the streets. Ed asked me if I felt safe at home. I told him no. I told him that in addition to my father I now faced another physical threat in the house.
Ed arranged a room for rent in a house just across the street from the pool hall. The house was a PMQ that was rented by a service member of the Canadian Forces. This guy had just broken up with his wife and his wife had left him and taken their children. He had already rented out one of the children’s bedrooms to another person. This arrangement worked fine until the summer of 1988 when the CF Housing Authority found out that he was renting rooms.
But anyways, from early 1988 until the summer of 1989, almost a year and a half, I had peace. I didn’t have to worry about physical violence or threats of physical violence. I could sleep in peace. In fact I never wet the bed again after I moved out of Richard’s house.
And while “Cat’s in the Cradle” didn’t really focus on my relationship with my father, it did have some similarities.
My father wanted nothing to do with me. And as an adult I wanted very little to do with my father.
My father really didn’t want kids. I have no kids. I don’t think my brother has reproduced either. All I know is that I’m taking this rancid Gill DNA to the grave with me.
What has stuck with me all these years about “Cat’s in the cradle” is the fact that Ed went out of his way to buy this one 45 to act as an icebreaker meant that my dysfunctional home life was actually visible for all to see.
I just wish that the right people had seen the dysfunction and reacted properly.
I never would have figured out that my father was the “artsy type” who would have posed for a statue. But here he is .
Richard Wayne Gill in his younger days.
Yeah, my father definitely wasn’t “dad” material.
As I’ve learnt in life, there actually aren’t too many men that fit the “ideal” model of a modern age “dad”.
Just as not every woman is fit to be a mother, not every man is fit to be a father.
Having sex and reproducing are simple enough that anyone can do it really.
No qualifications or experience required.
My paternal grandmother should never have reproduced.
My maternal grandmother should never have reproduced.
My mother and my father should have had a hysterectomy and vasectomy.
Sure, I wouldn’t have existed. But at the same token I would never have gone through any of the stuff that I went through.
Win-win I guess.
As I’ve said elsewhere, life isn’t a video game.
There’s no final stage boss to fight with the experience points you’ve gained in life.
You don’t win the game of life.
You don’t get bonus points for completing all of the missions and side quests in the game of life.
You don’t win a bonus life.
Two people have sex.
You gestate for 9 months.
You pop out into the world.
You then make a bee-line straight to your inevitable death.
What you life is like in between birth and death is pretty well determined by how well the two people who fucked to bring you into the world give a fuck after you’ve enter into the world.
I think someone forgot to flush the toilets at 101 Colonel By Drive…. the shit is overflowing at NDHQ.
Well David Pugliese had this article in the Ottawa Citizen today. The story involves the Minister of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces Chain of Command using the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service to harass and intimidate the Office of the Ombudsman of the Canadian Armed Forces.
The Federal court has rebuked the military and compensation has been paid to members of the Office of the Ombudsman of the Canadian Forces.
The Office of the Ombudsman for the Canadian Forces enjoys a rather unique position of independence from the Canadian Armed Forces.
Unlike the Military Police Complaints Commission which may only ‘ask’ for documents from the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal during investigations of complaints against the CFNIS. And unlike the Military Police Complaints Commission which may only ‘ask’ for persons to participate in their investigation. The National Defence Act makes mandatory the participation of military members in any Ombudsman investigation.
This is because criminal charges cannot result from any Ombudsman investigation or inquiry. The Ombudsman may only recommend changes and possibly compensation or other remedies.
The Office of the Ombudsman of the Canadian Armed Forces was the agency that recommended that while the Canadian Armed Forces were “technically correct” to deny benefits or compensation to any of the 12 to 18 year old cadets that were killed or injured in the 1974 grenade explosion at Canadian Forces Base Valcartier, it was absolutely the immoral thing to do considering that the regular force member whose negligence led to this disaster was allowed to receive benefits and compensation from the Canadian Armed Forces. The Ombudsman recommended that the Canadian Forces make amendments posthaste and offer the survivors compensation, counselling, and therapy.
There is one problem with the Office of the Ombudsman of the Canadian Forces. That problem is that the Ombudsman may only undertake investigations that the Minister of National Defence agrees to.
See, the Office of the Ombudsman of the Canadian Forces would have been the perfect agency to investigate the matter from Canadian Forces Base Namao. No criminal charges could ever flow from an Ombudsman investigation or findings.
P.S. could give all the information that he wished and he would never face criminal charges for what he said. Nor would P.S. be in violation of his Non-Disclosure agreement that he had to sign with the Government of Canada in November of 2008 in order to receive his settlement from the Government of Canada.
The Ombudsman could have called witnesses, including anyone who had been subject to the Code of Service Discipline during the events of the Captain Father Angus McRae affair.
Even though my father is dead now, had the Ombudsman conducted an inquiry while my father was still alive it would have been fun asking my father to explain just exactly who the hell was looking after his children from 1977 until 1981 if he was always away on training exercises and his wife had “abandoned the family” years prior. Was he letting his children run feral on a military base? Did he just drop his kids off at a random neighbour’s house for 6 weeks while he went and played soldier out in the woods?
The Ombudsman could have made recommendations to DND and the Canadian Forces so far as how to deal with the survivors of the Captain McRae fiasco.
But I can see why the Minister of National Defence would have declined the Ombudsman the permission to review the matter.
This would have been far too risky for DND.
If this matter had been reviewed by the Ombudsman, and news of this review made it to the media, how many other former military dependents would come forward with their allegations against DND and the CF?
Would the Ombudsman have made the formal recommendation that any and all child sexual abuse matters be formally handed over to the civilian police?
Would the Ombudsman make the recommendation that the Canadian Forces and the Department of National Defence hire an independent investigation firm to conduct a completely independent and arm’s length investigation looking at how many children were sexually abused on the bases from 1950 until the present day?
Would the Ombudsman make recommendations that Parliament pass the required legislation to nullify the effects of the pre-1998 3-year-time-bar flaw and the Summary-Investigation flaw for matters that could be considered to be child sexual abuse?
There’s just far too much risk for the Minister to allow the Ombudsman to go digging into the MIlitary’s copious dirty laundry.
And I know from speaking with various investigators with the Office of the Ombudsman that the Ombudsman has been fighting for even more independence from the Canadian Armed Forces and not having to rely on the permission of the Minister of National Defence to conduct investigations that look at historical matters which occurred prior to when the Office of the Ombudsman was created in the late ’90s.
One of the recurring issues that I’ve always had to deal with throughout my life is the incredible amount of self doubt and self hatred that I have inside.
“But Bobbie, you’re so smart”.
No, actually I’m not. Never have been. Never will be.
I’ve just managed to float along for most of my life.
Sure I can do things and fix things. So can anybody else.
Absolutely nothing special about what I can do.
People can sniff and smell my failings and inadequacies like a horrific stench that permeates everything around me.
I can weld. So can everyone else.
I can repair electronics. So can everyone else.
I’ve programmed in BASIC, Fortran, Cobol, C++, Python, Java. Again so can everyone else.
I can use Word, Excel, Open Office, Pages, etc. And so can everyone else.
I can use computers. So can everyone else.
I can find information. Big deal, did that change anything? Nope.
I discovered that my father actually legally kidnapped my brother and I.
Did anything come of that?
Nope.
I discovered that my father was actually a bigamist.
Did anything come of that?
Nope.
I discovered that the person who had molested my brother and I had criminal convictions in 1982, 1984, 1985, and 1986 for child molestation.
Did anything come of that?
Nope.
I discovered that Donald Joseph Sullivan was molesting children prior to joining the Canadian Armed Forces. He molested more children once he joined the Canadian Armed Forces.
Did anything come of that?
Nope.
I learnt that my family moved in April of 1983, not because my father wanted to “protect me” from the drugs that Pat and Wayne wanted to give me to make me stop trying to kiss boys. As it turned out it wasn’t Pat and Wayne that had concerns about my apparent homosexuality, that was my father and Captain Terry Totzke. We moved because my father was fleeing Alberta so that I wouldn’t be removed from his care and placed into foster care or residential care which would have exposed the fact that my father didn’t have legal custody of my brother and I.
Did anything come of this?
Nope.
I discovered that my father was known to lie and to bullshit and to kiss ass. To actually see in writing that my father “often told people in positions of authority what he thought the wanted to hear”,”or that Mr. Gill often told conflicting stories from on meeting to the next”,”or that Mr. Gill has a tendency to blame others for his problems and often expects others to solve his problems for him” was a beautiful fucking relief.
But did it change anything?
Nope.
I discovered that I had been diagnosed as suffering from major depression, severe anxiety, was terrified of men, was convinced that my father was going to kill me. I even discovered that I had been anorexic as a child. I also discovered that doctors at the IWK children’s hospital in Halifax, Nova Scotia had severe concerns about my father and my mother.
Did anything come of this?
Nope.
As my father once told me, “Be very fucking careful of sticking your fucking nose where it doesn’t fucking belong as you might not like what you find”.
Well, I stuck my nose where it didn’t fucking belong and just as Richard warned me, I didn’t really like what I found.
Sure, I’m not a fucking insane basket case, but I’ve realized that my life has been one very tragic fucking joke.
Left to suffer from untreated major depression, severe anxiety, and trauma from sexual abuse all because people people with political ambitions decided that it was politically expedient to sweep the full extent of the Captain McRae fiasco under the rug.
Nobody gave a single fucking shit about me my entire life. Not Richard Gill; Not Marie Dagenais; Not Al Dagenais; Not Susan Zwolle; Not Captain Terry Totzke; Not Colonel Dan Munro; Not Colonel J.D.Boan; Not Gilles Lamontagne; Not Jason Kenny; Not Jody Wilson-Raybould; Not Harjit Sajjan; Not Sgt. Robert Jon Hancock; Not Sgt. Christian Cyr; Not Glenn Stannard; Not Robert Howard; Not the Canadian Armed Forces; Not the Department of National Defence; Not the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; Not the Summerside Police; The fucking worthless media in this country that killed the idea of investigative journalism years ago. Not a single fucking one of these fuckers or worthless fucking entities gave a single flying fuck.
People who cared, but who couldn’t overcome the systematic bullshit. Pat M.; Wayne W; Aviva D; Richard Ford; Mrs. Donskov; Jonathan Bowles; Mr. Atkins; Mr. Richard Brown; The Casson family; Bob Becker; The Toronto Police Service; Constable Dustin Wilkins; David Pugliese; Nora Loreto; And many others.
I’ve been shaving my head since the summer of 1991 when I lived in Edmonton.
That’s just over 30 years now.
I would have been 19 and I was living in my first apartment and I had a lot of time to myself.
Marie, my mother, freaked out when I went to visit her at the acreage.
All Richard would say is that I was obviously insane like my uncle Al.
There were a few reasons why I decided to shave my head.
One of the reasons that I shaved my head was that I really liked how Sinéad O’Connor was able to pull off the look. If you have a round head, you can pull off the bald look easily.
The second reason that I started to shave my head in the summer of 1991 is that I was already sprouting a lot of grey hair. Not just one or two hairs. It was noticeable.
The third is that the top of my head was already thinning out.
In my 20’s I’d occasionally let it grow back in, but it usually came off really quickly as the grey was getting very noticeable.
If you’ve followed along with my blog to date you’ll know that I am taking escitalopram for major depression.
The escitalopram has worked with my depression. But it has had some minor side effects. Nothing serious. But side effects none the less.
One of the side effects that I am getting now is acne. Acne on my face and acne on my head. Nothing serious. But enough that I don’t shave each and every day. In fact I haven’t shaved my face or head for about a week now.
My beard and my hair are pure white. There isn’t a single black hair on my head or on my face. Even my moustache is white.
I’ve never grown a beard before, and I really don’t want a beard, but I want to see what this looks like. I’ve never seen what I look like with all of my facial or head hair white.
I’ve got facial tattooing coming up in February. I’m going to get some portions of my face filled in with black blocking so I should be able to get about 3 months of growth before I have to shave it all off again for the tattoos.
I’ve worked at the hospital since 2005 and no one there has seen me with facial hair, hair on my head, or even eye brows. Yes, I shave my eye brows off, otherwise it looks like I’ve got two very hairy caterpillars sleeping over my eyes.
The only hair on my face that I never trim is my eye lashes. I used to trim my eye lashes when I was younger when I was in school. But that will be for another blog posting.
I’ll probably post a couple more pictures of my facial hair in the upcoming weeks and months. As I’ve said, I’ve never had a beard before. And I probably won’t again. But this be something different.
I worked for a Jewish Cowboy when I lived in Toronto.
All of Bob’s customers called him the Jewish Cowboy because he always wore cowboy boots, khakis, long sleeved button up shirts, and a Stetson. Oh, and he was Jewish.
I don’t know too much about Bob’s origins other than he was Jewish and he was born in Poland sometime in the late 1920s early 1930s.
When I lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview I was a loner. Actually for most of my life after CFB Namao I was a loner. One of the things I loved to do was to jump onto the railway tracks that ran through the base. I’d walk up the railway tracks as far north as the rail yards north of Steeles Avenue.
I was always fascinated by the dead animals that I’d find on the tracks. How could they not hear a train coming. Even without sounding their horns trains were loud. Was it a quick death. Did the animal even know what had hit it. Was it painful. A million questions.
Usually I’d bring a book with me and I’d climb the signal platforms and read my book on top of the signals while the trains passed underneath.
On one of my journeys up the railways I saw a warehouse with video games in it. I was curious. I hopped the fence and went over to take a look.
I can’t remember how things went down, but I told Bob that I was handy with electronics and that I could solder. So as a test he asked me to solder some wires to a joystick. So I stripped the wires, fluxed the wires, tinned the wires, fluxed the switch tabs, applied a small bit of solder to the switch tab and then I applied the tinned wire into the molten solder blob, removed the soldering iron and let the solder cool. It was nice, and shiny, and perfect.
Bob then asked me to look at some video game logic boards that had some problems. I fixed them.
So I had a job. Bob paid good, just a little bit above minimum wage, which for a 13 year old wasn’t bad. And on days that I worked, Bob paid for my meals. Bob refused to buy me smokes or to let me smoke in the workshop, but he wouldn’t say anything if I stepped out for a smoke.
Bob owned two companies. Trans American Construction and Trans American Video Amusements. I don’t think he had operated Trans American Construction much by the time I started working for him. His main business was Trans American Video Amusements.
When I started working for Bob his shop was in a warehouse on Finch. A little while later he moved to a new warehouse on Steeles Ave.
Bob’s customers spanned all the way from Oshawa, Ontario to Niagara Falls, Ontario. He had agreements to put video games in all of the Holiday Inns in Southern Ontario as well as all of the Hasty Markets. Bob also had various other locations such as small convenience stores. I’d usually go in and work with Bob on Saturdays.
Bob had a Dodge Kary Van that was modified with a lift gate on the rear for lifting and lowering the video games in and out of the box.
Bob’s was red, not white and didn’t have the hazard light bar on top.
We drove in this van pretty well all over southern Ontario.
Bob wasn’t the least bit hesitant to drive on base and stop in front of our PMQ and toot the air-horns to let me know that he was waiting.
Bob didn’t like my father very much. Bob would often tell me that what concerned him the most about my father is that my father just didn’t seem to care that I was never home. What type of man lets a stranger take his son on the highway and out of the city?
By the time Bob moved up to Steeles Avenue I would come to work after school and I would stay there until 9 or 10 at night. Bob could always tell I was leaving late because Gerry, the guy who owned that auto shop next-door, would tell Bob what time I was leaving, and Bob could see what time I armed the alarms.
And this blew Bob away. He said that he’d never seen anything like this. He said if his daughter started disappearing for hours that he’d ground her.
And my smoking. Bob had never seen anything like it. The fact that my father didn’t care about my smoking shocked Bob. Bob couldn’t comprehend this.
I never could understand why Bob cared so much about my father or my home life. I guess at the time I didn’t realize just how off the rails and dysfunctional my household actually was and how apparent the dysfunction was to people outside of my family.
Bob was a good natured guy. He never really got angry or upset. I dropped a video game out of the back of the truck in the shop one day. I thought that Bob was going to be pissed off, or worse. Nope. Shit happens, just try harder next time. My father would have killed me or at least humiliated me.
One time we were driving to Niagara Falls. Antonio was with us. Antonio was another helper that Bob often employed. Bob was driving, Antonio was in the passenger seat, I was sitting between Bob and Antonio. Bob asked Antonio to clean the sideview mirror. Antonio reached into the glove box and grabbed a small “rag”, rolled down the window, and started rubbing the dirt off the mirror using the “rag”.
“Antonio! After all I have done for you, this is how you repay me!” Bob bellowed.
Antonio starts looking at Bob and then looks at the mirror thinking maybe he didn’t clean the mirror good enough.
I forget exactly how the exchange went but I clued in really quick once I saw the decorative embroidery around the edge of the “rag”. Antonio still hadn’t figured out why Bob was upset so I pointed at the “rag” and then I pointed at the back of my head. Antonio didn’t get it right away, but then the realization started to dawn on Antonio’s face. Antonio unfolded the “rag” and realized that he had just used Bob’s yarmulke to clean the mirror. When Bob saw the look of horror on Antonio’s face he couldn’t stop laughing. Antonio spent the rest of the day apologizing to Bob.
Bob got a flat tire once in the truck. I got underneath to put the jack in place under the axle. Bob didn’t realize that my legs were under the lift gate and he was in the process of unloading games off the truck to make it lighter. Bob treated me like royalty for the next couple of weeks after that.
Bob bought me a jukebox at one of the video game auctions at Starburst Distributors for my 15th birthday. Wasn’t an expensive machine, but it was more that what Richard had bought me, which was nothing.
I’m pretty sure that the summer of 1987 was the last summer that I worked for Bob. That was the year I dropped out of grade 9. And it was also the year that I started working for Ed Blah and Bruce Beveridge of Rainbow Games. But the summer of 1987 was when I learnt a little bit about Bob’s history.
We were moving games down to the CNE from Bob’s warehouse. As the CNE happened in August this was typically the most humid time of the year in Southern Ontario. Bob was sweating, and I mean really sweating. Sweating so much that I was certain that he was going to pass out from heat stroke. I kept insisting to Bob that he should take his long sleeve shirt off and wear a short sleeve shirt or a tee-shirt.
Bob was becoming visibly annoyed with my pestering. He looked over at me and asked me if he showed me something would I promise never to bother him again about short sleeved shirts. He also asked me to promise to never tell anyone about what he was about to show me.
Remember when I said that Bob had been born in Poland in the late 1920s? Remember the fact that he was Jewish.
Bob rolled up his left sleeve and there was his concentration camp number.
The Nazis had rounded him and his family up and they were sent to a concentration camp.
Bob was the only one who survived the camps. The rest of his family was gone.
After the war Bob first landed in America before settling in Canada.
And I think this is what bugged Bob the most about my father.
Bob’s family had been destroyed by hatred. Richard was destroying his own family out of indifference.
The Nazis had taken everything away from Bob and Bob in turn built a miniature empire and looked after his wife and his daughter.
Richard never had to deal with a force of destruction like the Nazis, but here he was content to exist in his little self absorbed world not caring in the slightest where his kids were getting off to.
It shocks me now to look back on all of the people I had interacted with as a child. People who I liked. But people who I though were wrong about my father. It wasn’t that my father didn’t care, my father was in the Canadian Armed Forces. He was a busy man defending Canada. Besides, I made the babysitter molest my younger brother, so maybe he was right to not like me very much.
I didn’t know that my father was being physically or mentally abusive. My father’s attitude was common on the bases amongst the other fathers. In fact when I saw civie kids “getting away with murder” I thought it was their parents that were abnormal or just too weak to discipline their kids properly.
Now I fully realize that men like Bob Becker were right. There was something horrifically wrong with my family. My family was a dysfunctional and self destructive military family.
One of the oddest things about growing up in Richard’s house is how defending myself often put me at the risk of being on the receiving end of Richard’s rage.
Being a child with severe depression and severe anxiety meant that I liked to keep to myself a lot. There were two boys on Canadian Forces Base Downsview that used to take extreme pleasure in beating me up. One of the kids lived at the end of the row house that I lived in. And we both attended Pierre Laporte Junior High. This kid I’ll refer to as “G”. The other kid that “G” hung out with was “S”.
Military bases were like the proverbial “company town”. Everybody knew everybody’s business and everybody knew everybody’s issues. If you came from one of the many dysfunctional families that lived on military bases in Canada, you may as well have had a scarlett D tattooed on your forehead.
There were four kids that attended Pierre Laporte Junior High that made my life a living hell to the point that one more than one occasion I contemplated stepping in front of the CN train that ran through the middle of the base just behind the PMQs or even the TTC subway train. “G”, “S”, “R.K.”, and “R.A.”
And the thing was, these four would often gang up on me. So it was never a fair one-on-one fight.
These four and their girlfriends were always taunting me about my lack of a girlfriend and my apparent “funny walk”. Also, my father’s frequent anger outbursts and the domestic dispute which occurred in the summer of 1985 seemed to feed these kids even more.
On one occasion I was coming home from school when both “G” and “S” caught me behind Downsview Secondary School. What I didn’t anticipate was that my only friend at the time, John, saw what was happening and he intervened to keep “S” out of the fight. I don’t know if “G” didn’t put as much effort into the fight because “S” wasn’t able to help him, or if I just realized that I had a once in a life time chance to fight back. But I landed a few good punches and “G” decided he wasn’t interested in fighting me.
When I got home my shiner was starting the develop.
Let’s not kid anyone. At that point in my life I was on the scrawny side. “G” was much more developed than I was. Christ, even my younger brother was taller and more muscular than I was. I didn’t actually break 120 lbs until I quit smoking in 1996 when I was 25. At the time I lived on CFB Downsview I’d be very surprised if I broke 90 to 100 lbs. During my adolescence my chest muscles and body fat were so thin that you could easily see my ribs.
I thought that Richard would have approved of me standing up for myself instead of getting the shit beat out of me as usual. Nope. I got a nice back hand across my face and he told me that I had to stop doing things to get myself beat up. He said that he was getting tired of me picking fights and then playing the victim.
I can only look back and wonder if Richard was projecting.
Projection in the psychological sense is where you take all of your flaws and superimpose them onto someone else.
In 2011 when I received my foster care records from the Alberta Government I would discover that both the psychiatrist hired by the Canadian Forces as well as my civilian child care workers had noted that my father refused to accept responsibility for his family, blamed others for his problems, felt victimized, expected others to solve his problems for him, often told conflicting stories, and often told those he perceived to be in positions of authority what he thought they wanted to hear.
Richard had already made it known to me at various times between the summer of 1980 and the fall of ’87 when I moved out that I was at fault for allowing the babysitter to molest my younger brother. As an adult I full well realize that this is the stupidest thing that Richard could have ever said. But as a child this cut right to the bone.
So was that it? Was Richard projecting all of his shortcomings and failings on me? Richard wasn’t home like he was supposed to have been and he left my brother and I in the care of his alcoholic mother. Did Richard blame me because otherwise he’d have to step up to the plate and take responsibility for his two kids being sexually abused on a secured defence establishment?
Richard would often “rage out” and get so violent, but then turn around mere hours later and forget all about it. Did Richard view me standing up to “G” and fighting back as me “raging out” like he was prone to?
I forget what rank “G’s” father was at the time, all I know is that he outranked my father. Was my father just afraid of catching flack from “G’s” father or from a superior of “G’s” father?
Richard’s refusal to allow me to defend myself has had repercussion well into my adult life.
Not being allowed to defend myself fostered a very low self esteem.
Not being allowed to defend myself taught me to appease others and just go with what others wanted as this would avoid confrontation.
This will always be a mystery to me as Richard is long since dead.
And honestly whether or not I ever got an answer from Richard would be pointless as the damage has long since been done.
I honestly can’t remember when I started wetting the bed. It was definitely in the aftermath of the sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao.
I can’t see me having wet the bed too frequently when grandma was living with us.
But it did start towards the end of our stay on Canadian Forces Base Namao.
By the time I was living on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach I was frequently wetting the bed. So much so that I even had plastic sheets on my bed.
Now, this period of time was right after the sexual abuse on CFB Namao and it was also when my father’s anger with me was beginning to peak because I allowed the babysitter to molest my younger brother and I had fucked with Richard’s military career. Not bad for a 9 year old, eh?
Actually, I’m pretty sure that I wet the bed one time when Richard had taken my brother and I to spend the night at Sue’s apartment by Londonderry Mall in Edmonton before she moved into our PMQ in August of 1980, so I would have been wetting the bed sometime after the summer of 1979.
So yeah, this would have been around when I was at and the abuse was starting to get bad.
They tried diapers on me. Didn’t work, couldn’t get adolescent sized diapers I guess.
Richard was supposedly looking at a device that would give me a mild electric shock when it had detected that I had wet the bed.
Sue had gotten so fed up with my wetting the bed that she rubbed my face in my own urine soaked sheets.
Initially when I started wetting the bed I’d get a fresh change of sheets and some new pyjamas. But as my bed wetting wore on I’d have to sleep on the same sheets. As there were no more pyjama changes, I started sleeping naked.
I still remember waking up in the middle of the night or the early morning with my sheets soaking wet and cold and smelling like pee. I remember learning to sleep around the wetness.
When I was allowed to take showers, no one at school would notice that I had slept in my own urine. But when it was determined that the best way to get me to stop pissing the bed was to make me go to school without a shower that when things started to get really bad at school. Who the fuck in their right mind wants to be anywhere near a kid that smell like piss?
And kids at that age can be very vocal in their opinions of someone who smells like a rancid onion.
So no, not changing my sheets, nor not allowing me to shower, nor any of the other humiliation techniques were successful in getting me to stop wetting my bed.
I did eventually stop pissing my bed.
I was 16 when I stopped.
I had found a room to rent locally and I moved out of Richard’s house.
That would have been around January or February of 1988.
I was terrified that first night that I lived “on my own”.
Know what?
My bed sheets have been dry ever since.
As a kid my beds were always the cheap disposable foam mattress type of beds. Not too long ago, actually earlier this year, I bought my first real bed. It has a frame and a box and a mattress that’s almost 8 inches thick. The box that the mattress lays upon has a solid flat surface. And there’s a head board. And real pillows. Why didn’t I buy a real bed before? I don’t know, I really don’t. Foam mattresses with cheap boxes were always what I had. Maybe that’s what I always thought that I deserved. Maybe I was also afraid that I’d just ruin a new bed by pissing on it.
To say that I was terrified of Richard would have been a grave understatement.
Did the sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao play a role. Certainly, of that there is no doubt.
With Richard being unable to take responsibility for his family, and with Richard needing to blame others for the problems with his family, it wouldn’t be too far out of line to say that the anger, disdain, and ridicule that Richard directed towards me for having allowed the babysitter to touch my younger brother as well as for me having “fucked with” Richard’s military career was taking an emotional and psychological toll on my young and developing brain.
Am I embarrassed to share this? No, not in the slightest. I’ve gone so far beyond the point of being ashamed that I no longer care.
Margaret (Marguerite) Mary Anderson (nee Waniandy) 1923 – 1986 I’m pretty certain this portrait was taken before her husband Andy slipped in the bathtub.
I don’t know too much about my grandmother other than she was full Swampy Cree.
She was born in 1923. Where, I don’t know. I’m thinking that it was in the Peace Region of Alberta.
Her only school records indicate that she attended Holy Angles Indian Residential School in Fort Chipewyan in Alberta
She enrolled in school on Oct 3rd, 1935 when she would have been 12 years old. She left school on March 21st, 1938 when she was almost 16.
Not that great of an education. But then again the goal of the government back then wasn’t to educate the First Nations, it was to destroy the First Nations. So long as they could “beat the Indian” out of the kids, that was all that mattered.
I don’t know very much about her father Modesta Waniandy or her mother Caroline Coutrelle other than her father died in Uranium City, Saskatchewan around 1969. He had been a hard rock miner.
Grandma had three sons. One with a man I don’t know the name of. And two with her husband Arthur Herman Gill. -Norman was her first son. I don’t know when he was born, but apparently he was 6 to 8 years older than my father Richard. -Richard my father was born in April 1946. Grandma would have been 23 at the time. -My uncle Doug was born around 1950, exact date I don’t know.
I don’t know exactly how long grandma and Arthur Gill were together. Richard was born in Peterborough, Ontario. However, by the time Richard started grade 1 grandma and Arthur had divorced and grandma moved with Norman, Richard, and Doug to Fort McMurray, Alberta.
I don’t know when she married Andy Anderson, but Richard and Doug never took Andy’s last name nor did they ever refer to Andy as their stepfather. The only time Richard ever referred to Andy as his stepfather was in 2013 when I examined Richard for Federal Court.
Grandma came to live with us in 1977 after my mother left. As I would learn in 2013, this wasn’t actually the first time grandma had flown out from Alberta to help her son Richard raise my brother and I. It’s just that when she came out to stay with us in Summerside in 1977 I was old enough to remember her. I would have been 6 years old when grandma came to live with us at CFB Summerside.
For the life of me I’ll never understand why the First Nations kids put so much faith in the Catholic Church and why they continues their belief in the Christian god into theist adult life. Grandma had an affinity for the Catholic Church.
When grandma came to live with us on Summerside I got put into Sunday school right away. I was already a prolific reader. I loved reading encyclopedias and any other type of scientific type literature we had around the house. Sunday school seemed like nothing more than a really bad Saturday morning cartoon that made absolutely no sense and seemed to require one to believe in magical fairytales. No, I didn’t appreciate Sunday school one bit.
When grandma moved into our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Namao in August of 1978 she started taking my brother and I to Sunday service at the base chapel on CFB Namao. Every Sunday we’d get up, put on our Sunday best, go to service, and then after service was over we’d go home and put our play clothes on.
Grandma was very strict and very authoritative.
Grandma had a few maxims that she lived by: – Children are only to speak when spoken to. -Children are better seen than heard. -Spare the rod and spoil the child. I have no doubt in my mind that these were drilled into her head during her stint in residential school.
A weird phrase of hers that has always stuck with me is “Animals get mad, humans get angry”.
Grandma was also very much an alcoholic. Both her and her husband Andy Anderson drank heavily. It was their drinking that ultimately put my brother and I on a collision course with Captain Father Angus McRae and his altar boy P.S.. My stepmother said that my grandmother’s drinking served to enable my father’s drinking. My mother said that my grandmother could drink my father under the table.
After Andy’s accident in the bathtub of our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Namao grandma hired P.S. to babysit my brother and I. No doubt P.S. came specially recommended to her by Captain Father Angus McRae, the chaplain at the base chapel where P.S. was an altar boy.
Grandma’s instructions were that my brother and I were to listen to and obey P.S. and if P.S. told her that we had misbehaved that she would deal with us when she got back and that our father would hear about our misbehaviour. What more could a teenaged child molester want than for two kids from a very fractured and dysfunctional family to be told that they have to obey his every instruction.
I’m not sure if anyone ever told grandma about my issues with beef protein and dairy. Even though my medical records indicate the doctors in Halifax told both of my parents that I was to be put on a diet that avoided beef and beef fats (dairy) I don’t think that anyone ever told grandma. The doctors in Halifax were noting that when I had beef fats or dairy that I would become very colicky and I’d exhibit rectal bleeding.
I couldn’t stand milk as a kid. I still can’t. When I drink milk it tastes very metallic and leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. If I get stupid and have ice cream, especially real ice cream with high levels of beef fats, I’ll be rushing to the toilet in about 30 to 40 minutes and it won’t be fun. I’ll spare you the graphic details.
Milk was one of grandma’s favourite food stuffs to feed my brother and I. While my brother would happily eat anything with dairy, I’d be doing everything possible to hide the stuff and flush it down the toilet or sneak it into the garbage when grandma wasn’t looking.
Grandma caught me once putting my cereal in the garbage. I had to eat all of the cereal out of the garbage bag. I tried to put my porridge down one of the air vents by the kitchen table. She made me eat the porridge out of the air vent.
It was like a game of cat and mouse with her.
Grandma was also unafraid to use corporal punishment. She never hit or slapped like Richard, but she could pinch and twist until tears resulted. She also wasn’t afraid to use the wooden soup spoon. She would even go out and grab a switch off a bush or a tree and use that.
Grandma caught me scavenging for goods out of the dumpster by the base arena around the summer of ’79. The dumpster was where the families who were being posted to different bases would dump off all of the “crap” that they didn’t want to haul off to the new base. Sometimes families would end up with a lot of crap if one or two of the kids were staying behind to live on their own in the nearest city instead of moving with their parents.
Needless to say, you could find lots of “treasures” in this bin.
Somehow grandma caught wind that I was in the bin. She came down to where the bin was. She told me to get out. She started yelling something about “self respect” and “being an animal”. She then told me to go break a branch off a small tree. I did. She started hitting me with it all the way back to the PMQ. If I started running she’d tell me to stop. Then she’d hit me more. And then there was the “wait until your father gets home”. As my father was frequently away, this meant that my father usually had three or four “wait till your father gets home” sessions to deal with.
One time, and I can’t remember exactly when but it was well after P.S. had started abusing my brother and I, my brother was laying on the couch in the living room and he had his hands inside his pants and he was touching himself. I was in the kitchen doing my homework. Grandma was cooking supper. She didn’t hear my brother making noise so she went to check on him. The kitchen and the living room were adjacent to each other. She took a few steps into the hallway, saw what my brother was doing, and yelled his name out loud and asked him “what the hell are you doing”. My brother answered “but it feels good grannie”. Holy fuck. She literally ran across the living room and with the large wooden spoon started beating the living Jesus out of my brother. She just kept hitting and hitting and he just kept crying. She called him a “filthy dirty pig”. She then turned around and saw me standing there. She yelled at me that I was a filthy bastard for teaching my brother how to do what he was doing. She chased after me over to Guthrie school. For a heavy drinker with a pack a day habit she could sure run. She caught me at the school. She beat me with the same wooden spoon all the way back home.
The reaction she had to finding my brother doing what he had been doing kinda tells me that maybe she had been molested as a kid. Probably in Residential School. I don’t have any proof of this other than we now know that there was an extreme amount of sexual abuse in the residential schools and that victims of sexual abuse often don’t react to sexual situations like people who were never molested. For example I don’t enjoy sex with other people. I find sex to be disgusting and filthy. Was grandma the same way? I didn’t actually dare touch myself until well after my 13th birthday when I was well away from grandma.
One day after I had been found being buggered by P.S. grandma saw P.S. walking down the common sidewalk that ran behind the PMQs. She went to the back door and she called out to him ” You filthy lying little bastard!”. At the time I never knew what this was about. I had assumed that grandma never discovered what P.S. had done to me, or my brother. So I had no idea. It wouldn’t be until 2011 that I would learn that sometime in the aftermath of P.S. being caught in the act of buggering me that he spilt the beans on Captain McRae and what Captain McRae had done. Grandma, in her blind and mindless devotion to the church would have seen Captain McRae as the innocent party and that P.S. was lying.
I’m sad to say it, but I actually preferred drunk grandma over sober grandma. Just like Richard, drunk grandma was a far nicer person than sober grandma. Drunk grandma would take you into the city on the military shuttle bus and buy you toys at Army and Navy. Or even a record at the record shop in Northgate mall. Grandma would sometime go drinking at the Roslyn Hotel and she’d give my brother and I a few dollars to go bowling or to play at the malls adjacent to the Roslyn . Sober grandma wouldn’t buy you fuck all. With drunk grandma you could talk when you wanted to. With sober grandma you didn’t dare interrupt her, kinda the same as Richard.
Grandma was a heavy smoker. She didn’t buy pre-made cigarettes. She’d buy a tin of tobacco and she had one of those rolling machines. She’d get me to roll her cigarettes for her.
Even after we moved to Toronto in April of 1983 Richard unloaded my brother and I on grandma in the summer of 1984 and 1985. Once a week in the summer of 1984 we’d take her shopping cart full of empties and head down to the bottle depot at the Labatt’s Brewery and cash the bottles in. Then she’d pick up a couple of cases or a flat or two of Pilsner two-fours and we’d head back to the apartment. If she ran low on beer over the course of the week there was always the Co-op taxi service that would pick up beer for her.
Grandma was the first adult in my life to ever give me beer. And not just one bottle, but two full bottles of beer to drink. When I was 12. I don’t know if she was trying to teach me a lesson, or if she thought I was old enough to drink, but yeah.
I don’t think my father or my grandmother viewed alcohol as anything evil. Every now and again when my father would be home they’d let me have little sips of beer. Every now and again when they’d be having wine again they’d let me have the occasional little sip. One more than one occasion my father would let me have a sip or two of his rum and coke. I guess the paternal side of my family really had problems with alcohol.
In the summer of 1984, my brother had said something about P.S. to my grandmother. I don’t know what he said and he doesn’t remember saying anything. I can’t see my grandmother having asked if what my “father” said was true. I came home after working at the pizza shop in Kingsway Garden mall. Grandma kinda cornered me in the entry of her apartment suite. She demanded “Is it true what your brother said about P.S.? Tell me! Is it true!”. Sure I could have told grandma what ever my brother had told her was true about P.S., but I had just spent the previous four years being told by both my father and Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke that what happened on CFB Namao was my fault and that I had allowed P.S. to molest my younger brother. I managed to get out of the apartment. I made my way up to Canadian Forces Base Namao and tried to report P.S. to the military police. They didn’t want to hear about it because P.S. was a civilian. I went to the Edmonton Police Service, they wanted to talk to my father, the man who blamed me for what happened on CFB Namao. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t go home that evening or night. There was an old abandoned warehouse on 105th Ave and about 111th street and I’m sure that I hid in there all night. When I got home the next day grandma was drinking by herself and she never mentioned P.S. again.
Grandma died in 1986. I’m not sure if she ever got her Indian status back before she died. I know that after she started to sober up in 1985 and started going to AA that she started taking a lot of pride in her First Nations heritage. I don’t think that she was ever ashamed, like Richard had been, but she just seemed to be more open.
By marrying Arthur Herman Gill my grandmother would have lost her “Indian” status. She wouldn’t be able to reclaim her Indian status unless she married a man with Indian status. The government of Canada changed that rule in 1986. Now a First Nations woman no longer automatically loses her Indian status for marrying a non-First Nations person.
She had taken my brother and I to a couple of “sweats” when we lived on CFB Namao. I had my first taste of pemmican when we lived on CFB Namao. But as a kid I just never made the connection that my grandmother was an actual “Indian” or that my father was part “Indian”. Yeah, grandma used to buy us moccasins and she had even bought me a leather vest with the colour beading on it, but I just honestly never made the connection. But in the summer of 1985 she was more vocal about her heritage. That was the first time ever that she had told me that she was an Indian and that she was Swampy Cree.
She never talked about her time in residential school other than the topic kinda vaguely came up one day. I noticed that grandma could write with both hands. I asked her to teach me how to do that. All she said is that she’d have to beat my knuckles with a stick like the nuns had beat her.
Grandma sitting on the couch in the window bay of PMQ #11 – 12th Street Canadian Forces Base Namao, Alberta She use to sew her own dresses.
In retrospect she wasn’t an evil person. She was just as fucked up as everyone else in my family. She was damaged by the Government of Canada and the Catholic church and the determination of both entities to assimilate the First Nations people into “white” culture.
Okay, so this topic came up in the last post, and I thought what the hell if I’m writing the story of my life can’t do it without mentioning this.
I have in fact collected welfare a few time in life.
I’ve also collected U.I. and E.I. a few times in life as well.
The first time that I collected welfare was in Edmonton, AB. I forget the exact dates and my tax records aren’t exactly clear, but I was on welfare from around September of 1991 until February of 1992.
The thing I remember the most about applying is (a) how fucking humiliating it was, and (b) because I had been born in Nova Scotia, Alberta was willing to buy me a plane ticket “back home”. I say “back home” as I hadn’t lived in Nova Scotia since I was 5 years old.
Why didn’t I call my father for money? There is no fucking way on Earth I would have ever called him asking for money. You just learnt as a kid to never ask him for money. You just didn’t. Most times he’d just answer that he was “broke” and didn’t have money, but if you could wait for a month he might have some money then. And this would be for amounts like $20. So asking him for $300 to cover rent for the month would have been out of the question.
Marie didn’t have much money, but she did help me out with groceries a couple of times.
Edmonton was a hell hole in the early ’90s. It was in the midst of a recession. I tried delivering Pizza, but that was super risky walking into some parts of town with money in your pocket. I did “dial-a-bottle” delivery for a while. Same risk as the pizza though, but this time not only could they steal your money, they’d steal the booze too. I worked at a car wash. Nothing better than working in a car wash in Edmonton in the winter.
I moved to Vancouver in February of 1992. The job I had come down for ended up getting moved back by a couple of months because the two mechanics that were supposed to be leaving Lions Gate Lanes stayed for longer as they were having issues getting their venture going.
I applied for welfare in BC. Only thing is at the time unless you lived in BC for sixth months you couldn’t get welfare. I was given two options. A free bus ticket back to Edmonton or I could go stay at Catholic Charities Hostel for Men on the periphery of the infamous Downtown East Side. I chose the men’s hostel.
At the hostel you got a couple of meal vouchers. One for breakfast, and one for lunch. I would use the breakfast voucher and trade the lunch voucher for singles. Singles were single cigarettes.
I started smoking around age 13. My younger brother was smoking before I was. Richard didn’t care. By the time I was 18 I was up to two packs a day. By the time I hit Vancouver in ’92 I was still at two packs a day. Singles weren’t enough. So I ended up picking up butts out of ashtrays and using the unburnt tobacco to roll smokes in rolling papers. I was able to find piecemeal work, but I was only allowed to stay at Catholic Charities for 6 weeks. After six weeks you had to get out and find smoother place to stay.
Luckily the job at Lions Gate finally opened up.
I worked at Lions Gate from June of 1992 until June of 1993. The reason why the two previous mechanics left was that the owner of the shopping mall was not going to renew the lease for Lions Gate Lanes and Brunswick was shutting the centre down at the end of the ’92 – ’93 league season. I stayed on with Brunswick for the dismantling of the centre. I then got hired on by Larco to help build the new centre. When Larco cancelled the lease for Lions Gate Lanes, they thought that they would simply walk in and operate the centre for a couple of years until the redevelopment happened. The only problem with that is Brunswick had years of experience repossessing bankrupt bowling centres. We had Lions Gate Lanes stripped to the bare walls in 12 days.
This left Larco in a lurch as they had promised the leagues that there would be bowling for the ’93 – ’94 bowling season. But Lions Gate Lanes was an empty shell.
Warren Flanagan with Brunswick Corp said that there was a job waiting for me in Mississauga if I wanted it.
Phil had been hired on by Larco to oversee the construction of the centre. Phil called me and asked me if I wanted to help build the new centre. I said sure. Larco hired a company from the states to supply lanes, pinsetters, scoring equipment, and the rest of the capital equipment. It took about six week, but we built that 36 lane centre. The only problem was the pinsetters were a mishmash of used American and Japanese Brunswick machines. Some of them even came from a flood damaged centre in the states and were super rusted. The electrics were iffy on the machines and not a single one of them had been overhauled.
The bowlers were rightfully pissed off. The lanes weren’t ready for the start of the season. In fact, the lanes weren’t ready until about 2 weeks later. But the pinsetters were in such rough condition that they were having jams and blackouts non-stop.
One of the machines couldn’t detect standing pins. And this was the lane that the League President was bowling on. He told Phil that if the machine screwed up once while he was bowling on it he was taking the entire league and they’d move to a different centre. Phil begged me to keep it running. I tried to keep it going without having it shut down or sweep standing pins. Unfortunately I got my arm crushed in the machine.
After I got my arm free of the machine I stumbled my way up to the front and I asked Phil for a ride to the hospital. He told me to take the bus. I quit then and there. The next morning I called Warren and asked him if the job was still open in Ontario.
Because I had opened an U.I. claim when Lions Gate Lanes closed and we were all laid off, my claim was still open. When I went to the U.I. office a couple of days later I explained what had happened. They considered that I had already been through the waiting period and therefore they would get my payments underway right away.
With my final cheque from Park Royal Lanes and my U.I. cheque, and my savings I moved to Toronto in late November of ’93.
The job waiting for me was at Brunswick Mississauga lanes. I went in and met the manager. The manager said that he had heard excellent things about my from both Warren and my previous centre manager Wendy. I can’t remember the manager’s name, but I can remember the head mechanic’s name. Don W. The manager got on the intercom and called to the back. As soon as Don emerged from the walkway I could tell this wasn’t going to work. “I told you, no one from the fucking West Coast is going to tell me who the fuck I have to hire”. Don and the manager went into the office and had a yelling match. Don emerged and look at me and said “get your stuff, we’re going to the back, and don’t get comfortable because the first time you fuck up I sending you out the fucking door.” I lasted at Mississauga lanes for about three weeks. U.I. reviewed my termination and determined that it wasn’t justified. As my claim was in British Columbia they’d have to transfer the paperwork over. In the meantime I was now collecting welfare in Ontario. Once the U.I. office got the paperwork sent out it was a few weeks for the the processing to take place. Once that was done I was back on U.I. again.
To keep rent down as low as possible I had been staying at the Salvation Army down by Moss Park.
Toronto wasn’t great at the time. Job interviews weren’t leading to job offers. So I ended up heading back to Vancouver. The only thing I hadn’t counted on was the 6 weeks that it was going to take to change my mailing address. They would also have to re-evaluate my claim as I had moved to a different claims jurisdiction. And of course, they’d have to transfer my paperwork back to British Columbia.
So I ended up receiving emergency welfare from the BC Government. No wait period this time, but it would be clawed back from my U.I. cheques when they started showing up.
Why didn’t I call Richard and ask Richard for money? Not worth it. Not worth the humiliation. Not worth the degradation.
I ended up getting a room at the Salvation Army Dunsmuir House for Men. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was wrong with this place. Someone broke into my room and stole my knapsack and when I called the VPD the Sgt. responding laughed at me when I said I wanted to file a report.
Most of the men in this place were angry. And I mean really angry. Fights would start over the slightest issue.
In 2011 I would learn that the Salvation Army Dunsmuir House for Men was a Federal half-way house and housed men who had just been released from prison. At the time when I moved into the Dunsmuir I just needed a cheap room. No one ever told me that this place also housed freshly released prisoners.
I’ll save this for another post, but my return to Vancouver was when I tried to work up the courage to jump off the Lions Gate Bridge. Instead of working up the courage to jump off the bridge, I worked up a case of pneumonia.
I ended up getting work at a small bowling centre in East Richmond around the end of June. I was there until 1999 when I got into commercial property management. And as they say the rest is history.
So yeah, the first part of my 20s was very, very rough.
Which is why when I read Richard’s statement that he gave to the CFNIS 2011, I choked. He made it sound as if I kept calling him non-stop for money and that he had been giving me money whenever I asked for it.
Did the CFNIS suggest to Richard what he should say?
Was Richard really so keen to play the victim that he said what he said?
Was Richard just vengeful?
This will always be one of life’s little mysteries because Richard is dead.
Beeshive 