MY FIRST HOUSE

   Well, we made it over to the east side where we ran into a few people we knew. Wet Brain Zack and his girlfriend Vanessa were there, strung out of heroin as they would be in Vancouver. I still wasn’t into heroin much at this time in my life, so we weren’t doing a lot of it, although we started to bang coke again.

  We didn’t stay too long here before we took off back to Montreal. I don’t remember the trip back to Montreal. The next thing I remember was being back on St. Laurent and Ave De Pins hanging out and shooting tons of coke while living behind the Jean Coutu in some cubby hole. IT was funny, one night I just laid down to go to sleep when two drunk girls came up to the entrance of the cubby hole to take a piss. It was dark so they couldn’t see me but I could totally see them. I should have said something sick and twisted to them.

  It was starting to get cold and we were fed up doing coke all day, every day. I was eighteen now so that meant I could get a welfare cheque. Baja was in town, so I used her address to get my first cheque. Our plan was to stop shooting coke and get a place so when I got my cheque I found an apartment in the paper on the corner of St. Catherine and De Lorimer in the gay village, and the start of the east end. I was super happy to have my own place. I had never been able to say “this is my place” before. It was just one big room with a bathroom and a kitchen; it wasn’t great but good enough for the three of us. Well, we didn’t make it too long without doing coke, go figure. Just my luck, there was a 24/7 coke dealer four doors down from us . Bye bye welfare cheque. That would be the first of many welfare cheques to go straight in my fuckin arm! Proud to be Canadian, give me another hit!

  Man, I was getting so paranoid in this place. Syd knew how I got when I was high, so it didn’t surprise her to see me hiding under the table with a knife or squeegee, but it was still pretty embarrassing to me when I came down. Fuckin coke man!

  I’ve seen some funny shit that people do when they’re high. One day my buddy Dave, after doing his hit, grabbed a frying pan off the kitchen counter, sat on the bed and was trying to hide behind it. Hi Dave, we can still see you! Or this other time a few years later, which is my personal favourite, we had a squat right by the squeegee corner by St. Laurent, where Todd, this prostitute chick that he was fuckin, and I were all staying. So every time she would come back from pulling a trick or whatever I would be high, peeking out the window, holding a knife or my squeegee and she would say to me, “get out of the fuckin window there’s no one there, Mark.” Not in my head, honey! So after two weeks of this, I guess I wore off on her because one day I came back to the squat and she’s in the fuckin window and I’m like, “What the fuck are you doing there’s no one out there.” Then I would go do my hit and I would be right next to her looking out that fuckin window, Ha!

  So we had this apartment for three months from December 1st to March 1st when we decided we had had enough. I took my March cheque and bought a via rail ticket for the three of us and we headed to Moncton, New Brunswick.