This new house is a little two-story postwar Special, covered in purple bottle-glass stucco. The front yard of this house is small and ratty with weeds choking everything. Cracks spiderweb the stucco and it looks like a stiff breeze could pull it down in big powdery chunks. The front porch is crowded with a never-ending supply of empties that the homeless binners can’t seem to carry away fast enough. Standard exterior of a punk house in Strathcona, but this is just camouflage, something to keep the landlord from venturing in for a closer look.
Over the last year, Pilot and a hurricane of new roommates have salvaged materials and fixed up the busted hardwood floors, painted, put tile in the kitchen, and installed a hardwood bar in one corner of the living room. The backyard is even better, there’s a huge vegetable and flower garden, a big plum tree, and a little greenhouse where Pilot grows tomatoes. Benefits of living with some budding carpenters and landscapers.
She won’t let herself put the key in the lock because she knows later she’ll convince herself she somehow unlocked it by checking like that. She turns the knob and pushes but the door doesn’t budge. Her satisfaction evaporates when she turns to leave and sees her landlord’s son walk around from the side of the house. Her landlord is a failed hippie who didn’t manage to alienate his parents enough in the sixties, so they left him a bunch of properties when they died. He’s a wearer of socks with sandals who once told Pilot, straight-faced, that an infestation of raccoons in the attic was a standard feature of a heritage house. His son is the type who asks his dazed-looking girlfriend to hold his shirt before he fights someone outside a nightclub. Pilot used to sell drugs to people like him and he makes the bottom of her stomach drop out.
“What are you doing here, Jimi?”
“The backyard looks amazing. How long have you been working on that?”
“You have to let us know when you’re coming by. You know that.”
“Just business, huh? That’s cool. I came to talk about your rent increase.”
He’s standing too close to her. His breath smells like those mouthwash strips that dissolve on your tongue. “You can’t give us another rent increase, your dad just gave us one.”
He smiles like he just silently farted and no one has smelled it yet. “Yeah, see, when you didn’t complain, I knew I had to come down here. I’m like, Dad, that house is a fucking pit, no way will they pay more rent. So when you just paid up without bitching, I thought for sure you were growing weed or something. And then I saw your backyard. Walked through the house too. Sweet setup you got, but you didn’t ask to make all these changes.”
“What do you want?”
“Three hundred dollars per month paid to me, and my dad doesn’t have to know how I suddenly want to move into this house.”
Pilot’s block has three houses on it full of dude anarchists. If a car backfires, six of them run into the street, hoping the revolution has started. Of course, none of them are around now to hang Jimi from a lamppost, there’s just Pilot’s ancient next-door neighbor who’s come to her window to make sure she’s okay. Pilot gives her a little wave.
“You’d never live in this house or anywhere around here.”
“Of course not, my condo is totally the bomb... but I could have some great house parties here before I decided it wasn’t for me. My dad respects my life journey. Your band could play the parties or something. You’re in a band, right? Everyone in East Van dresses like they’re on their way to band practice.”
“Three hundred dollars is too much. I can’t swing that, none of us can.”
Jimi’s eyes flicker over the new sleeve tattoo that glistens on her arm. “Nice ink.”
Pilot fights the urge to tuck her arm behind her back. She saved for months to get the work done, and the artist cut her a break on the price. None of this is Jimi’s business. She grinds a thank you between her teeth.
“Hey, I know how hard it is to get by these days; it’s a good thing you’re so industrious, you’ll figure it out. Or you can get kicked out and wander from shack and shack to fix them up before they get torn down. Like a shitty East Van Johnny Appleseed. We got a deal or what?”
She could explain it to her roommates tonight and they’d all be angry for a while, but they’d just move on. She likes her roommates, they’re kind people who don’t make her feel like she needs to padlock the door of her room. One of them just got a job in a kitchen and has started bringing home Cuban sandwiches for everyone when he gets off work. Pilot will figure something out, anything to get Jimi and his plastic mint breath away from her.
“Deal.”
Pilot picks up shifts in four bars along the Hastings strip and one illegal booze can above a closed artisanal butcher shop on Powell. Tonight’s shift is at Dumpster Fire, the newest and by far the nicest of them. Dumpster Fire is a gentrification special, once a hot underground club, now home of the third-best burger in Vancouver. Unlike her other workplaces, this bar doesn’t smell heavily of bleach and rot, and no fights break out that aren’t solved with sarcasm.
Tonight it’s only half full, and Pilot is thankful for the quiet. The soundtrack inside is third-generation alt-country. Drinkers periodically interrupt the flow of conversation and hold their phones up to identify a song. The beer taps are topped with doll heads and the walls are dotted with flat-screens. The TVs play clips of skateboarding injuries, old chat line ads full of women with giant eighties hair, and YouTube stars giving commentary as if they’re astonished or angered by everything in the world.
Charlotte, the other bartender working tonight, finishes lashing her dreads into a thigh-width ponytail and frowns as Pilot checks the time again. “You okay?”
“I guess I am. I’m meeting that guy.”
“Creeptastic?”
Pilot nods.
“Gross.” Charlotte slices bar fruit while Pilot pulls a pint for herself. Charlotte shifts uncomfortably. “Did you get my text?”
Pilot nods and slurps foam off the top of the glass. “Yep. I can cover your shift, no problem.”
“Thanks, I wouldn’t ask only my mom comes into town tomorrow and she’s really freaked out someone is going to, like, abduct her as soon as she gets off the bus, you know? Small-town moms are scared of everything, I guess.”
“Yeah, my mom’s scared of everything too.”
Charlotte is six foot one and wide, with biceps built for crushing. Pilot has seen her lift full kegs one-handed, toss drunk bros out onto the street like they were inflatable dolls. With her hair tied back like that, she looks like a Geiger painting. She is sure to give her mother city confidence.
“You texted me this guy’s details, right? Phone number? License plate?”
Pilot nods, takes a drink of the cold and bitter beer, something local named after a cartoon she’s never watched, and sets the glass behind the bar. “Watch this for me? I have to change.”
Pilot heads to the storage room, waving at the kitchen staff as she walks past. She stowed her backpack full of slut clothes in the corner earlier, behind stacked flats of cheap pilsner. She thinks about her mother, a woman she dearly hopes has a rich interior life, who has said about ninety words to Pilot, ever. Pilot actually thought she saw her dad in the bar at the Balmoral Hotel two nights ago and she nearly fainted, but it was just someone who could have been his twin: long wild gray hair, wiry bordering on skeletal, and dead eyes like a shark.
She hasn’t seen either of them in eight years. Last time she’d been crouched in their little kitchen listening to her father explain himself to a poor legal aid lawyer who’d been foolish enough to make a home visit, foolish enough to try and help her dad.