My second year of art college brought with it some aches and pains, fresh starts, and new perspectives.
That summer, I’d moved away from Park Place to share a two-bedroom flat with my sister Kim and her new boyfriend Mike. This change of household removed us both from bad memories of our family and of Kim’s time with the worst bastard she’d ever known. Kim was now enjoying her new life with Mike. We were all just kids really, in our first rental apartment.
Our new apartment was one I’d found down on Pender Street, not all that far from Vancouver’s industrial waterfront on Burrard Inlet. Our neighbourhood wasn’t in the infamous downtown eastside, but it was a big step away from the relatively green lawns of Park Place.
It was the first rental agreement I’d ever signed. I remember the old three story walkup, probably built in the twenties, and I remember the overweight man in the manager’s office. He wore a sweaty undershirt and worked a cigarette between his lips while he passed me the yellow rental form to sign. No eye contact. He’d done this a million times before. He said something that I can’t recall, gave me my copy and my key, and that was the last I ever saw of him.
The staircase up to the third floor was wide, panelled in dark wood, and reminded me of my grandfather’s hotel in Victoria. It was seedy, but also had a dated, historical feeling that appealed to me. Above the door of our suite was a transom – that little tilt-out window thing that I’d seen in old movies and in Poppy’s hotel.
The apartment was large and spacious and the ceilings were so high! There was a smell of age, moisture, and mold that I remembered from our seedy motel days over ten years earlier. It just felt very familiar to me. Maybe age or a sense of history gave me some kind of a comfort.
A large picture window in the livingroom gave us a nice look at the north shore mountains. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed seeing them till that moment. I liked the apartment almost immediately and the many pretty sunsets seen through that livingroom window bolstered my satisfaction in the months to come.
The move helped me to kind of shrug off parts of my own past too: It felt like reaching a new-level of freedom – a chance to reconfirm my independence. Park Place had been the site of my family home from 1976 until 1984, and in that time I’d watched my family suffer in so many ways and finally break into pieces. Whatever glue had once held the Love family together and united our hearts was just gone. Mum’s mental illness and alcoholism had landed her in Riverview, Dad’s physical illnesses and alcoholism had landed in a long-term care home, and at the ages of nineteen and seventeen, me and Kim had been split up to fend for ourselves.
So, living with Kim again made me happy. We were keeping our part of the family together by sharing a home again, and that healed some old feelings of loss. Not having to live in the shadow of my parent’s struggles, and seeing now that my sister Kim was actually safe and sound living with her new guy, I felt a real sense of relief and liberation from the rut of a clawing family past.
One day, I was told about a chance to take a bike courier job for the summer. With my pedicab experience and a lifetime of urban cycIing experience under my belt, I fancied myself a good cyclist and I wanted to see if I could do it. Dad let my buy myself a new mountain bike to replace my old Sears 10-speed.
A couple years earlier, when I briefly worked as a (bad) bike mechanic at West Boulevard Cycles, the manager Alex had regularly teased me, calling my bike “The Sears Pig”, which always made me laugh. With its all-steel frame and middle of the road parts, it really was a pig, but it had gotten me to every class and job without so much as a flat tire or thrown chain. By the time I stopped working at West Boulevard, I’d made that old bike as tight as a drum, and given it new canary yellow tape on the handlebars and the truest wheels on the road. But to be a bike courier, a mountain bike with sturdy wheels and lighter frame was required. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
I got the cycle courier gig, after a brief and harried interview. With my shiny new bike and bright blue spandex cycling tights, I must have looked about as new on the job as anyone could possibly be. It was rushed and a bit nerve-wracking, but I made a few successful deliveries, and the first half-dozen were even kind of fun. I self-consciously endured some good-natured cat-calls of “Whoo, Rookie!” as I loped back out to my bike from a drop-off at one of the Bentall Towers. I felt very exposed and self-conscious at first, like some kind of circus clown riding a penny-farthing bike.
It was really hard work: I got lost once or twice, and it seemed that every other bike courier was bigger and twice as fast as me, and also more than a little insane. As I watched another courier cut down the centre line of Georgia Street between opposite lanes of traffic, I wondered what the hell it took to be successful in this racket. Some kind of a death wish maybe?
After a few hours and some painfully steep hills in the Downtown West-End, my walkie talkie was broken and I’d somehow sprained my right knee, reducing my pedalling down to an awkward circular limping motion. I could hear the dispatcher’s increasing frustration at my slow rate of pickups and my lack of replies. “Come on 51! Where are you?” By this time, I was completely demoralized and felt such relief when the dispatcher grunted an annoyed “Come on in 51. You’re done.”
The punchline to all this pain and failure was my massive paycheque of thirteen dollars.
I told Dad that the courier gig didn’t work out well for me (I might have even still been limping when I visited him), but I think he was happy to have helped me to try.
I kept that Norco Mountain Bike for another twenty years. It was a much better bike than I was a courier – still perfect for getting me to school and around town.
Art college remained my personal oasis of safety and idealism, full of opportunities to meet new people, to expand my horizons, and to take on new ideas. All I wanted now was to pursue art school and to feel the sun and wind on my face as I raced across town on my mountain bike. I just wanted to learn and replace hard old shadowy worries with the whatever new light I could gather.
My second year promised more focused studies in art history, drawing, and computer graphics. I missed seeing some of my first-year classmates who’d left school for other things. Some left after Foundation for jobs (I saw one former classmate stocking groceries in The Great Canadian Superstore). Some went into film and video, and some into animation, or the painting and printmaking programs. Some got into multidisciplinary and performance art. Everyone seemed to be finding their new path.
Sometimes, I’d see some familiar faces in the hallways or in art history class (which was still compulsory), or I’d share classes with a few of them. People were diverging on their personal paths, but it was still a shared journey.
I was starting to understand some of the ways that artists and art movements intersected and interacted with science, technology, and politics, and I started to wonder if art could provide me with some of the hope and aspiration that my life had been lacking.
As a kid back at home, whenever things seemed unbearably dark or hopeless, nobody in my family prayed to god. Dad was a materialist, and provided us with no model of how to hope, and Mum was either non-communicative or absent. It seemed like hope and consolation always had to come from elsewhere: from friends, teachers, other parents, or from excapist fantasy and fiction. To feel hope for the future, idealism and optimism had to be grown internally using whatever external fuel you could find or create for yourself.
In Foundation, we studied art history from prehistory through antiquity up to the Renaissance. In second year, we studied modern art history, which basically covered movements from the 1700s to the modern day.
In my modern art history lectures, I was fascinated to learn how the Dadaists and Surrealists wrote manifestos and staged exhibitions and events that poked fingers in the eyes of their 1920s establishment. Dadaists in Europe after the first world war were kind of like the “fuck you” punk rockers of 1970s Britain. I began to see that underneath the apparent nihilism they demonstrated against old, classical ways, there was also a generative rebuilding, a desire to reform things into new shapes and approaches. The next generation might tear out some old things by the roots, but would still actively till the new ground.
In life drawing class, I had to once again confront a live, naked human body and interpret it using a stick of willow charcoal on cheap newsprint. I cannot think of any other activity that confronts your ego so directly: all you have is your hands, eyes, charcoal, and paper. If you are trying to sketch something realistically, there are few moments more unforgiving, honest, or revealing, except maybe singing.
It was maddening to see how much fear and how little skill I had. Each three hour life drawing class felt like running a marathon in soccer cleats across my own heart, tearing up the too-delicate flesh of my self image. I had to admit that I kind of sucked at life drawing, but I also saw that I could slowly improve if I kept trying. In those moments, I just had to do the work and also be my own best friend. Scar tissue would grow in wherever it was needed.
I didn’t know where my new territory would be found, or if I could break my own ground, but I had already seen what giving up and exhaustion looked like, so continuing forward was the only way to go.
