My Awful life (A Resume)

I was seventeen when my parents separated. At first I lived with my mother, but we couldn't get along, so I moved in with my father. He took it as a personal victory. On my eighteenth birthday, we got drunk. That evening he said to me, "Son, there's something about your mother we never told you."

So I quit College and spent six months backpacking in Europe. In Luxemburg I met a girl. Her name was Berenice, and she said she believed in God. She seemed afraid for me that I didn't, she said "Something terrible could happen." She took me by the hand and guided me past ravines and tunnelled walls, sat with me on cafe terraces, in her yellow miniskirt, her skin like caramel. When the time came for me to leave, she pressed her cheek to mine. "You'll forget me," she said, "but I won't forget. Not the holes in your shoes, or the way you pronounce my name. Not the things you said, when you thought you were only talking."

Back home I got work slinging beer. Late nights, afterhours, cycling home as the sun rose. Day by day passed, the same; I felt I was living in a fish bowl. Then one night a regular locked himself in a toilet stall and opened his veins with a broken bottle.

I went back to school. My friends were getting married, taking on mortgages, having children. My sister married an artist who sold Crystal Meth to pay the bills. At the wedding he was so euphoric he couldn't remember his lines. My mother cried and cried.

I entered university on a four-year B.A. course with Psychology as my major. After the first year I switched to Languages, Italian and French, dropped them after the first semester, and took up Philosophy and Far Eastern Studies. Finally I quit university altogether and joined a band. We hit the road, toured the redneck bars of northern Ontario. In Thunder Bay, a jealous boyfriend kicked our drummer down a set of cement steps; he went into a coma for three days and then died. We packed our equipment and drove home.

Here I am now, in my rainy city. I have no job, I'm on welfare. In this town everyone is rich, or poor, or thinks they're poor. I wait on Granville Street, wait for a plan, wait for direction. The other day I asked someone for spare change and he glared and I saw it was my brother-in-law. As it turns out, he and my sister have been separated for some time. He brushed me off with vague excuses. But as he was leaving, he said to me, "I heard about your mom."

Guy Wilkinson was born in Liverpool, England, raised in Saskatchewan, and now lives with his wife and three children in Vancouver, where he teaches literature at Langara College. He has had stories and poems published in various U.S. and Canadian magazines and is currently working on a novel..

Email: Guy Wilkinson

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