By Lucy

How broke is too broke?

The temperature plummeted on the weekend and I am starting to think that the starter on my car is dying. I’ve replaced the battery already, so it’s either that or the alternator. It’s been chugging whenever I start it up, and I don’t know if the Chrysler dealership here is any good. Probably not. I could change the starter myself, but I’m not sure how the remote starter factors into it. I need to look into it.

I started taking Metamucil again, which isn’t cheap. It’s been working though, first time in 4 years I’ve been able to go back to taking it. I feel good, I’ve been able to eat apples and oranges again, and I’m not running to the bathroom every two hours. It makes a difference.

I ran out of Xylimelts. It’s more dire than it sounds: they don’t sell them in stores anymore. I used to be able to pop into any Shoppers drug mart and grab a pack for 12 bucks, but I’ve gone to three drug stores in town and no one has them. My only option is to buy a bundle of them from Amazon, which by the time all is said and done costs me 73 dollars.

I’m still staring down the barrel of another 3 weeks without a paycheck, at least. The landlord’s given me a couple of names, but the problem is that what I want and need is that fat live-out check from Dryden. If I go anywhere for work now, I burn that bridge by leaving in two weeks. Or I could maybe grab a temp job for a couple of days, but that’s no guarantee.

I’ve been to the foodbank before. When I was on chemo. The foodbank in Barrie tries to give you 2 to 3 weeks of food at a time. I dunno what the one here does, but I don’t have that kind of space. So I went begging for alms.

I suppose no one calls it alms anymore. There’s a church around the corner that offers hot meals from noon to three, or bagged lunches from 9AM, no questions asked. I looked them up initially as a volunteering opportunity.

Do I have a choice? Every dollar I spend on food now inches me closer to not being able to cover an emergency. If my car breaks down. Or do I forgo Xylimelts and let my teeth rot out of my head? Or give up Metamucil? Not to mention, the hotel in Dryden will want me to prove I can cover the week between work starting and my paycheck coming in. And my rent here. And my car insurance. And and and.

So I bundled myself up against the cutting -20 windchill and walked up to the church to ask for a bagged lunch. I viewed it as a kind of penance, the pain from the cold. I found the door around the back and slipped in, my ears ringing from the wind. There was an older gentleman arguing with a volunteer about coffee. The volunteer asked me a couple times before I could hear him because my ears froze in the cold.

“Bagged lunch?”

“Yes, please.” Was it because I was too early for hot lunches? Or did my work clothes give me away? The working poor is still a thing, sadly. He offered me a plastic bag right away. There are people in Toronto complaining the mayor increased their property tax, but here I am, debating how close to destitution I want to get before I ask for a free lunch. I hesitated a moment, but he didn’t say anything else, so I accepted it and slipped back out the door. I didn’t check what I was given until I got home.

Not bad. A water bottle, two sandwiches, two slices of pizza, an apple, and a donut. I packed one of the sandwiches and the donut and water bottle for work. Everything else was stashed in the fridge.

At the build, we breaked for lunch at 12. The sandwich was good, thick condiments, 3 different kinds of meat, and cheese. The donut was cakey, the frosting well covering it. Someone put a lot of love into this. I tried not to cry or tear into it like a rabid animal. When Scott came back at 1, he had brought pizza and Tim Hortons. I wish I had known he was going to do that before I had eaten my sandwich, then I could have held onto it for another day. But with what they’ve given me, I only have to go twice a week for now.

I’ll come back and volunteer. When I have money, I’ll donate to them.

My dad has a story about being this broke. He liked to wave in me and my brother’s face, so magnanimous he was for deigning to feed us. At some point before my uncle burned through everyone’s good will, he was released from jail with nothing. My grandmother convinced my dad to rent an apartment with him, but this left them broke. Dad says he went to the store, got a 10 pound bag of potatoes and a 5 pound bag of hotdogs, and that’s all they ate for the month. “Aren’t you lucky you won’t have to do that?”

I was introduced to John today. Before Scott left, he had me prep the stairs for Doug to floor them. That means sweeping them once, then using a scraper to scrap all the bits of spackle off the plywood, then sweep them again. Then I was partnered with John to cut the casing for the windows. John trains firemen a few days a week and has no trades background. He’s used the saw before, but he kept deferring to me, either because he thinks I know what I’m doing, or because he thinks I should be doing the hands-on stuff to practice. We get along well though, and to a certain extent we were giggling and talking more than actually on task. We were somewhat limited – first we had to wait for Scott to get back with the casing, then we had to wait for Doug to be done the stairs so we could come back inside. So we stood outside in the -20 windchill and shot the breeze.

It’s freakin’ cold. It’s not really been warm, but this week with the windchill, its been below minus 20. It’s been too cold for my usual walks. There’s been no snow to block the wind. I woke up and discovered my window was frozen and I’m unsure why that happened, although it was pretty.

Monday was also my first meeting at the carpenters union. Now, obviously I didn’t expect it to be like the meetings in Toronto, the ten-thousand-strong union. I figured I’d show up half an hour early, introduce myself to any females present, and probably get pulled into a conversation or two with some of the older guys who are amused by my swagger. I threw on the baggiest clothes I had, put my hair into a tight bun and tucked it under my tuque.

There was no one in the lobby when I got there. On the right is a glass wall for a room that is clearly a meeting room. Everyone turned to look at me as I walked into the lobby, and a guy got up and ran to the door and stuck his head out. “This is the executive meeting, the general meeting is next door in half an hour.” As if I had meant to interrupt. I noticed the sign next to the door said “executive boardroom”.

I wandered down the hallway anyway, because I wasn’t going to sit down where I could be gawped at by a bunch of men. The room next door was classroom numero uno, next to classroom number 2, and then the build room. So, this small building in a small city had enough room for an executive boardroom, that the general meeting doesn’t get to use? Seems like a good waste of resources. The larger union in Toronto lets us use the boardroom for our general meetings! That will change if I get promoted to the board.

A couple of guys trickled into the lobby. I decided to go back and sit with them, get a feel of the group. When the meeting was supposed to start, the guys all filtered out of the boardroom and most of them left. The rest of us went into classroom one and sat down at the school desks. We were given tickets for a draw at the end. Two guys sat down at the head table and introduced themselves, and we started the meeting. I’m not even sure there was 20 people in the room, but I was sadly the only female.

There’s 700 odd members in all of Northern Ontario. Supposedly March is always the slowest month. They went over all the jobs that might come up this summer and next year. I met the guy who had us support the pow wow, and apparently he ran the booth from 10:30 til 2 on Saturday and that was it. I’m a little disappointed by that, but at least we did support it. At the end we did a draw and I got a baseball cap that I will probably never wear, but it is nice to have something from this union and not my old one. We also got stickers.

After the meeting, some of the guys stood around chatting. I half expected someone to pull me into a conversation, if only to question why I moved here, because it seemed like everyone already knew my name. No one did though, and most of them were young guys, not the older journeymen who might get me work or be a mentor, so I left.

Tuesday we were painting the house. Not sure why, but we are painting it a light grey, which looks white when wet. I don’t know why we don’t just paint it white, and it’s very easy to loose track of where you are when you look down to put more paint on the roller.

When I got home, the guy who woke me up to offer me food he had cooked became a problem. He caught me as I went into the kitchen and told me he was cooking us dinner. When I politely declined, he refused to hear it. I heated up my food and started the kettle boiling, and went back to my room. When I came back for my tea, he attempted to offer me the now-cooked plate of food I had declined before. I ignored the offered plate, took my tea and went back to my room, now slightly… well, not afraid of entering the kitchen. But there is this slight dread when you anticipate having to constantly fend off advances. A weary sigh.

He’s also the problem tenant. He flooded the bathroom before I moved in, which caused damage to the apartment below it, and is refusing to pay for it. The landlord emailed all of us to let us know he was thinking of renovating the bathroom to remove the old clawfoot tub and ancient pedestal sink, and install something more modern that wouldn’t flood. Which is good, cuz honestly my problem isn’t even the tub, it’s the sink. I can barely get enough water out of it to brush my teeth and not enough to wash my face, so a lot of the time I end up doing it in the kitchen, which feels rude.

I was awoken Wednesday by a text from Scott. He wasn’t going to be at the house that day, so I couldn’t go in. Now I had a whole day to myself to stare into the void and contemplate existence.

Wayne was in the kitchen like usual when I got there to cook breakfast, so I asked him when he was busy. He’s been talking about how much he’d love to check out the hostel, so I offered to walk him down and introduce him to Holly. Then we could also ask her if we could pay her to use the showers while the bathroom was being renovated. He said he’d be back at 11.

At 11, we walked down. I buzzed the front desk and froze when she asked what we wanted. “Umm, can we talk?”

“Is this Lucy?” She buzzed us in. “You scared me, you sound like a cop!”

I could only blush and hang my head, me and my cold robotic demeanor. I asked her about the showers and she declined, fair enough. I also told her that Wayne wanted to look around inside for a bit, and she was thrilled to bits and offered him a whole tour. She told Wayne I’m basically one of the family there, and I could have fainted! I suppose she meant cuz I hang out with Hanuman so much and he’s important, and presumably he talks about me to her, but I still would have called myself “Hanuman’s weird little friend”. That’s why I was so formal at the door, I’m honestly surprised every time she remembers my name. I didn’t even stay two weeks there!

When they got to the top of the stairs she knocked on the staff door and woke up Hanuman for me, which I didn’t ask for (oops). He groggily came out into the hallway and we talked for a bit while Wayne and Holly talked, then all four of us went back to the front door. Holly excused herself as she was busy, and I was left with Wayne and Hanuman, suddenly feeling a little sheepish because Wayne has replaced Hanuman as my breakfast philosophy partner. “Hello, this is the newer model, hah hah.” Wayne tripped over his name and somewhat recovered by saying namaste as a goodbye (which isn’t really how it’s supposed to be used, but he tried). Later on, Wayne asked where Hanuman is from. I burst into laughter; “Hamilton?” (I shouldn’t have laughed. He was trying not to be presumptive). He raved forever about how gorgeous and spacious the hostel is, which is very true. Holly has put her heart and soul into it, and the love shows in every seam.

I sat around my room very much unhappy with my day off. I did apply to a local temp agency, always good to have a back-up plan, and I can always decline any jobs they send me. At 6:30pm, K texted me and asked if I wanted to go for a walk or try the weird Reuben pizza he had purchased (both!). He was close to my place, so he came in. He stopped at the door, it clearly just hitting him that I wasn’t being hyperbolic about having a tiny room literally furnished with children’s furniture. I showed him around the kitchen and bathroom too. He noted my pc tower unused next to my desk, and I informed him that I had no screen for it, so he offered a screen he wasn’t using. We had some of the pizza, which was strange but not in a bad way, and then we went for a walk around Boulevard lake.

He told me that the soup kitchen was started by a former lawyer who just upped and quit one day, and started the kitchen. It’s interesting how Thunder Bay seem to draw/induce religious experiences in people. I took that as a sign to confess I had actually attended it this week, and explained my financial situation. When we got back to my room, he divided the pizza in half.

When I showed him to the door at the end of the evening, he stashed a twenty on my desk.

I noticed it as soon as I sat down again, and for a moment I debated throwing my shoes on and chasing him down the stairs. A twenty wont get you much these days. A load of laundry at the laundromat is almost 10$. I’d like to buy bread for sandwiches, but I have no freezer space and it won’t last long on the counter. A jar of peanut butter. Bananas.

Still, it was twenty more than I had before.

I texted him and made a few jokes about the twenty to defuse any awkwardness, and thanked him for it before going to bed.

Thursday we finished painting the house. I grabbed the screen from K’s apartment on the way home, and set it up. I finally have my pc up and running, and with the extra pizza I didn’t need to go back to the soup kitchen (yet).

Hunter S Thompson and Charles Bukowski lived like this, didn’t they? They’ve sort of become my idols. Or Hanuman and the Vagabond, both wandering tradesmen, like I aspire to be.

I could do worse for myself. There are darker places than this.

P.S. I finished writing the long, long story of my cancer diagnosis. I’ve written it out before and it’ll be updated as things change, of course, but it’s available.