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Chapter Five - The Eighties

In January of 1980, we got the worst snowstorm we had seen in Victoria, but in two days it was gone. I liked the climate there because there was hardly any winter. It never got cold and people were mowing their lawns in February. On April 18, I bought a `76 Dodge van for $2,650. It was in perfect condition but the engine was not that powerful. I sold the car for $640.

May 18 was a day to remember. We took a load of stuff to the swap meet on Jacquelin Road. We made more money that day than at any other swap meet. We sold a lot of stuff including the old wicker baby carriage for $350. While we were at the swap we heard a loud explosion and the earth shook. At first we thought it was cannon fire because it was Victoria Day. Later we found out that the Mount St. Helen’s volcano erupted in Washington State. On May 25, massive earthquakes rocked the entire State of California. The following day we got ash fallout from the eruption.

Visiting My Three Half-Sisters and My Mother

On June 2, we decided to take a trip to Toronto. We stopped over in Vancouver where I met my oldest half-sister, Mary. I hadn’t seen her since I was 14 and now I was 44. She turned out to be an alcoholic lesbian and had been living with a Chinese girl for years.

From Vancouver, I wanted to see my second oldest half-sister, Betty, who lived at 100-Mile House, north west of Kamloops. On the way, we camped out (I had camperized the van) on the edge of the Fraser Canyon near Cache Creek. I parked the van on the edge of the highway right next to a 600-foot cliff. The next morning, I woke up at 7am. Normally, I would make a thermos full of coffee, but something told me to get out of there fast. I didn’t even stop to light a cigarette. I whipped the van out of there fast. Within seconds, I heard a loud rumble. I stopped the van and looked behind me. There was a huge rockslide right in the exact spot where I had camped. If I hadn’t got out when I did, we would have all been killed from being swept 600 feet down into the Fraser River below.

When we got to Betty’s place, I was surprised to see how much she looked like me. We could have been twins. She was married to a guy from Finland. They had an antique business. They seemed to have money, but I got the very strong feeling that she was an abused wife. From there I went to visit my youngest half-sister, Violet, in Kamloops; I had never seen her. I always had to present myself as a man because I didn’t think they could accept the real me. Violet was beautiful and sweet, but she was married to an alcoholic native. She had five kids and two of them were mentally retarded. She never knew for sure that she had a brother but she had heard rumors. She gave me the biggest welcome of them all. She was elated to see me but I felt sorry for her. She said she always wanted a brother and was sorry we didn’t grow up together. When her husband came home, drunk as usual, he didn’t believe I was her brother. He had never heard of me and thought I was after his wife. He was not nice to me.

From there I drove to the town of Chase to see if my mother was still there. I had not seen her in thirty years. I found her in a senior’s residence. Physically, she was in perfect health but she had Alzheimer's disease. She invited us in but she kept repeating herself over and over again. She showed a sense of guilt and kept saying she was sorry. Michelle had her third birthday in the van. Driving through Saskatchewan, I though I would visit my foster parents on the cattle ranch. The son who I used to drive to school thirty years ago had taken over the ranch, which was a lot smaller now. The younger sister had died years ago. His dad was now like an innocent child because his wife had convinced him to have a lobotomy. The hospitality was great. I was almost out of gas and the son filled it up free with purple gas.

A Visit With A Black Witch

I also stopped in Wapella to check out Christy McP again. She had moved to a farm near Red Jacket. Going there was one of the weirdest experiences of my life. As I drove into the yard, six men were standing there. I am positively convinced they were zombies. They moved very slowly and awkwardly into a half circle around us. They all had rifles pointed right at us. There was no expression on any of their faces and the color of their skin was gray. Betsy was starting to get scared. As we moved toward the door, they all turned slowly to keep their eyes on us and their guns pointed at us. When I knocked on the door a seemingly perfectly normal woman answered and greeted us, telling us to come in. She remembered me but I had no idea who she was. We entered the house and saw a retarded teenage girl lying on the couch wearing nothing more than a bra and panties. Then Christy came downstairs and greeted me. She still had not aged and seemed in perfect health although she had to be at least 96 by now. She said “Oh, you must come and say hello to my brother Malcolm (the warlock). He’s upstairs.” We went upstairs and when I saw him, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The “thing” that was lying on the bed wearing only a loincloth appeared to be nothing more than a skeleton covered with skin. There was obviously no tissue or organs yet this thing was alive. I believe he was the living dead. Christy asked it to say hello to me. I was standing by the bed in disbelief when his back started rising up like a zombie in a coffin. He reached out his hand, grabbed my hand and squeezed it until it hurt. Logically, this was impossible, but I felt the squeeze. It never uttered a sound.

I was trying to get some of Gramma’s things because I knew Christy had them. She wouldn’t give me anything except a picture of her sitting in a white wicker chair with Gramma on one side of her and another sister on the other. The picture had a cardboard frame with the name of the studio that took it. The studio was located in Moosemin, NWT. This was obviously before Saskatchewan became a province. In the picture, Christy looked the same as she did now. How old is she really? Betsy was really scared and thought we should get out of here really fast. Before letting us leave the “normal” woman gave us a whole bunch of food, fresh eggs and vegetables. The zombies were still in the yard as we left, still pointing their guns at us. I drove as fast as I could to get as far away as possible without stopping. Meanwhile, Betsy threw all the food out the window because she didn’t trust it. I didn’t stop driving until we reached Virdin, Manitoba.

There was something spooky about that picture that Christy gave me. Over the years, I would see it as I looked through my scrapbook. Then I noticed Christy’s waist in the picture was slowly but progressively disappearing. I could see more and more of the white wicker chair behind her. At one point her waist was almost completely gone, then the picture just vanished into thin air.

Travels With Betsy

I drove through Canada to Toronto. Betsy never learned how to drive and never seemed to have any such interest. Wherever we went, I always drove. We stopped at Ruth’s and I found some of my stuff that I’d forgotten. Downtown that night, we ran into Ted. He was excited to see me although he was drunk. He saw Michelle for the first time and was excited about that. I saw Alvin for a while and had a great time. We started heading back through the States. After all, we were just on a holiday trip. I drove to Sarnia, then to Battle Creek, Michigan, and we stayed the night in Kalamazoo. I had already traveled all over the United States and had found some really interesting places. Now I wanted to show them to Betsy.

On the way to Rapid City, South Dakota, we drove through the Painted Desert and the badlands. We stayed in Rapid City that night. The next day was Saturday so I got the paper and marked all the garage sales. Since I had a map of the city they were easy to find, and we found a lot of good stuff. Nearby was Mount Rushmore and I wanted Betsy to see that. It really is an amazing monument. We also went to Custer where someone has been carving a mountain in the shape of a native on horseback defeating Custer.

From there we went to Deadwood. At that time, it scarcely looked different from the old wild west town of the 1800s. A lot of the original buildings were still there. We went in the Silver Dollar Saloon that had a long bar covered in silver dollars under Plexiglas. In another bar, the floor was covered with gold bricks. We went in the saloon where Wild Bill Hickock was gunned down. We had a ride in an original stagecoach. We went to Deadwood Gulch to see Boot Hill cemetery where Wild Bill and Calamity Jane were buried. While we were in Deadwood there was a Hell’s Angels convention going on and it was impossible to find a parking space. There were thousands of bikers and we walked wherever we went. I introduced Betsy to buffalo meat.

From Deadwood we followed I-90 into Wyoming. We stopped at Devil’s Tower where they filmed the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is a phenomenal work of nature. We went west to the town of Cody, Wyoming. This is the town built by Buffalo Bill Cody. In the center of town is the original Irma hotel, which Bill built in 1912 and named it after his daughter. The original saloon is now turned into a restaurant but the rest of the hotel remains as it was built. The bar is still there and the back wall of the bar is completely lined with rosewood. In the center of the wall is a life-sized head of a buffalo carved out of rosewood. What fascinated me was a framed tin sheet hanging on the wall. It was a side view portrait of Buffalo Bill drawn with bullet holes. I’m not sure who did it but it could have been Anne Oakley. She was the sharpest shooter in the west and traveled with Buffalo Bill’s show. I met some of Bill’s descendents who still live there.

Cody is near the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It really is like another planet there. As we drove through the park, there were boiling pools of water and mud. There were lots of geysers and we saw Old Faithful erupt. One area was remarkably different. It was the result of thousands of years of mineral springs bubbling up and these formed a vast area of slimy layers of multicolored rock (mineral deposits).

I drove back up to I-90 heading through Washington State and stopped in Moses Lake. That was a weird experience. The whole town was covered in volcanic ash from Mount St. Helen’s. It was July, but it looked like the middle of winter. There were snowplows trying to clear the streets, but the ash was so fine that the slightest breeze would send clouds of ash into the air. People were wearing surgical masks. Police cars had huge air filters mounted on the hoods of the cruisers. They changed the filters every twenty minutes. The ash got into the engine of my van and the gas pedal would stick when I pushed it down. I had to get used to pulling it up with my toe. We reached Victoria on July 12. In August, we took a trip up island as far as Qualicum Beach. It was a beautiful trip.

Changes In Michelle

For the first three years, Michelle was a perfect angel, then she underwent a personality change. She wasn’t the sweet angel anymore. I believe something traumatic happened to her, but I don’t know what. She was rarely out of our sight. We had gotten tired of living in a museum and the landlord was complaining about all the nail holes in the wall. We put our museum up for auction and got several thousand dollars for it. We moved to the upper floor of a duplex at 422 Wilson Street in Victoria West. We had a huge living room with big windows in the front facing south. We furnished it with wicker and rattan furniture. We had rare and exotic tropical plants.

On October 28, Hollywood started filming a western movie called The Last Desperado. They turned Pandora Street, between Douglas and Government Streets, into a wild west town. They took out all the parking meters, covered the street with dirt and sand, and covered the sidewalks with boards. We watched the filming. There were runaway stagecoaches and cowboys in gunfights. I could have been in the film as an extra because I still had that old costume, but I passed on it.

The Dull Year

I don’t have much memory of 1981 except for a trip we took to Regina and Prince Albert. Actually, we traveled all over Alberta and Saskatchewan.

1982

In 1982, I bought a `78, 4x4, GMC van. The dealer was asking $12,000 for it, but I kept dickering with him for about a month and I beat him down to under $7,000. The dealership allowed me $3,600 trade in on my Dodge van (I paid $2,650 for it) and I had to come up with $3,000 in cash. I had about $2,000 in the bank and sold a lot of stock to make up the difference.

In September, I rented a table at a record show in Vancouver. I made $2,000. I had done a few record shows before in Victoria, Seattle, and Vancouver. I would go with a few thousand records that I paid a dime for on the average and sell them for $5 up to $100 each.

Michelle had started kindergarten and loved it. When she graduated in 1983, she didn’t want to leave. She couldn’t understand summer holidays.

loved it. When she graduated in 1983, she didn’t want to leave. She couldn’t understand summer holidays.

The Move to Calgary

In August of `83, we decided to move to Calgary. On the way we just missed a landslide at Rogers Pass. We camped part of the night in Banff. Betsy woke me up at 4am saying we had to get out of there. I was asking why? She insisted we leave immediately for Calgary. We always liked to look around in Banff and go to our favorite eating-place, but I knew better than to argue with her. We left immediately. Along the way, we ran into torrential rains and a lot of semis were coming our way. We made it to Calgary. I was looking for the motel district along the Trans Canada Highway. Then I noticed that I just passed it and so I made a left turn to go back there. I pulled into the driveway of an apartment building to turn around and just then the pitman arm broke and I had no steering. I couldn’t back out because the wheels were turned against the side of the driveway. People were just starting to go to work and I was blocking them. They had to climb a hill to get past me.

I realized that if we had driven around Banff instead of leaving at 4am, the pitman arm would probably have broken in the mountains. I would have hit a semi or gone off a cliff. Betsy’s intuition saved us once again. There was a gas station about a block away and I went there to get a tow truck. The tow truck hauled me to the service station. I told him the pitman arm was broken in half. Now this was a problem because the pitman arm was custom made since the van had been converted to 4-wheel drive. It could not be replaced. It would take forever to get a new one forged and it would cost a fortune. I asked if he could weld it and he said “no way. That would be illegal”. Finally, he told me that he knew someone that would weld it under the table but if I got caught, he would deny ever seeing me. We slept in the van the first night. I had made a bed in it that was big enough for the three of us. Under the bed I had boxes full of stock to sell but I needed the van fixed first. The next day we rented a room at the Circle Inn Motel and tried to get social services with no luck. The second night we slept in the van. On the fourth day I took the pitman arm by taxi to get it welded. The guy charged me about $200. The service station installed the pitman arm and charged me $100 for installation and storage. Two days later I got the van.

Finally, the social services department came through with a check for $709. We rented an apartment in the same building where my van had broken down. It was the Queens Apartments on Ulster Road, NW. Our rent and damage deposit came to $603. We called the food bank and they brought over enough food for two months. On September 12, Michelle started school in Grade One at University Elementary School.

On October first, we made $276.25 at the Bowness swap meet. The next day, we made $254.85 at the Market swap meet. On Oct. 6, we got $332 from social services. We decided to leave Calgary and head east. We took Michelle out of school; she was very upset and cried. On Oct. 9, we made $123.70 at the Northland swap meet. Next day we moved out of the apartment and camped in the van. The next day we got our damage deposit back and left Calgary for the east.

To Toronto

We headed for Toronto through Canada. We ran into a severe snowstorm in Thunder Bay. We were planning to go to Sault Sainte Marie, but the road was closed. The police warned us not to use that road. I ignored them because I had a fully loaded 4-wheel drive van. I had no trouble getting to the Sault even though the ditches were lined with semis and cars. We drove through Michigan and London to Toronto.

The Seaway Hotel Experience

We paid $400 for a month’s rent at what was called the Seaway Hotel at the time. I called up Alvin and he took me out to dinner and then to his place for some fun. I decided to sell the van and put an ad in the Toronto Star. That same day, they went on strike for the first time in 100 years. Just my luck. I ended up putting an ad in the Truck Trader magazine. I sold the van for $6,700 cash. I visited Ruth in her new home in Mississauga and met her daughter with Nick B. She was only a few months younger than Michelle. On Nov. 10, Alvin took me for dinner and sex again. Then I ran into Ted and we spent the night talking. Ted was the only person in my life who ever read The Biocratic Manifesto and discussed it with me.

Two days before we left the hotel, we had quite a disquieting experience. There were two guys staying in the room across the hall from us. I talked with them one night while they were eating a spaghetti dinner in the restaurant. The next morning, we decided to go out to a restaurant for breakfast instead of to the hotel restaurant. When we attempted to go back to our room, the hotel was surrounded with police, ambulances, and TV cameras. We had to get a police escort to our room. When we got off the elevator, I almost stepped on a gun. There was blood everywhere. The two guys I had talked to the night before were shot and killed over a drug deal that went sour. One guy had his face blown off. I saw the bodies still lying there. The killers were still on the loose. Our room door was wide open. The police said they had to check all the rooms for the killers.

The Bloor Street West Apartment

We rented an apartment at 1990 Bloor Street West right near a subway station. Just then the subway broke down right at that station and was out of commission for a while. We thought we had found a nice apartment but we discovered that the walls were paper-thin. People around us were having wild parties all night and it was a drug house. The lock on the door didn’t work properly. Michelle started a new school a few blocks down the street. We always took her there and picked her up.

Toward the end of our first month there, a really loud party was in full-swing next door to us. People were shouting and fighting and I could hear every word they were saying. They were mostly Chinese people and the Chinese landlord had an apartment across from us. I stepped out my door to see if I could ask the landlord to speak to them. Just then a crazed or drugged Chinese teen came out swinging a meat cleaver. He spotted me and yelled “I’m going to chop your fucking head off”. As he came at me, I ran into my place and tried to lock the door. It wasn’t locking and he was trying to open it from the outside. Suddenly, I got it locked (or my guardian angel locked it). He swung the meat cleaver and half of it came through my door. Then he spotted someone else and started chasing him.

We needed time to find another place so we stayed another month without paying. The owner of the building was in Vancouver and he threatened me for not paying. I dared him to take me to court because I would prove his place was unfit for human habitation and he would be closed down. He dropped the issue.

Needling the System

On February 29, 1984, we moved to an inner-city, four-story apartment building at 95 Davenport Road. All the units were furnished bachelor apartments. The building was on the corner of the block and the rest of the block was the Jesse Ketchum Elementary School. The school itself was ten feet from the back door of our building. Michelle continued her Grade One there. Her, and our, experiences with that school turned out to be a real horror story.

The Department of Health had just passed a law of compulsory immunization. I didn’t believe in vaccinations and Michelle never had any shots. Besides, she was breast-fed for two years. Within a couple of weeks we got three warnings from the Health Department to have our daughter immunized.

Michelle’s regular teacher was a born-again Christian. I strongly believed in the separation of church and state. The first thing in the morning, they would start with Catholic prayers. I protested this especially since Toronto is the most cosmopolitan city in the world. I know there were Muslim and Jewish kids in the class. Michelle’s teacher hated her because even Michelle complained. When the class started, Michelle had to wait out in the hallway. Other kids thought she had done something bad. The teacher’s daughter was in the same class and was brainwashed by her mother. She hounded Michelle and kept preaching over her right in her face. Michelle pushed her away. The kid said that Michelle hit her. The teacher got an adult to hit Michelle. We ended up getting the police involved. It didn’t do any good. One day Michelle had written a beautiful story in beautiful handwriting. This was a first for her and she put a great deal of effort into it. She was very proud of it. She took it in to her teacher and the teacher found only one mistake. In one sentence, she forgot to start it with a capitol letter. The teacher took a ball point pen and put a huge X across the entire page with such force that it went through 3 pages below. Michelle was devastated and came home crying. When I saw this I took it and marched right into the teacher’s office and gave her royal shit right in front of her class. Some of the kids cheered. I told her I was going to get her resignation. I went to the principal, showed him what that teacher had done and demanded her resignation. The principal was sympathetic but said he couldn’t do anything because the teacher’s union was too strong.

On March 19, we received a suspension order from the Department of Public Health effective March 26. We decided to appeal on the grounds that it took away our freedom of choice. We sent appeal letters to Trevor Hancok, Associate Medical Officer of Health, to the Northern Health Area, Department of Public Health, to the Health Facilities Appeal Board at Queens Park, and to the Toronto Board of Education. On March 26, Michelle was expelled from school. On March 28, we received a notice from the Board of Health that they were going to take us to court and a hearing date was set for April 10 at Queens Park. We applied to Legal Aid for a lawyer. We were given a lawyer by the name of David C, but there was a conflict of interest because he was a friend of Trevor Hancok. While we were waiting for a new lawyer, we got a call from a Rachael G. Somehow, she heard about our impending case. She told me to call Dorthea Nusbaum because she was the head of an organization called the Committee Against Compulsory Immunization. She sent me some information that should help me in court.

We got a new lawyer by the name of Marcia M. She was a Japanese graduate of law school and we were her first case. I showed her the material I got and she started giving me advice. She told me I can’t smoke in the courtroom and I should not wear the jeans and T-shirt to court. She said I have to look as respectable as possible. On April 10, we went to court. I actually wore a man’s suit and tie. This was the second and last time I ever wore a suit. The first was at my wedding to Ruth. I had a briefcase with some papers that I thought might be helpful. Everybody just automatically assumed I was Betsy’s lawyer and other lawyers started speaking to me in legalese. I had to hold myself back from laughing. We were charged with failing to provide essential medical care by refusing to have our daughter forcefully immunized. If we lost the case we could go to jail and the Children’s Aid Society would take Michelle away and put her in a Catholic foster home.

The Board of Health had five of Toronto’s top lawyers against our law graduate. Our lawyer told the court she didn’t have enough time to prepare the case and asked for a postponement. They set a new trial date for May 24. Dorthea N and her co-worker Edda G were in the courtroom and met us after the judge was through with us (for now). We all had a meeting with our lawyer. Dorthea told us we had a lot of guts to stand up against this law because so far, no one else did. She said there was one exemption to this law and that would be on religious grounds. But the Board of Education had us listed as atheists because when they asked us our religion to register Michelle in school we said we had no religion. As far as we were concerned, that wasn’t the point. We were fighting for the freedom of choice.

Through the Committee, we had access to a world-renowned pediatrician from Chicago who had a daughter living in Toronto. He had written a book on the disadvantages and absurdities of Immunization. I got a copy from the library and read it. Dorthea talked to him and he said he would be willing to testify for me in court. I went to the Ontario Government bookstore and bought a copy of the Education Act and a copy of the Immunization of School Pupils Act. I was shocked at what I read. It made me think I was living in a totalitarian dictatorship. They had the power to charge us with failing to provide an education for Michelle, even though they were the ones who kicked her out of school. Furthermore, they forbid us to use a private tutor. We defied them there too because we went to the Board of Education and got a private tutor, part-time.

The Board of Health, according to the Act, had the power to send the police or even the military to smash down our front door and destroy all of our possessions to take Michelle away from us and lay charges against us. But we were freedom fighters and so we took our chances. A public health nurse came to our door and threatened us. She said that we had better sign this paper right now or she would call in the Children’s Aid to come and take Michelle away. I said to her “you can’t do a damn thing until after the court hearing, now get to hell out of here.” She left.

I talked to the office of the Ontario Ombudsman, the Canadian Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Commission, the Royal Academy of Medicine, the health critic at Queens Park, the Liberal Party Office, the Freedom Party of Ontario, and Suzan Fish, my local MPP. None of them were helpful. I filled out a religious exemption form stating a system of beliefs rather than a religion. I sent it to the Medical Officer of Health but it was rejected. The Children’s Aid Society sent someone to our place to investigate us. They harassed us for not immunizing Michelle saying we were endangering her health. They also said our bachelor apartment was too small and Michelle should have her own room. They said they could take her on these grounds alone. I spoke on Radio CJRN about our case. I got the message out to a few people. The Children’s Aid Society called and said they were sending us a subpoena to appear in Family Court to decide if Michelle is a “child in need of protection”. We never did get the subpoena. I had also gotten a copy of the Education Act and found out that the entire educational system of Ontario was run by the Roman Catholic Church and had been since the inception of education in the province.

Dorthea N was concerned about us and had an escape route planned for us if necessary. I had a 24-hour, hot-line number to call if need be. A van was waiting ready to take us to Winnipeg but we couldn’t take anything with us except the clothes on our back. They had a safe house waiting for us where we would be looked after and be out of the clutches of the Ontario Government. Dorthea and others decided that I should write a press release and they would help me with it. We would state our case and release it to every radio and TV station in Toronto all at the same time. We contacted CBC Television in Toronto and were granted an interview with Barbara Fromm who did The Journal on the 11pm national news. I went to Trevor Hancok’s office and told him what I was doing. He had me scribble any old thing on the religious exemption form and all charges were dropped. Michelle was allowed to go back to school. Her former teacher had quit and Michelle could maintain a normal schooling. We fought the government and won! The Ontario Health Department didn’t want the publicity because we would be stirring up a hornet’s nest and they felt they would have a flood of people challenging the law. Shortly the law was changed. There was no more compulsory immunization in Ontario.

A Trip to the Dentist

When we were in Calgary, I came across an organization called The Freedom From Fear Foundation. I told them we were going to Toronto and asked them if they could recommend a dentist who could handle someone with an extreme phobia of dentists. They gave me the name of such a dentist. When our court battle was over, I called her to make an appointment for a consultation. She turned out to be the greatest dentist I’ve ever had before or since. Looking at my teeth she said they were in very bad condition and would need a lot of work. Her office was very homey with floral wallpaper and dainty curtains. Soft soothing music played in the background. The first day she never touched my mouth. She demonstrated her instruments on or near my hand and I wasn’t afraid of them. Altogether, I had thirteen sessions with her. She cured most of my lifetime phobias except for getting needles in my gums and taking X-rays. I also couldn’t get impressions made without gagging. She had a beautiful young girl assisting her and she would hold my hand and rub my shoulders. I even had a root canal that didn’t bother me even though her equipment broke down halfway through and it took her six hours to complete it.

Taking Care of the Tenants

On June 23, the caretaker of our apartment building got fired. The owner offered me the job which involved keeping the place clean and collecting the rent. For that I got free rent and $50 a month. I got paid extra to clean apartments when someone moved out. Now I had to deal with the tenants, and what a weird assortment of characters they were.

First the previous caretaker was threatening me because she thought I stole her job. Then there were two gay guys on the third floor (we were on the second) and they were huge. The younger one was well over six feet tall and muscle bound, and nearly every weekend they would get drunk and fight. They would yell and scream so loud that the whole building could hear them. They were very violent. One night, the fight was so bad that I could hear the younger one throwing the other one against the wall in the hallway. I called the police and went up with them. They and the entire hallway were covered with blood. Their door was open and their room was full of blood and the furniture was all smashed. The police had to take them out in handcuffs and they were taken to the hospital. The older one came back with severe cuts and bruises all over him. His arm was in a cast and he had bandages on his head. The younger one was taken to jail. I gave them an eviction notice, but they refused to move out.

There were drug deals going down and I often saw dealers carrying guns. I always stayed clear of them. Right next door to me was a strange man. He never talked to anyone and was very reclusive. One month his rent was late so I knocked on his door. His door wasn’t completely closed and when I knocked, his door swung open. He was sitting on the couch with a gun pointed right at my face. Then he said “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were somebody else. There’s a guy coming to kill me and I wanted to make sure I killed him first.” I never asked for any rent. I slunk off to my apartment and called the police. When the police came I noticed his door was locked. I had a master key for every apartment and the cop asked me to stand to the side of the door and just unlock it. He already had his gun drawn. When I unlocked the door, he kicked it in but the guy was gone. I never saw him again. I had to clean that apartment to rent it out again. You wouldn’t believe how filthy it was (as most of them were when someone moved out). Betsy would help and luckily we got paid by the hour.

When a Spanish couple moved out from the second floor, I got my first look inside. It was hard to believe. Instead of using the stove they would build a fire on the floor and cook over it. I’m amazed the place never burned down. The entire walls, ceiling, floor and windows were covered with a thick, black soot. It took days to clean that place.

Then there was a weird girl who kept her window wide open all winter while she had all four burners of the stove on twenty-four hours every day. She kept blowing out fuses and would ask me to come in and replace them. She always had a strange look on her face and she always carried a butcher knife with her. The first time I went into her place I noticed her walls were covered, or decorated, with knives. They were mostly large butcher knives and meat cleavers. When I was fixing her stove, she kept so close to me she was nearly touching me and carrying a butcher knife. I did not trust her. I told her I would not replace any more fuses and if she kept the burners on she would be evicted.

There was also a psychiatrist living there and one day he freaked out and ripped out all the bushes and flowers growing beside the building.

The winter was the worst. Homeless, filthy, drunks would come into the lobby at night to sleep. I was supposed to chase them out but that didn’t work. If I said anything to them they would curse and swear at me and threaten me. There was one woman who was the worst. She was not only drunk and filthy but also diseased. She had open sores on her body and some were oozing puss. And she was hostile. I tried calling the police but they wouldn’t do anything.

Times With Buddies

I was seeing lots of Ted, Alvin and Bill K. I was especially having lots of sex with Alvin. I hadn’t been wearing women’s clothes since Michelle was born because I thought it would only confuse her (but she was always used to seeing Betsy and me in the nude). I wasn’t dressing like a man either, just unisex. I was playing the role of a man because it gave me a sense of power. I was really confused. I was already 48 years old but always looked so young for my age. Lots of times people would not believe I was that old. Somehow I seemed to attract a lot of young girls. I used to get all kinds of marriage proposals. Ted and Ivan were jealous of me. One of them said “You’re not even a man and you attract all these women.” One day I was sitting in a restaurant booth with Ted, Ivan, Godfreed, and two other guys. A teenaged Italian girl came in, stared at us for a minute and picked me out of the lot. I took my coffee and sat with her at the counter. Within twenty minutes she offered to marry me. I gracefully turned her down. I also had a lot of men after me and I didn’t turn any of them down. I often had sex in public with people watching me, even with females, and I never got caught.

Godfreed was becoming a woman. He was on a program at the Clarke Institute and now he had big breasts from taking female hormones. He had long blonde hair and always wore white woman’s slacks and a blouse. I was kind of jealous of him. He was never gay and had no interest is sex of any kind. I thought that was strange, since I thought of myself as a sex machine. He looked funny though because his body and his features were very masculine.

On May 7, 1985, I bought a `77 Chevy Van for $1,200. We must have had intentions of leaving Toronto because there was never a reason for me to have my own vehicle in that city. The body of the van was shot. It was full of huge rust holes. Then I found out the motor was shot also. In the meantime Ted’s wife, Betty came into an inheritance of $35,000. She wanted to buy a new car even though she couldn’t drive. They bought a new Plymouth K car. I took my van to the shop and they told me the engine needed replacing. By coincidence Bill K was planning a trip to Europe (as he usually did every summer) and for the first time he offered to take me with him. I didn’t feel right about going without Betsy and besides I needed a new engine. Bill said that my trip would cost him $2,000, so he gave me a choice. I could go with him or take the money for a new engine. I took the money. I put a bigger and more powerful rebuilt engine into the van. October 31 was Michelle's last day at school because she was continually being harassed. We opted for home schooling and I was her teacher. In the meantime Ted decided to move back home to Edmonton where most of his family still lived.

Hi Son

One Sunday night on November 10, I got a strange phone call. A male voice asked me if I was Jeff Mitchel. I said “yes”. Then he asked me if I had lived in Hamilton around 1960. I thought, “Oh-oh, someone from my past is coming back to haunt me!” He asked if I lived with someone named Vicky. I said “yes”. Then he said, “Hi, dad”. I was shocked. It was my first-born son. I had no idea what to think. I didn’t know if he would accept me or want to beat me up for abandoning him as a baby. We talked for hours on the phone. He had started looking for me a year before this and was going to a Parent Finder’s meeting that happened to be four blocks from where I was living. I may have passed him on the street and never knew it. He was going to Catholic Social Services because they had the information he was looking for. At that time it was never made available. So he started dating one of the girls who worked there. He charmed her into giving him some information and that’s how he found me.

All he got was my name, which is very common in the phone book. The only thing is that he didn’t know I spelled my last name with one “L”, so it took him a long time to find me. It was four days before he came to see me. On November 14, he came over to see me. He gave me a big hug so I figured he accepted me. We talked until the wee hours of the morning. He said his name was Robert W and asked what his original name was. I told him it was August Conrad Mitchel. I told him he had a brother just a year younger than him. He was very surprised and began an exhaustive search for him that took him five years.

When Robert finally found his brother, they looked so much alike they could pass for twins. His brother’s name was now Andy E. I never met Andy but I saw videotapes of him and got a few letters from him. Robert was very intelligent, talented, scientific, an inventor, and had lots of ideas for making big money. His life was virtually a complete failure. He never had a successful relationship with a girl. I was thinking about the curse and he was the perfect example of the third part of the curse. I later found out that Andy was highly intelligent, well versed in the sciences, an artist, a cartoonist, a writer, and a business consultant. He never even had any kind of relation with a girl (and he wasn’t gay). He was as big a failure as Robert was and both of them were often suicidal. The curse again? Robert was excited and surprised to see his half-sister Michelle, but they didn’t get along. Later on they hated each other. Robert had a hard time accepting my nudity and a harder time accepting me liking men, but he still kept in touch with me.

Back to Victoria

In January of 1986, we decided we were going to move back to Victoria. We had had enough of that place we were living in and we were tired of facing danger every day. On February 3, we left for Victoria. We wanted to stop in Edmonton to see Ted. Driving through Alberta was an ordeal. It was thirty degrees below zero and the van was full of holes where the wind would come howling through. It didn’t matter that we had a good heater. Michelle sat in the third seat (that I made for her) inside a down sleeping bag. Betsy was wrapped in heavy blankets. I was wearing a down parka with a thick blanket over my legs. I couldn’t drive over fourty miles per hour without creating an unbearable, freezing wind. We made it to Edmonton and stayed with Ted and Betty for a couple of days.

On February 10, we left for Victoria and arrived there the next day. On February 13, we moved into an apartment at 1037 Wychbury Avenue. There was a school about half a block away, which Michelle attended, but the kids were not nice to her there. They would hit her and kick her, knock her off her bike, and throw garbage on her. I complained to the teachers and the principal but it did no good. The principal was another “born-again” Christian. The caretaker of our building had a little bus and was always taking kids somewhere. He kept asking Michelle if he could take her to the store, to church picnics, and so on. I think Michelle knew better than to go with him. We didn’t have to tell her. Soon we saw his picture on the news. He was arrested for child abuse. He was charged with molesting a lot of children.

On September 1, `86, we moved to 824-B Russel Street. It was the lower half of a house and there was a school right across the street. I think this was the best school Michelle ever attended. Michelle won a really nice mountain bike in a radio contest, and she was proud of that bike.

The Male Syndrome and The Biocratic Manifesto

I had written a radical feminist book called The Male Syndrome. It was 400 typed pages long. I created a series of artworks for the book but I never put them into it. These drawings were very shocking because they were drawings from the subconscious mind, and people who saw them couldn’t handle them. I went to modern bookstores and to the library and got the names of every publisher who ever published a feminist book (I had been a feminist since Grade Nine). I sent excerpts to every publisher I found and got total rejection from every single one of them. I even got some nasty replies because my name was still Jeff; they said, “How could any man know anything about feminism?”

I also put together an eighteen-page synopsis of The Biocratic Manifesto. I got 125 copies made and I sent about 100 of them all over the world. They were sent to heads of state, well-known scientists, and other influential people. Out of those 100, I got two replies. One was from Linus Pauling saying he wasn’t interested in reading it. The other was from NASA from the Lindon B. Johnson Space Center. They criticized it saying it wasn’t appropriate for this time period and it sounded more like science fiction. It was signed by the chief of the Solar System Exploration Division. This letter came in March of 1987.

Around this time there was a global symposium going on headquartered on Tokyo, Japan. The symposium was about global infrastructures. The Biocratic Manifesto contains all the infrastructures they were looking for. I tried to contact everyone that was involved and got only one reply. It was from the Alaska Pacific University, which was less hostile than NASA but still rejected. I had made this synopsis before I left Toronto and I attended a gathering at the University of Toronto and tried to present it. I managed to put a copy in the hands of David Suzuki who never spoke to me even though he lived a couple of blocks away and I would sit next to him on the bus. He was always hostile to me.

One day we met the Skipper of Gilligan’s Island. He was doing a TV commercial for a Chrysler dealership. Michelle wanted to talk to him because that was a character in her favorite TV show. When she saw him she was disappointed because all she had ever seen of him was in reruns of the show as it was filmed in the mid 1960s. He was now a lot older and maybe a little senile. We talked to him but he made no sense. He was actually living in Victoria and we used to see him occasionally driving by his apartment. We also met Little Richard at a book-signing event and got his autograph.

In The Gardens of the Wealthy

In the spring and summer of 1987, I worked for the Brandon Estate in Oak Bay as the gardener. He was filthy rich but paid me only two dollars an hour. I didn’t care because I loved working with plants. His exotic gardens had been badly neglected and needed the restoration which I did. I worked there until June when I got what seemed to be a better offer. A very wealthy real estate agent who lived in Edmonton owned a huge mansion in Cordova Bay where the “new money” lived. He wanted someone to look after his place, which was empty most of the time. We met him there but it was not easy to find. The address was 4571 Leyns Road. I took us a while to find the road which turned out to just a dirt trail in the forest. The place was at the very end of the trail. There were huge iron gates. We got through those and followed a long winding drive through bush and rock. The driveway was half a mile long. Finally, we saw the mansion. We met the owner and he hired us on the spot. In front of the estate was a flat area of ground that needed landscaping, lawns to be mowed, rock gardens to attend, and flowers to be looked after. There were lawns and gardens behind the estate as well. All I was supposed to do was work four or five hours a day for three days a week and the estate was ours.

Behind the back gardens there was a steep rock cliff dropping to the ocean below. At one side of the property, there was a steep pathway to the beach. It turned out to be a nude beach and we often watched couples having sex in the sand. We were in a neighborhood of celebrities. Two doors down was the famous flutist Paul Horn (whose recordings with whale songs are famous). The first month I worked hard on that place. I put in eight hours a day five days a week. At the end of the month, the owner came by. I was in the front yard having a cigarette and he said “Oh, I don’t allow any smokers on my property. You’ll have to quit or move out.” I remember when he interviewed me I smoked right in front of him. Why didn’t he say something then? I lied to him and said I’d quit so we spent the next month there doing absolutely nothing. On August 31, we moved out.

Nanaimo Nightmare

A junk dealer we had known for years bought some property south of Nanaimo. His name was Howie. He talked us into buying our own property. We looked around Nanaimo but couldn’t see anything we liked, and the properties were really cheap then. On September 15, `87, we bought a mobile home on half an acre of wilderness seven miles south of Nanaimo. It was on a short street at 1547 Grandom Place off a service road beside the Trans Canada Highway. We got it through a real estate company for $18,000. We didn’t have the $2,500 for the down payment, so Howie paid that and turned it into a second mortgage. This purchase turned into another house of horrors.

The real estate agent never gave us a key to get into the place, and so we never saw the inside before we bought it. There was a small window on the side of an add-on and we lifted Michelle up so she could go through the window and unlock the door. She opened the door and ran to the van. When we looked inside, it was the worst pigsty imaginable. We couldn’t believe how filthy it was.

We ended up taking sixteen bags of garbage out of there plus the furniture that was left behind. There was a perfectly good refrigerator there but the real estate agent said it belonged to a former tenant and we had to put it outside for them to pick it up. We ended up getting a new fridge and the good one ended up in the garbage. The place was completely infested with fleas and they were the biting kind. Michelle slept in the van for the first three nights. She wouldn’t even set foot in the trailer. We had to rip up all the carpeting because that was where the fleas were nesting. That wasn’t easy because the carpet was not only nailed to the floor, it was also glued. Once we got that done we had to spray the entire place with insecticide. I went to use the washroom and my foot went through the floor. There was now a big hole in front of the toilet. The real estate people never did take the garbage away and we had to haul it to a dump site just out of Nanaimo. A neighbor from across the street came over to introduce himself. He said “by the way, did they tell you all this land is being expropriated by the Department of Highways to build a bypass around Nanaimo, but they will offer to buy you out.” Well, nobody told me that. When I asked the real estate agent, he said he forgot.

I contacted the Department of Highways and they offered to pay for a lawyer for us. The lawyer, of course, turned out to be on their side. He wanted to practically give our place away. We got into some furious battles with our lawyer and the Department of Highways. Betsy especially got furious with the lawyer. She got into yelling and screaming matches and pounded on his desk. We were all calling each other names. The lawyer had secretly made a deal with the Department of Highways to let it go for a pittance, much less than what we had agreed to pay for it. We threatened to take our lawyer to court but he said that we couldn’t get a lawyer to go against another lawyer. He also said we would be expropriated and have to take whatever the Department of Highways decided to give us. Betsy ended up going behind the lawyers back about six months later and made a deal directly with the Department of Highways. We ended up making $12,000 profit, getting $6,000 then and the rest when we left. After she made the deal, we rented the place for $100 a month.

When we first arrived there, we noticed a school within walking distance and thought that would be good for Michelle. Before she could attend, they closed the school down. She ended up being bussed to Waterloo School out in the country. That was a disaster. She was constantly bullied and picked on by the other kids. Not only that but the principal was a really mean guy. He had made a rule that no wrapped food could be eaten in the yard. Michelle took a banana to school and started to eat it in the yard. The banana peel was considered a wrapper and now Michelle was in serious trouble. I drove down to the school to confront the principal and it almost turned violent. He expelled her and we got her into another school which wasn’t much better. The staff were okay, but the kids continued to harass her.

In the winter of `87-`88 we had a severe snowstorm and were trapped for a week until it melted. In the early spring of 1988, our closest neighbor came knocking on our door. It was a Sunday afternoon. He was drunk and covered with blood. He said, “Can you call the police. I just shot my wife”. I called the RCMP and they sent two squad cars to my place and I saw an ambulance pulling into his place. I found out that he had also shot his son. He was taken away in handcuffs. His wife and son survived. He was only in jail for two weeks.

I really did a lot of work on that property. I had to clear some of the land. I got a chain saw and cut down a lot of dead trees. I was smashing huge boulders with a sledge hammer and moving 200 pound rocks. I was moving wheelbarrows full of rocks and I developed hernias and ruined my abdominal muscles. On Saturdays, we would go to garage sales in Nanaimo and on Sundays we would sell at a flea market about two miles south of us.

Premier Vandersam had set up some make-work programs and one of them was the Tall Ships Society in Ladysmith. Everyone knew it was a scam but the premier was good at that. I got hired for a six-month project. Someone had raised a tug boat that had been sitting on the bottom of the ocean for fifty years. We were supposed to rebuild it. A retired shipbuilder was hired to instruct us and supervise the project. We received truckloads of expensive hardwood but most of it was taken home by the society members. What was left of the boat was housed in the south half of a huge warehouse. The north half housed another group rebuilding steam locomotives. Seven of us worked for about one week out of the six months. We patched a few holes and that was about it. The rest of the time we just fooled around and got paid eighth dollars an hour.

Most of the workers were drug dealers or psychotics. The one I befriended was an elder Cowichan native Indian. He had a great sense of humor and was one of the most intelligent persons I met. He had been a commercial fisherman and knew every island and every cove along the coast all the way to Alaska. He knew every type of creature that inhabited the coastal area. If any bird made a sound in the sky he could identify it without seeing it. He knew every type of vegetation that grew along the coast. I remember one day someone had broken the handle of a file for sharpening the teeth of chain saws. He said “Gimmy that”. He selected a certain type of tree, cut off a branch as thick as the original handle, and cut it down to the same length. He knew that the center of the branch was the right softness, took a hammer and pounded it into the spike of the handle that was still there. He cut some groves for a better grip and said that this handle is better than the original and this one will never break.

He had a house in town and relatives or friends would kill a dear and bring it to him. He would skin the deer and dry the skin. He would butcher the animal and give meat to those who brought it to him. He was a drum maker and made most of the drums for the pow-wows. He would use the deerskin for the striking area and would carve pieces of wood for the sides.

In the summer of 1988, we did a lot of traveling but without incidents worth reporting. What a change from so many of our other trips.

Seeking A New Home

In the spring of 1989, we decided to leave Vancouver Island. This was a very significant year in my life. We had no idea where we were going but the only direction open to us was obviously east. We thought we’d check out the provinces and decide which one to live in. We put all our stuff in storage in Calgary because wherever we ended up it would be easy to get our stuff from there. We visited Ted in Edmonton for a few days. We decided against all the Prairie Provinces. From Winnipeg, we went south to Duluth Minnesota, around Lake Michigan, through Illinois to Flint, Michigan. We came back into Canada at Sarnia and reached Toronto.

Before we got to Toronto, we stopped in a town, the name of which I can’t remember. We had heard there was a famous woman there by the name of Anna Mitchell-Hedges. Her father had been a famous explorer in Central America and rode with Poncho Viho in Mexico. He had discovered a crystal skull in Honduras. Anna had that and it was insured for a million dollars. She invited us in and we saw the skull. It was featured on a TV series in the introduction to strange events. Lots of celebrities visited her; Lee Majors had been there the day before we arrived. She had two African shrunken heads. I examined them and they were real. They were smaller than a grapefruit. Alfred Hitchcock used them in a movie and she complained that he damaged them. She also had a very ornate silver mirror that once belonged to Mary, Queen of Scots who was beheaded in the Tower of London.

We spent two weeks in Toronto at my son Robert’s place. I saw Alvin again and that was nice. I was kind of confused though. I was caught in a tug-of-war between going back to Alvin and staying with Betsy and Michelle. I hadn’t had many men since I left Toronto with Betsy. That was bothering me but I never told Betsy. For some reason, I decided to keep on living as I was. Bill K treated us to a fancy dinner at Old Ed’s Warehouse, one of the finest eating establishments in the city.

Our next stop was Montreal where Betsy had a rich uncle married to a sophisticated Chinese socialite. They lived in Mount Royal where one of their neighbors was Pierre Trudeau. A friend of his was away so we were given his place for a couple of weeks. It was a huge penthouse apartment suite filled with priceless antiques. The uncle took us on a tour of the city and the Old Town where buildings were two to three hundred years old. We drove through Western Quebec to Riviere-du-Loup where we watched the world famous wood carvers at work. From there we went to Moncton, New Brunswick and to Cape Tormentine. Here we caught a ferry to Borden, Prince Edward Island. We stopped in Charlottetown and at Woods Island, we crossed back to Pictou, Nova Scotia. We went to Saint John where Betsy had another rich uncle.

Saint John is on the Bay of Fundy where they have the highest and fastest tides in the world, and the reversing waterfalls. We stayed a few days at his home where he had a yacht. He took us up the Saint John River and we sailed over the reversing falls at high tide. He even let Michelle drive the yacht. We had been in every province in Canada except Newfoundland and decided we would live somewhere in Alberta. We went to Fredricton and into the State of Maine. We went to Portland, to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and to the witch town of Salem, Massachusetts. I drove through Boston, to Providence, Rhode Island (such a beautiful state). We went from New Haven, Connecticut to New York State. Michelle tried desperately to get me to drive to New York City, but knowing the city as I do, I would not drive through it. We drove through nineteen states on the way to Alberta.

We came to Calgary and thought me might live there. After all, we found it to be a very friendly town. We put a deposit on an apartment and they told us we would find out in three days if we were accepted. Then we drove to Edmonton and stayed a few days with Ted and Betty. The Calgary rental agent called us to say that they gave the apartment to someone else. I got a paper the same day and found a vacant place just a short walk from Ted’s. We moved into the lower half of a house on August 15 at 12818 - 96 Street. Moving in there was the greatest horror story yet.

A few days later we took Michelle to a talent agency because she had always wanted to be in show business. When we were in Toronto, she was in a children’s TV show called Vid Kids. The kids sang and danced and talked to Computer Man. They had famous guest appearances. The day Michelle was on, they had the Nylons singing “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”. Anyway the agency had nothing for Michelle but offered us to be extras in a Hollywood movie with Farah Fawcett and Ryan O’Neil. It was called Small Sacrifices. We had to be in the courtroom at the law offices downtown. We worked four days for five dollars an hour but we had to be there a minimum of twelve hours a day and up to sixteen hours. Most of it was sitting around doing nothing but when they filmed, we sat right behind Farah Fawcett and got to talk to her occasionally. What fascinated me the most I think, was the incredible amount of cables, lights on long poles and reflectors everywhere. The cameras were on movable tracks and when they filmed it was as if nothing else was there. During filming the lights were bright and hot.

Betsy Goes Crazy

About two months after the filming, Betsy began acting strange. She was saying things that made no sense. In December, she called Michelle and told her we were breaking up. Michelle said nothing but ran to her room and slammed the door shut. Later, Betsy said she was going to Toronto and would find a place and send for us. She kept saying she was going to die. I could tell she was seriously ill but wasn’t sure exactly what it was at the time. She had actually suddenly become severely schizophrenic. I later found out that she thought Michelle was Satan and that she was the savior of the world. She had planned to kill Michelle by cutting off her head. She bought a one-way plane ticket to Toronto for $500 and I drove her to the Westin Hotel to catch a bus to the airport. What I didn’t find out until the next day was that there was only thirty nine cents in our bank account. There had been $5,000 in the account but it was a joint account. I later found out that she had thrown away $4,500. Some was flushed down the toilet and some was thrown in the garbage. When I got home from the Westin Hotel, everything clicked in my mind. I instinctively (or intuitively) knew she was going to commit suicide. I also knew how she was going to do it. She was going to throw herself in front of a subway train.

I called my son Robert in Toronto and told him what she was going to do. I also called the Toronto Police and gave them a detailed description of her and what she was wearing. This was getting too much for me and the next day I went to see a councilor. While I was there, Michelle phoned me. I don’t know how she got that number because I never told her I was going there. Michelle came on the line and said that Betsy called and said it was game over. I told the councilor and she gave me her phone and told me to call the Toronto Police which I did. Then she said to get home fast. She told me to take a taxi because Betsy would be calling me to say goodbye. Within a few minutes of getting home, Betsy called and told me it was game over. I asked where she was but she wouldn’t tell me. I called Robert again and he took the rest of the day off work. He went to every subway station in the city but had no luck.

I called the Toronto Police again and I called Ted, explained what happened and asked him to come over. I needed company. At 11pm, Robert called. He said he just spoke to the police and they found Betsy. They had good news and bad news. The good news was that she was still alive. The bad news was that she jumped in front of a subway train and was run over. They said she was in the trauma center at Sunnybrook Hospital in serious condition. When I told Ted and Betty, they were in shock. Michelle and I were too. Shortly after Robert called I got a call from the Toronto Police. They told me virtually the same news as Robert had told me.

The next day Robert went to see her, then he called me. I was told that two subway cars ran over her and the only thing that saved her life was that she jumped about two seconds too soon. She was rolled and tumbled under two cars. Her right leg was pulled out of the socket, her left scapula was broken in half, a strip of her scalp was ripped out of her head. Her left arm had swollen to the size of a football, she was covered in grease, and her entire body was severely bruised. The rescue workers tried to get her out by pulling on her partially detached leg. She yelled at them and she managed to crawl out on her own. She actually crawled the distance of two cars to get out the front. There was no room at the sides. She wasn’t in any pain because she was traumatized. At the hospital, she still wanted to die and kept pulling out the life support systems she was on. I called Betsy’s sister Suzan in Los Angeles to tell her what happened. She took the next plane to Toronto to see Betsy. Out of her whole family, Susan was the only one who came to see her in the hospital. Suzan spent hours getting the grease out of Betsy’s hair.

Chapter Six - The Desperate Years

Living in Hell With Betsy

It was now January of 1990. I wanted so badly to go to Toronto but I had no money, so I applied for welfare. They gave me a food voucher but I had to wait three weeks before I got my welfare check. In the meantime, Betsy was calling me (collect) saying that she was sorry and wanted to come back to Edmonton. She sounded quite normal, mentally. When I got my check I bought a one-way bus ticket to Toronto. I didn’t have enough for a return trip let alone taking Michelle. The lady of the house agreed to look after Michelle and feed her. I found out later she did nothing for Michelle. She had to fend for herself but she managed. When I got to Robert’s place, he drove me to the hospital to see Betsy. She looked absolutely awful but she was glad to see me. We had been together fifteen years and maybe over that period of shared experiences we had developed some kind of bond. Betsy was especially cunning, especially with this disease. She talked some social worker into getting her a mercy flight back to Edmonton. The only rule was that she had to get on the plane under her own power. I had to wait two weeks at Robert’s place before they would release her.

While I was in Toronto for those two weeks, Betsy kept calling Michelle collect, and Michelle kept calling Robert. The phone bill later showed she called him several times a day; on one day she called him twelve times. Later the welfare department paid the bill and took $25 a month off our check. It took us about five years to pay that bill. Betsy had no clothes to wear in the hospital, because when the train ran over her it tore everything she was wearing, and also everything was full of grease. I bought her a second-hand pair of sweat pants, some shoes, and a top. Then I bought her a brand new cashmere sweater with matching beret and scarf. I spent almost all my money.

While I visited her every day, she began telling me what she was going through before she jumped. She told me she was hearing voices telling her different methods of killing herself. One voice told her to follow two police officers, then grab one of their guns and point it at them so the other would shoot her. Then she thought she might only be wounded. She decided on the subway because she thought that was guaranteed. It virtually never fails and she was told it was a miracle that she survived.

Finally we got the clearance for a flight to Edmonton. It turned out to be a Lear jet from Shell Oil. The C.E.O. was the only passenger. A Lear jet is like a limousine with wings. It is pure luxury. We were served a luxurious meal fit for royalty. There were snacks and booze everywhere. Before we got to Winnipeg our plane lost an engine. I thought for sure that we were going to crash. Somehow and fortunately, there was a small Shell Oil landing strip close enough that we could glide to it. We landed safely but it was closed. The pilot called someone and in about twenty minutes someone came and opened up the building. There was a repair hanger and a nice lobby. We went inside. It was awfully cold outside and we had to wait for the lobby to warm up. It took them two hours to repair the engine and the couch was very uncomfortable for Betsy. She had crutches but because of the location of her injuries they weren’t much use to her. Finally we were on our way again. The jet was only going to Calgary so we had to take another one to Edmonton. When we got to Calgary about 11pm, a big black limousine picked us up and they put us in a fancy hotel for the night. They gave us a nice breakfast and then the limousine took us to the Lear jet. We flew without incident to Edmonton and landed at the municipal airport. From there we got a taxi home.

I spent almost a year nursing her back to health. In the beginning, I had to wipe her bum when she had a bowel movement. At least she was in remission so she was easy to handle. Every night I would massage her whole body with ointments to try to heal the bruises. Eventually most of them healed up but some were permanent. I must admit that this made me feel more like a woman or a caregiver, and besides it was an outlet for my disease to please. In the meantime I ran into one of the extras from the movie we were in. He told me that right after the filming, his son developed schizophrenia and committed suicide. Then I told him about Betsy. He said “holy shit, I’ve got to check with other extras to see if it happened to them”. We noticed that after the filming, Farah Fawcett broke up with Ryan O Neil and Farah developed a mental disorder. We thought the film was jinxed.

In early December of 1990, Betsy had a severe relapse and showed all four types of schizophrenia to the fullest degree. For the first time in my life I experienced fear. I had never feared anything before but now I was terrified. All sense of reason was gone. She was hearing voices again. She had delusions of grandeur thinking she was God, and she was going into catatonic states. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence she would become a frozen statue for up to an hour, then come out of it and continue her sentence. She would talk mostly about very gruesome things. She would tell me that my body would be chopped into pieces after being tortured for hours, and Michelle would be raped and strangled. A couple of times she grabbed me and demanded that I stare into her eyes and not blink. I have always had trouble saying “no” to people, but this was hard to do. If I blinked she would threaten me. She said she was getting her life force from my eyes and thought she would die if I blinked.

She became obsessed with the crystal skull we had seen at the home of Anna Mitchell-Hedges. She believed she had it and it had the power to rule the world. While we were down East, she was researching her family tree and found that her great, great, grandfather was Chidiac T, the poet laureate of England who had had an affair with Mary Queen of Scots. She remembered seeing Mary’s mirror at Anna’s place. Now she thought she was that same Mary that was beheaded in the Tower of London. She dragged Michelle and me to a big mirror that we had and said, “Look, can’t you see the scar around my neck where I was beheaded”. Then she thought the crystal skull was inside her head and this gave her absolute power. She thought she could point her finger at someone and they would evaporate. She totally ignored Michelle and would not acknowledge her existence. I was becoming a nervous wreck. This was the most difficult thing I ever had to deal with at that point. One day she took a shower. I was in the washroom when she stepped out of the shower and the hair on top of her head was perfectly dry while the rest was wet. I put my hand on top of her head and it was hot. She would yell and scream at me for no apparent reason and sometimes didn’t know who I was.

I knew Betsy was is serious trouble and needed help. I called the police, hospitals, psychiatrists, and everyone I could think of. No one was willing or able to do anything unless she was willing to get help and she wasn’t. One day it got so bad that I had to go to the doctor to get some tranquilizers for myself. I went to a nearby clinic that I had been to a few times before. I saw Dr. Deborah Andrews who I had seen in passing before. I was crying in front of her and she listened to me intently. I had never met anyone in my life that was such a good listener. I told her about Betsy and when I mentioned her subway jump, she said, “That was her?” Apparently the doctors heard about the incident almost a year ago. I was actually afraid to leave Betsy alone because I thought she would commit suicide, but I needed those tranquilizers. When I came home, I was afraid to go inside because I heard some screaming. I put my key in the door and opened it. Then all hell broke loose. I never got to set foot inside the door. Her eyes were insanely wild and she screamed at the very top of her voice while she rushed me. Her hands were like claws, like a monster. She grabbed me with her claws and dug them right into my sides. She was screaming at me with her face pushed right up against mine. I broke loose and ran.

I knocked on the neighbors’ door and asked them to call the police but they didn’t. I knew Michelle would soon be home from school and I could not let her go inside the house. I decided to wait in the van so I could turn on the heat and warm up because it was freezing out. This was January 1991. When I tried to unlock the van the lock was frozen. I kept lighting the key with my lighter and after what seemed like hours I finally got into the van, started the engine and finally got some heat. I never locked the van after that. I waited and waited for Michelle and, of course, she was late. Finally she arrived and asked me why I was sitting in the van. I told her about Betsy and gave her a quarter and told her to go to the pay phone down the street and call the police. I told her to say it was an emergency and our lives were in danger. She did that and came back to the van. Soon a police cruiser pulled up and two officers got out. Before we went in I had to tell the police briefly about Betsy and the subway jump in Toronto.

We all went into the house and Betsy was sitting on the bed. Suddenly, she seemed perfectly normal. When the police started questioning her she said, “Oh, everything is fine. My husband (the first time she ever called me that) and I just had a little dispute, but everything is okay now. There’s nothing to be concerned about”. Now I was really scared. I thought the police would accept her word and leave. If that happened, I knew that Michelle and I would be dead meat. Fortunately one officer asked her why she jumped in front of the subway. Then she lost it. For a while she hung her head in silence. Then she started freaking out. She started throwing things in the garbage like Michelle’s toys. She pulled the tuque off my head and tossed it into the garbage. She started yelling nonsense. The police called an ambulance. I noticed the officers had their guns sticking out of their coats and I told them what she thought of doing with two police in Toronto. They carefully concealed their weapons.

Betsy had been wearing a nightgown and she took it off and started running around in the nude. She would grab the cops and wrap her legs around them and try to kiss them. Finally, the ambulance arrived. A male and a female attendant came in with a stretcher. Betsy would not cooperate. The female attendant, who was fortunately big and strong tried to get Betsy dressed. But Betsy would have no part of it. Betsy was on an adrenaline high that was giving her super strength, so it was pandemonium. Betsy grabbed the attendant’s crotch and she asked me after if Betsy was a lesbian. I said that she was never a lesbian. Finally Betsy went into a catatonic state and they could get her dressed and onto the stretcher.

They took her to the Alberta (mental) Hospital. I rode in the ambulance and Michelle rode in the police car. The police had to give their report to the hospital. The female attendant started giving her report to some guy and he turned out to be a patient. Finally a psychiatrist came, took the report and checked her in for a month. She was still catatonic. The police drove Michelle and me home. I couldn’t help thinking how traumatic this must have been for Michelle to witness her mother going through all this. I visited Betsy a couple of days later and she was a basket case. But she was clever enough to talk her way out of there within two weeks. She phoned me one day and asked me to bring her a sweater. When I got there she said she was coming home today. They were going to release her. I thought, “Oh, no. This can’t be happening”. I thought she would kill me for getting her into a mental hospital. She had to attend a meeting first with about twenty people including psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and so on.

While we were waiting to attend this meeting, Betsy kept putting her head in her hands and laughing hysterically. Once we were in the meeting, she was perfectly normal, but she did tell everyone there that I was homosexual. She had everyone fooled. The consensus was that she was normal and could go home. I demanded a private meeting with her psychiatrist. I tried to convince him that she was not normal and that she should be kept in there. He thought she might be okayt. He told me that she was schizophrenic and that there was a 50-50 chance that Michelle could develop it too. Betsy never said a word on the way home but once we got home she said, “How could you do this to me? How could you send me to a mental hospital? You’re going to pay for this”. I knew exactly what she meant. She was going to kill me. And I knew how she was going to do it. She was going to plunge a knife into my heart when I was sleeping. She stayed around for two weeks and needless to say I got very little sleep. On the average it was two hours a day. I slept only when she went out and even then I sort of slept with one eye open. The whole time she never spoke a word to me.

Sometimes I would see her in Northtown Mall sitting on a bench staring into space. Most times she didn’t know who I was. She would walk the ten blocks or so wearing summer clothes even though it was a cold January. The cold never seemed to bother her. She also didn’t seem to need food or sleep. One day she went to the mall and I knew that she had eaten nothing that day or even the day before. I saw her sitting there and asked her if I could buy her something to eat. She refused. I had eighteen dollars in my pocket and I gave her fifteen dollars to buy some food. She threw the money in the garbage. Then toward the end of January, she disappeared. I waited three days and then filed a missing person report. Two detectives came over and they were really nice. I gave them a full description of what she was wearing and a recent photograph of her. They posted her picture in every bus station and train station in Canada. They put out a nation-wide alert for her. Then they put her picture on the 11pm news.

In the meantime I had been seeing Deborah A. I told her I can’t get by on two hours sleep a night; I need four. She laughed. About three days after Betsy left, I got a call from the police that they had found her. She was in a women’s shelter in Victoria, B.C. I have no idea how she got there. In February, I got a call from Deborah saying she opened her own clinic in Castledowns. She said to drop by and see her. When I first started going there it was almost like she was coming on to me, and she would be any man’s dream. She was so beautiful that she could easily have been a model, even a Playboy model.

The Woman In Me

During this time, everybody started seeing me as a woman. I guess the woman in me just couldn’t stay suppressed anymore. Even though I wasn’t wearing woman’s clothes, everybody was calling me ma’am or miss or lady. At garage sales they would always direct me to the women’s clothes and jewelry. If I asked for the washroom anywhere they would always send me to the ladies room. When I was at home I was always in the nude. The landlady would often come down to talk to me or bring me some Ukrainian food or to collect the rent. She kept telling me to put some shorts on. I don’t think it bothered her. I think she was turned on. I just wanted to be natural. One of the strangest things was the landlady’s neighbor. She would visit her and always walk by my open door and start talking to me. I would be standing there in the nude and she kept saying, “ Oh, you’re such a pretty lady”. Once I got on an elevator in an office building downtown. On the next floor a woman got on and stared at me. She said, “You remind me of someone, but you couldn’t be him because it’s perfectly clear to me that you’re obviously a woman”. This kept happening more frequently as time went on. There were still women out there who thought that I was a man and were coming on to me, but I was looking for a man and not having much luck.

In February of 1991, I joined a twelve-step program called Emotions Anonymous. I felt I really needed this now. I went there for less than a year. Toward the end, I met a girl by the name of Carol W. Sometimes we would talk and we exchanged phone numbers. On April 2, I joined a Toastmasters group. I went a few times and even spoke effortlessly on the podium. Nobody wanted to talk to me there so I left. Then I started a course at the YWCA. I was sent there by Social Services. The first part of the course was life-skills training and the second was how to look for a job. For the life-skills, I ended up teaching the instructors and they didn’t know how to handle that. After all who had more life skills than me? During the course I got lonely and depressed. I asked Deborah for some Valium and she gave me some but she cut me off after two weeks so I wouldn’t get addicted. I kept falling asleep in class.

Deborah and Linda

Deborah gradually started inviting me over to her house, sometimes for dinner. We got along great. She was living with a lesbian who was recovering from a serious car accident. At first her room-mate Linda was friendly. I asked Deborah if she was gay but she denied it. I knew she didn’t have a boyfriend and was not looking for one. I had made it clear to her that I was looking for a boyfriend. I started hanging out at the Gay and Lesbian Center of Edmonton but after several months of this I had not found one man who was interested in me.

On April 17, I joined a native group called Mother Earth Healing Society. They met once a week. We did all the native ceremonies such as smudging and after the meeting we all hugged each other. That was the nicest part of it. There was one big white dude that used to hug me really hard and I knew he was after me. I wasn’t interested. I wasn’t that desperate yet. On May 3, I put an ad in the paper looking for a man but that didn’t work out. On May 9, when I was at Deborah’s, she told me that she and Linda were going on vacation to Vancouver for ten or twelve days. She gave me the keys to her house to look after it while they were gone. The next day Betsy was on our doorstep ringing the doorbell. I could see her from one of the bedroom windows, but I was afraid of her and didn’t answer the door. Later I saw her lying on the cement having a nap. I felt sorry for her but it was too dangerous to contact her. Michelle and I went over to Ted’s for a few hours. On the way back we saw Betsy on 97th Street staring at car tires. We thought we couldn’t stay at our place that night so we got into the van and went to Deborah’s place and spent the night there.

Deborah and Linda came back on May 20. I had done a lot of yard work while they were gone. June 6 was Michelle’s birthday and Deborah threw her a big birthday party. On June 8, Deborah and Linda took Michelle shopping for clothes.

On June 9, I went with Ted to a Sunday night meeting to read and study the Urantia book. It was 2,097 pages of channeled spiritual philosophy. Ted was the only person in my life that ever showed an interest in The Biocratic Manifesto but now he was saying to hell with it. His whole life was now obsessed with Urantia and he set himself up as the guru. I went to his meetings for five years missing only two of them. He could not accept anyone interpreting it in any way other than his. He lost a lot of people that way. When we were down to the last chapter, even I couldn’t stand him any more and I quit.

On June 13, I set up a table at The Works Visual Arts Festival in Sir Winston Churchill Square. I was there for two weeks and I had lots of artwork to sell. Nobody showed any interest and I never sold a single thing. I did this three years in a row, always with the same results. I couldn’t help thinking of the curse.

On June 20, Michelle and I went to Deborah’s for her birthday party. I gave her a big birthday hug. Three days later, Linda called me and freaked out. She screamed at me to stay away from Deborah and never see or speak to her again, and not to dare ever set foot in her house or clinic again. Deborah was there at the time and heard everything. I called her the next day at her clinic. She said, “I think you should come over here. We have some unfinished business”. When I saw her at the clinic she was crying, and so was I. I knew I meant something to her and she meant something to me. Now we had to say good bye. She didn’t know why Linda said those things but she had a commitment to her. That was the end of that.

Living: Housing and Income

On July 1, I met a lady named Vilma. She was an intellectual, which is very rare to find, and she was sort of a radical, which I also liked. She was from Trinidad and was half Chinese, a quarter African, and a quarter Arawak Indian. We spent the afternoon in the park having a stimulating conversation. As I left to go home, she gave me her phone number and I gave her mine. We called each other on occasion after that but nothing lasting came of that connection.

On July 8, I registered with Edmonton Housing Authority (now called Capital Region Housing Corporation) to get subsidized housing. They told me there was about a two-year waiting list. It was too expensive living on 96th Street. The welfare cheque wasn’t covering my rent and I was doing odd jobs and going to the food bank. I had a contract with the Art Network to promote my Gizmo comic strip but nothing ever happened. On August 7, I got a job as a line cook at Banditos Mexican Restaurant. That job didn’t last very long because my hernia was now bothering me from the work I did on Vancouver Island. I couldn’t stand for more than an hour and so they fired me. On August 21, I was contracted to paint Christmas T-shirts for the Art Network. It also fell through.

I called Edmonton Housing again and told them I was going to get my power cut off. Since I was a single parent with a thirteen-year-old daughter, they put me at the head of the list. On August 28, `91, I moved into a two-bedroom townhouse with a full basement and front yard at 8925 149A Avenue. On September 1, I was offered a job with the ITV Network to work on TV commercials. Of course, that fell through also.

Sex In My Life

On the 25th, I saw Vilma and she took me to a dinner in old Chinatown. She could speak Chinese. After dinner she invited me to her place. I didn’t think anything of it. But soon after we got inside she got in the nude. She was asking for sex. I didn’t know what to think. I hadn’t had sex of any kind for at least nine months and that’s the longest I’ve ever gone without sex in my adult life. It was tempting and she was such a nice person that my disease to please kicked in and we had sex.

Whenever I had sex with anyone, I always made sure that they were satisfied, even with women. I always remembered Jack’s saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing well”. When I was with a woman, I would begin by massaging her entire body to get her relaxed and to try to find her G-spot. I always believed in the importance of foreplay. Then I would start kissing her, and French kissing her too. I would lick her neck and suck on her earlobes. I would gently rub my palms across her nipples. If they weren’t already hard, they would be now. I would lick her nipples and twirl my tongue around them. Then I would suck on them. While I was doing that, I would massage her vagina with my finger. Then I would start rubbing her clitoris. Soon I would be licking it. Some women would already have an orgasm by now. While I was doing all this, I never got an erection. If they wanted intercourse, I would have to play with it and soon I would have an erection.

With men, it was more like “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am”. They didn’t want foreplay (with the exception of Alvin). They usually wanted it over in five minutes or less. But they still had to do it my way. I always got into the position of lying on my back and I would pull them on top of me. They had to get in a kneeling position over my head and just slide it down my throat. This way, I felt more like a woman. I was very good at giving blowjobs this way and I never got a complaint. The problem with the women I had sex with was that they so appreciated my forepaly that they kept coming back and wanting more and more which I was not willing to do. A lot of women told me that most men treated them the same way they treated me – five minutes or until they climaxed.

On September 27, I received a notice to appear in court. Betsy wanted custody of Michelle. Michelle said she would never go with Betsy. I went to Legal Aid and they gave me a court intake worker. Our court date was set for October 23, but Betsy never showed up and the case was thrown out. After that, Betsy would call on occasion and demand I give her Michelle. I had to keep telling her that Michelle didn’t want to see her.

In December, I met a guy named Jim. He came over and we had wild, passionate sex the whole night. This was the first man I had been with in ages and I sure needed and appreciated that time together.

Carol W

Carol W had been calling me on occasion and finally on January 20, 1992, she decided to meet me. This was three months after I met her briefly at a meeting. She came over for a visit and right away she wanted to have sex. I did not. I couldn’t picture her as a sexual person. She told me she hadn’t had sex in five years and was really horny. She started undressing me until I was nude and for some reason I got an erection. She dragged me up to the bedroom and took all her clothes off. I felt sorry for her and my disease to please overcame me and we had sex. But I just couldn’t go through all the motions of foreplay and she didn’t want to waste any time anyway.

Carol was not like anyone I had ever known before, nor was she the type I had wanted to know in the past. She was the stereotypical female and conditioned to the social establishment. She went to church on Sundays. I thought it would be an opportunity to experience a person like that. We did a lot of things together, things I had never done with anyone else. She even managed to drag me to church occasionally. Carol would take me to movies which I was never in the habit of going to, and picnics in the park which was also alien to me. We would take trips on the spur of the moment to Calgary or to the mountains. On March 19, Carol finally invited me to her place. She hadn’t invited me earlier because she felt ashamed that her place was such a mess. I met her son Derek who was about 19, and her daughter Natalie who was about 21. About five years before I met them, they had been in a serious car accident when the car they were in was hit by a drunk driver. Natalie got the worst of it. She had brain damage which gave her constant migraines and she often expressed her pain with bouts of severe temper. She couldn’t seem to control her anger.

Carol had been an abused wife by an angry alcoholic. Natalie had an intense hatred for her dad because of this. He had remarried and wasn’t around. Natalie would smash furniture, fight with her mother and Derek, and scream at the top of her voice. Carol was diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder and Derek suffered on-going depression. Carol was a substitute schoolteacher and taught piano privately. At Christmas time, they would go out of their way to decorate the house and a big Christmas tree. I had never experienced this before either.

On March 23, I met a lady named Vera. She was very jolly and outgoing and we often went out to restaurants and talked for hours. She would invite me over for wonderful home-cooked dinners. Pretty soon she wanted sex. I kept putting her off by telling her I only liked men. She wasn’t willing to accept this. She said she was in love with me and I was her soul mate. I knew I was in trouble now. I said I wasn’t going to see her again, but she had my phone number and she kept calling and calling me, even in the middle of the night. She said she was going to kill herself and take me along with her. If she couldn’t have me, nobody else could. I finally got rid of her and I have no idea what happened to her.

Around that time I met another lady named Esther. She was rich and intelligent but always lived on the edge of the law. She was into criminal activity that she was sure she could get away with. She had a lawyer on a permanent retainer. She fell in love with me too and also said I was her soul mate. I realized I must have been doing something wrong. Why aren’t I meeting men like this?

I managed to get Carol interested in garage sales and we would go every weekend for a long time. I was still always recognized as a woman and they were always showing me woman’s clothes and jewelry. I was always being directed to the ladies washroom. Often at garage sales, they would say, “How are you ladies doing?” This bothered Carol. On May 24, Carol offered to marry me. I told her I couldn’t because I liked men too much. We had only had sex a few times and I wasn’t enjoying it and I told her I didn’t want any more. We could just be platonic buddies.

Around this time I fell down my stairs and broke my foot in two places. I was in agonizing pain. I called Carol to see if she would come and drive me to a nearby clinic. She couldn’t be bothered, so I took a taxi. I ended up with a cast and crutches. I am a very fast healer and I had the cast off in two weeks.

Art Work

In August of `92, I got a job through a make-work program at the Edmonton Young Offenders Center (EYOC) for six months. I was hired as an art teacher for kids who were not in school for whatever reason. It was a very secure jail with cameras everywhere and electronically controlled locks on every door. They warned me it was dangerous because there were always plenty of weapons and drugs. I had a list of what to do in case of a riot. There was violence there, but I was lucky not to have been in that location when it broke out. When I started on the job, they told me that there was a remote possibility of getting killed and did I still want the job. I said “yes”.

The program was a total failure. Most of the time I was all by myself with nothing to do. I killed time by doing my own artwork there. Whenever I did have kids, none of them were interested in learning art (or anything else for that matter). One of the kids was gay and he had to be kept in solitary confinement because the other kids threatened to kill him. I overheard kids making threats against his life if they could ever get their hands on him. On April 8, 1993 my contract was up. One of the guards asked me what I was going to do now and I said I didn’t know. He suggested I call the Edmonton Federation of Community Leagues, which I did later on. I completed a lot of works of art while I was there. I took my art works to most of the art galleries in the city and most of them sounded thrilled with them. I told them I’m getting some limited edition prints made and asked them if they would be interested. A lot of them said “yes”.

I went to a printing company and got 100 editions of five different pictures. Now none of the galleries were interested. One art gallery in West Edmonton Mall wanted me to set up outside their store and do some artwork while making my work available to the public. Then they called me and told me not to set foot at their place. I called the Community League Federation and got a lot of contact names but this was June and the programs didn’t start until September. In the meantime, the only prints I sold were to a couple of Carol’s relatives.

On July 26, I got a job at Jean Birney’s Artistically Speaking School of Fine Art. She only wanted me to teach cartooning. I started my cartooning classes by drawing cartoons and getting photocopies to pass out to students to copy or trace them. Virtually all my students were young kids. I went to art supply stores and bookstores to find some instruction material that could be helpful in my classes. I couldn’t find anything suitable.

I decided to write my own instruction books. Cartooning is definitely an art form established originally by Walt Disney and perfected by Warner Brothers. This was my basis but I went beyond them. I used the science of anatomy, muscle movement, universal facial expressions, body language, principles of movement, attitudes, and so on. I drew all these in realistic form and exaggerated them for the cartoon effect. I incorporated techniques I had developed over the decades, because I had been cartooning since I was three. I came up with two professional instruction books each with 212 pages. There was nothing like them on the market.

In September, I started teaching art at community leagues all over the city. My classes were usually in the early afternoon. I was at the art school on Fridays and Mondays. I did this for five years until I ran out of students. The market collapsed. In all those years, I never taught anyone anything. Nobody was interested in learning. I was just a highly-paid babysitter. I had about a hundred instruction books printed up. I sold some to the parents of my students. I sold quite a few to art supply stores and a few bookstores, but the bookstores could not sell them. Just like everything else this was just another big failure.

While I was at the art school, I would go to Carol’s place because she lived only a couple of blocks away. I would stay there for the weekend in the spare bedroom. I became her slave. Her place was always a mess. I would always do a huge pile of dishes and pots and pans. I would also usually make the dinners. I would always clean the place up and vacuum even though it was a mess again the next day. I fought a loosing battle but I always wanted to please in any way I could. I used to set up art shows all over the city but never sold a single item. On March 23, 1994 I went to a cartoonist party for Yardley Jones. I had met all the local cartoonists before but Yardley was the only one who spoke to me. In April, Carol got a settlement in the lawsuit against the drunk driver that hit them. They waited ten years for this and they got nowhere near what they were asking. Carol got enough to have a new house built for her.

I received an offer to do cartoons for CFRN TV, but that quickly fell through. On October 21, I sold my van for $300 and bought a `79 Chevy one-ton, twelve-passenger, sports window van for $890. I met Don B at one of Ted’s Sunday meetings. He was a musician and his wife Sharon was an artist. Don found out about my work at the meetings and showed an interest. We started hanging out together and he liked my work. I got lots of hugs from him but the best of all were from Sharon.

Goodbye Michelle

When Michelle turned fourteen, it became unbearable for me to live with her. She was seeing a fourteen-year-old boy and was having sex with him. She started doing drugs, and she constantly blamed me for everything in her life she didn’t like. She blamed me for what happened to her mother. I have always had a strong obsession with order. I could not tolerate a mess in my place. In someone else’s place it didn’t bother me but in mine, no. Michelle became very vindictive toward me. She would maintain the biggest mess possible out of spite. There were papers and clothes and garbage everywhere. She would use up piles of dishes and pots and pans and never wash them. I usually ended up washing her dishes. She dropped out of school and couldn’t even do correspondence courses. I tried and tried to get her out of the house but she said I couldn’t legally evict her until she was eighteen. It got to the point where I actually hated her. This was the first and only time I’ve ever hated anyone. I would yell and scream and swear at her. I told her she had to be out of here at noon on her eighteenth birthday or I will have the police evict her. She moved out on that day – June 6, 1995.

A Painless Dentist

Shortly after this I broke a front tooth and was forced to see a dentist. I found one that used a sleep method. I talked to the nurse. They used an intravenous sedation. I would be unconscious, feel nothing, and remember nothing. I went through it with ease even getting an impression of my upper gum and teeth. When I came out of it I was on the most beautiful high. I was stoned for five hours after. The dentist told me I had to come back and get all my top teeth out and wear a plate. I only had six upper teeth left and most of them were in bad condition. I had been wearing a partial plate. I had the procedure done and afterwards I found he had butchered my gums and shoved a distorted denture into my mouth. He told me to take the denture out that night and rinse my mouth out with salt water. I could not get the denture out that night because of the swelling. The next day I went to another dentist and she got it out for me and showed me how to take it out. My gums were full of stitches and she said, “What did that dentist do to you?” I ended up going to a denturist and he was shocked at what that dentist had done to me. He made me a perfect new denture but he had to take an impression from my other denture because I could not tolerate it the normal way.

Hernia Repairs

By now my hernias were bothering me so much I decided to go for surgery. I had a huge hernia on the right groin and two smaller ones on the left side. On May 14, 1996 I went to the Misericordia Hospital. The surgeon wanted to do just one side at a time and I insisted he do all three at once. He agreed. I had to stay overnight because this was considered major surgery. On the right side, they had to sew all the muscles to a plastic screen. While I was in the hospital I went into convulsions. I had to ask the nurse three times for hot blankets. And three times they gave me a shot of morphine for the pain. Carol and Natalie came to pick me up the next morning and took me to their place. It took me a month to recover well enough to go home. I stayed in Carol’s spare bedroom. Carol had a habit of having the heat a lot lower than I was used to. If the temperature dropped below a certain level, I would go into convulsions and no amount of blankets would help. I needed an external heat source. I had to beg and plead with Carol to turn the heat up and she did slightly. It wasn’t enough.

Natalie was my perfect nurse. She would make me whatever I could eat. She timed my painkillers and did everything for me. Carol did nothing to help me. Within a few days my whole abdomen was black and blue, down my right leg to my knee and half way down my left leg. I was showing it to everyone and they found it disgusting. They were all used to seeing me in the nude so that didn’t bother them, although they preferred that I wear something. After a week I wanted to take a shower. Natalie was willing to help me but Derek was there and he insisted on helping. I got the water as hot as I could and got myself all wet. Then I went into convulsions. Derek had no idea what to do. Natalie asked if she could help and Derek said I was fine. I told him I was freezing so he dried me off, put a robe on me and put me to bed with a huge pile of blankets on top of me. It seemed to work that time.

After two weeks, I was up and around and would go places with Carol or Natalie. But when they hit a bump or pothole, I would yell out in pain. Through `96 and `97, I was having a lot of convulsions usually when I was away from home when the temperature was low and when I was tired. It started in my back. I could feel all my body heat escaping from my back and the only way to warm up was to put some external heat supply on my back. I saw many doctors but none of them could diagnose it.

Also in 1996, I started loosing my sight. I developed cataracts in both eyes and was going blind. Just at the time this happened I got a call from a stand-up comedian who was looking for a cartoonist. He wanted to do a comic panel for syndication. He would supply the jokes and I would draw the cartoons. He bought all the supplies including a powerful magnifying glass because my sight was going. We put together a book and he sent a copy to a California syndicate. He got a rejection slip and was devastated. He became very depressed. I didn’t care because I was used to everything going wrong.

In the winter of `96-`97 I started going to the gay and lesbian center for the city. They had different groups with that center. One of them was called PFLAG-T, which stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays and Transgenders. At first I wasn’t wearing women’s clothes when I went there, but soon I started dressing as the woman I felt I was. They met the first Sunday of every month. I went there for a whole year and in all that time nobody would acknowledge my existence. The most I ever got was a rare “Hi, Janis”. Even the other transgenders wouldn’t talk to me.

I wasn’t having much luck with men and I really wanted a man. I decided to attend a group called Prime Timers. This was a group of older gay men and I was already sixty. They met the second Sunday of each month and they had about twenty or thirty members. I went there for two reasons. One was to find a man and the other was to promote myself as a cartooning instructor. The only person in the entire group who showed any interest was Don S. I had passed out my business card and Don called me the next day. He ended up playing a major role in my life. He was ten years older than I was and I wasn’t expecting anything. Then he wanted me to give him blowjobs. This went on for a while but it reached a point where he couldn’t get it up anymore or lost interest.

In the meantime, I just couldn’t play the role of a man any more and started wearing women’s clothes on a daily basis. I had been accustomed to being accepted as a woman for years already in public. I just had to be the woman I always was. Carol, Natalie and Derek took a dim view to this and were just tolerating me now. Carol would not take me to her parents or sisters homes any more because she was ashamed of me dressing as a woman. A lot of people I knew were not as friendly any more.

With Derek to Arizona

In late March of `97, Derek wanted to drive to Arizona but he didn’t want to go alone. He wanted me to come with him. I had no money but he said he’d pay for everything, but there was one condition. I had to wear men’s clothes. He thought I could get in trouble in the states wearing women’s clothes with male identification. I thought it would be worth the free trip. He drove a truck with a canopy and we had a bed in the truck with lots of warm blankets.

Our first stop for the night was Waterton Lakes Park in Montana. Derek wanted to sleep in the truck to save on motel rooms. It was cold out and there was snow on the ground. I warned him ahead of time that the conditions were right for me to go into convulsions. About half an hour after we went to bed I started convulsing. He lay his nude body on me but he didn’t have enough body heat. He did have a sexy body but I never had sex with him. I managed to get dressed and he put me in the cab of the truck and turned on the engine so I could get some heat. He told me to sleep in the cab and when I started convulsing to turn on the engine. I did this for hours but I could not sleep. Finally at 5am I just couldn’t stay awake and I knew I was going to die because all my body heat would escape from my back. While I was dozing I kept thinking that once I fell asleep I would never wake up. I would die, and I prepared myself for it. I was not afraid. I knew I had to go sometime and this was my time. I thought about how Michelle might feel and that she may have to claim my body and then I fell asleep. Derek came into the cab at 7am and shook me, but I didn’t rouse. He started the engine and eventually got some heat coming into the cab. I think he was scared. Once the cab got hot, I came to. I woke up but I didn’t know where I was or what was happening. I had experienced mild hypothermia.

I guess Derek or my guardian angel saved my life. If I had been in that cab much longer I think I would have died. Derek said, “Well, I guess from now on we’ll have to sleep in motels”. We did, but that wasn’t much better. Derek couldn’t stand the heat and I needed it. Almost every night I went into convulsions, and I had to fight with Derek to turn the heat high. I couldn’t help Derek drive because now I was legally blind. I couldn’t enjoy the beautiful scenery because I had trouble seeing it.

We stopped in Salt Lake City and I showed him the Mormon Tabernacle. I showed him the pipes of the great pipe organ. It has thousands of hand carved pipes ranging in size from a quarter inch to twenty-six feet tall. Just then the organist came in to practice. He told us to sit in the back row. He started by dropping a pin and we could hear it loud and clear. He played a number on the organ and the sounds were out of this world. It sounded so beautiful. From there we drove a hundred miles across the great salt flats (just south of Great Salt Lake) to Nevada.

All along that road there were designs that people made from pieces of car tires and chunks of asphalt. I made a cartoon of the head of Gizmo in the salt and it will probably be there forever. I had to taste the salt and it sure was salty. We saw a salt mine along the way. We traveled south down a mostly deserted road on the eastern side of Nevada to Las Vegas. This was my first time in the City of Lights and I found it fascinating. Derek didn’t like it. We stayed for a couple of days and it was about 110 degrees Farenheit. I never had any convulsions there, in fact I needed the air-conditioning on.

After we crossed over the Hoover Dam by Lake Mead we entered Arizona and drove on to Phoenix. The giant saguaro cactus plants fascinated me; some were thirty feet high. We went to the old town of Tombstone near the Mexican border. It still looked like the Wild West town of the 1800s. Actors with six-shooters portrayed Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, and we watched a re-enactment of the shootout at the OK Coral. We went into one original building that still had bullet holes in the walls from ancient gunfights. They still had the original guilded cages hanging from the ceiling where the prostitutes danced. This is where the expression “a bird in a guilded cage” came from.

From there we drove to Flagstaff and the next day we toured the Grand Canyon. I couldn’t see it very well because my sight was getting worse. We drove through the Petrified Forest where trees were turned to stone 250 million years ago. We went through the Navaho Nation on the way to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a fascinating city with its mixture of modern and ancient architecture. We stayed overnight and ate real Mexican food. We went to Santa Fe and I noticed that all the architecture there was based on the adobe principle. With adobe, no air-conditioning is needed. It just goes to show how smart the original natives were.

When we reached Denver, we were out of the heat; that night I went into convulsions. In Denver, we watched a shootout between the police and some gang. On the trip home, I was convulsing every night and Derek decided to rush back to Edmonton because he thought I would end up in the hospital. Once I got home I was fine because I could regulate the thermostat and turn the heat up. I had to have it at a minimum of twenty-five degrees Celcius. In spite of everything, I enjoyed the trip. I saw three new states and by now I had been in all but four of them. The only states I haven’t been in are Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas. I have been in every province and territory in Canada.

As a Woman of the Arts

Now I started living as a woman. I got rid of every piece of men’s clothes I had. I just couldn’t take playing the male role any more. The one thing I wanted more than anything else was to have obvious, noticeable breasts. I started wearing padded bras and taking herbal female hormones.

In July of `97, I joined a woman’s art group that was supposedly promoting local female artists. After about three visits they rejected me and that was the end of that. Don S decided to be my manager and promote my artwork and other projects. He drove me to art supply stores and bookstores to try and sell my cartoon instruction books. I was the one who did the talking and I managed to sell books to most of the stores. The problem was that the public showed no interest in buying my books from the stores. Was this yet another failure caused by the curse? The same thing happened with my limited-edition prints. Don even got some prints framed and they hung in boutiques on Whyte Avenue. They never sold one. Later I had the prints in an art boutique for many months and never sold one.

On August 15, I attended a party for some of the people that used to go to Ted’s Urantia meetings. There was a guy there named Reiner who I had met a few times before. He was so handsome or beautiful that I could have fallen in love with him. I wanted him so badly but I knew he was married and had a six-year-old daughter. I did have his phone number and talked to him and I invited him over. When he came to my place I was dressed in a very sexy dress and started flirting with him and talking sexy to him. I guess I got him turned on and he said, “Okay, lets go upstairs”. I didn’t hesitate a second. We had really great sex. The next day he called me and said he felt guilty and I never saw him again.

On November 8, I gave a lecture on The Biocratic Manifesto at the old planetarium by the Space and Sciences Center (the Odyssium). I had an audience of seventeen people including Ted and Don. I had an overhead projector to show slides of charts from my book. I spoke for at least an hour. The intention was to see if I could start a group to meet periodically to discuss my concepts. No one was interested.

Finding an Understanding Physician

I had been trying to find a doctor and ran into a lot of discrimination because I was living as a woman while a man’s name was on my health care card. Most of them couldn’t accept that. One doctor threw me out of her office. Then I found one in a clinic that would accept me. I saw her on November 22 and told her that I was taking herbal female hormones. I informed her that if she could prescribe some for me the cost of the prescription would be covered by social services. She gave me Premarin but I found out later that the dose was far too low to be of any use. I asked them at the desk to call me Janis. Reluctantly they did but they couldn’t register me as that without a legal name change.

Cancer in My Men

On November 27, `97, Ted had a stroke and was rushed to University Hospital where he was in a coma for three days. I knew for quite a while that there was something seriously wrong with him. He was practically a skeleton and was overdosing on sugar. I wanted to tell him he should see a doctor but Ted was the type that you couldn’t tell anything. They did a lot of tests on him and found that he had had a diabetic stroke. Not only that, he was riddled with cancer. His gall bladder was gone along with most of his liver. The cancer was in his pancreas and it had spread through most of his abdomen. He could no longer produce insulin. After he came out of his coma and was told about his condition, I went to visit him in the hospital. He was miserable and filled with hate for everyone, especially the hospital staff. He was cursing the doctors and nurses and now he hated me because I was a woman. Whenever a doctor or nurse came in while I was there he would point to me and say, “That’s not a woman. He’s a man who thinks he’s a woman”.

Ted had six brothers and five sisters. One of his sisters who had been a nurse accepted me but the rest of his family could not. He was taken to the Cross Cancer Institute to decide what to do with him. They offered him a residence for cancer patients but he insisted on going home. He wasn’t expected to live more than three months. Since he needed someone twenty-four hours a day, his wife had to quit her job to look after him. He had to give himself insulin injections and cut out sugar. His wife Betty became his slave and he was ruthless with her. She couldn’t leave the apartment except to get food and she had a time limit. Betty called me one day saying she wished he would die because she couldn’t handle him any more. That miserable bastard lived for almost a year after.

On January 6, 1998, Alvin (my long-time boyfriend) called me from Toronto to tell me that Bill K had died of cancer. A guy who had power of attorney for him told me that he became miserable and hateful before he died. He had always been the most cheerful man I knew. The guy, who I knew from the past and used to have wild sex parties with, told me that Bill had left me some money in his will. But he said not to get excited because it probably wouldn’t be enough to pay my rent. He left tens of thousands of dollars to some cats.

A Diversity Conference

I had been talking to a guy named Rick M who had an organization that supported gays and lesbians and transgenders. Rick knew about a conference being formed by a group affiliated with the United Church of Canada. I spoke to the minister and his wife a couple of times. They were setting up a three-day weekend symposium at Grant MacEwan College with workshops on Saturday. They told me they definitely wanted me to be there and participate in a workshop. Rick also insisted that I be there. He said I shouldn’t miss this opportunity. But when the time came the door was slammed shut in my face. Again, nobody would even talk to me. Well now, isn’t this typical?

Finally, An Understanding and Cooperative Physician

My doctor who was accepting of me quit and it was really tough finding another. But I got lucky. I found a good one. I told her that as far as I was concerned, I was a woman and I want to be a total woman. She gave me the great hope of my life. She said she would recommend a psychiatrist who specializes in transgenders. On February 24, I had an appointment with Dr. Lorne Warneke at the Grey Nuns Hospital. I had to fill out a form and he asked me a lot of questions about my sexual orientation and so on. His prognosis was that I had gender identity disorder and I was labeled as a transgender. He told me I was eligible for sex reassignment surgery, and this would be covered by Alberta Health Care. You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to hear this. I had already met all the requirements for acceptance. The only thing I had to do was to have my name legally changed to Janis, which I did but my gender was still listed as male. He sent me to an endocrinologist on March 26, and I got the maximum dosage of estrogen and progesterone. I did develop more feminine characteristics and my breasts grew slightly. I was now wearing padded bras.

I know there is still discrimination against gays and lesbians but now I was considered a cross-dresser. That is far worse and some men would kill me if they found out. Carol, Natalie and Derek could not accept me because I was now wearing beautiful dresses, jewelry, high-heeled shoes and a padded bra. I’ve always been open and honest with everyone I knew. When I told everybody I was going to have a sex change operation, everyone I knew slammed the door in my face and totally rejected me. The only people who still accepted me were Don and Lynn, a former girlfriend of Derek’s. Even my son (who used to visit me occasionally) and my daughter (who I had talked to a few times since she left) could not accept me. My son has never talked to me since. Being a transgender invites the most discrimination I’ve ever experienced. Even in the medical profession I experienced discrimination. A lot of doctors cannot accept this because it is rare (like one in 40,000) or because they are prejudiced. Don had been taking me to garage sales where I got a lot of nice women’s clothes and jewelry for next to nothing and I soon amassed a huge collection of beautiful clothes.

Travels With Derek

Derek actually kept in touch with me because he was extremely lonely and very depressed. I guess I was the only one who would listen to him and put up with him. He would call me crying his eyes out and I would try to cheer him up. On May 11, Derek decided to take a trip to Toronto. He was too lonely to go by himself and he invited me to come along. I was hesitant to go because I thought he might do something drastic on the way. On the other hand I liked the idea of seeing Alvin again and having some great sex. I agreed but as long as he accepted me as a woman. By now I was really loosing my sight and Derek had to take my arm wherever we went. I had no depth perception below me. Derek was very depressed along the way and when we were driving through Northern Ontario (I couldn’t go through the states) past Kenora, there were some high rock walls right beside the road. He wanted to crash into a rock wall to kill himself and me as well. I guess my guardian angel stepped in again and he didn’t crash.

We got as far as Thunder Bay and then he freaked out in the motel. He started yelling and screaming at me and cursing me. He said he was sick and tired of me because I was useless because I was blind. He could not accept me as a woman, and he suddenly couldn’t accept my smoking. And he would not call me Janis anymore. I said, “Well, I guess this is the end of the trip”. He said, “It’s the end of the trip for you. I’m dumping you here and you can find your own way home”. He stormed out with all his stuff saying he was getting his own motel room. I was in a real dilemma because I had no money and I had a bunch of luggage. How would I get home? I looked through the phone book (I had a big magnifying glass) to find a welfare office but I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t hitchhike because I had too much stuff. I lay awake for hours. Then about 3am, Derek came charging in the door. He said, “I’m going to buy you a bus ticket home so get all your shit together and be ready at 7am sharp. Then he stormed out slamming the door on his way.

I picked out a nice dress, packed up all my stuff, got dressed and lay on the bed. I think I might have slept about two hours. Derek came in at seven and bought me breakfast, then he drove me to the bus terminal. He bought me a ticket for $200 and luckily, he gave me $100 for food along the way. Unfortunately, I just missed the bus and the next one was at 8 in the evening. I had nearly a twelve-hour wait. There was a big mall diagonally across the street and I had to make several trips there to kill time and to eat. I had to cross a very wide major intersection. One street was a main highway and the other was a major busy street. I was no longer able to see the traffic lights. I couldn’t tell if the light was red or green. I could see the moving shadows of cars and I crossed when they went the same way I was going. I think this was the most boring day of my life. Finally the bus came and I got on. I slept most of the time on the bus. We got into Edmonton at 5am. Don knew I was going on this trip and I think he was concerned. I phoned him. He said, “Where are you?” I said, “I’m in Edmonton at the bus terminal”. He said “I’ll be right there” and he hung up. He was soon there and he drove me home. It was May 16.

Back Home and an Explanation

I had been on welfare for a long time trying to live on $400 a month. It was difficult to afford to eat and smoke at the same time, but I couldn’t stop smoking. I had tried everything and nothing worked. I would regularly go to the food bank and to the missions. I accidentally got a credit card in the mail from Zellers. I never asked for one and it was the only one I’ve ever had. I bought cartons of cigarettes there on credit and ran up a bill of $500. Just then I got my inheritance from Bill K’s will and it was exactly $500. I cashed it and ran down to Zellers and paid them off and never used the credit card since. Soon I managed to get on AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped). I had applied for it about a year ago but I was now eligible because I was blind and because a psychiatrist was treating me for gender identity disorder and I was to have surgery. Through AISH, I was now getting over $800 a month. I could afford to eat and smoke.

One day I was out with Don and I started gasping for air and making strange sounds. He wanted to take me to the hospital emergency. I said, “No, just take me home and stay with me for a while”. He did. Fortunately, I had an appointment with Dr. Warneke the next day. He told me I was having panic attacks. He said they manifest in two ways, the gasping for air and convulsions. Finally I got an explanation for my convulsions. He explained that stress levels build up to a point where they become anxiety (and God knows I’ve had more than my share of stress in my life), and then anxiety levels build up to a critical point where they become panic attacks. He said the only treatment is a very powerful drug called Clonazapam. He prescribed the lowest dosage for me. I started with two pills a day and later four. Don took me home and hung around for a while. I took one tiny pill as soon as I got home and within five minutes I was totally stoned for the rest of the day. This was on June 9, 1998. The drug cured my convulsions and helped a lot with my breathing.

Failing Eyesight

Shortly after, Don took me with him on a trip to Vancouver. On the trip each time I took a pill I would get really stoned and fall asleep. Don didn’t like the reaction from the pills. In Vancouver, Don took me to an upscale hair salon and I got a beautiful hairstyle for $100. I enjoyed the trip although I saw very little of it. When we would go into restaurants, I could not read the menu, and at food courts I could not read what was on the wall. I could still see colors if they were close to eye level but if they were at any distance they were out of sight. Earlier, when I looked at traffic lights there were three of them, after there were five and the edges radiated out. If I looked at the moon there were five moons and I could never tell which was the real moon. When I watched TV, I had to sit a few inches from the screen and then it was like tunnel vision. I couldn’t recognize anyone’s face unless I was a few inches away. I couldn’t read a street sign unless it was at eye level, which it never was.

On July 27, `98, I became a member of the CNIB. Don bought me a folding white cane, which I should have had long before this. I had been walking into walls and windows and had a couple of bad falls at home. I could never see curbs but I could feel them with my cane. Walking on the sidewalks and parking lots was the worst because I had no depth perception, and the cane helped a lot here. I now could feel obstacles in my way that I otherwise would miss. Another benefit of the white cane was free transportation on the public transit system. People were now helpful to me. When they saw the white cane, they would open doors for me and would take my arm to cross the street. Unfortunately, the white cane is a visible sign of a disability. And there is a lot of discrimination against the disabled. Now no one would ever talk to me in public. I was rejected because of my white cane. In September, I started going to CNIB support meetings and even they would not talk to me.

On September 18, I sold my van for $200 just to get rid of it. I hadn’t driven it for two years and thought I would never drive again. On that same day, I got my name legally changed to Janis. Then I got all my other ID changed too but they all listed me as male. I had to wait for my surgery to get that changed. Since I had now reached the age of 60, I applied on October 8 for the Canada Pension. I was getting $115 a month but it was deducted off my AISH income. About this time my doctor quit and the owner of the clinic threw me out. She couldn’t accept someone like me. I asked Dr. Warneke if he could recommend a doctor for me. He referred me to Dr. Candler who specializes in gays, lesbians and transgenders. I saw him on October 23. He was the most understanding physician I had yet met.

Being Frank With June

In mid December, I went to a few free Christmas dinners. At one of them, I sat next to a lady named June about my age and we just started talking. She was very friendly. We exchanged phone numbers and she would often call me. When I visited June in a seniors’ home I, for some reason, told her I was a transgender. I rarely told anyone because of the potential consequences. She said, “Does this mean you have a penis?” I told her I did but she would not believe me. She even argued with me that there was no way because I was a woman. She demanded proof saying, “If you have a penis, pull it out and show me”. I did and she was shocked, and for some reason I got an erection. She told me how beautiful it was and said if she wasn’t celibate she would drag me into the bedroom and have wild sex with me. I told her I was only interested in men. By now I was passing entirely as a woman. I had been using the ladies washroom for a long time now and nobody ever gave me a second look.

Enter Esther

On December 18, I met Esther. She ran a group for seniors. She came to play a significant role in my life. She would visit me once a month. Her group was for women only and I would go on outings and lunches with them and no one ever suspected. I never told Esther but on about her third visit, I was talking about discrimination against gays, cross-dressers, and transgenders. She said she knew I was a transgender the first time she saw me. She said she was very intuitive but she fully accepted me.

On Christmas day, Ted died and his funeral was on December 28. This was the third person I had known for a long time who had died of cancer. I was invited to the funeral, not because they accepted me but because I knew Ted for thirty years. Don was also invited so he could drive me to the church. A lady I used to know from Ted’s Urantia meetings met us there and she grabbed my hand to lead me to a seat. She had made it clear to me earlier that she did not accept me and her husband was almost hostile. Ted was cremated. After the service, we mingled in the church lobby. I was wearing a really nice floral dress, a pretty hat and a nice fur coat. I was standing in front of Ted’s mother who I had seen several times before. She looked at me and said, “And who is this pretty lady?” I just told her I was the one who knew Ted for thirty years. I think she was shocked.

In January of 1999, Dr. Warneke gave a lecture on transgenders and gender identity disorders. There must have been twenty or thirty of us there. He suggested that the transgenders set up a meeting once a month. The first meeting was on January 10. There must have been about twenty people coming to most of these meetings. They seemed to be a fairly equal mixture of pre-operative and post-operative transgenders. I was never accepted there even with my own kind. I went to those meetings for about a year and during that time virtually nobody would acknowledge my existence.

Dying to Smoke

On Feb. 24, my doctor prescribed a drug called Zyban to help me quit smoking. I quit for a very short time but the drug had horrible side effects. I got so depressed that I decided to commit suicide. I had it all planned out. I was going to put on my prettiest dress, new panty hose, nice dress shoes and my fur coat. I would lay on the couch late in the evening, take a whole bottle of powerful pills and before morning I would be gone. Before I got dressed I seemed to have got a smack on the head, maybe from my guardian angel, which kind of brought me to my senses. I heard a voice saying “It’s too stupid to give up your life over some cigarettes. Go back to smoking right now”. I immediately lit up a cigarette and threw the Zyban in the garbage. Gradually my depression lifted.

On April 8 `99, I joined a group called Nicotine Anonymous, a twelve-step program to stop smoking. They only had about seven or eight members. I went there every Thursday night for a year. During that time, not one person there would acknowledge my existence. None of them knew anything about my gender so it wasn’t for that reason. I was in the habit of never telling anyone. One evening before I left I banged my fist on the table and yelled out, “Hey, am I fucking invisible? Can anybody see me standing here?” Nobody said a word, and the next few meetings were no different so I quit.

On May 20, I went to a dermatologist because all my hair was falling out. I used to have really thick, long, red hair, but now it was coming out in chunks. I was left with strings. The doctor prescribed a scalp treatment but it wasn’t covered by Blue Cross and it was far too expensive for me to buy. I ended up getting a buzz cut.

Looking Through a Greasy Glass

By now I was so blind I could only see foggy shapes and no detail at all. I couldn’t watch TV anymore and I was getting depressed. I talked to several eye surgeons and found out the procedure that was covered by Alberta Health Care. I didn’t like it. They would only cover a large $35 lens which required the eyes being stitched up after. I talked to ten people who had this surgery and virtually all of them had serious complications. I couldn’t go through that and yet, I couldn’t live with the blindness. I got very depressed and I thought of suicide. Then I heard of a high-tech lens that folded in half and sprang open when it was inserted. It only required a small incision and there was no stitching involved. The only problem was that it wasn’t covered by Alberta Health Care and it cost $500. There was no way I could afford that. But Don came up as my savior and agreed to pay for the lens.

On June 11, I had my first cataract surgery by Dr. Henning at the Royal Alex Hospital. It was a piece of cake. They injected me with some drug and although I was wide-awake, I felt no pain. In fact, I was a little stoned. When I got off the hospital bed I had a big patch over my eye so I didn’t know the results. I had to go in the next morning to have the patch removed. When he took the patch off I was shocked. I could see!!! It was a miracle. I could read the clock on the wall. I could see Don’s goatee. I grabbed a magazine and I could read it, even with only one eye. I was in ecstasy. As Don drove me home I was gawking at everything, reading signs on buildings out loud and reading license plates. I think I drove Don nuts on the way home because I was so excited. On July 23, I had my second eye surgery and it too was a piece of cake. When I got my patch off the next day, I could see in stereo and I could read a book without glasses. I could see distance and close up. I had a new life, and no more white cane. Now people started talking to me again. Don took me to a lot of festivals that summer and Esther took me to a barbecue at Peaceful Valley north of Sylvan Lake. This became a twice-a-year thing.

Toward Montreal and Becoming a Woman

I had passed all the hurdles to be accepted for sex reassignment surgery in Montreal. All I needed now was a letter from two psychiatrists to be sent to Montreal and to Alberta Health Care. On October 5, I saw the second psychiatrist and within a week both letters were sent off to both places. I was now officially on the list, but I was told there were thirteen people ahead of me. This was very discouraging because I was so desperate to get the surgery and now I would have to wait a long time. Now that I was on the list, I started buying my home care supplies. I needed a lot of stuff and it cost me about $300. The first things I ordered were the dilation stents (to keep my newly-created vagina open); they came from Saskatoon and cost about $150.

On December 15, I had an afternoon Christmas tea at Esther’s with about twenty other women. I never felt that those women ever accepted me.

On December 21, I went to the voice clinic at Glenrose Hospital because I thought my voice wasn’t feminine enough. First a doctor hooked me up to a machine that measures range, pitch, resonance and so on. I had to make different sounds. The machine said I was completely within all the characteristics of a female voice. I talked to a speech therapist and some other lady that was there. They said there was nothing they could do for me because I was already there. They said my voice was female and all my body language and gesturing was completely female. That made me feel good.

Chapter Seven - The Tragic End

2000: A Year of Triumph and Tragedy

In February, I met a strong, powerful lady, Claudette Osterreicher. She worked in an upscale women’s fashion store in Northwood Mall where I used to go a lot to browse around. She was very friendly and soon we were talking a lot on the phone and she was inviting me over to dinner. She gave me a lot of fashion tips. She was only the second person now to suspect I was a transgender. She asked me and I said yes. She had no problem with that at all. I really admired her as a person. She used to visit me a lot too. On March 19, she came over for supper. After our meal, I showed her my artwork. I showed her some disturbing pictures that I never should have shown anyone. They were from my subconscious mind. After that her whole attitude changed toward me. She would not come to my place again and she would never invite me to her place except a couple of times on special occasions. I still talked to her on the phone for a while and saw her occasionally in the store until she quit. Soon she would reject me.

On April 7, Don was very nice to me on my birthday. He bought me a lot of wonderful gifts. Don was always very generous. He had given me some beautiful and expensive furniture, he would buy me things at garage sales, he was always taking me out to lunch, and so on.

Funding for Montreal

I was really starting to get depressed because Alberta Health Care was screwing me around on my Montreal surgery. They started pushing back my funding date. The surgery would cost about $12,000 and I was told that they only had so much funding. At one point they stopped funding altogether claiming that Montreal had raised its prices. When I heard this, I was devastated. I became suicidal. Fortunately the funding was reinstated and again I had hope. I tried joining more gay and transgender groups but nobody would accept me.

Esther managed to set me up with a psychologist, Dr. Kingsley Payne at Grant MacEwan College. I didn’t have to pay anything. He was just what I needed then. I saw him for a long time and he really helped me a lot. June tried to set me up with some men but they were mostly all psychotic or homeless drunks.

On June 28, I met a lady who I had seen often before on the bus going to the mall. Her name was Carole and she lived within walking distance from me. We exchanged phone numbers and she called me a lot and visited quite often. I often went to her place. She was very friendly and seemed to be understanding. I thought I would put her to the test. I asked her what she thought of gays and lesbians. She seemed perfectly comfortable with that. She even admitted to a lesbian encounter in England when she was a teenager. I told her I knew someone who had a sex change and she ran into a lot of prejudice. She thought that was awful because they are people like everyone else. They should be treated the same. I dared to tell her that I was going for a sex change and I was biologically a male. Well, she slammed the door in my face and never spoke to me again. You just can’t trust anyone.

By now I was developing hernias on my left side. I had two of them and I thought I should get them looked after before I went to Montreal. I saw Dr. Ciona at the Grey Nuns Hospital on July 6 to be examined and get an appointment set up for surgery. I had my surgery on July 24. By now all the muscles were gone on the left side and they had to sew them all onto a plastic screen. It was a piece of cake. I never took any painkillers and it healed up very quickly. I could have gone home the same day but I would have had to have somebody stay the night with me. Don would not do that so I had to stay the night in the hospital. Don who knew Claudette, talked her into coming to visit me in the hospital. He picked her up and she brought me a huge vase of flowers.

In August, I met Charles at a Liatris Society plant exchange. The Liatris Society was a group of gays and lesbians who shared an interest in gardening. Don had already met him through a personals ad on the Internet. Charles showed an interest in The Biocratic Manifesto. Don’s daughter had already typed the first three chapters into a computer disk. Charles eventually was willing to type the other four handwritten chapters into a computer disk and I got a printed copy of the entire Manifesto. This major work would now not be lost if anything should happen to my notebooks.

On September 12, Don drove me to Hawrelak Park where I burned those disturbing pictures that I had drawn. I felt that nobody should ever see them again.

I was getting very depressed again and even suicidal because the people at Alberta Health Care were not doing anything about the funding for my surgery. They kept pushing me back. I spoke to the liberal health critic. I visited Bill Bonner, my MLA. I complained to Dr. Warneke saying I’m already 64 years old and I can’t wait. I really had to fight tooth and nail to get the funding for Montreal. But I had a lot of help. Some politicians got involved along with a few doctors and pressured Alberta Health Care for my funding. Finally, on October 26, Alberta Health Care called and told me I was approved for funding for my surgery. For a moment I was elated. Now I had to wait until Montreal received the letter from them. Finally, on November 14, I got a call from Montreal that they had received my information. Now I had to get in line for surgery. There was an eighth-month waiting list. I was devastated again. Anyway they set a surgery date for June 18 of the next year. On November 20, I got a letter from Dr. Yvon Menard in Montreal telling me what I needed to bring and what I need to do (and not do) to prepare for surgery.

I managed to get to a few free Christmas dinners in December. Don brought me some presents, gave me fifty dollars, and took me to dinner at Swiss Chalet. I hadn’t been feeling good for a long time now. Don had bought me a host of self-help books but I couldn’t relate to them. Somehow they never seemed to apply to me. My circumstances were too rare. I actually came to believe that God put me on this earth to live a life of rejection from birth until death.

On January 18, I actually finished writing The Biocratic Manifesto. I had thought it was finished years ago but I always felt there was something missing. What was missing was the spiritual aspect of it all. I had five chapters completed and I always knew there were supposed to be seven. Chapter 6 describes the entire process of spirituality and Chapter 7 describes what God is and what the afterlife is like.

On March 2001, I joined a church group nearby that started a workshop for loss and grief. It ran every Tuesday afternoon for six weeks. There was one lady there named Susan who exchanged phone numbers with me, and she kept in touch occasionally. But after I met her she never showed up at any more meetings. None of the other women there would acknowledge my existence.

Don bought me a brand new single bed for my birthday to put in my spare bedroom to use for recovery after my surgery. He even bought new pillows, sheets and pillowcases. On my birthday, Don took me for a steak dinner. On April 12, I got my flight booked to Montreal. On the 16th I received my flight itinerary. That month I got my blood tests, X-rays, an ECG in preparation.

I was now 65 and applied for the old age pension. I got my first check at the end of May. Now I had an income greater than before. I talked to the home care department of Alberta Health Care to set up assistance for me as soon as I got home from Montreal.

On Becoming a Female

On June 13, Charles gave me a bon voyage party at his place. Don took me over and there was a friend of Charles, a lesbian lady, and another transgender that I had met a few times before. On the 14th, I shaved and got mostly packed. Don took me out for a wonderful dinner and bought me a tiny radio. He stayed overnight at my place because my flight was very early the next day. On June 15, I flew to Montreal. Don drove me to the airport. I had to go by way of Calgary because they had just cut direct flights to Montreal.

When I got to the Montreal airport there was a man holding up a sign with Janis written on it. I knew this was my driver to pick me up. He took me to the residence which was such a beautiful place. It was like a lodge for the rich. I found out that 97% of the patients there were Americans. It was a lot cheaper because of the exchange rate on the dollar. There were about eight pre-operative and post-operative patients there and none of them would believe I was a patient. They thought I was somebody’s mother. They were shocked when I told them. The next morning I had an interview with Dr. Menard. He was doing my surgery. He said I had two strikes against me, my age (65) and my smoking. I knew these were absolutely not factors and they weren’t.

On Sunday, I had a good breakfast of bacon and eggs and a chicken dinner. In the afternoon another TG from Georgia named Jamie and I were waiting for a taxi to take us to the hospital. I had developed such a strong bonding with the other patients that they hugged me and kissed me before I got into the cab. Jamie and I arrived at the hospital and the intake nurse didn’t believe I was a patient. She thought I was Jamie’s mother. She was shocked when I said I was here for the same thing. I had no qualms at all about my surgery. I knew I would go unconscious and wake up as a real woman. The next day, Monday, June 18, 2001, I had my surgery. Jamie had hers in the morning and mine was in the afternoon.

Triumph – A Woman At Last

I woke up in my recovery room next to Jamie. I was tremendously swollen and bleeding. They had created a vagina and put a plug into the opening to keep it open. It was a condom packed with cotton and stitched with three wire stitches. My testes were removed and my penis was reshaped into a clitoris and repositioned. I had a perfect labia minor and labia major. After almost a lifetime of feeling that I was a woman, I finally was one physically as well as mentally.

My triumph was marred by the almost unbearable pain of recovery from the surgery. I reported that I was in a lot of pain and I think the nurses gave me two or three shots of morphine. The bleeding got worse and through the night I began hemorrhaging. There had been a huge clump of dressing wired into my labia minor and this was where I was bleeding. The next day, I had to go back into surgery to have the bleeding stopped.

On Wednesday, the nurse said I had to start walking. I told her to take me to the back door because I was dying for a cigarette. I lit one up but I couldn’t smoke it. It tasted awful. I actually walked by myself three more times that day to try to smoke but with no success. I talked to Jamie and she seemed to be doing fine. I wasn’t; there was an enormous amount of bruising and I was swollen as big as a pumpkin. I was afraid the stitching from my hernia surgeries were going to tear. Thursday morning I shaved for the first time since Monday and had three bowel movements, the first since surgery. When the nurse was changing my dressing she handed me a mirror and I got my first look at the miracle surgery. It was pretty gross actually and the skin was all black. I had a nice steak dinner and talked to other patients.

On Friday, Dr. Menard removed the wad of dressing that had been wired to me. I then had half a shower and was brought back to the residence. Don called me there and I think he called me every day I was in the residence. Saturday, I was now in pain and took painkillers for the first time. The pain was in my vagina and I didn’t know why at the time. The plug wasn’t due to come out until Monday morning. On Sunday, I was in excruciating pain. I was taking painkillers every four hours. That night I was crying my eyes out. Some people were praying over me. A nurse put some polysporin where the stitches were at the vaginal opening. It seemed to help a bit. On Monday morning Jamie came to comfort me. Finally Dr. Menard came and took the plug out. What a relief!

That same day I was supposed to start dilating with the stents. One nurse who was just an angel showed me how to use them. She inserted the smallest one for me and I was supposed to dilate five times a day. I found it painful to dilate and to get it in to the full depth. The nurses agreed to let me dilate just three times a day because of my age. I was beginning to wonder if it was worth the torture of dilating every day for a few months but then I decided it was worth it to have a vagina. Sometimes I would skip the dilations and lie to the nurses that I did do them. On Wednesday the 27th I still had a catheter in me to pee. Since I was going home the next day, Dr. Menard had to remove the catheter. The nurses told me I had to drink tons of water because I had to pee on my own now. If I couldn’t they would reinsert a catheter and I would have to have it removed in Edmonton. Well with that prospect in mind, I gulped down a lot of water and finally I could pee on my own.

Home and Healing

On Thursday June 28, I flew back to Edmonton. I had to arrange ahead of time to have a wheelchair waiting for me at the airport. It was a late flight leaving Montreal around five in the afternoon, but I would gain two hours on the way. At the residence we were all given invalid rings to sit on. It was okay sitting in the wheelchair at the airport, but when I got on the plane it was so uncomfortable I couldn’t use it. The plane taxied down the tarmac waiting to take off but it took so long I had a really bad panic attack. I thought I would miss my connection in Calgary and Don would be waiting for me at the Edmonton International Airport. Some passengers were concerned about me because I was gasping for air and couldn’t sit still. I told them I would be all right when we got up in the air. I just barely made the connection. I told the flight attendant to radio ahead to Calgary to hold the plane. They did.

Don met me at the airport and drove me home. He stayed the night with me. He told me he had never seen a happier expression on my face. While I was at the residence was definitely the happiest time in my life. I managed to climb the stairs and sleep in my own bed. In the morning, Don helped me unpack and he did some shopping for me. I called home care first thing in the morning. They sent two nurses over to evaluate me and change my dressing and do a saline cleaning. I had a lot of discharge for some time. The first week of July, I was in so much pain I was put on narcotics and I was groggy every day. Don got a few e-mails for me from Jamie in Georgia. A bunch of the patients said they would keep in touch with me but they didn’t. I was managing some dilations but they were too painful. By July 5th I could no longer use the stents. I started using candles in a condom. On July 9th I received my affidavit from Dr. Menard. Now I could get all my ID to list me as female. The doctors were prescribing all kinds of stuff including anesthetic creams. Nothing worked very well. By the 15th, I had difficulty standing. I couldn’t stand at the sink to shave. I shaved in a bowl sitting at the table but it got too painful to sit. The next day Don picked up a wheelchair for me from rehabilitation services. Don was very helpful. He cleaned my bathtub because I had to have a bath every day which I could manage, and he cut my toenails.

Tragedy - Losing My Vagina

On the 17th I saw a gynecologist and he ordered me to stop dilating because I now had open wounds on the inside of my labia major and my vaginal opening. He sent me to the emergency unit of the University Hospital to see a plastic surgeon. I spent seven agonizing hours there, four in the waiting room before I got a bed. I never did see the plastic surgeon. Just as I was ready to leave, a resident surgeon and two nurses came in and told me my labia major was coming apart. Now I was getting home care and a worker started coming over to wash my hair. Dr. Candler told me I had to walk to keep up my strength. Don took me outside but I couldn’t walk very far.

By July 20, the nurse taught me how to change my own dressing. They weren’t coming by as often. The nurse managed to get me a bath seat with the front cut out so I could sit on it. I phoned Jamie in Georgia and told her what was happening and she sounded sad. She was doing fine and had no problems at all. On July 24, I saw Dr. Ahmed and I was now having pain in my labia minor. He examined me and reported that now my labia minor was inflamed. He said there was a good chance I would loose my vagina. I certainly didn’t like to hear that. Don had picked up a commode at a garage sale for me. I put it behind the couch and used it a lot because it was too much effort to go upstairs to the bathroom. By the second week of August I could not insert my little finger into my vagina. Now I was using a very thin pencil (about less than a quarter of an inch in diameter) with lots of lubricant but that didn’t work for very long. I had been depressed for a long time now with the idea of losing my vagina but now it was getting worse. August 30 was the worst day of my life so far. I talked to Dr. Menard in Montreal. He said my vagina was gone and it was useless to try any more dilations. He said he could open it up again in a year’s time but I knew that would never happen.

As a Gender-less Person

Now I felt like a freak. I was a woman without a vagina and I couldn’t accept that. I was constantly depressed. I had waited sixty-five years for this miracle transformation into the woman I had always known myself to be and now it was being taken away from me. I felt everyone rejecting me, except Don. I saw people on TV and I thought they were real men and women but I was not. I started gradually getting rid of all my women’s clothes because I considered myself no longer a woman. I bought all new unisex clothes. I did get them in the women’s section but they were not feminine. Ironically, I soon received all my new identification cards listing me as female. By the end of September, I was still in a lot of pain and taking strong painkillers. I manage to get out almost every day to walk from ten to fifteen minutes. I still had discharge and needed to do saline cleaning.

In October, Don seemed to be getting a little tired of driving me around everywhere. Esther put me in touch with a group called Seniors Driving Center. They had just opened and they had volunteers to drive me places. It cost $5 for a two-hour ride. I started using them but they were not always efficient.

The New Janis

I was seeing Dr. Kingsley Payne, my psychologist, for post-traumatic stress disorder from loosing my vagina. It was something I could not accept. Then I developed dissociative identity disorder. This is similar to multiple personalities, but my subconscious mind created one new personality that was very different from Janis. She (I) still used the name Janis, but now I considered myself to be a lesbian. I had absolutely no sexual interest in men. The new Janis never had the surgery and this was intended to help me cope with my loss. It only helped a bit and eventually turned into another tragedy. I also started drinking, mostly rye whiskey and strong beer.

I was now getting very depressed. Don was still driving me places but not everywhere. I was feeling now that all men were pigs and I didn’t want a pig in my life. But I was still very dependent on Don. I wanted to be intimate with a woman badly but I thought that no woman would want me in my present physical (genital) condition. Some days I would get really drunk. Then I did a lot of crying and I started to think about suicide. To add to my misery, I was now being tormented by a bunch of preteen girls in my townhouse complex. They were calling me, “old man, hey grampaw”, and things like that. I talked to several doctors who have knowledge about this type of surgery and none of them had ever heard of a case going wrong. I was getting increased swelling in my labia minor and major and increased pain. I eventually got to the point where I looked forward every day to when I could go to sleep because then I escaped the endless hours of the day that were so hard to get through. The TV was now my time killer but it didn’t always work. Now I no longer felt human because I had no gender.

I noticed that I was now exceptionally turned on by women much more so than I was ever turned on by anyone before. I felt that my new destination was death but I also felt that I could stretch my desperate journey up to three years. In early November, I met a woman named Heather. She was a social worker at the General Hospital. She seemed so understanding and such a wonderful person. But that didn’t last very long. She soon rejected me and I never heard from her again. I notice that my labia minor was starting to close up from the top down. It was as if it were knitting itself together. I got basic cable so that my TV could maybe be a better time killer. The only real way to kill time seemed to be to sleep or to die. I began noticing increased swelling and the swelling was spreading. Don got a bunch of information off the internet on healing but nothing applied to me. I called a lesbian group for women over 45, and they wouldn’t accept me. After all, who wants a senior citizen in a wheelchair?

On December 4 `01, Don took me to Dr. Searles’ wound clinic. He said I was severely inflamed and prescribed a steroid cream to apply twice a day. It did nothing. Now I started getting a cleaning lady to come in twice a month; it was a service that is provided free by the Victorian Order of Nurses. I was also getting my sidewalk shoveled in winter and my lawn cut in summer by people doing community services work instead of serving a jail term. I got a disabled placard so I can put it on Don’s rearview mirror so he could park in handicapped spots when he drove me to places. I was supposed to go to a huge Christmas party at the Shaw Conference Center on December 24 put on by a church. They refused to take me because I had a wheelchair. On Christmas Day, Don took me to a dinner at the Coast Terrace Inn because he had already booked it for him and his daughter but his daughter couldn’t make it.

Another Year of Desperation

I started the year 2002 in a lot more pain and drinking more every day. I almost welcomed the physical pain because it seemed to dull the emotional pain which was far worse. It was interesting to me to discover that I had resisted writing my autobiography up to this year because the life review it would demand seemed too emotionally painful. However, my physical pain was worse than any emotional pain from reliving my past through reading my diaries. The pain was so intense at times that I had the urge to cut my arms and legs with an exacto knife. Somehow I managed to refrain from doing that. I also had the urge to pull out all my hair. I felt a lot of anger and was often suicidal again. I estimated that at this point I had about two years left to live.

On January 15, Dr. Searles did a biopsy inside my labia minor because nothing was working to get rid of the inflammation. The next day I got a brand new wheelchair. It was much lighter than the old one and easier for Don to fold up and put in his van. Don had bought a new computer and he loaned me his old one. I set it up in the basement. On January 30, Don set up the computer for me and he showed me a lot about it. I liked playing solitaire on it. Then I started writing short stories on it.

My Sexual Addiction

Watching TV was really starting to bother me. I was getting so obsessed with women. I saw sexy women in almost every program and commercial. These images were a constant reminder that I wanted to be intimate with a woman so badly but I couldn’t have them. It was driving me crazy. All my adult life I had been seriously addicted to sex and now I believed that I could never again have any sexual intimacy with anyone. I am addicted to cigarettes, but at least I can get all the cigarettes I want. I think I have been with between 300 and 400 men in my life and at least a dozen women. I know why I’m addicted. It’s because I’ve always felt rejected and what everyone needs more than anything else is acceptance. This has put a hole in my soul that can’t be filled because I can’t get acceptance. So, I have always tried to fill that hole with cigarettes and sex. But it doesn’t work. That realization causes me extreme emotional pain and loneliness. I am now very jealous of women just because they are women and I’m not.

Cancer or No Cancer?

Tuesday February 12 was what I call Black Tuesday. I saw Dr. Searles and I got the results of the biopsy. This turned out to be my death sentence. The biopsy showed that I had an enormous growth of blood vessels in my entire genital area, and a rapid proliferation of metaplastic cells. All these cells are pre-cancerous. He said it was only a matter of time until the cancer set in. He also said it was the type of cancer that is not treatable and that spreads very fast. Once it sets in, he said I would have three months to live. He said, in his opinion, the only thing that could save my life was laser surgery. He said I had to get that as soon as possible. Dr. Searles had known that I healed very rapidly but since my surgery, my healing ability speeded up so much that now it was completely out of control. I didn’t say anything to Don while he was driving me home but I said I wanted to talk to him when I got home.

When we got home, I told Don the results. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so serious. He listened intently and seemed to be concerned. The very next day Dr. Searles called me to tell me that he had set up an appointment for me to see Dr. Groot on Friday. He was considered to be the best laser surgeon in the city. Don came and stayed over Thursday night because I had to be up at 6:30 for my appointment with Dr. Groot. The doctor did a test site on one half of the inside of my labia minor. He said the laser should destroy all the overgrowth of blood vessels and hopefully the pre-cancerous cells. His work was not covered by Alberta Health Care but he said he would put it through as cancer treatment. When I got home I was bleeding and I bled for a few days. The treatment caused more swelling and I could hardly stand up or walk for the next few days. I had to go back on painkillers for a while. On February 20, I went back to Dr. Groot for the results. He examined me and told me that the laser surgery had accomplished absolutely nothing. He wouldn’t do any more. Now what was I going to do?

Now I know what happened since Montreal. When I had my surgery, my body considered my vagina as a wound and immediately started to heal it up. That is why I had such excruciating pain where the plug was. My healing speeded up so fast that created a growth of tissue to close my vagina. Soon it was almost completely closed. Then it speeded up even more to heal the rest of my “wounds”.

How To End It All?

On March 2, I was really depressed and I got really drunk. I was down in the basement thinking about suicide. I thought I could hang myself. I had lots of rope down there and the ceiling was high enough. I made up my mind that I was going to do it. I noticed that I still had some drink in my glass and I thought I should finish that first and I should have one last cigarette before I went. While I was smoking my last cigarette, I knew that Don would be calling because he called at least once a day. I also felt that if I didn’t answer for a while he would suspect something was wrong and come over. He has a key to my place and he would find me hanging in the basement. I thought that would be too hard on him and felt I couldn’t do that to him. So, I got through that day.

I had to put up with that gang of girls tormenting me and it got so bad I had to call the police. I was crying every day now. I was trying to find the perfect method of committing suicide but hadn’t decided on one yet. Whatever I did, I wanted it to be guaranteed. I also began thinking that I might have to check myself into the mental hospital.

Don knew how suicidal I was feeling and so he arranged a farewell party for me for March 7. He called it a Celebration of Life party but I thought of it as my wake. He contacted quite a few people, mostly people I had met before. I think he, and everyone else, believed that I was going to die soon and he wanted me to have a good time before I did. About seven people came to my place. Claudette was the first to arrive and I never expected to see her again. She brought a beautiful vase of flowers and a big ice cream cake with my name on it in icing. Some of Don’s friends who I had met before came and then Jill and her girlfriend. I had met Jill earlier when she bought Don’s cabin at Sandy Beach. Then Charles arrived and he brought me a printout of The Biocratic Manifesto.

There was a lot of high energy there that evening. I really enjoyed it. I had a really good day for once. I was especially attracted to Jill but she already had a girlfriend. That party gave me a renewed interest in living and writing once more.

I wrote several companion booklets to The Biocratic Manifesto. They were intended to be easily read articles to spark interest in reading the full document. Charles took disc copies of my computer files and ran off print copies but I don’t know if anyone will ever read them. I had more harassment from kids on March 24 and the police came over. They talked to people in the neighborhood and I was put on the list of the Special Victims Unit. On March 27, I got a $500 cushion at the rehabilitation center for sitting in my wheelchair or anywhere else. It was the most perfect thing I found to sit on because there are packets of gel that can be placed wherever you want extra cushioning.

By now all the doctors had given up on me. None of them had ever heard of my super-healing condition before. My condition of over-healing that would kill me seems to be completely unheard of in medical science. It was so rare that it might only have happened to me. I should be making medical news but they have all rejected me. Even my body has rejected me.

On March 31, Don had a heart attack and ended up in the hospital. Raj, a friend of Don’s who I had met a few times before, called me a few times to update me on Don’s condition. He had seen him in the hospital. I was still drinking in response to my depression. I had the urge to chop off my little finger but the urge passed. Don’s daughter, Pat called me to say that Don was doing better. Don finally called me from hospital. He seemed to be in good spirits.

April 7 was my birthday and all I got was a call from Don wishing me happy birthday. It was a really lousy day. Don went home from the hospital on April 9. My swelling was increasing and so was the pain. The swelling was spreading too. Don was calling me almost every day again. Esther was having lunches every month usually with guest speakers and Susan (from the church) would drive me there. In spite of these diversions, I felt I had no reason to live anymore and I really wanted to die. I wanted to escape the hell that I found myself in. I thought a lot about suicide now.

I talked to a councilor at the Hope Foundation. They supposedly help people who are suicidal because they have no hope. She said she had thirty years of experience but she certainly didn’t give me any hope. I had talked to every seniors group in the city and they all rejected me. Esther was the only one who did accept me. I felt like an alien now because there was no woman left inside me or outside. I felt that I was no longer a human. I was able to take my wheelchair on the bus for short rides, such as to Northtown Mall or Londonderry Mall. It was a struggle to wheel myself from where all the busses stopped to get into either mall. The one thing that I could not do by myself was grocery shopping. I could not wheel myself in the wheelchair and push a shopping cart. Charles was the only one that seemed to be willing to help me in this department as long as he was available.

Difference as Devil

I think it really needs to be mentioned here that there is an unnatural and outrageous discrimination in our society against anyone who is different. It is people’s differences that make them unique in a way that everyone can learn from them. Still today there is widespread discrimination against gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders. Everyone should have equal rights but the governments and churches will not allow that. Being homosexual is not a disease. It is a condition of birth that cannot be helped. It is not a choice. It is a fact. What society needs is far more education toward equality. Equality should be part of the curriculum of elementary schools. More gays and lesbians should be running for public office. Young gays and lesbians need role models before they can have the assurance of acceptance that will enable them to contribute wholeheartedly to society. As we embrace more diversity and reduce or eliminate discrimination, then all people who could be considered ‘different’ will be freer to work together. Gradually more and more ‘different’ people are making an influence in the church and society by speaking out.

My Plans

I started getting physiotherapy in May but they recommended me for group therapy downtown. I called them but they wouldn’t accept me. How would I get there anyway? I went to the physiotherapy clinic in Northtown Mall by bus, but it was a big effort to wheel myself to the clinic from the bus stop. I wasn’t getting much help there anyway.

I came up with two plans for suicide - plan A and plan B. Plan B was guaranteed but it was not very pleasant. Plan A was pleasant and might be guaranteed but it was not foolproof. On May 19, I thought I’d do a test run on plan A. I took a little of something and passed out for an hour. I woke up feeling strange and sick. At least, now I knew how much to take to do the job. I felt like a monster and how was a monster supposed to live with humans. When I saw people on TV or in public, I couldn’t relate to them. They were a different species. They were humans. I saw an enormous difference between the male and the female of that human species, and I knew that I was not one of them. The females looked like a different species from the males. When I looked at myself naked in a full-length mirror, I didn’t see a person with a gender or even a human being. To my eyes I didn’t see a man or a woman. My breasts were so tiny that I didn’t notice them and my labia major looked more like small testes. Every morning I had to shave my face otherwise I would have a full beard. I think what I miss more than anything else (and have for more than ten years) is affection. I have always been a very affectionate person and I crave it. I have heard it said that it is the one thing in society that is needed more than anything else. The closest I came to this now was getting hugs, and I tried to get hugs from everyone that saw me. When I slept at night, I cuddled a teddy bear. I spent most of my days snuggling a teddy bear on my couch.

Michelle had been calling me on occasion but she could not accept me. She usually talked about how everything bad in her life was all my fault. In May she was showing definite signs of schizophrenia. I guess that was to be expected. Don had been driving me to appointments and events for a while and on May 23, he dropped over for a few minutes because he was in the area. I tried to put an ad in the personals column of the Edmonton Journal under women seeking women. They refused to accept my ad. Toward the end of May, Don started taking me to garage sales and out to lunch but I could not take my wheelchair as he couldn’t lift it. The Seniors Driving Center decided they would have nothing more to do with me. There were no more rides from them. Now there were only two people I might be able to count on for shopping -- Charles and Susan. I was able to get a few joints on occasion and was getting on some really good highs.

Every Friday, I had to make a long wheelchair trip to get the Edmonton Journal. This was only for the TV guide to keep track of how the TV would torture me through the week. Don used to get the paper for me but when he no longer felt he could do that I tried wheeling myself to the nearest paper dispenser box. That worked for a while with difficulty but then they removed that box so there was no paper box within wheeling distance to me. This was becoming an ordeal.

June 18 was the unhappy anniversary of my surgery. I had gone through a year of suffering by now. I developed the urge to drink my own blood but that passed. I had to take my garbage out to the bin in my wheelchair because I couldn’t carry it. I tried to get out every day and roll down the sidewalk in my wheelchair for exercise.

On July 5, Don called and said he could not call me every day because my calls were too stressful for his heart. He gave me the impression that he would have nothing to do with me anymore. He said he would never speak to me or see me again until we met in heaven. I guess this was to be expected. It seemed like everybody rejected me eventually. I was used to his phone calls every day and now my phone rarely rang. Now I was more lonely than ever. I was still drinking almost every day.

On July 11, I was more suicidal than ever and called the crisis line. I talked to Dr. Warneke and he wanted to put me into the hospital. I asked for some antidepressant drugs to try that first and he agreed. I talked to Susan and she came right over and I got the prescription filled. I was drunk by now. Later I talked to Charles. Now that I was on the antidepressant drugs I just wanted to sleep all the time. On July 17, I got a written and a spoken apology from the kids who were tormenting me. I had also started to be on friendly terms with the woman and her young daughter next door. But it looked like Esther was now abandoning me too.

Lady(?) in Waiting

As I write this, I am just waiting for the cancer to set in and then I’ll be gone. I’ve been given a death sentence but not an execution date. I have only one dying wish, that I have an intimate encounter with a woman before I go. I probably have less of a chance than a snowball in hell of that ever happening, but I am still perfectly capable of satisfying any woman. I talked to Dr. Candler and he said he knows nothing about this, but he said women that are pre-cancerous in the cervix may take years before they develop cervical cancer. Now I just have to wait. I have no idea when it will be, but I don’t expect to live through the winter. Yet who knows when I will reach ...

the End

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