Windsor University Creative Writing Class Assignment about my messy office

  

MY CHEAP ATTIC OFFICE ROOM FRIGHTENS LOTS OF PEOPLE

 

By Stephen Weir OMG. No, Double OMG. If the city inspectors sees this, I’ll be tossed into a snowbank, while they weld my alley door shut for the safety of the city.

What am I doing here? Stephen, the landlord had a list (72 pt bold) of the renting features of this attic bedroom cum office. “Number One! ” it yelled at me. “It is a Gawd Damn Cheap. Number Two No Rats … not on the third floor at least). Number Three. No toilet .  You use the landlord’s  downstairs …. and he promises to make sure it is kept clean … most of the time. Number Four. It is the cheapest rent you will get at Young and Egg.”

Young and Egg?  What do I know? I thought I’d just moved into a third-floor office walkup at Yonge Street and Eglinton Ave.

“Oh, what a unique space. Love It.” Truth was I didn’t bring a bed to my new city digs, and the space was too narrow anyway. 

And, as I remembered, it was really cheap!  

Landlord Stephen  
(LLS) lay down a slab of form core between a wall of books and the stairwell.

If I was a spiritualist, I might talk to the ghosts that crowded the many dingy spider webbed dust corners. LLS said they were the ghosts of the Group of Seven – the century old house was once owned by the man who framed their masterpieces. He said, picking-up a dusty one of their70 -year old empties, from an airduct under the stairs. “The ten artists used to drink up here as he framed their work!”.

Ten painters in the Group of Seven?  Who Knew! The things you find out when you move to the Big Smoke.

There are so many books I am worried about the weight on the wooden floor.  Landlord Stephen annually donates books from the major Canadian book prizes to a First Nation’s library in Curve Lake. He has piled 2 -years worth of Covid delayed books stacked to the ceiling waiting for that drive up north.  LLS thinks he is altruistic. I know he is a hoarder.

Artifacts he recovered underwater are everywhere. He encourages me to keep business cards, glasses and pens in his empty Spam can collection …  he hangs a one-string banjo made from Spam cans on the wall. 

Beside there is my pillow made of a pile of soft covered books.

The walls are covered with curled/fadidig B&W photos from LLS’ extensive and valueless newspaper PR photo files – Mulroney, Springsteen, Khrushchev, and pictures of an Ottawa Roughriders football practice in Peterborough. Behind my bed roll there is a church pew he claims to have rescued from a Calabogie church in 1969 – it has over 200 Diver magazines stacked on the bench.

The walls are covered in cork. Starring at me is a picture of LLS taking a picture of a skimpily dressed Mas model on the catwalk of a midnight Soca costume launch fashion show. 

Notes about doctor’s appointments that he has missed are tacked up there too. Cameras. Computers. An empty Mickey Dee BTS container hangs tight. No one, not even the Fed Ex guy will come up here. Neither will my agent,  fellow authors or my friend who delivers from Jollibee (he calls and tells me where he has hid the chicken order on the front lawn … usually by the dog friendly fire hydrant. 

I am told it don’t smell so good up here. Sniff Sniff I believe ‘em. But hey! It is cheap.