The Berkeley

It was April 1987 when I moved from my one bedroom apartment at Salsbury and East Pender, where I had been living for six months after caring for my grandmother in Los Angeles (and before that, three years in Victoria, BC, where I completed a Bachelor of Arts in April 1986), to a bachelor suite in The Berkeley, at the corner of Bute and Nelson in Vancouver's West End.

The rents were the same in both places ($400 a month), so too was the square footage (500 sq. ft.). Surrendering a living room and a bedroom seemed a shame; but the bachelor suite had huge south-facing windows, which meant tons of sunshine, and I was but a couple of blocks from Robson Street, where our band Hard Rock Miners had begun busking and, as it happened, were making enough to supplement what was for most of us an eight-hour work week.

When I read the notice for a suite in The Berkeley I phoned the landlady and arranged a visit. The following day I arrived in my best clothes, where I was met by a chubby older woman who took me up the wide marshmallowy stairs to the third floor, opened a door two apartments to the right and, in a more-world-weary-than-gruff voice, said, "Here it is -- you can't go in because the floors are still drying." And floors they were! Yellow sun-lit oak with what looked like three coats of Verathane.  I told her I'd take it and she sighed, "We'll see if your references check out. You'll know within a couple of days."

After viewing the apartment I walked over to Caroline Court to share the news with my fellow Miners, most of whom were living there. While walking I replayed the experience: pressing the landlady's buzzer, noting the wide hallways (the building was built by the Lightheart Brothers in 1913), how well-kept everything was, arriving at the landlady's tiny ground floor office where she sat slumped on a swivel stool; but then, as we turned right on the third floor, the two apartments we walked past, both doors open, and inside the first a frighteningly skinny old-looking younger man sitting before a walker, and inside the second, a similar looking man in pyjamas and dressing gown being helped through a jungle of rubber trees to the door, one of the two men on either side of him whispering, as if for the umpteenth time, "She's waiting out front in the car."

The men living in these apartments, I would learn, were end-stage AIDS. Indeed, over half the people living in the Berkeley were HIV/AIDS, many of whom would pass away within the six months I lived there. Why only six months? Not because I didn't like living there -- I loved living there more than any place I have ever lived -- but because I too had come down with an illness and, at my mother's insistence, moved home with her. I went to give notice and as usual saw the landlady through the open door of her office at the end of the hall, working at her desk. She seemed surprised I was leaving. "Is it too much?" she asked, and I told her no, I could afford it. "Not the rent," she said, "the ambulances. I keep telling them to turn off their goddamn lights!"