Steve is coming unstuck—obsessing less. He is lighter. I like to think it has to do with how each drawing brings a kind of completion. Completion inspires change, which, according to How You Can Help: A Toolkit for Families,66 comes in five stages: pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance.
Doing art has brought a lot of positive change into his life. Every week, we complete three sketches. We complete a shop and a visit—a special sibling achievement. But as the family toolkit suggests, problem solving also brings a waxing and waning of determination. On any given day, an art exhibit might seem worthwhile; the next, it’s “a terrible idea, Joan.” If it’s up to me to motivate change with empathy and support, then I must avoid argument and roll with resistance.67
“Let’s go to RONA, Joan. I need some paint,” Steve says after a sketch session at Basic.
“What for?” I ask, but he doesn’t specify.
Steve draws well, but he isn’t a painter. Not in the artistic sense: not acrylic, not oil, not watercolour. Truth is, he has an aversion to artists’ paint. Where latex and primer wall paint are concerned, though, it is love at first swipe.
Whenever I drop him and his groceries at the top step, I notice cans of it—stacked in the corner on the veranda, under plastic and paper bags and crushed cardboard boxes. Up the stairwell, the walls have roller marks of white paint applied in fan-like accordions. I’m reminded of a fictional character that does this with paint…one that Steve knows all too well.
Mild-mannered Mole pursues a spring-cleaning paint ritual in The Wind in the Willows. Steve tires of whitewashing like Mole, or so it appears from the stairwell’s whitewash accordions. He has an illustrated hardcover copy that he lends me. He has no need for it. It’s indelibly imprinted in his mind. Animated creatures come to life for Steve as audiovisual hallucinations.
Was it Mole who empowered Steve to come out of his hole for a while with me? (Mole, and Steve’s other morphs—Bart, Clown, Bilbo—are his gang of good guys.) Steve doesn’t tell me about them; he lends me the book. Occasionally, he impersonates characters, imitating perfectly the dialect, the lilt, the expression. He never says, “This one’s my English accent; this one’s my wise old man, my impish boy, or my clown,” but I clue in.
Mole comes out of his hole to enjoy the nearby river with his sidekick, Ratty. Steve tunnels out of his hoard with me. Why? It could be as simple as: “Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.”68
I’m a bit like Ratty, a creator of doggerel (poetry that’s gone to the dogs) and lover of boats—in my case, the double kayak I share with Ken. Steve may recall that Ratty holds no sway on the mole hole. Neither do I hold sway on any household cleanup at Steve’s (unless it’s in a very early pre-contemplative stage).
“Why don’t I take these old paint cans to recycling, Steve?”
“I’m in the middle of a tidy up,” Steve says. “Leave it, Joan.”
Splotches of whitewash smudge his black leather jacket, his hands, his shoes, his clothing. Whitewash is a poor man’s paint, with antibacterial qualities. Carbon dioxide cures into calcium carbonate and makes it cooling and sanitizing for dairy barns and the bases of orchard trees. Does Steve know this about whitewash?
Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer character is tasked with whitewashing a fence. He ends up commandeering his friends to do the job for him. Such is his power of persuasion, a power to make others relish the dirty work: “The retired artist [Tom] sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents.”69
Steve doesn’t coerce me into painting his hallway, but I’m at RONA, out of my depth. RONA has so many types and sizes and brands of paint, it’s dizzying. There are pigments, additives, diluents, binders and resins, flat finish and semigloss, solvents and paint removers, indoor and outdoor paints.
There are paint additives with VOCs (volatile organic compounds) that vaporize at room temperature, and there are mould-resistant paints for kitchens and bathrooms. Steve’s makeshift kitchen is part of his cramped area where he stores brushes, pans and cleanup guck, willy-nilly.
Thank goodness, he chooses not to add artists’ paint to the disorder. Not that I’ve seen him limit disorder, but he limits his painting activity to that which goes on the wall, versus on a canvas. Whitewash is what he’s after.
At RONA I don’t see whitewash anywhere. Steve buys an equivalent of it, and he applies it with Mole- and Tom-Sawyer-like fervour.
The word whitewashing can also refer to psychological cleansing: an idiomatic expression for covering up sins, averting blame—a kind of absolution. Whitewashing is Steve’s antidote to hoarding.
Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has said, “When we feel inadequate and unworthy, we hoard things.…We hold on…to comfort ourselves…out of fear.”70
I try my one-to-two-year rule on Steve: “Steve, if you haven’t used it for two years, toss it. Better yet, recycle it.”
“Easy for you, Joan,” he says.
Hoarding disorder is consistent with schizophrenia’s “disorganized thinking.” My hoarder brother lays my two-year rule aside his ten-to-twenty-year rule and contemplates it. (Contemplation: an early stage of change.)
A poorly vented apartment is an unsafe storage space for paint products. Full stop. Darren and I know that Steve is familiar with wood stains and lacquers from his woodworking days. They, along with paint, are worrisome fire hazards.
Darren calls me. “Hey, I met up with Lawrence over lunch.”
“Nice. How’d it go?”
“He wants Steve’s space tidied up.” (Lawrence insists upon this every year or so. We’re thankful he’s so lenient.)
“How are we going to do that?”
“Tell Steve we’ll do an inspection next week.”
“Great.” I’m really not that excited about it.
I call Dr. P and he says, “Make it as surgical as possible.”
It is my first time inside Steve’s place. I’ve seen the cluttered stairs and the glassed-in veranda: the space he shares with Lawrence. While Darren talks to Steve downstairs, I head up with a broom and garbage bag. We have forewarned Steve of our “inspection.”
I get to the top of the stairs and crab-walk into the main room. To the left, a hallway leads to what once was a bedroom, but both spaces are now crammed with stuff. When I drag open the twisted closet door, it is full of old hangers, but no clothing is hung. Clothing bits and pieces are littered, layered and lying around—on the floor, by the bed, draped. Piles of books, outdated magazines and journals are strewn so that no furniture is recognizable.
What is recognizable is the smell. Steve’s smell. Steve doesn’t have body odour; it is more a pungent gritty smell, mixed with a white powder he sprinkles the way Peter Pan sprinkles pixie dust from Tinker Bell onto his flying protege, Wendy.
White sediment frosts the floor, and I imagine Steve twirling and sprinkling, the residue landing on the floor and on him. Him, flying around the room. Instead of hoovering dirt into a vacuum bag, Steve expels powder.
To the right off the landing, Steve’s bathtub is full of old yogurt containers and dishes, roller pans, bits of paintbrushes, bits of rags, bits of bits, and worst of all, it is mucky. Bathing, if it ever happens, would entail sink sponge baths.
“What about one of those bathtub refits, Steve? They come in and custom line the tub with a bath fitter…in and out in one day.”
“No thank you, Florence. No thank you, Nancy Drew,” he says.
I fall, in Steve’s estimation, somewhere between Nurse Florence Nightingale, a nineteenth-century reformer, and Nancy Drew, fictional girl detective, when I try to intervene or step beyond my role as art manager into the realm of health-and-hoarding sleuth.
I can’t tackle Steve’s mess. I don’t know where to begin. Darren tells me how he got his daughter to clean up her room by bringing her to Steve’s.
All I can handle is the art, some errands and a bit o’ bocce, I think.
The rest is as overpowering as the smell that permeates his books and bags. Grime, his residue. Grime, his cologne.
I sweep haphazardly and put empty pizza boxes in the garbage bag.
“What are you doing?” Steve has come upstairs and is looking at me with dismay.
“Just cleaning up a bit, Steve. The pizza box smell might attract rats.”
“The only rats I smell are you and Darren. Quit it,” he says.
“Steve,” says Darren, who’s followed him upstairs, “we’ll give you two months to toss some of this junk. We’ll be back with a dumpster.”
“Harrumph,” says Steve.
“Well, we tried,” I say to Darren in the car.
“Just call me Dumpster Darren,” Darren says.
In early episodes of the Peanuts comic strip, Pigpen was a dirt dignitary who said, “I haven’t got a name...people just call me things...real insulting things.”71 In later episodes, Charles M. Schultz, the creator, wrote Pigpen out of the series. Turns out dirt jokes aren’t all that funny.
A new member at a Basic Inquiry session says, “Your brother is so smelly and dirty.”
“Do you think you can sit somewhere else? Because there’s not much I can do about it,” I reply.
She doesn’t come back. For the most part, I’m indebted to Basic members for their tolerance.
In an attempt at cleanliness, I introduce Steve to the local laundromat; we go there twice, but he can’t organize the steps involved, even with the bicycle panniers I get him. I wash a garbage bag full of dirty clothes every other week.
“Steve, let me have that jacket; it’s gross.” (It is the jacket I gave him for Christmas, and he loves its bagginess—its zips, snaps and Velcro pocket flaps.)
“Don’t bother, Joan,” he says. (My parents used to say that.)
“Slip it in here and I’ll have it back to you next week,” I say.
He gives it to me. Or to be more exact, he lets me take it.
Away from the chaos, Steve takes the beginner and intermediate painting classes at the Art Studios with Bev and Julian, without me. Both facilitators are qualified artists, and I’m hoping he’ll enjoy this new art medium.
“Joan, maybe Steve could try a class on his own,” says Ann.
“I’m totally fine with that,” I say. And I am. I don’t want to baby (or, as Darren suggested, babysit) Steve. And I also think he has room for art more than one day a week at Basic. That is not to be.
I purchase some acrylics from a paint supply list that Bev gives me, and I sign myself up for a series of classes, in case Steve takes to it like I am. My class consists of ten night-school classes to complete an acrylic still life from a photograph. My favourite is a vase of flowers on a window ledge. What fifteen people turn out fascinates me: all as different as what writers do when prompted on the same topic.
I try a Saturday afternoon acrylics session with a local landscape painter, Maria Josenhans. Maria takes us through the steps in plein-air painting. It is complementary to writing, this artful study. I appreciate the building blocks of compositional painting. I’m pleased enough with the result to prop one on my living room window ledge.
Similarities exist between writing and painting—both art forms establish a point of view or an angle; both start with a quick sketch to determine what to include and what to leave out; both fill in and blot out until a picture or idea takes shape.
I buy a full spectrum of 150-millilitre tubes of Stevenson Acrylics, noting the irony of Steve’s name in the brand. I also buy us each a set of not-quite-top-dollar brushes in a variety of sizes, and two rubber hand-held spatula applicators, just for fun. Brush cleaner and a butcher tray for mixing palette colours top off the list.
I love learning about colour: the primary and complementary, the warm and the cool. Acrylics dry quickly; Steve could do one or two per session at Basic, but no. He sticks with pastel, except for one or two experiments.
I tuck several paint tubes into our toolkit. Basic Inquiry sessions are full of artistic peers, each doing their own thing in a variety of ways. Steve grabs a paint tube from the supply box on the floor between us. I take note, but it’s not just any tube. Stevenson Titanium White. Squeezing it like toothpaste, Steve uses the rubber applicator to spread it on his mixed-media-and-pastel piece. It covers smudge marks. It makes the image pop.
A contour blade is a rubber, hand-held tool for spreading paint. We leave the brushes unused. The blade is as effective as charcoal outlines in delineating and accentuating the figure. Steve blades white paint onto big pieces of cardboard as a finishing touch; pastel paper hasn’t got the teeth to hold paint.
Just like the 1960s Colgate toothpaste ad—I guess we are “a one-toothpaste family again.”72
Like the whitewash in his stairwell and the white dust on his floor, blades of whiteness freshen the work.
Jackson Pollock was an abstract expressionist of the 1940s and 1950s who dripped and splattered his way to fame on huge canvases. He didn’t use brushes, but instead poured paint using knives, trowels and sticks to shape the free form. Steve would have heard of him in his art school days. Steve tries a Jackson Pollock experiment that backfires a bit. But that’s just my take. Artists don’t make mistakes.
Steve drips red, dark blue and lime green paint over an orange wash. It’s the first thing he’s completed at home (probably in the yard or on the exterior back stairs). He lets the poster board dry and tells me to collage some of his pastel figures overtop. They aren’t really splatters; they are blobs. They look planetary—solar system-like. I cut out figures from rolls of sketch paper where Steve’s figures are strong, but the backgrounds are spoiled. Juxtaposed over his splattered background, one figure reminds me of fictional superhero Wonder Woman. She’s actually a he, as I remember the powerful model, but no matter. “They” are a trio of figure collages that could be panelled and hinged together like modern photographic triptyches.
When Dr. P’s office is looking to put art on the mental health unit walls, I carry the three pieces, framed and ready, to one of Steve’s appointments. Dr. P is encouraging. But there seems to be a catch. The mental health office’s suicide-prevention program doesn’t like the drips of red. They call to tell me.
“I’m the one who taped the figures over the splatter,” I explain. “It wasn’t Steve’s idea.” Steve hasn’t juxtaposed the figures over the painted backgrounds. Still, they reject them because the red suggests blood. I’m not sure how to tell Steve. Statistics show that as many as 60 percent of males with schizophrenia attempt suicide, with 10 to 15 percent being successful. I don’t know if he has ever considered it, but most attempts are in the period of early diagnosis, or in an active phase of the illness. By now, Steve has had schizophrenia for over thirty-five years.
We take the framed pieces home with us. In the meantime, I mention the conundrum to Ann Webborn. Ann works not only at the Art Studios, but also for the South Mental Health team.
She says, “Our mental health unit would be delighted to exhibit Steve’s splatter-paint collages.”
The following week, I tell Steve. “Steve, Ann, from the Art Studios, also works at a mental health unit. They want to display your pieces.”
“I thought we were putting them on Dr. P’s wall,” says Steve.
“Yes, but they have a problem with it.” I want to gloss over it.
“Oh?” He is waiting for my response.
“Their suicide-prevention team thinks the red splatter looks like blood.” There. I’ve said it. Steve is as nonchalant as if I just told him the time.
We visit Ann at her mental health workplace and drop off the pieces; they find a home.
The backfire rebounds to become an outcome worthy of artistic examination—a playful element of creativity.
One day when we are leaving Basic, Steve says, “The rule today is no talking.”
“Uh-huh,” I nod dumbly.
“Drive to the pickup area of the Salvation Army, Joan.”
“Uh…” I am happy we aren’t going to RONA for more paint.
“Don’t say anything,” Steve says. I nod.
Steve gets out of the car and goes in, and the two employees roll an oven into the loading bay. I back up the car as directed, and they load it into my utility vehicle. It is a perfect fit. We drive to Steve’s. The whole while I am thinking: How are we going to get this monolith inside? How can I, a double hip replacement who’s not supposed to do heavy lifting, possibly help him?
“My old oven is crap,” Steve says.
“Wait here,” he says as we park outside his home.
I wait. I’m learning to wait.
He comes back with a roll of old carpeting and some heavy-duty plastic. He tips the oven out of the car onto the narrow grass boulevard. Using the plastic and the carpet roll, he drags the oven to the foot of the exterior stairs.
What now? I think.
But he says, “I’ll take the weight. You support it.”
He coaxes the oven, and me, up the stairs. He has leeway…about six feet, tipping and rocking. Once at the top, we squeeze through the two front doors, and at the foot of the interior staircase, he has half the jimmy room.
“I’ve got it, Joan. You steady it,” he says. There is a weight between us. I am above him, with its bulk blocking my view of him, but I can hear him. He is working hard, panting. I know it is heavy. We stop halfway up the stairs. Each step is a grunt. He is Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders.
“Take it easy, Steve; it’s not worth hurting yourself.”
Halfway up the stairs, there is no going back…if we are going to make it. Could we break the side window? Could the oven fall on him? Could one or both of us get injured? Possibly all of the above.
But it unfolds just as he’s planned. He manoeuvres it each step of the way. With a bit of support, he makes it work. At the top landing, Steve says, “Okay. I’ll take it from here.”
How is he going to carve a path to where he wants it through all the junk? How is he going to get rid of the old one? Is it electrically compatible? A safe hookup?
I am learning to execute tasks as requested—to stand back and respect his way of doing things.
More than any of these considerations is the illness itself. It is the weight that he carries.
Make it lighter. That’s my job. He continues to figure out ways to manage, to cope. And of course there is our date with Darren and the dumpster.
By the time that happens a month later, he and Darren have an old oven to dispose of. I fill a few bags with loose paper (and the familiar pizza boxes), sweep up and sanitize the bathroom. They drag the old oven to Steve’s tiny, north-facing balcony and tip it into the yard. It lands with a thud on the soft grass. The dumpster is only half full. It is enough to satisfy the landlord.
“We’ve left some room for your stuff, Lawrence,” we say. Lawrence smiles.
I leave liquid soap and baking soda behind for Steve. Baking soda is my favourite multi-purpose cleaning powder. It’s white, so maybe Steve will like it. Odourless. I tell him how I sprinkle it on a soapy, wet J-Cloth to clean the sink and the tub. Then scrub-a-dub-dub.
The three of us celebrate over coffee at a local café. We’ve put more than a dint in the yard. We’ve put a dint in the process of change.
Here’s my tribute to Steve, written in the two-thousand-year-old, four-line style of Qu Yuan:
Listen to the wetness roll up the wall In overlapping strokes Smoothing smudges Like a new tide.