There’s a real problem when you live in the West End of Vancouver: you never seem to leave.  

It’s not as though I’m so enamored with this part of the city that I don’t see a reason to flee once in a while.  I’m an adventurous gal.  I’ve lived and traveled around the world.  I get bored being in one place for too long.  There’s always somewhere to go.  I’m a lady who always has a destination.  Last year alone, I flew to the UK four times because of a now-imploded relationship.  What I miss more than anything about those trips–what breaks my heart, what I feel the most loss over and daydream about and get all misty-eyed when thinking about it–is the absolutely nutty country of England.  I even miss the airports, the bad airplane food, the personalized movie experience, the train rides zipping across the country.  The transportation and everything about it.  I really, and I mean really, miss Boots and Superdrug.  I even sort of miss Greggs, but not that much.  

I miss the beautiful British eggs that don’t have to be refrigerated.  I would buy some and keep them in my suitcase, happily cooking them up when my ex was out of the house, as I wasn’t allowed to eat what I wanted.  I even got interrogated when I was on my own (which was most of the time) so he could find out what I ate while on an outing.  During one particularly awful visit in which he typically spent little to no time with me, I had been very nervous to admit that I had sampled the (incredible) local fish and chips during my day trip to the coast. He attempted to laugh it off, but I could see rage simmering beneath the surface. During a later argument, he yelled, “I was even okay with you eating fish and chips!”

It’s still going to take me some time to accept how very unwell he was.  Is.  Present tense.  I have zero problems with vegans who mind their own business and are content with their decisions, but I have all the problems with evangelical, judgmental, eating-disordered, malnourished, controlling fanatics who don’t see the hypocrisy and fallacies in their recycled talking points and who engage in abusive behaviour in order to prop up their disordered superiority complexes. Anyway, those brown British eggs were something else.

Back to the West End.  I just never really leave here, because there’s no reason to.  Sure, I’ll sometimes head out to wonderful New Westminster to visit my pal and hit the thrift stores, but it can feel like a haul.  I’ll occasionally trek out to Kingsway and Joyce to load up on dirt-cheap produce, but that’s still a massive field trip just to save many dollars.  I will indeed schlep to Chinatown to buy this tea I’ve been drinking for thirty years, but marching forward and pretending not to notice the human shrapnel can be draining.  I like to take the SeaBus to North Vancouver and poke around that wonderful part of the world, but those little jaunts across the harbour are becoming few and far in between.  

I’m just mired in the West goddamn End.  Everything’s here, whether I like it or not.  I pay a premium for nonsense here.  The Persian grocer half an hour away has three lemons for a buck fifty; the local ass rapist just down the road sells them for one dollar apiece.  I’ve mentioned this before.  I go through about half a dozen lemons per day–in my Sodastream water, all over my food–so this will never be acceptable.  

(Indulgent beauty tip: lemons help with collagen production.  That’s why I look 45 instead of 48.)

I’ve set up camp here on a couple of occasions in the past–in fact, I think the only area of Vancouver proper I’ve never lived in is Kitsilano–but as it stands, I have been living in my current pad for the better part of a decade.  Ten years next February, actually.  Because of British Columbia rental laws, what I pay each month is incredibly reasonable, and besides, there’s nowhere to go.  I’m basically stuck here for the rest of my life.  There is not a single place I could move where I wouldn’t be paying nearly a grand more per month, and I’m including once-shuddered-at places like Abbotsford, or even Keremeos.  

So what brought me here at the beginning of 2015?  Why did I move from the rodent palace in East Vancouver?  It’s because I had a freelance / contractor job with two of the weirdest people I have ever met in my life.  

For a lady who used to teach English internationally and has been in and out of rehabs, that is saying an awful lot.  

Now, it’s not that I think the owner of the business I’m going to talk about has it mentally together enough to sue me for libel, but I am going to have to change some details when recounting this tale; it just saves everyone, myself included, a great deal of embarrassment.  Everything I plan to share is the truth, the whole truth–so help me God–but the male half of this duo was such a bizarre combination of self-destructive and indescribably egotistical, I can picture him pounding back pint after pint of bottom-shelf vodka and Googling himself until the wee hours.  All night.  Every night.  There’s probably only a maximum of about five Google entries about him that exist, but I’m quite certain he does this.  

The guy’s Scandinavian name was, oh, let’s call him Sven.  And his business, if we must call it that, was creating this gross, inedible food product straight out of the 80s or early 90s that was considered to be “health conscious.”  I’m not sure if any of you recall what the commercial nutritional industry was like back then, but I sure do: I got my first health-food store job in the late 90s, and worked in a few of them on and off while I attended university.  The big thing in the early 90s was to go fat-free, which we all know now is a laughable farce.  Also, there was a massive focus on the consumption of flaxseeds and fish oils, powdered green drinks, creatine for building muscle, and gulping down terrifying ephedrine pills in order to lose weight and kill your appetite.  I recall one store in which I worked had its own house blend of this speedy garbage, which consisted of caffeine, ephedrine, aspirin, bee pollen, and a whole glut of other nonsense stuffed into large gelatin capsules.  They named it Thermalean.  Every single staff member there was cranked up way past Pluto on this stuff, including yours truly, and the exaggerated mania induced by ingesting this stimulant made for some very persuasive sales techniques.  

So Sven had created this horrible, dry, nearly-inedible product in the mid-90s.  How can I describe it without completely giving it away?  I mean, I would love nothing more than to expose it for the ghastly fare that it is–and I do not believe that Sven is capable of feeling humiliation since his ego is so colossal and unstoppable–but I am going to hold back.  I could easily use this blog as a forum to air my grievances and be a nasty piece of work, but I won’t do it.  I mean, taking down abnormal, radical approaches to personal lifestyle choices is something I will never tire of, but I’m not going to directly attack anyone here. I could, but I won’t.  I have always maintained that a person’s karma is not presented to them after they die, but instead, is experienced in the quality of their current life on earth: if you’re a crap person, you have a crap life nobody would want to live.  

Anyway, this food product of Sven’s was something like a crude burrito, or an empanada, except the exterior was made entirely of fatty-acid-containing nut paste, and the filling was several versions of tasteless, unseasoned, bland, somewhat-undercooked vegetables and legumes.  From this point forward, let’s just call them Sven’s Wraps.

It was the sort of food supplement that you’d inhale thirty years ago during your lunch break whilst pinching your nose, thinking you were doing your body good; therefore, flavour, texture, and salt didn’t matter one bit if you were eating something allegedly healthy and nutrient-dense.  We’ve come a very long way in regards to tasty “health food” fare (or we can simply eat nutritious, preservative-free whole foods such as a piece of grilled salmon and some steamed broccoli–my meal of choice at least four days out of the week).  There is absolutely no need to eat the sort of gag-worthy drywall that Sven had been hawking since 1995 or so.  

But Sven believed, and likely still believes, that he stumbled upon something revolutionary.  Something that would make him a zillion bucks.  Something for everyone, really, except in his case, “something” meant a palmful of achingly-bad provisions that I would not even donate to a stray dog, and “everyone” translating to several dumpsters in the downtown eastside.  

That header pic?  I bought that stuff in England.  It’s actually quite tasty.  Sven’s wraps could have used just a little bit of cock-flavoured seasoning, but his pomposity and arrogance were the equivalent, I suppose.

•   *   *   *   *   *

It was the fall of 2014, and I had absolutely had it with the language school at which I was teaching.  HAD IT.  I’d been doing fairly well with a freelancing gig–editing, proofreading, ghost writing, A great deal of it contracted out for very lazy, well-off university students–but one always needs an anchor in place if they work on a client-to-client basis.  This particular school was one of the worst, and that isn’t saying much considering they are all corrupt, exploitative abusers of both learners and educators alike.  I think the final straw was the Friday right before Thanksgiving weekend, when I allowed the students to leave class about ten minutes early.  They were all restless and had plans and weren’t interested in learning about the high-tech world of pagers (this joint hadn’t invested in updated vocabulary resource material since around 2001), so they were extremely delighted to just get out of there and get going.

The following week, the school director yoinked me into her office to admonish me as though I were a naughty child in need of stern discipline.  It was a very unfun sequence of events.

“You let them out early!  You’re not supposed to do that!”  She was a large woman, and her body seemed to jiggle and quiver with each exclamation.

“It was ten minutes!”  I protested.  “They wanted to go!  They were happy to do so!”

“Doesn’t matter!  Rules are rules!”  

The assistant director, a nauseating company man, was also there, giving me looks that nearly split my mind in two.

“Could you stop smirking at me?” I spat at him.  “There is no need to sit there and look smug!  Jesus Christ!”  His face fell.  

“I just need you to…sign this,” said the fat director, pushing a piece of paper towards me.  It appeared to be a written warning.  I scanned it up and down.

“No.  No.”  I pushed the paper back at her.  “This isn’t going to happen.  I don’t need this, and I don’t need you.  I don’t need this nonsense for twenty dollars an hour and not even full-time hours.  I’ve never been treated like this before in my life.  I’m done.”  I stood up, actually curtseyed, and walked out of there forever.

One of the best fuck-yous I have ever lobbed at an employer, and I still think I could have done better.  However, it meant I now didn’t have that paycheque anchor, no matter how meagre my earnings were from that absolute clown car of a school.  Charles had moved out just a month or two before, and I was on my own in the East Van pad.  No, I must correct myself: it was me and sweet sweet Annie, two dainty, bloodthirsty girls just trying to get by.  

A friend of mine was working for a wholesale produce outlet (and here’s some intel for you: Whole Foods ALLEGEDLY sources its fruits and vegetables from the same place as Wal-Mart).  One of the customers who came in to purchase boxes and boxes of produce was this fairly jovial older man who liked to chat, and one day, this man mentioned that he had just opened a business on Denman Street and wanted to attract customers but wasn’t sure how.

My friend said, “I know a lady who could help with that.  She’s a teacher and a writer and could probably help with promotion and social media.”  He then passed along my contact information to the older man, who turned out to be Sven.  To this day I’m not sure why my pal thought of me, but he also knew that I loathed the world of ESL and was hunting around for a new gig.  Later that day he texted me to say that he’d given my number and email address to a customer, and I could expect to hear from this guy.

Sven indeed called me the next day.  

“Have you heard about me?  About my product?  It’s amazing.  I’ve been making Sven’s Wraps for twenty years and we just opened a shop on Denman,” he boasted. 

“That’s great.”  What was I supposed to say?  I quickly Googled this as I was talking to him.  Ah, okay.  Never heard of him.  The wraps looked dreadful, too.

“We sell at New West Quay, we sell in Victoria at the Market on Yates, we sell at the farmer’s markets when it’s in season,” he continued. “I just opened a cafe and we need some marketing and promotion.  Can you do this?  Your buddy recommended you.”

“Yes.”  

When you’re being offered a job, that’s your answer to every question.  Details and experience can be sorted out later.  At my Communications Coordinator job, it was expected that I would be fluent in MS Excel, possibly the worst software program in existence.  I spent an entire weekend watching YouTube tutorials and taking free online tests until I had the basics.  I will still never understand pivot tables, though, and thank goodness my current gig doesn’t require a lick of Excel knowledge.

“Great!” Sven exclaimed. “Would you like to meet with me and my business partner Dianne?  Can you come to the West End tomorrow afternoon?”

“Yes.”  See previous paragraph about answering in the affirmative when a job is being offered.  

The next day I took the bus from East Van to downtown, then walked to Denman Street, which is where Sven’s shop was situated.  I will never understand people who take the buses to get around downtown Vancouver, which is one of the most compact, walkable cities I can think of.  Waiting around for one of the trolley buses that merely crawl from stop to stop takes far, far longer than just marching–as the crow flies–to wherever you need to go.  Yes, there are far too many traffic lights and crosswalks and vehicles, but it’s a city.  A silly one, but a city nevertheless.  I think our former mayor, the confusing Gregor Robertson, wanted to ban all cars in the West End part of  downtown.  Despite him being a five-star weirdo, I still stand firmly behind that proposal, which will never see the light of day.

Sven and Dianne were waiting for me at this place, which was a surprisingly spacious cafe.  Or was it a restaurant?  A juice bar?  It was tough to sort out.  There were baskets full of his wraps behind the front counter, there were fresh juices sold in small mason jars in a fridge, there was a coffee counter, but the concept and idea behind this establishment wasn’t clear at all.  

Sven was probably sixty years old, silver-haired, had a lot of enthusiasm and energy, and I immediately noticed that he adored the sound of his own voice.  Dianne was in her fifties, I think, looked to be in poor health, and seemed to be the personification of a sigh.  She just gave off the air of someone perpetually tired and fed up and stressed and bearing all sorts of crosses.  I would later learn that she came from big money–big family money–because her clan was in the oil business.  She appeared to have a bottomless pit of cash, and was funding Sven’s absurd vision single-handedly.  I believe they had been romantically involved many years before, but at this point, Dianne was still hung up on him, while he was mercilessly wringing her free of money as though she were a human washcloth.  He was also her roommate somewhere in Burnaby.

I learned all of this over the next few weeks.  I also learned that Sven was a raging binge drinker, the likes of which put me and every alcoholic (whether in recovery or not) I’ve ever known to shame.  He would be whistle-clean for a while, extolling the virtues of health food and his ridiculous wraps and fresh juicing, then this sixty-something man would hit the liquor store and disappear for absolutely days.  The cops would find him somewhere around Oakridge with his pants off, having torn through several bottles of Smirnoff and causing all sorts of public chaos, and take him into the drunk tank for the night.  He would vanish from Dianne’s house, getting up to no good, then reappear in the wee hours of the morning several days later, utterly out of his mind on the Russian firewater and banging on her front door.  Pantless yet again.  Then rinse and repeat with the health kick and the inevitable descent into a no-joking-around bender.  I am not judging, knowing first-hand how alluring and demonic alcohol is, but this guy took it to a level that seemed awfully startling for his age.

During that meeting, it was determined that I would help promote and market Sven’s Wraps (also the name of the business).  I wasn’t given any particular direction or guidance, because it was apparent that neither of them had a solitary clue in regards to what they were trying to do, how they wanted to be perceived, or the sort of clientele they wanted to attract.  This was very clearly an ego mission for Sven, and Dianne was tossing fistfulls of dollars at his pursuit of glory.

Dianne agreed to pay me twenty-five dollars per hour as a contractor, which meant no deductions of any kind.  At the time, it was completely decent pay, especially after having endured the sort of nonconsensual assault that the world of ESL had been imposing on me for so many years.  Sven asked if I could come there every day to work, rather than working from home (which at the time wasn’t a normal thing, seeing as it was late 2014 and “coronavirus” was still being frantically worked on).  

“Of course,” I said.  “I live in East Van, but it’s no big deal to get here every day.”

“Good!” he said, grinning.  “That shows commitment!  It shows dedication!”

I still had no idea what I was going to be doing, but I at least knew it would involve social media marketing.  I was quite eager to embark on a new professional adventure, promoting a fledgling business and coming up with all sorts of ways to get word out to the public.  And they had a very sweet location on Denman Street, with its nonstop foot traffic.  There could be free samples!  Sandwich boards!  An official grand opening!  The potential and possibilities were infinite!

“No problem at all,” I replied.  “When would you like me to start?”

“How about tomorrow morning?”  Sven said.  Dianne just sighed.  

“Sure.  I can be here first thing in the morning with my laptop.  What time do you guys actually open?”

“Well, technically–”

Dianne cut him off.  “We open at ten.  Can you be here at nine?  I’ll give you a key.”

This made absolutely no sense–not their opening time, nor my being there an hour early–but I just nodded.  What sort of downtown eatery opens at ten o’clock in the morning?  And moreover, would I would be just sitting at one of the tables with my computer while passers-by glanced at me, wondering why I was sitting in a closed cafe?  What if they were thirsty for some coffee, or had an intense craving for dried-out yam wraps, or could not possibly kick off their day without several gulps of fresh carrot-ginger-mint juice?

“Yes.”

To be continued.  I have work to do.

(Reach me at nadya@nadzvera.com)