Bea, 25

a portrait of a Weird Facebook habitué in 2015

In 2015 I was living in Toronto and my friend Brad had started a magazine called 4 Poets that featured 4 poets per issue, about 25 pages of their writing. I am not now and was not then a poet, so I didn’t really have anything to fill those pages. So I asked an illustrator I knew to illustrate about 20 of my funniest Facebook statuses, which took up a few pages, and the rest I filled with two ‘portraits’, of which “Bea, 25” is one. I knew Bea through ‘Weird Facebook’, a community/culture I wrote about for Real Life Magazine the following year, but was essentially a network of young artsy people using Facebook like Twitter; you’d randomly friend anyone with whom you had 100-700 mutuals who showed up in your Suggested Friends, and then do whatever it took to max out your likes. Bea was trans, grew up alongside an Indian reserve, and was extremely smart and funny, and stood out to me by virtue of also being located in Toronto—the Weird Facebook scene was spread pretty evenly across North America (I got into it when I was living in Alabama, a couple years earlier). I like Bea’s story a lot, and if I was writing for a nationally distributed magazine, I might call it “important.”

I made these portraits by interviewing people I knew at the time, and editing those interviews into first-person narratives. At the time I felt like I was inventing a random new art form, but a couple years later I ended up doing a series of this exact thing with Canadian immigrants for the Torontoist, and, a couple years after that, a very similar thing in a ghostwriting capacity for American entrepreneurs. Writing this now, it feels like an almost too-perfect encapsulation of a certain kind of artist’s arc, from pure whimsy to meeting the market’s needs. Anyway, thank you Brad, for soliciting this work—I’m glad it exists. If anyone would like to hire me to ghostwrite their memoir, hit me up, you know where to find me.

And, enjoy. The words below are Bea’s.

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I’m twenty-five. I grew up in a town called Hagersville, Ontario. It’s about forty-five minutes south of Hamilton. Hamilton is in the very westerly corner of Lake Ontario—that bay. South from there is a highway called Highway 6. Runs down to the shore of Lake Erie, directly south. Hagersville is about fifteen minutes from Lake Erie. About a third of the town is part of the New Credit Indian Reserve. And it’s like, there are no signs anywhere saying like, where, like, what’s the rez and what’s not. It’s just like, you walk across the train tracks and like all of a sudden you’re in New Credit, and you’re under like, slightly different laws and different police. If police are chasing you and it’s something relatively minor, they usually won’t follow you {laughing} if you run over the line, if you cross the line over to the rez and just like, keep driving. If it’s serious they’ll call like, band police or they’ll chase you themselves but often they’re just like... {throws up hands like ‘fuck it’}. So that’s the environment I grew up in.

I lived there my whole life up until I was seventeen and then I moved here. And I lived here for six years. And then I moved... and then I became pretty much homeless, like transient, and started living in different like, pretty fucked up places in Hamilton, where, all different friends from home—cuz home is really fu-, like, it’s really fucked up. All different people from Hagersville, like, they go, cuz there’s no jobs or housing at all there, they go out to Hamilton and like, get squats in the north end, and continue doing what they do in Hagersville, just in Hamilton. It’s like a denser population but it’s just as bad in terms of like, Oxy addiction, meth, crack. So basically I started living with a bunch of crackheads. But ones that I knew from home, you know {laughing}.

It was fucked. Living an addict lifestyle is like—it’s not fun. It’s—north Hamilton, north end of Hamilton, is like old Parkdale. And it’s like... there are lots of really good people there, that I love, and you have a really really good time there, there’s a lot of like, strong... it’s a strong community? You’ll see stuff like, just the other day, I saw a guy on the corner, and his friend came up, and they were like, ‘What’s up’, and his friend was like ‘Oh, you brought your kid along this time’, and he was just like ‘Yeah, I get my kid on the weekends, isn’t it great?’ and he was like ‘Oh you got a really cute kid’. But like they were like, you know {slaps one hand with their other hand}. Like, a drug deal.

It’s certainly not a great place to raise a family. But I don’t really think like, anywhere is. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a good place to raise a family. ’Specially not in southern Ontario. Like, it’s a very family-friendly neighbourhood, so people know each other on a first name, they know all their neighbours on a first name basis, the community’s really tight... if a kid goes missing, you know, you can walk down a few doorsteps and be like ‘Oh like, local head who knows everything, where’s this kid?’ And they’ll be like ‘Oh, your dumb kid is over here’. So it’s like... people who are my age, and still living with their parents, which I do often—my father lives up in Haliburton County, I don’t see him very much, I haven’t seen him for the last two years. And my mom lives in, actually a wealthy suburb of Hamilton, which is like, cuz Hamilton has this like, big ridge around it, and up on the ridge is like, wealthy suburbs, and, to the westernmost point of this ridge, right at the very corner of what could be considered Lake Ontario, there’s a bunch of like, really really nice like, pretty special forest, that like, basically it’s the northernmost reach of a very specific kind of forest called a Carolinian forest that’s got like, a lot of nice trees like sycamores and stuff that you don’t get in Canada really, cuz the climate is like a little microclimate and it’s a little bit warmer there all the time, and there’s all these springs and stuff, and it’s like a really, really, really nice—I hesitate to even call it a suburb, cuz it’s just like, a really-really-really-really nice wealthy like, beautiful town. But it’s like, on the bus route. It’s like, part of Hamilton.

And the only reason we live there is because my mother started seeing my little sister’s hip surgeon about six years ago. And they’re planning on getting married. And this is a man who literally owns a hospital in the Cayman Islands. So he just bought the house for our family with cash. And we just like—four generations just live in it {laughing}. So it’s like, some Beverly Hillbilly shit, right? I try to spend as much time there as possible. It’s a comfortable place {laughing}.

I would much rather be self-sufficient though, and not carrying around all this shit. Like, I’ve been doing drugs and basically been a drug addict since I was like, fourteen. Like at my school, like, in grade eight, like when you’re twelve, like, Oxycontin is like, huge. It’s like, eeeeveryone is hooked on opiates. Which, I actually never really had any love for, like, my thing was stimulants and that’s what destroyed me. But, like, I absolutely would prefer to have not gone downhill over the years, and be like, more self-sufficient than I am right now. But like, I’m not.

Basically I’ll go to my mom’s house and I’ll like, hang out in a room in a basement and just like, live in my mom’s basement and it’s like, it’s great. It’s great. Like, I’ll catch some heat from my family. I mean, my whole family is pretty into me, except, they’re just like, really-really-really worried about me. And this is me being like, real generous about the way that they treat me {laughing}. They’re really worried about me and I wouldn’t like, say anything bad about them, or like, speak like I have old personality clashes with my family or something like that. I think that’s normal for a family.

I have a little sister who’s twenty or twenty-one. She’s just like, the most perfect person. She’s incredibly incredibly incredibly intelligent. She’s incredibly emotionally intelligent as well as being just like, academically like, extreeemely gifted. And she always has been. Like she started reading when she was like three years old. I’m five years older than her, and we were like reading together, like I was like teaching her to read and she was like, reading at a level where she was like, comprehending and reading books on her own at three years old. She’s like, a real savant. Except she doesn’t have any negative qualities of a savant. She’s a bit autistic, like diagnosed, but she’s like, she’s great. She’s got it. Only thing is, she’s not really mobile. Like, her... she’s got like, some degenerative bone condition... that actually a lot of people in my town have. And I think it’s because of tainted water supply... {sighs}. A lot of people who were born around the time my little sister was have problems with like, premature arthritis and degenerative bone conditions and all this stuff. So my little sister basically uses a wheelchair all the time. But she’s in a pre-med program right now, tops of her class in everything. She’s also really good at philosophy, way better than I am. Like, way better. The only thing I think that I have over her at any point is I have slightly better taste than her? But that doesn’t mean anything {laughing}.

The tainted water thing is because we grew up by the rez, and, I’m sure you know there’s no regard at all for the well-being of native people in Canada, and there was a big ass fucking tire dump just on the border of the rez for so many years, like, companies were just dumping old used bald tires, and it was just this mountain of fucking tires, and it was like the Springfield Tire Fire, but it happened to us. Someone came and they were like ‘Let’s set it on fire’, in about, I think it was 1990—if you google ‘Hagersville’, what will come up is Hagersville Tire Fire news. In 1990 this giant multi-ton pyramid of tires burned, like, they couldn’t put it out it burnt right down to the ground till it was nothing. And then they just paved the area over. And all that entered the local water table. And since we all grew up drinking from wells, because there’s no water infrastructure—it’s a big status symbol out there actually, is getting water delivered to your home to get pumped into a cistern, and then like buying water at the grocery store to drink. But it’s a status symbol that actually means something, because you’re like, keeping your family safe by not drinking out of the water table. So many people have like... I mean, there’s obviously like drug and alcohol problems too so it can be difficult to differentiate between like ‘Oh this person has FASD’, or ‘This person started doing drugs when they were five’, or is it just the fucking water. In so many cases. It’s a lot like Gummo, with Indians.

The fastest way out of Hagersville was to go straight into university as a seventeen-year-old. So I went to U of T.¹ That’s when I started living here. But my plan for going to U of T was just so that I could live here, it wasn’t that I thought that there was some program that I wanted to take. I went to school for history and I was terrible at it because I was a drug addict and it requires too much focus, and actual knowledge. I thought I wanted to take history because I’ve always been pretty pissed off at history and I wanted to like... learn more. But then I found out that history is actually really labour-intensive, you have to do a hell of a lot of reading. Hell of a lot of reading. Whereas, literature, you have to do hardly any reading at all. Comparatively. So yeah. It was basically a matter of—I didn’t realize I was a drug addict until a couple of years ago—but it was basically a matter of, like, I couldn’t complete the history... I couldn’t, not just complete it, but I couldn’t get what I wanted to get out of the history program, as a drug addict. But for the lit program: yeah, absolutely.

I never got my degree. I have one credit left to go. But I mean my best bet for like, living any semblance of like, uhh... like, a normal, like decent life—because I do have some pretty good grades on my transcript despite how fucked up I was in university—is to go get funding, do a PhD program type thing—something I could absolutely do. I’ve kept contact with a lot of academics. People who can write me recommendations, shit like that. So I always... I forget it a lot, but I have that in my back pocket. And it’s like, quite an advantage when I’m like, feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I’m twenty-five, what is my life, I’ve lost the last like, three years of my life to a crack addiction’ or something like that {laughing}.

All the stereotypes are true about crack. Every silly, oppressive stereotype about crack is true. People will do anything to get it; it will completely destroy your mental functioning and your personality; it will randomly kill you; there’s no safe amount. For the longest time, when I was getting into it, I was just being such an asshole and just being... to my friends back home, who have access to large amounts of like, not cooked shit but like pure shit, and then like, cook it up and like move it out around Hamilton, because that’s how growing up next to the rez is, like you have access to quite a bit of pretty freshly smuggled-in shit.

Everything comes from the States. When it comes to cocaine. Like, it’s ideal for it to cross as few borders as possible. So, it’s coming in... there’s a reserve on the St. Lawrence called Akwesasne. That’s a Mohawk reserve as well. Lots and lots and lots of the cocaine that comes into Canada, and I mean lots, comes through there. And the reserve that I grew up next to is also a Mohawk reserve, it gets run down there, and it also just comes straight across Lake Erie. There’s lots and lots and lots of little houses that used to be like, cottages for like, English people, and like, wealthy industrialists and stuff, like tiny little cottages, that were built up during the early early twentieth century. And that real estate was never worth anything, people just bought it up there because it was a nice area. Then all this fucked up industry got built up all along there and it became this like, postindustrial hellscape. Like it’s really beautiful, it’s really really beautiful, the water’s always like, way too warm because it’s like, all getting spilled out from the factories. But a lot of stuff just comes from Pennsylvania and New York State, and Michigan, and just comes just across the lake, you just need a speedboat. And not like a speedboat that you see, just a little fucking like—it does get choppy on Lake Erie and like, people do die doing smuggling runs, but it’s like, you just take like a fourteen foot aluminum boat across the lake.

I knew my area was fucked up when I was growing up, but I didn’t realize how much fun I was having. Growing up I was like, angry at it, I was like ‘Oh my God, this is like, so sad and awful’—and I’m still, like, a staunch decolonial socialist, like I want Canada to not exist. But at the same time, since it’s sincerely damaged me, I’m gonna be like, ‘Oh that was fun though. That was a fun place to grow up. It’s a hell of a place to raise a kid’ {laughing}.

I try to consider myself an artist. I’ve had a couple of pretty damn good bands that never played a single show. Like, I’m like, a music person... I’m not anymore, I’m not an anything person anymore, I literally don’t read or listen to music, I like put things over my eyes and plugs into my ears and like huddle, like this, in my spare time. But like, the bands that I had were quite good. Were quite good. So those are some abortive projects that I’ve had. I’m actually playing one of the first shows I’ve had since I was like nineteen years old in about... on July twenty-fourth. Just me. This is gonna be a country music set. Just me and a guitar. And I’m gonna be singing some country songs that I used to use as material for my abortive country band. We were called Marijuana. Actually, the other members of both of those bands actually like, really literally hate me, and would like... One or two of them would be like, ‘Oh, I hope that person is someone I can talk to in a few years’, and then one of the people is like, ‘If I see you, I’m going to kill you’ {laughing}. But that’s what... like, drugs do. Drugs, they kill, they kill art.

Other than that, I had a friend who owned a gallery in Hamilton, and I was going to put up an exhibit there that was just gonna be all like readymade shit, but it was gonna be all medical equipment, because I really like the aesthetic of medical equipment. Because my family is so medicalized because we have so many health problems, I grew up around a lot of medical apparatuses and stuff like that. And I really really really like the aesthetic of medical stuff. And I was gonna put like... like obviously you have to have one of those IV drip rack things; I had a CPR dummy that was quite nice, and actually I still have him. My partner at the time named the CPR dummy ‘Daddy’. It’s just this blank-face, like, genderless goon. Daddy was gonna be part of the exhibit. I have access to a couple of surplus hospital beds, I was gonna put in there... when the theorizing for the project got really extreme, we were talking about it as performance art where I would just lie in the bed and do like, a Hamilton version of a David Blaine stunt and just lie in bed and die and not eat for days and days and just like waste away in the window of the gallery. Because Hamilton’s economy, aside from drugs, is pretty much all hospitals. There are like, three or four massive hospitals in it, and they employ the vast majority of the well-employed people in Hamilton. And then the rest of the people spend all their time at the hospital. Treating their abscesses and trying to get their prescriptions and stuff like that. Dealing with their bone cancers that they got from drinking tire fire water.

Writing is something I only really got good at a year ago. I’ve been writing my whole life. Poetry and short stories, typical shit. I’ve never really been able to journal well. I’ve tried to do that before and it really really doesn’t work out. I have a very difficult time like, perceiving myself. I just don’t like to think about it. For a long time I couldn’t escape that juvenile feeling of, this thing I’m doing is too this or too that, you know? I can’t write this way because it is... too much itself. I was so afraid of being like, a stereotype of myself. But at this point I’m just like, I’ve realized that I have some level of skill and I just wanna like, I just wanna do it and make money off it so I don’t have to fuckin’ work.

What they call ‘The New Sincerity’ is something that I really want to like, and in many ways participate in, and like... I both want to and I have to. And I also think that it’s like—kind of trite. You know? Like, Livejournal has always existed {laughing}. That’s something I don’t have time for, you know? Like... the world is a serious place. And people have serious problems. People have serious problems. And people are seriously underrepresented as human beings. And I don’t really have any particular interest in any one human being representing themselves to the best they can be. I don’t think that that’s—and this I guess is more of an ethical argument than an aesthetic one—I don’t think that that’s what writing should be for, or what it’s for.

I mean on Facebook I’m very much consciously writing to an audience. Very much so. It’s part of why I go through waves of being extremely popular, and then extremely unpopular. It’s because people... because I can’t keep it up forever, and the fact that I’m pretty much being bitter like 90% of the time becomes clear to people, and they’re like ‘Oh, no, you’re genuinely an asshole’ {laughing}, like {sad disappointed voice} ‘Ohhh....’. And I’m not! I’m actually a very open and accepting person to all sorts of people who have all sorts of things wrong with them. And that’s not... it’s not my thing to make people feel bad for being themselves. At all. I have lots of friends who other people just wouldn’t put up with. But. If you’re coming to me and saying things, saying ‘Things are this way’, then I have no problem saying like ‘No they are not this way. They’re not this way at all’.

They’ve turned oppression into social capital. Which is disgusting. It’s disgusting because people who are actually oppressed don’t have access to these fucking communities. And that varies. Like, it depends on where you grew up, like access is not something that you can universally... cuz there are many different nations within the Americas, you can’t universally be like ‘You know, you have access because you’re at this income level’ or something like that. You know, there are a lot of people who are like seriously marginalized who contribute to this really well, but they contribute on Twitter, you know? There’s Black Twitter, and that makes a difference that actually causes things to change. And then there’s Queer Facebook, which is mostly just crazy people making each other crazier. It’s a whole lot of just enabling. And, you know, coming from like, a serious place, seeing serious problems in my own family, and, you know, growing up in the middle of a very visible race war, I don’t have time for these people’s like, half-thought-out like psychoanalyses of how oppression works. Like, not only is it stupid, and I would just make fun of them for fun, but it’s actually harmful to the wider discourse.

[My roommate Dan comes home, sees two bottles of wine on the table, says to me: “What are these interviews? You encourage people’s vices and ask them about their sexual histories? ‘What’s your fuck-style, bro?’”

Bea {laughing}: “That’s basically what it’s been leading up to, or skirting around.”

Dan: “Will you be distracted if I do dishes and stuff?”

Stephen: “No, it’s cool.”

Dan: “I forgot to get toilet paper on the way home.”

Stephen: “I didn’t realize we were out. I can get some.”

Dan: “I think it’s probably your turn.”

Stephen: “Yeah.”

Dan (to Bea): “What’s your, what do you...?”

Bea: “I’m not a writer... I have a couple of things published but I’m very much like, a non-prolific person. And kind of wondering why I’m being interviewed. To be honest.”

Dan: “That’s okay though. You know, this artist who I saw whose name I can’t remember, he’s like an old dude, and everyone loves him in Vancouver, but like... he’s a great artist... I guess, I think... {Bea laughs} but he didn’t take advantage of the system that much, like he didn’t make that much money, but, you know... he built up—”

Bea: “I am a writer, people know who I am... some people.”

Dan leaves.]

I’m really hung up always on whether or not I should move. And I think that I should. But on the other hand I feel like everything that—really everything that I am is part of this very specific place. And in Toronto I’m close to it, and in Hamilton I’m in it. But... I think I should move to LA. Because I really really really really love places on Earth where we have real communities where I could live. Like, someone like me who knows too much about... history... to not be mad, but is also too okay with people to not enjoy the sheer stupidity of our culture, you know? Because I genuinely love like, wraparound mirror shades and vapes. And like I really love those expensive leather sandals that are like strips of leather woven together on an expensive sole and like wearing an expensive sock with that and walking around vaping—I think that that shit’s great. It’s not just that it’s funny; it like speaks to me. The LA aesthetic speaks to me very much. And also it’s just like, the most fucked-up place in the world. It’s the end of the world. LA is like the very edge of... it’s the end. It’s the end of the colonial project. That’s what you get at the end, is LA.

And, um. I feel like it’s a place where people wouldn’t... people, ah... people don’t just not look down on, but they embrace... like there’s no anxiety... over... how stupid you look. Or, um... all of those sort of things that are what Toronto is all about. These feelings of, of white anxiety. Of like, ‘how dumb this is’. Because the other thing is, I identify as agender, or like, butch, but I’m kind of in the middle of things with respect to that. There was a time when I was insisting on using feminine pronouns to refer to myself and presenting in various degrees of femininity. It sucked. People treated me like shit. Now I just ask those who are close enough to me to want to be respectful to use feminine or gender neutral pronouns. I don’t know. I have always been out of place in masculine-dominated, or masculine-oriented social groups. They make me very uncomfortable. And I can’t stand being the only person who seems to give a fuck in a group so I just don’t. Oh, I just remembered that ‘neutrois’ is my preferred gender descriptor. I always forget that word, but I feel like it describes me perfectly. Obviously I am very tall and scruffy so I get misgendered almost always except by the very slim slice of people who would ask me what my pronouns are first.

Something actually that I saw on Facebook a while back, and I forget which of my friends said it, but they said ‘I fit right in in LA because I can rollerblade down the street in my spandex shorts, vaping, with a ghetto blaster pumping Taylor Swift on my shoulder, and everyone’s like “right on”.’ And they meant it. And like, that combined with the fact that... that’s part of past and future Mexico. Like this is another center of decolonization. I want to live at the end of white culture. I mean I think I probably belong in fucking like, Colorado or some northwestern city because I’m just ultimately just a hippie. But like, I’m way too focused to ever find contentment in those places. I know that I am. LA is the end of the world, hopefully the start of the new. I wanna see Regis Philbin reincarnated. I want Regis Philbin to be turned into a lich. I want Regis Philbin’s soul put back into his dead body immediately after he dies and... I wanna interact with that. I want that to be part of my day-to-day life.

1. For non-Canadians: U of T is the University of Toronto, which is considered Canada’s best university—it’s the only Canadian university in the global top 20, above some Ivy Leagues (though, a note for Americans: this does not mean it’s expensive).