About Bob Bagnell
I met Bob Bagnell a number of years ago at my corner 7-11 store, at Broadway and Nanaimo in East Vancouver. When I first saw Bob, I decided to begin talking to him and give him a little cash whenever he asked for it.
It is quite common, maybe almost human nature, for people to ignore beggars or street people, at least in my experience. I saw from the beginning that Bob had a laid back personality and a sense of humour.
When I first met Bob, he was a drug addict, a folk artist, and already HIV positive. This is striking in itself, but what really stood out to me was that Bob wasn't just hanging out bumming change from people. In fact, he'd usually be sitting drawing or painting pictures with a his kit of pens or paints.
I work as a web designer, went to art school, and I love to draw and look at other people's artwork, so I was immediately interested in Bob's artistic point of view. A number of times we would talk about the places where he would sell his drawings (or try to).
Bob was heavily into tattoos and into the dark imagery that I sometimes thought of as "biker art", even though he wasn't a biker. Bob always kept a folder or binder of his drawings in plastic sleeves to show off his wares. Numerous times, I browsed through them and sometimes bought some of his dark, densely-coloured images of dragons, skulls, or powerful birds and other creatures. Upon a second look, I stopped thinking of it as biker art or tattoo art: it was an expression of the man's own personal symbolism. Inside his images, he was telling his own story.
I think Bob told me that he had been a heroin addict since he was 14 years old. He said his nickname was "Riff Raff", and he chuckled about it. He mentioned that he had been in San Quentin at one time, which shocked me a bit. He wasn't a physically large man, so I wondered how the hell he'd manage to protect himself in any prison, much less a huge U.S. one like San Quentin.
I don't know how much of what Bob told me is true, but I took it all at face value then, and still do. It looked obvious to me that this man had one hell of a hard life as a drug addict, and that he must have spent a lot of time either on the street or in various low-rent housing.