black and white
All posts tagged black and white
Those were pretty good years, if you didn’t dwell on the hard bits.
“Johnny and Star – Uber Alles!”,
he would shout to the universe, when things got difficult or when things got good – between them – either end of the emotional spectrum.
“Over All! – Babe! – Over all! -We got each other!”
That wasn’t always much comfort to her.
Back in the day, when they were younger – a dream or two, still keeping pace with time, those words could bouy her up, keep her from drowning in the ugliness around them.
They were often like spokes on a wheel – now.
Going round.
Going round.
Going round.
A never breaking circle, cycling itself, an ouroboros – tail in mouth – longing for – a fabled past – a new beginning – anything, anything other.
The couple that was them – then, was strictly survival – now.
Hustle up enough for a few blasts – between them.
Momentary.
Mind always reaching.
Seeking.
Blast away the memories, of who or what he thought this was going to be.
Blast away the residue – which leads to paths that had only wanted to be avoided.
Been working so far, eh?
Been keepin’ them on an,
unmerry-go-round.
Trying not to choke on the bitterness of so much emptiness – all those…… years exhaled into…………………….this?
Claiming this doorway as their own. For this moment, this night,
this never permanency.
tbc.
Under street lights, we got us – outside – outside alright.
Something final, in that – that’s for sure.
Every day – another indignity – another minor trauma. They have been in these streets together for the past couple years. Initially it was summer and it didn’t matter and the drum and the bass would drop all over this provincial town. Providing places to see, people to be.
Derelict warehouses.
Empty slaughterhouses.
Rented sound stages.
Abandoned storefronts.
The city then, was rife with spaces no one cared enough about, where for a few hours it could transform – its own language – customs – rituals.
Most nights there was somewhere to offload a bit of gear, get right fucked up and dance – and dance – and dance – just fucking dance.
Both natural and pharmaceutical chemicals released – indifferently – efficiently – pulsing the body – moving through the music – through time.
Another lifetime ago, another thought of who or what they were then – they are now.
Lights flashed – yellow
Lights flashed – blue
Lights flashed – red
A body undulating
- a techno beat –
a space in time - a pulsing vibration –
a symmetry
-a breakbeat –
a dance floor
-a drum coded –
Those days felt more real in ways, more connected to each moment – each other – an immediacy – which overflowed into everything else.
“We Are One,” she whispered –
her hot breath unfolding each syllable in his ear. And he got it – but he didn’t get it – and that left him feeling vulnerable -awash in new realities.
The peak hit a new high
and he saw his punk rock facade,
fade to dayglo, as the shimmer of ergot – gone wild – went wild, he saw for the first time – that it was all a dream – outcome uncertain – not of concern.
Parts not wanting to be remembered – recalled, not wanting to regurgitate or recreate the feelings locked in
let out,
nightmare just beneath the surface
all part of the inner landscape
hellscape.
This is escape.
Another blast.
Flame, tension burnt.
Last blast for each of them – tonight.
Eyes wide, flickering along the flame line – feels like the best thing ever – feels like it’s all gonna be okay – last blast – tonight – under street lights.
tbc
tbc
The work it takes to maintain all this distance – from self.
Distract – change emotion – distract – ignore – keep going – find ways to dull the continuous ache.
He felt lost – so much effort – so much distract – tweaking his neurons – seeking release – seeking…….solace.
The balm of a hit, the false narrative propped up, the sound of untruths, become normalized, become true.
There was no hindsight. No “It should have been another way.” It was step up and run screaming – from the pain – from the…fear.
Unfounded – not tested – tried – tired.
Still in his twenties, still just a kid seeking ease, bumping into this shit. It’s a deep bath in melancholy – a sadness born from generations of struggle – addiction – mental health issues – poverty – homelessness – trauma.
So many late nights – staring down the abyss – a love found – a deep well.
“….and then I was pregnant, strung out on rock, crack babies were in the news back then, CAS took him right out of the hospital room, handed “the boy” over to his grandmother – left Johnny and I to sort out ourselves – by ourselves.”
“We weren’t even juggling for the money, really, we were just, you know, surviving. We turned people on. We were doing the good work, all that trip.”
“Saw so many people, become ONE with the universe, with themselves, make positive change, switch their shit up. But we were out here, just surviving on the love and the drugs and the working it out tomorrow. That was the part where we got lost. We got to feelin’ so good, that we thought we were, so good and could stick with one more pill, one more line, one more tab. It gave release and relief, whole new meaning.”
“And like that, spat out the narrow opening, from a scene we helped to build, create community, heal, fucking heal.”
“Those with the means, just disappeared, maybe suburban lawns, maybe a pricey rehab, someone had been awaiting their return. We had nobody.”
They just had each other, need, love – open wounds oozing all kinds of toxin. All beliefs are true, until proven otherwise.
The come downs, hit harder, more difficult to find a self that wasn’t so goddamned broken, so held together by string and wire, tied up.
tbc
…and it would take years to come back from that disconnection – from everything they thought they were moving towards, everything that was lost, everything that never happened. Shifts in the fabric, twists in the plot, changes in the pace and different outcomes. New realities engaged, but soon retreated from in the face of what was seen, experienced and juxtaposed by their day to day reality.
A few utopian years of new beliefs, what felt like true understanding, feeling that they had found a tribe of the also wounded and that would help to propel and uplift them all – and everyone – everywhere. Seeking a tipping point that never quite materialized – there was no – Timewave Zero.
Psychedelic techno pioneers before the internet became commonplace – before cellphones became ubiquitous. These were the days of phoning the flyer number at 10pm – from a landline or a pay phone – to find out where the meeting place or the party was and getting there, somehow before midnight, before the price went up. It was really living on the fringe, of a culture lost in its own lack of cohesion – lack of connection. So they found their own on the outskirts – with other lost dreamers – others dying for change.
Jungle
dnb
trance
Hardcore of a different kind
The world was backing grunge at a time but they just moved from:
- punk
- to industrial
- to new beat
- to acid house
- to techno.
Downtown kids – feral, it was the end of the eighties after all. Started underage at The Twilight Zone, Nuts & Bolts, Catch-22, The Comfort Zone.
They both played the game of supplier – received the spoils – the access – the street cred – the ability to quit the seven am to four pm for him and the eight pm to four am for her. From hash to pills to blotters to powder to rock – there were always customers in the clubs – a few years in and it was the raves – the parties.
And that was alright – until it wasn’t.
tbc
Then the rock started to rule. They couldn’t shift them fast enough to catch up to the deficit that disappeared in the glass stem. That feeling of disconnection had faded, for the first time – that feeling good – with self – with life – there were many happy and some truly ecstatic moments.
It was really the switch from the drugs that had opened them up – to the ones that now closed them off – that made them believe, for a while anyway, that they were still – open.
Not all white powders are equal, not all drugs lead to the same outcomes. It was the moments when this truth was forgotten – that things spiralled away from what they thought they were doing, who they knew they had become.
Their love grew – for the other – for the collective, but the love for self – got lost in the brief vapour trail – from the next hit on the stem pipe – created in front of a corner store – made from a small brown glass – bottom broken off – ginseng bottle and a piece of Brillo crammed in the end with a dirty chopstick.
Despite the love they had, they each craved more than the other was capable of giving. The lack that each brought to the scene – grew between them – overwhelmed each, in a dis-understanding – a dis-ease – a longing for that – which was not there and losing sight of that which was.
Having been a team
- accomplices in love
- partners in hurt
- co-conspirators trying desperately to heal from their traumatic beginnings.
They couldn’t keep a grasp on how much they meant to each other, each of them lost sight of how to hold the other.
tbc
One With Everything
They couldn’t keep a grasp on how much they meant to each other, each of them lost sight of how to hold the other.
And they didn’t know where to go with it. A divide had shown up between them – that in some ways was an impenetrable wall – though to others it appeared to be the glue that kept them together.
Having met in high school, all those years ago – two kids – both thinking and acting from places that certainly didn’t adhere to the culture of the time – they clicked, and kept clicking for all the years since. They had been through so many underground scenes together – music – drugs – fetish – body art – but like window shoppers – they took it all in but never committed to anything – but change.
Now the change was between them – uncertain how to navigate as individuals – they kept moving together while falling apart.
It was as if their falling apart – kept them working as one – not the same as it had been before – they had really integrated a new understanding of – we are all one.
tbc
The moments between the pain – are the ones to savour – hold on to – then let go of, for impermanence is the only constant. Like the ebb and flow of an ocean, life bore down on them – continuously tearing at the emotional fabric of individual self – forcing each moment to become a choice – a challenge – an opportunity – to grow or devolve.
History was in front of them – experience strictly in the now.
All the yesterdays – compiled – assimilated – not always brought into the moment – not always – a starting point, as the past, somehow forced them into the future.
Still getting high off their own supply, the daily grind kept interfering with momentum. Stasis crept and wailed – often shadowing and preventing real growth. In this directionless void – they replayed and reran – all the hurt and sorrow of their accumulated years.
Fortunately the connection and love for the friendship, helped the coiled spring of terror and dissociation, bind them in mutual survival.
The party scene had now become dark and paranoid – as Ecstasy was replaced with Crystal and long nights turned into long days and days and daze. The Chill Out Room replaced with a cash bar – after the good City of Toronto decided that kids couldn’t have unsupervised underground experiences – in unlicensed and unsanctioned facilities. No more – warehouses – under bridges – abandoned factories or parking garages.
This mainstreaming turned the music – that originally drew them in, once fresh and innovative – into just more of the same – inauthentic overly commodified and safe from the unnamed harm for the youth, that had originally come together seeking connection – fun – spiritual and emotional elevation -a place to call their own.
The upside to losing that which they loved – was a new market of second wave shopping mall ravers, willing to drop their allowance on any drug that was put before them – it was this byproduct of reactionary over regulation that brought more customers and kept the couples hustle going and lucrative enough to keep them high and mighty on the streets.
tbc
tbc
Queen and king of the night. Doing the only thing they knew how to do – getting through. And you know they sampled all the wares – most nights, watching the scene change and the kids get younger – stupider. Gobbling chemicals – eyes like saucers – some past out in the dark corners of basement fire traps.
The scene had gone further underground – into dangerous spaces, the beat kept on.
kick drum – bass
hi-hat – bass
snare on the backbeat
pulsing keys up front
repeat
repeat
repeat
bodies moved
lights flashed
sweat oozed from the walls
just as the M hit
they each jacked a tab
smiles for miles
riding a wave of warmth
radiating from their cores
merging with the sound
until the body became
indiscernible from space
open
open
open
for self
for the other
for everyone in the room
eyes closed
soaring into the beat
primordial
intrinsic
heart filling
receiving
flowing outward
one with everything
one
one
one
bump of K
the top flew off
this is what it feels like
this
is
it
The music stopped – suddenly
Bodies kept moving
confusion
Head spinning, smiling, standing in a corner while a uniform went through his pockets.
“Fuck? What the fuck is going on?”
“Rahwahrahhaw bblurpering”
came the reply .
He was lost in a different sea, bearings way off course.
“Um….Fuck…s…going on??”
Blurred out his mouth
eyes slurring in the scene.
Shivering in a cold sweat – heart pounding – confused – scarred – eyes searching for understanding.
He was led out in handcuffs and floated towards flashing blue lights – cold air chilling his sweat drenched t-shirt – a full spectrum of colours turning the air in front of him into a geometric matrix – which described all of creation.
Laying on the cold vinyl seat – disembodied voices crackling from an unseen radio – he stared up at the interior dome and knew that none of of it really mattered – he had felt something tonight – more real, than every feeling he ever had combined – more fulfilling than any amount of time in his past – he felt alive for the first time – he saw the whole of everything – the whole fucking ride – he saw who he was – saw who he could be – wasn’t sure how to get there – wasn’t sure where he was or what happened to Star.
tbc
Sensation roused him, crusted eyes aching into a dark tunnel of vision. Blurring in a brightness – feeling the coldness of hard surface.
He became aware of being splayed across a concrete floor – uncertain – confused. There were about half a dozen others scattered around the holding cell, lost in their own decrepitude.
The night before slowly resequenced itself to him – he remembered receiving a download of the ultimate understanding of existence – recalled feeling at one with the universe and then the recollection of how the night ended and of how much gear he had on him. The last point – stood out sharpest in his mind.
“Fuck.”
He had a full sheet of A, a baggie of M, several half g vials of K, a ball of Crystal, a fistful of rocks and a wad of damp cash.
“Fuck.”
He laid his head – back on the dirty concrete floor and lost himself in the bare flickering florescent tube hanging directly above him.
An undistinguishable blur of time later. He lifted his head upon hearing – “O’Brien” – “Johnny O’Brien” – shouted impatiently. He struggled up and leaned himself across the room, meeting the voice at the steel bars.
A jangle of keys, a click of a lock, the creak of a door, his laceless shoes clapping his movements, beyond the confines of the bars – followed by the same sounds in reverse. He swayed in the uncertainty and followed the officer down the featureless, narrow hallway.
“Here’s your belongings, sign here,” a bag of familiar items – plasticized and proffered at eye level- a paper on the desk in front of him – a finger pointing to a line.
He scratched blurry black ink across the line.
“This is your Promise To Appear.
You are charged with Trespassing, Resisting Arrest and Possession of Cannabis, Contrary to the Canadian Criminal Code.”
Johnny just smiled, took bag and the paper – turned and walked towards the desolate sun in Regent Park, exiting – 51 Division.
tbc
“Park it……just fucking park it”.
Samantha yelled at Tobias after he circled the block for the fifth time.
“I really don’t want to pay twenty-five bucks to park” he countered.
Attempting to inject a calm perspective into the uneasy situation.
“I get that, but I also want to get out of the fucking car, before the show is over”.
It was fast approaching the 9pm show time at Massey Hall, and Samantha really did not want to not miss the Misfits. She had been waiting over 30 years to see her favourite band. Danzig had finally gotten over himself and Jerry Only had needed a better paycheque than he had been getting without him. So the love of two minute songs and large retirement accounts had won over their former animosity.
The two founding members of the influential 80’s hardcore act had hugged it out at a lawyers office in New Jersey and agreed to cash in on the rising interest in their back catalogue. Being senior citizens now, it felt to the both of them, that it would have to be now or never.
During the 80’s, Tobias had been more Duran Duran and Flock of Seagulls than Samantha’s Dead Kennedys and MDC. He didn’t really get the allure of punk rock, but he had also missed his youthful rebellious period, due to a rare illness that kept him bed ridden through his early teens. When he and Samantha met at the 7-eleven, that used to be at Donlands and Danforth, he didn’t know his Jello from his Cretin. He can now tell by ear whether a Black Flag song was sung by Dez, Keith, Henry or Ron.
Tobias, sensing it would be a long time before he would hear the end of this, reluctantly parked in the old Sears lot on Mutual and paid the $25 with his phone app. Samantha, stretched her legs as she got out of the car threateningly pointing her well worn Docs toward Tobias’s ass, which to great effect hurried him along. She would be pissed if she missed the band playing Bullet, Skulls or Angel Fuck. She definitely loved the Misfits more than she loved Tobias.
Sonja immigrated to Canada from Yugoslavia with her family, in August of 1965, she had just turned fourteen years old. In October the previous year, an unseasonal rainfall caused the Sava River to flood, washing away much of Zagreb and leaving Sonja’s family home, uninhabitable. As both of her parents were academics who worked at the University of Zagreb, lecturing on Eastern European History and Folklore, they were provided with a small space in a cramped, over capacity dormitory on the University campus. The crowded conditions and the pause of their teaching positions due to the flood damage to the lecture halls, pushed the need for the family of six to seek out better living conditions and opportunity. Her parents applied for and were offered positions at the recently expanded York University, in the northwest corner of Toronto. It was during the summer after the flood that the family, which included Sonja’s three younger siblings, arrived in Canada, so that her parents Dragana and Bogdan could begin their new positions when the Fall semester started at York.
Fourteen year old Sonja was devastated to leave her friends and her City of birth behind. The move was hard on her and she had a difficult time adjusting to her new life in Canada. She didn’t like the damp cold climate, nor the xenophobic stupidity of the locals as expressed by the treatment she received from the other kids at her new school. The locals constantly made fun of her last name, which was Dracul. They would sneak up behind her saying, “I vant to suck your blood”. They constantly mimicked her accent and they appeared to have no knowledge of Europe, outside of England, Scotland and Ireland where most of their families had originated from. They usually referred to her as “The Communist” or “The Russian” despite her home country being Yugoslavia. While this infuriated her, she still tried like any other teenager to ignore it and fit into her new environment.
Sonja’s relationship with her parents went downhill after she turned sixteen. It was during her high school years that she started acting more like her new western peers. She started staying out late, sneaking around with boys, skipping school, drinking alcohol, all the usual teenage activities. By 1969, she had discovered pot and started hanging out in Yorkville, which had become the hippie enclave in Toronto, making it the easiest place to score dope in the city.
It wasn’t long before Sonja was dropping acid and eating peyote as often as possible with her new bohemian friends. She even started having sex with the twenty one year old lead singer of a local band called the Mynah Birds, who took on the stage name Rick James. Rick had changed his last name from Johnson to James and was now able to hide in plain sight, singing in a rock band, while dodging military duty in America. This was two decades before he would blow up with his album Street Songs. Their relationship lasted a whole of three weeks.
Sonja loved the vibe in Yorkville. The small art galleries, cute boutique stores filled with the South Asian style clothing the hippies liked to wear and the head shops with all the pot smoking paraphernalia. The highlight of the neighbourhood though was its numerous coffee shops where she could find great music and poetry most times of the day. There were cool places to hang out, where you might find Joni Mitchell or Gordon Lightfoot playing an acoustic set. One time she wandered into a cafe to find Leonard Cohen, reading poems and hitting on all the girls. Despite being thirty-one at the time, Leonard liked the younger suburban girls that hung around the Yorkville scene.
It wasn’t too long before Sonja made friends that were hanging out at Rochdale College, not far away at Huron and Bloor Streets. Rochdale was initially created as a federally funded housing co/op for University of Toronto students, which then morphed itself into an unstructured free College. Initially it was run with intention, purpose and idealism. For a period of time it successfully pursued and seemed to achieve some of the ideals of a generation that were looking to break away from the confines of straight conservative Toronto and specifically the academic stuffiness and snobbery of the U of T. With University students and an assortment of poets, filmmakers, visual artists and musicians steering the direction, the College had the best of the possibilities of the sixties built into it. It was difficult to reach any consensus and as things slowly devolved into entropy and chaos. When the Toronto authorities took a hardline and bounced all the hippies out of Yorkville, under the guise of public safety. Freaks of all kinds, including bikers, criminals and non-idealists descended upon Rochdale from a sort of out of sight, out of mind move, where shit got weird and heavy fast. Sonja had been crashing with her friend Fiona, until their unit got taken over by speed dealers. Slowly the spirit of the sixties, was put to death by nervous straights and could coinciding with the change in drugs from Pot and Acid to Heroin, Cocaine and Speed, creating bummers and general bad vibes. The summer of love had now officially ended.
Growing up in a Socialist country, Sonja understood doing for the collective good. Her original political ideology, a mishmash of Tito, Mao, Marx, Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara and Tommy Douglas, seemed naive and out of place, against the backdrop of Canadian conservatism, capitalistic greed and the every motherfucker for themselves mentally being spewed from the five or six American TV channels that were available at the time. Slowly the dark reality that was now surrounding her, made her question her youthful idealism. The fascistic reaction of the state against the kids hanging in Yorkville really knocked the wind out of her. It seemed like the Peace, Love & Understanding of the era was dying with the cool winds of the season change. As the flower power wilted away, Sonja was under the pressure of her new boyfriend who was the antithesis of a hippie. Tiny was a biker, a big, scary biker and he didn’t like “Commies”. Still Sonja was smitten. She liked to walk with him and watch the crowd part to let them through, her insecurities fed off of this fear based respect, received when they were out together. She felt safe with Tiny. Under his tutelage, she learned about “the free market”. She quickly turned many degrees to the economic right, becoming a Milton Friedman, fangirl in the process, a tiny, Tiny. Tiny’s business model essentially consisted of stepping on his drugs so much that buyers of large fronts were reluctant to pay him because they couldn’t find buyers who wanted his sad shit. Then he would use his size and biker friends to intimidate and get paid. The spoils of the free market, became all the rage. He was Capitalism at its finest and Sonja was madly in love.
During the first couple of years of the new decade the huge housing building had devolved into a sort of flop house-drug den. Regular students moved out and everyday hippies, transients, criminals, people with mental health issues, all carved out space in the common areas, usually rent free. Paranoia was rampant due to a heightened police presence and all the speed being consumed and distributed out of the building. The drug scene that ran the place for a couple of years, was unpredictable, friends were hard to find and greed and self-preservation replaced cooperation and inclusion. Tiny was in and out of jail, mostly for petty crime and drug possession. His size and choice of dress, headband, leather jacket, torn bell bottoms, always brought the heat to him. Sonja became smacked out on skag and would turn tricks out of an apartment on the west wing, to pay his bail and feed her growing drug dependence.
As the Taurus moon of 1975, closed out the month, the RCMP, undercovers that had been squatting on the seventh floor, took down Tiny and his ragtag gang of unaffiliated roughnecks. The Toronto cops carried out the last residents roughly tossing them in paddy wagons and sealing the doors shut. The ideals and the hope for the experimentally open academic environment and cooperative housing, died in the middle of the Me generation.
After the building was cleared out of the rest of the students and assorted freaks the Feds took back the building, as the CMHC hadn’t been receiving its mortgage payments. “The Unknown Student” statue that had sat facing the front of the building was out turned away, towards Bloor St. as Rochdale was turned into Seniors Housing.
Walking away from him was one of the hardest things Sharona had ever done in her life. After so many years of going in circles and doing the same things, bailing him out, giving him money, setting him up-again, worrying about him, hoping for the best. She finally saw that she wasn’t really having an impact. There was no lasting change. He was still alive, yes, but it seemed like she was the only one still hoping for a better outcome. That reservoir of hope was mostly dried up now. She felt like the only one even trying. She could see that he no longer believed in himself, no longer believed in change, even as a possibility, he had completely given up. And she knew where that came from.
There were times years ago, when he wanted help, when he reached out for it even. Only to be left to free fall through the broken system, supports in place one day, gone the next. Another relapse, another bit of jail time, another period of time disappeared into the void. She understood his desire to numb himself, to forget his past, his pain, to stay away from his family of origin. But she was lost by her inability to help facilitate change. She understood that he was prescribed some serious antipsychotic medications, and that they only could do and actually did so much, even if and when he took them regularly. She also knew that the side effects from the meds could cause serious changes, both physical and mental and he told her time and time again that he didn’t like the lack of feelings he was left with, when on them. He said he felt dead, floating through a world of cotton batting, muffled, foggy, forgetful, dragged, hopeless. After all these years of trying, he still had no family doctor, no consistent psychiatrist, no access to actual therapy. It’s like he now felt about the system, how the system had always felt about him – indifferent, failed, incapable, useless.
She died a little with each parting. Watching her son walk away from her, clutching the twenty dollar bill she forced into his hand. Tears would leak from her eyes, her heart would break, each and every time.
He hobbled away from her, on the shaded sidewalk, unbelieving her loyalty, which he mistook for simple stubbornness, just attempts to assuage herself from the early turmoil of his life. She kept finding him, on the city streets, though he told her time and again that he was alright, that he didn’t need any help. Once he was out of her sight, he gave the twenty she forced on him to the next panhandler he saw. Getting rid of her energy, her dogmatic belief that he could still be fixed. He had jumped through more hoops than a circus dog and there still were no answers, no solutions, no changes to how he felt, to how he understood this life to be. Like an endless nightmare, that you can’t will yourself awake from.
At first he went to all the appointments, he tried so hard to help himself, to quiet the feelings of not rightness, his feelings of wrongness, of his reality not matching up with those around him. He never believed the lies they told, he knew intuitively that there would be no happy ending for him. Just an endless living hell, this life, and unfortunately it was the only certainty he knew. He still couldn’t figure out if his inability to accept things and have a job and kids and a family, all the “normal” things he was supposed to aspire to, he still wasn’t sure if his inability to do so was a curse or a blessing. He wasn’t sure and didn’t care, anymore. He just kept ambling alone in a world, cold with casual indifference. That hum you hear on a street corner, in between the sirens and the screaming, that is the sound of indifference, it is no sound, it is unsound, it is all pervasive. The stink of indifferent systems that loose people, that give up, that don’t fund the supports that will help, only the ones that sound good on the evening news. Ten year monetary commitments easily unfulfilled and forgotten after the next election cycle. He felt like a ball in the air, exuberant on its launch, gut punched on its decent.
As the setting sun burnt his iris, he still couldn’t turn away. Everyday he watched the sun leave the city behind, as it faded behind the silhouetted cardboard facade. As it sunk behind the life sized film set, he felt himself free falling through the earth. If he closed his eyes, he would pop out on the other side of the planet, and watch it rise again, against a land both foreign and unknowable. He felt uncertain about the axis from which the earth rotated, he felt that every time he looked around, he was in a different world. The voices he heard constantly provoked his feelings of isolation, constantly confirming all his negative self-beliefs. They explained to him, his place in the universe and confirmed reality as he understood it. While at the same time he knew that they were trying to get him, get what he knew, take away his autonomy, his knowledge, his truth, take away his life. These things he knew, these things were true, these things the voices confirmed.
Looking every which way, he paced the sidewalk in front of the agency several times before he walked up to the slide open take-away window. tThe young looking woman with green dreaded hair, septum piercing and light green eyes asked in a sing-song voice,
“Hi, how can I help you?”
He felt human for the first time all day, walking the alienating streets, talking to himself pulling a converted golf bag cart, with various electronic devices tied to it with bits of coloured wire, he rescued curb side along his travels. He was storing this gear, under a bridge by the river, knowing that eventually he would build a device that would finally take him home.
Smiling at the attention from the striking looking woman, he replied:
“ Can I have a bowl pipe?”
She handed him a glass meth pipe, wrapped in a thin white styrofoam sleeve. He put it to his ear, listening intently before, he frowned and tossed it into a yellow No Frills bag, hanging off the cart which was overflowing with his street haul and asked:
“ Can I have one more”.
She smilingly passed a second pipe, again he put it to his ear, this time releasing a sigh of relief, putting it in the torn front pocket, of his torn and stained, burnt orange puffer jacket.
“This one likes me”, he smiled back at the still engaged worker.
“Did you know, that my brother is looking for me? He wants to help me to work at our father’s company, but I know he is actually working for CSIS and they want to steal all my patents, cause I know how to stop all global suffering, but the government doesn’t want that to happen, as it would put them out of business, which is why they have been giving those vaccines”
He spit out the last word while making air quotes.
“You see every time they jab someone, a little piece of nano-technology goes into their body and the government’s central computer, because they are looking for me, so now every time someone who got the vaccine is near me, it beeps the location and a hit squad shows up trying to kill me”
“ Wow. I’m sorry that is happening to you. Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked earnestly.
He looked into her sincere eyes, the depth of green reminding him of the ocean when he went to Florida as a kid, then with his gaze to the sidewalk below him and sounding a little scared said , “ No. But I have to go, so you won’t get caught in the cross fire – cause they will be here any second now”.
“Okay, well, would you like a bottle of water and a granola bar?” Her hand extended through the window with those items in it. He paused for a moment, looking hard at the items and then back into her eyes. Reaching forward he took the granola bar, leaving the water bottle in her hand.
“That shit will kill you”, he said as he turned and made his way down the street, limping slightly and slyly watching the reflection in the storefront windows, waiting for the agents to appear, again.
At last the voices went quiet and the footsteps faded into silence. Still I waited another thirty minutes. Hearing nothing more I shifted the ceiling tile and lowered my sweating self to the floor, without making a sound. I had entered the building during business hours at around three o’clock on the heels of a tour group, which I joined at the back and pretended to be a part of. I lagged a little behind them and once they turned a corner in the corridor towards the elevators, I made a dash for the stairwell and quickly made it up to the fourth floor, two stairs at a time. Using a large metal storage cabinet of some sort, conveniently located against the wall in the corridor, I climbed up on to it and was able to pull myself into a hiding spot in the ceiling. I wedged myself above the ventilation pipes, ductwork, florescent light fixtures and wiring with only the concrete ceiling above me. I believed that I would be completely out of sight unless someone stood directly below me and looked straight up, perhaps in contemplation of their meagre existence or perhaps where to get their next cup of coffee.
Holding a cold metal inch and a half pipe I swung my body to the ground. When I hit the speckled white tile floor, my knees buckled a bit from impact and inactivity, but otherwise, I was feeling in fine form, excitement and adrenaline rushed through me.. I had planned on getting in here for some time and knew exactly where everything I wanted access to would be found. The intel I had acquired was mostly from reviewing the social media accounts of the company and the employees that worked in this part of the building. It was amazing how you could quickly find a staffing list online and then a little digging would get you access to the selfies and photos taken of their coworkers. I didn’t care about the people in the scenes, it was everything going on in the background that I was looking to discover. Piecing the scene together from a couple of dozen photos, I felt like I had a pretty good handle on the layout and where everything was.
I hadn’t been able to ascertain the security guards movements, but every time I passed the front of the building over the past two weeks I could see the lone guard either sitting at a desk in the lobby, chin to chest doing something on his phone or outside the front doors, pacing and vaping, phone still in hand.
I knew the room I was looking for was 408, as Kathy Johnston, one of the researchers, had posted a selfie from the hallway, in-front of the door. The door being ajar, I could clearly see racks and racks of mycelium and psilocybin, in various stages of growth.
The company had set up shop on the MTU campus. Despite existing to increase the wealth of their shareholders at PSILI, Psychedelic Society Investments Lifestyle Inc.,
the company had somehow managed to access research facilities on a publicly funded university campus. They did this while attempting to get patents on substances created by nature and utilized by indigenous cultures for spiritual exploration over millennia. I was happy to see renewed interest in these substances that had been criminalized and deemed too dangerous to even research, decades ago. I still had strong feelings about the Corp-redelic agenda. I did not trust business to come to the table in the spirt of real interest in the potential for the spiritual, emotional and cultural advancement of humanity, through the ingestion of psychedelic substances. Having injected
Standing in front of the windowless slate grey door to room 408, I tentatively attempted to turn the knob. Locked. In the pictures I did not see a keypad at the side of the door, so I came only expecting a lock and was not disappointed. I brought a couple of tools along to support such a situation. I took off my backpack and pulled out an eight inch metal pry-bar with chipped orange paint, and with a little effort managed to bend back the lock plate, exposing a thin slice of the deadbolt, between the frame and the door. So far this had been a faultlessly silent adventure. Now I needed to take a chance and took out a Makita cordless angle grinder, that I boosted from a Home Depot last Thursday. The disc blade easily fit thru the gap I pried between the door and the frame.
As we were on the fourth floor and I didn’t expect the underpaid security to do any rounds, I wasn’t too concerned about the noise from the grinder. I started it up and when It hit the deadbolt, sparks flew every which way, recalling memories from a 1991 show at the RPM by German industrial band Einsturzande Neubauten. I aimed most of the sparks towards the ground as it slowly cut thru the deadbolt. Because the metal was hard after a little bit the worn blade could no longer reach thru the gap, having been significantly decreased in size by the friction. I had anticipated this and quickly changed out the worn blade for a new disc. A few minutes later the deadbolt split and I slowly opened the door, revealing row upon stacked row of more magic mushrooms than a hippie commune could get through in a decade.
Putting my tools in my backpack and sliding it onto my back, I entered the room and closed the door behind me. Despite the strong industrial fans pulling the odour and moisture from the room, there was still a dank muskiness in the air, which reminded me of the farms, which surrounded the small Southern Ontario town where I grew up. I was overwhelmed by all the varieties of psilocybin I could see. I could identify Liberty Caps, Golden Teachers, Flying Saucers and Penis Envy among the dozen or so genus I could see. Pulling two blue translucent garbage bags from my grey backpack, I walked the rows, filling smaller black bags with handfuls of the ripe, raw fungi, placing those bags into the larger ones until I knew I couldn’t carry anymore. It felt like each bag weighed about twenty-five pounds, as its moist contents dropped and sagged towards the floor.
With the rounded, weighted bags slung over my shoulders and my tools secure in my backpack, I walked funnily to the southeast stairwell and made my way out an exit far from the engrossed guard by the front door. After getting about two blocks away, I hailed a cab and made my way home. Weighing myself on the bathroom scale and then weighing myself holding the bags I was able to determine that I had 58 pounds of raw psychedelic mushrooms. Once dried they would reduce in weight to about 6 pounds. If I sold them off at $100 an oz, I could net $9,600. If I sold them as grams for $10, I could make about $26,000, though it would take a lot longer, and add a lot more risk.
Either way the room was starting to get more colourful, as I yawned. I could feel that familiar tension in my body starting to take over, my head was becoming more open to the inputs that we usually ignore in our day to day reality. Colours became brighter, the room around me became more vibrant, the Bill Laswell Dub coming out of my small computer speakers, took on more vibrancy of sound. I could feel the bass, from deep inside of me. In other words the handful of raw mushrooms I ate 20 minutes ago in the cab was starting to kick in and I felt at home in the universe, once again.
It was just another July night. Hot early summer air, loud traffic moving slowly in both directions on Dundas, between Church and Jarvis Streets. He could hear bits and pieces of pop songs and the occasional hip-hop beat splashing out of open car windows and floating into the thick humid night. It was all bright lights, big city down here. He and his boys were hustlin’, flexing’, trying to make a name for themselves. Trying to make some cash. Trying to be the men they had been led to believe they should be, all the while attempting to fly under the radar of five-o.
He belonged to a small crew, run by his best friend’s older brother, J. J ran things tight, both in the hood and out in the streets. Out of line, late with a call back, late with cash owed and you just might catch a beat down. J would show up randomly, just to check in on them or with the re-up. He would drive up in a white Jeep with gold rims, Pink LED lights shining down from underneath. Not too flash, but just enough to let you think he might be a real player. Though he was just another soldier, living in his mama’s basement in the project. 1980’s paneling on the walls, decent sound system, a framed Kobe jersey on the wall next to a NAS poster, closet full of sneakers. No diploma in a frame, no assets, the car on a high interest cash lease. Twenty-five, no prospects, other than his gang affiliation.
The boys in the crew thought J was a god, they looked up to him, wanted to be like him. Saw the ride, the girls, the folded pinks and browns. Saw the respect those things gave him in the urban blocks they all lived on. While the City let the bricks and mortar crumble, they plied the old neighbourhood trade. Periodic sweeps occurred. The Babylon system sending in their uniforms every now and then to remind everyone who was really in charge. The crew knew the drill and innocently dribbled balls on the worn out courts watching as a couple OG’s running a trap house got paddy wagoned away. Laughing at 51 division as they tried to look hard, out of place, no body cared, fucking pigs.
Everyone up the line was just trying to get a piece for themselves, get a little ahead, dreamt of getting out. This fucking town, this fucking country, it did all it could to keep people like him down. Wrong colour, wrong address, just wrong, tough fucking luck. His anger somehow kept in check, most days. His bitterness, a well worn groove on the handle of the glock he kept in his waist pack. They sold what was in demand, these days fentanyl had replaced crack, so that’s what they slung. He didn’t care if these dumb street fucks died. Worst fucking dope ever. Each week a new batch. Each batch a new colour and no different than a fresh bullet in the chamber. Toronto street roulette. One puff of smoke or mainline and your life could be over, gone, exhaled. If you think the dealers care, you’re living in a fantasy, living like the fucking Cosby show, a different world all together. No not that Different World. Ain’t no one care if you junkies die. Not the cops, not the mayor, not the other street life. In this life, it’s for life, which is usually way too short.
He knows all that, as he zips his glock in a designer shoulder bag and hops on the electric scooter that will keep him moving all day. From hood to customers, to re-up, to bag man, to nothing but another job that no one really wants, though some still think they do. There is always another fool, waiting in the wing. It might seem like not working and the paper might seem good today, but tomorrow there ain’t no unemployment benefits, no sick days, no security, nothin’ but looking over his shoulder, holding a few small bags of dope, money owed up the line, a gun. Each of which could get him killed or put away for a several years, federal time. Die trying, try not dying.
He didn’t know another way of life. The housing he came up in promised no future, but this. By nine years old he was running for the bigger boys. Doing errands, watching for cops. Getting paid in dope. They wanted to see if he was an entrepreneur and flip it on his own or if he was just another joke, who smoked it, nodded out, eventually OD’d. He flipped it and slowly built the trust of the gang and moved up to his current crew, who were now all of nineteen, twenty years old.
He stood on the dirty dark sidewalk, looking up at the newly built condos. Mesmerized momentarily by the steel and glass, lights shining out into the unglamorous streets below. He heard the car stop, the door slam, he turned to look, saw a blur of movement, heard the bottle smash, down on his ass, head bleeding,. All he could smell was the acrid aroma of vodka, his skull numb, eyes blurred by the viscous blood pooling in his sockets.
“What the fuck, are you doin’, cuz?”
Was all he got out before being surrounded by four guys that looked just like him, size, age, skin colour, black bandannas obscuring their faces.
“You tell J, we own this fucking street now. Motherfucker”.
Spit the one who hit him with the almost empty twenty-sixer of Grey Goose, smashed glass scattered on the broken sidewalk, around him. As what seemed like a parting afterthought, three of them then laid a few boots to his now curled and protected torso. As they walked back towards their ride, one flashed a glock in his waistband and shot him three times with his hand, fingers pointed, thumb half-raised.
“Your dead”, he laughed, as they got back in the haphazardly parked matte black Benz.
Still alive, still in one piece, he got up off the ground and wiped the blood from his face with the front of his now stained t-shirt. He limped to his scooter, leaning against the buildings closed storefront.
Now that he felt safe, he spit blood onto the street and laughed.
“Stupid fuckers, didn’t even take my shit”. Laughing as he checked his pockets and still had a fat roll of twenties, a bag full of little dope bags and his gun. He knew J would be out for blood now, but knew he was good, nothing lost, means nothing owed.
The train squealed to a stop at the midtown subway station. Maxine and Johnathon used the distraction of noise and the bustle of passengers exchanging train interior for platform and platform for train interior, to go over the railing blocking the narrow walkway at the end of the station. The walkway led into the subway tunnel, the direction the train had just arrived from. They skittered over the rusting steel railing leaving the brightly lit platform behind them, as they descended into the catacomb like darkness of the tunnel.
They moved quickly but carefully, avoiding the storied dangers of the third rail. Breathless, hopping over stagnant puddles of pooled water, avoiding the scurrying rats and the assorted detritus of urban life which had been sucked into the tunnel by the undulations of stopping trains. They could feel a lifelike electricity in the air as they made their way deeper into the damp enveloping blackness, it made the hair on their arms stand erect. Ears listening expectantly, they heard the train now pulling away in the opposite direction they furtively moved, continuing its southbound trajectory. The unnerving sound of metal rubbing against metal, slowly faded the further the train got away from the station. As the echoing of the squeaking wheels became distant, a surprising quietude washed over the dank surroundings. A peacefulness which made it feel as if they existed alone in a manmade subterranean cave, like blind mole rats running feral in an abandoned world.
As their eyes adjusted to the lack of light, they sought out an alcove they were familiar with from past excursions. They knew it was about sixty feet from the tunnel opening and off to the left side of the southbound tracks. Finding it, they knew themselves to now be safely out of the way of the next oncoming train, scheduled to arrive in about five minutes time. Though the Toronto subway schedule should only be treated as estimated time, it usually skewed wildly far from actual. In the darkness, with the glow from a dim emergency safety light, ten feet away, they could just make out a raised platform off to the side of the tracks. Johnathon being the taller of the two, was able to clamber up on his own, providing his hand to assist in helping Maxine up, once he was safely settled. After they were both up on the six foot by six foot wooden scaffold like dais, they caught their breath and started to shed the many layers of clothing they were wearing. All their jackets, snow pants, jeans, hoodies, T-shirts, laid around them like the comfortable, insides of a Bedouin tent. The cool air around them was moving, as it subtly whispered through the tunnel. They experienced a stillness, a calmness, a tranquility, one wouldn’t expect in the subway system. They felt alive together in their, now comfortable oasis, 50 metres beneath the mid-town, midday, late winter hustle, happening at street level.
To Max and John this winter had been long and had felt endless. The City had broken several one hundred year old weather records. They were homeless and living precariously since their Unemployment Insurance (EI) ran out and they had to go on Welfare (OW). This left them with barely enough money for food, hygiene items and clothing replacements, they didn’t qualify for a housing allowance. Mostly they got by on a little extra cash by panhandling for change. Johnathon could no longer busk on the street, in Kensington Market. His guitar had been trashed months ago, by the City.
The couple had been living in a tent, surrounded by discarded wooden pallets, under the Gardiner Expressway at Bay Street, back in October. The City had been bent on ridding commuters of the unsightly view of the encampment they were part of. Riot Police had violently cleared out the area early one morning, making multiple arrests. Johnathon had spent four nights at Max’s bedside in St. Mikes hospital. She had IV tubes putting fluids and antibiotics into her, a catheter flushing away her waste. The result of an abscess on her left arm combined with tetanus which happened when she was poked by a rusty wire from a metal fence. She had been out scrounging for empty beer cans to buy breakfast, at dawn one morning a week prior, when it happened. It’s very difficult to prevent infection when homeless and after a week the unhealed wound, was very angry, sore and appeared to be spreading up her arm. At 10 am the day she was discharged from hospital, they arrived back at their “home” to the sight of a line of yellow clad, bicycle cops, blocking off the area and a frontend loader dumping all their belongings, into the back of a dump truck. They lost everything they owned, winter clothes, sleeping bags, toiletries, guitar, tent, an album of family photos, books, letters, Max’s journal and Johnathon’s book of songs he had written. They watched it all get hauled away, feeling sick to their stomachs. It left them uncertain and afraid for their next night, homeless without any belongings. Some Streets to Homes workers offered them a shelter referral. Most places in the shelter system separated couples and neither of them felt safe in those dormitories without each other. All the spaces for couples were full. This left them no alternative than the streets, as they were economically locked out of the rental housing market and faced the near impossibility of finding employment without having a fixed address.
They had wandered, aimless that first night. At one point slipping into a subway station and riding a train from end to end, east to west, west to east, until service ended and the train parked itself for the night. They found themselves forced to exit the last train by a surly Toronto Transit employee in a suburb that they knew nothing about, in the East end of the city. That night as the employee stopped watching them exit to answer his cell phone, they slipped into the tunnel and sought out a safe place to crash. It was cold and damp and the occasional train being shuttled by disturbed their sleep, but they felt safe. Safe from predators, safe from cops, safe from transit workers, safe together.
Over the next few months, they explored the tunnels. Wearing dark clothing, always mindful of Transit Cops, TTC maintenance workers and the prying judgemental eyes of the general public. They found several spots that they could use for a few nights and occasionally met other tunnel dwellers that offered valuable information from a more experienced perspective. They got caught attempting to enter the tunnel at a couple of stations, threatened with fines but gratefully let off with only a warning each time, as they were walked to street level exits. They would X that station off their mental transit maps, for the time being. They were always careful to clean up after themselves. They would take any empty water bottles and food containers out with them. They took to defecating in grocery store plastic bags to easily rid the environment of evidence that they had been making a “home” in the underground. They would dump all the evidence in a public trash container on their way out of the station each day.
Today though, it was the middle of the day and they were looking for a place to feel human. To connect as a couple away from the dirty, harsh city streets. A little flesh touching flesh, arms around each other, physical contact, sex. They wanted each other, they needed each other, they missed the intimacy they used to have in a warm bed, under clean sheets, before their lives went sideways.
Johnathon lost his job a couple of months back. He had been with the same company for eight years. He was trained and worked as a tool and die maker, manufacturing parts for school buses. When the shop he worked for got outbid for a contract renewal by a company in Mexico, he became redundant and with only the Unemployment benefits, he had paid into, he was barely able to cover the rent. Then Maxine’s hours got cut as her employer figured out that his company didn’t have to pay benefits to part-time staff. So now between them they could pay the rent but nothing else. After a couple of months they got behind on the rent and got evicted from their rental housing. There was no safety net for them, their income no longer covered the rent, so there was no way to catch back up. Maxine had taken on a second part-time job, but it barely helped with food. Provincial rental subsidies only went to those who were already homeless. There was no program to help keep them housed. They both looked for work but couldn’t find anything that paid more than minimum wage. Minimum wage did not pay rent in what had become Canada’s most expensive city.
Today, a slushy early March day they were hoping to put reality on hold for an hour or so. Having stripped down to underwear they kissed slowly, holding on to one another, passion rising like the steam coming off their exposed body parts. Their kisses becoming harder, their tongues more probing, the body grasping firmer. The space between them disappeared.
The level of the platform they were on was about five feet above the rails, the same level as the bottom of the subway window. They were off to the side after a small blind. This meant the subway conductor wouldn’t see them from his front window seat as he readily approached the station. The lack of light would prevent the train passengers from seeing them in the darkness which hugged them, like a black blanket. Because the subway cars are lit on the inside, Max and John could see very clearly into them.
After several trains has passed and the sexual tension had built up between them. Maxine pulled her panties down to her thighs and got on all fours facing towards the southbound train tracks. Johnathon pulled out his swollen cock and firmly yet, slowly entered her warm pussy from behind. Holding her hips tightly with his strong hands, he started gently thrusting himself in and out of her. Their hunger for each other was rising as they listened for another approaching train. He actively picked up his pace as they started to hear the distant rumble of a train approaching. As it got closer and louder he got faster, louder, faster, louder, louder, faster, louder, faster, faster, louder, faster, louder, louder, louder, louder. At the first flash of light from the passing train they both reached orgasm. As the interior light of the lit up windows flashed past, it made them squint from the sudden brightness and the juxtaposed scene of Johnathon still hard and inside Maxine while the passengers, in perfect view to them, stood fully dressed, oblivious and staring into the void, looking directly at them in their passionate act, without actually seeing them. They screamed themselves hoarse, gasping for breath and collapsing onto the platform. The sound merging with the squealing of the slowing train, once the conductor’s car entered the station and the last windowed passengers, passed them by.
They felt unified in the shared experience, both satiated in the way only sexual communion can achieve. Hearts beating hard in their chests. Two sets of lungs panting for air. After the train fully stopped in the nearby station they lay on their backs in the quieter darkness, Max’s head on John’s chest, his left arm draped around her shoulder, his hand rising and falling with the up and down movement of her breasts. The two of them now lost in the quiet revery of the moment. Happy to have each other, happy to have found a way to share this time together. Happy.
They had a joke between them about these moments underground. As neither of them had ever been on a plane and were doubtful they ever would, the idea of joining the Mile High Club, seemed very unlikely. So they coined themselves members of the Quarter Mile Underground Club and kept their membership as active as they could, given their current circumstances.
James lay on the ground, his lips blue, skin ashen, not breathing. He appeared peaceful, serene, surrounded by an island of his belongings, a black Nike backpack, 2 cheap on the verge of tearing Dollarama plastic disposable bags and a couple of green reusable grocery bags made from recycled plastic bottles and a glass bowl pipe laying near his right hand, fogged with the burnt residue of recent use.
Jody had just gotten off a 12 hour, 8pm to 8am shift, working security in a Downtown office building that from the best of her estimation didn’t actually need overnight guarding. In her head she was making calculations about the $180 she had just earned and to which pile of debt, it would end up being applied to. Turning the corner at the Tim Hortons she saw James laying there.
Jody and James had spoken on a couple occasions as she always stopped into the coffee shop for an extra large, no sugar, 1 milk, on her way to the empty building she was assigned to sit and struggle to stay awake in. The coffee cost $2.19 plus tax which added up to $2.47 rounded to $2.50, ever since Canada eliminated the penny back in 2013. Jody always kept a $1 and a $2 coin in her pocket, so that she could use them to purchase her coffee. James was often sitting outside the front door entrance to the Tim’s and Jody would always give him the 2 quarters she received as change, on her way out. On days when he wasn’t outside Jody’s anxiety would kick in and she would become worried by having to hang on to the 50 cents, so much so that she would often leave it on the bench in the bus shelter, 10 feet away, figuring that as she had seen James staying dry in there during a few rain storms, that maybe it would get to him that way.
Jody had always found Toronto, the biggest city in Canada to actually have a weird small town vibe going on, as despite its large population and ever changing landscape, you would often run into people you knew from other parts of the city or that you met in completely different places. Talking to James, she had discovered that they were both from Timmins and even went to the same high school, though a decade apart. So there he lay to the east of the bus shelter, looking like a Friday night drunk asleep on a Timmins snowbank. Appearing like a ghost of his normal self.
Jody’s security training kicked in as she flung off her work issued backpack and pulled out the Naloxone kit she was issued, in case of an overdose on the corporate property. She quickly unzipped the kit and pulled the nasal opioid reversal drug out of its sealed plastic packaging, tossed the packaging to the ground and stuck the tapered shaft into his left nostril, pushed the red plunger, releasing it into his mucus membrane, where it would quickly cross the blood brain barrier to sit on his opioid receptors. She called out to a passing woman of about 25, who was looking over as she casually strolling past the scene. Jody yelled for her to call 911, to which the woman looked away and kept on walking. “Fucking Cunt”, Jody thought as a man of about 60 walked over with his phone to his ear saying that he was calling 911.
Jody ripped open James’s worn and torn winter coat and started to give him chest compressions, exactly as she had been trained to do. She could feel James sternum give way to her force and heard a muffled cracking sound. With sweat pouring from her forehead, her arms and shoulders in pain she continued pumping blood and oxygen through James body. All her effort seemed to be paying off as James started to make small movements and then suddenly opened his eyes and attempted to raise his head.
Jody stopped pumping James chest and sat back on her haunches feeling both exhausted and elated at the same time. After a few minutes, an ambulance arrived. She told them about her intervention and quickly drifted into the background of sidewalk gawkers and curious people passing by.
It had been a long day. Actually it had been a long day and night and day, but with enough coke in him, he never really tracked time or felt tired. He had stopped into Mom’s Deli on Parliament Street for a quick pint to get his head straight. Mom’s was a dirty floored watering hole masquerading as a deli and the pint was 12 ounces, pretending to be 16. He didn’t care though, he was used to things not being quite as advertised. William had spent a lot of time, running a lot of different scams in Cabbagetown over the years and when he was in the neighbourhood he always stopped in to Mom’s to see if his old friend George was behind the broken down counter, slinging make believe glasses of beer. Today he wasn’t there though, only George Senior and George Junior. He often wondered why, since the Greeks invented language, why did they kept repeating the same names. But as with a lot of the coked up thoughts that entered his head, he didn’t really give it too much thought. He paid for the two $5.50 beers by dropping a $20 on the counter and asking the Georges to let George know that William, “Says Hi”.
He then walked north on Parliament, dodging a couple having a full throated fight in the middle of the sidewalk and at least three motherfuckers not looking where they are going, as their faces were buried in their phones. He also had to dodge the same amount of oversized folks driving four wheeled scooters down the middle of the sidewalk. He crossed at the lights at Carlton and continued up Parliament. He stopped into the Growers Shoppe, one of the many, too many weed shops in the small neighbourhood. He grabbed a couple of 1 gram Sativa pre-rolls for the walk and a half-quarter of the Grapefruit Hybrid by a grower in Smith Falls, for when he got home later tonight. Pocketing the weed, after putting one of the pre-rolls behind his ear he exited the shop and once out the door turned left to continue in the direction he had been going and then turned left again on to Aberdeen, which was a quaint narrow one way street that ended at Ontario St, which was his destination. Once clear of the bustle on Parliament he pulled the joint from behind his ear, lit it with his mini-torch and Bogarted it until the quiet street ended at an even quieter one. To his left he could see his destination.
Guy and Martan, had become full patch members of The Flaming Skulls, (Crânes Enflammés) in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil, back in the late 1990’s. Over time they had made many enemies in the larger Montreal underworld, but through a bit of luck, a heavy hand and good business acumen they had managed to launder and bank a good pile of cash while staying alive, a difficult task during the 90’s biker wars in Quebec. Though after a couple of near misses, they were smart enough to know that they had better split town for good. They didn’t have enough to retire to the islands so they invested in a little building that was a former church, Tabarnak!, and figured that it would be a good low key place to ply their trade from. Their trade being, whatever they could get away with while earning money. In the meantime they would wait to cash out the real estate in the popular east side neighbourhood. In order to be a little more discrete in Toronto they sold their Harleys and bought matching 2021 Cameros before leaving Montreal.
William stopped just before the stop sign at Ontario, tossed the filtered roach from his joint and looked across the street and down the block. He liked to be early and get his bearings before a meet. He saw there were two yellow bricked Victorian houses across the street, then a fair sized parkette with an apartment building behind it, then the little church where he was to meet the former bikers. He found a discrete spot in the deserted parkette and waited for the sun to go down, watching for anyone coming or going at the former Christian Church. As darkness set in he was feeling a bit tired, but thoughts of his plan and periodic bumps from an ample baggie of blow, kept him on point.
Hunched over an antique oak desk, scuffed and scarred from many years of use, Guy was watching the screen that monitored the area around the church. He saw the hooded figure fade into the back of the park next door and figured it was either the guy they were waiting for or his back up. Martan, had just come in the back door from Neutral Lane and hadn’t seen or been seen by the person watching the building. Guy and Martan had done so much together over the years that they thought similar ways, like an old married couple, which was what their bickering looked like to outsiders. As they watched the monitor they wondered what his play would be.
As night creeped in, the chill in the air, got into his bones. While the temperature had started to rise a bit as the city braced itself for a threatened snow storm, it still was a January night. He shuffled his feet and put up the hood of his long parka. In five minutes it would be eight o’clock and that was the arranged time. They had been connected through mutual business acquaintances and had spoken over an encrypted video software a couple of times, arranging for tonight’s meeting. At 7:59 William had one last nostril full of coke, stomped his large feet and moved slowly to the front door of the building, feeling confident and a sense of excitement that his plan would come to fruition and he would be able to take an extended vacation from the cold gritty city streets.
At exactly 8 o’clock, Martan responded to the ringing of the doorbell. William entered and in one swift motion unzipped his parka and pulled back his fur lined hood. He then looked the Frenchman in the eye, lifted the bottom of his lime green hoodie, showing the butt of his nine millimetre automatic. Martan reached over and pulled the piece out of William’s waist band popped out the magazine released the round in the chamber, which skittered across the wood floor like a cockroach when the lights are turned on. He then slid the Nine back into the waist band of man standing in front of him.
Playing with the magazine like a lighter in the hand of a smoker waiting for an intermission at a boring play, Martan walked William deeper into the building, up a short set of stairs to the back office where Guy was sitting behind the oversized desk. Open and sitting in the middle of the desk was a Cohiba Cigar box with a cellophane wrapped cube of compressed white powder. In the centre of the brick an FS was embossed on its surface.
Guy motioned to the box and said, “ There’s your Kilo, you got the 100?”
The arrangement was that William would bring his phone and once satisfied with the product he would transfer the equivalent of $100,000 Canadian in Bitcoin from his electronic wallet to theirs. A simple transaction that could be confirmed immediately, didn’t require a briefcase full of cash or having to even count the cash. They would agree on the exchange rate at the meeting and then William would initiate the transfer. At the current rate he would transfer close to 2 Bitcoins. Once the digital currency was in the former bikers’ Bitcoin wallet, William would walk out with a kilo of pure fentanyl. If mixed up and sold right, he could easily and quickly turn it into half a million dollars, which would still leave the next level of dealers able to make good profits themselves.
William motioned that he was reaching into his back pocket for his phone. Guy nodded and William slowly reached but then quickly pulled out a 16 inch hunting knife from a hidden sheath that ran down the back inside of his pant leg, he leaned forward and with all his might aimed his swinging arm towards Guy’s veiny tribal tattooed neck. William had grown up in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan and had learned how to hunt and survive in the woods by his Métis uncle, Francois. He knew how to stop a charging moose or bear with nothing but a buck knife. Guy however was fast from years of playing racket ball while doing drug deals with members of the Montreal Mafia and very quickly leaned back just as the sharp metal blade of the knife flashed from left to right making the smallest of scratches on the tip of his Adam’s apple. Martan who had been a semi-pro frisbee golf player before getting sidetracked by a blown out knee and dropping out of Collège Ellis – Campus in Longueuil, whipped the Nine’s magazine he was still playing with and hit William in the side of the head, right in his temple. A small drop of blood appeared as William’s knees buckled, his eyes went wide, vacant and distant and as he fell, to his left, piss stained his light blue jeans a darker shade at the crotch and down his right pant leg.
Guy now standing yelled, “You stupid fucking tête carré, come into my place and fuck around, mon calisse!”
Martan walked over and putting two fingers on the fallen man’s jugular said, “ Fucker’ still alive, should I finish him?”
Guy replied, “Put him in the trunk of your car, let’s just get rid of him this piece of merde”.
Martan brought his Camero around the back of the building and they carried the limp but breathing body down the stairs and tossed him into the trunk.
Putting on their seat belts and following all the traffic laws, they drove west past Sherbourne, past Jarvis, turning left onto Mutual St. Martan backed the car up to the loading dock of a now abandoned distribution centre. They popped the trunk, each grabbed a different end of the still breathing man and tossed him over the railing onto the corrugated rusted metal surface. As his back landed, they heard a loud smack of the large man’s head hitting the metal base. Turning and looking back as he approached the passenger door of the car, Guy could see a small pool of crimson forming around the man’s head.
As they drove away, thick flakes of snow fluttered to the ground in the headlights of the matte black muscle car. That certainly hadn’t gone as planned, they both thought in the silence of a red light at Gerrard and Jarvis, as they watched a tall blond trans woman in a short leather skirt crossing in front of the stopped car. As the light turned green and Martan accelerated he punched the dashboard in frustration of the 50K in profit they were missing out on. They drove back to the former church in the hope that it wasn’t a mistake coming to this fucking English city, as they watched it get blanketed in what was starting to look like a Montreal snowstorm.
Donna ran into the bathroom screaming, “You fucking Bitch, who the fuck do you think you are” and smacked the woman sitting on the toilet across the face.
Gwen, was shaking, a turd still half inside of her and half outside of her as she jumped up in an attempt to flee from the unexpected intrusion. There was no exit with the other woman in front of her. In a movement that defied reason, but was her only option, she swung her torso towards the bathtub and tripped as her pants were tangling her legs. The sound of her face hitting the porcelain, made Donna grimace but did nothing to curb her appetite for violence or the anger that was coursing through her.
Holsten point the converter towards the TV while pressing the volume up button to drown out the yelling from the bathroom. In the darkness of the room, he was bathed in the flickering light of the badly acted action movie bouncing into the din from the large flatscreen attached to the wall opposite where he slumped low on the beige couch. He was wearing boxer shorts and a torn stained sleeveless Metallica, Master of Puppets t-shirt. He knew better than to get involved in “woman business” and simply reached to the side table for his half empty can of warm Labatt Blue, while dropping his cigarette butt, burnt to the filter into the empty can of Blue beside the one he was drinking from.
“You stupid fucking twat, thinking you can blow my man for a couple of rocks”, Donna hissed as she reached forward and grabbed a handful of the crying woman’s hair.
Gwen went limp, tears streaking from her eyes overly caked with mascara , running like an oil spill down her ruddy cheeks. She had managed to kick off her pants. She wasn’t wearing any underwear, hadn’t in several years due to a cyst near her anus that she was far too afraid to go to the doctor to find out what it was all about. Her white crop top, with a large CK, in black ink in the centre of her chest was the only thing now covering her emaciated body.
Donna was pulling the unresisting woman out of the tub, her greasy hair, rope like in Donna’s hand, the younger woman’s feet flipping against the slippery porcelain like a cartoon character trying to get a grip on a sheet of ice.
Donna was a hard woman, 15 years on the pipe, she finally got clean of it by switching to IV meth use. She didn’t give a shit about too many people, including the fat fuck in the other room, though he did have his uses, the occasional fuck with his beer can sized cock and he was at least good to make the rent, by the first of every month. She was so tired of being disrespected by these street creatures that showed up when she was out boosting clothes and jewelry from the Eaton Centre, so that she could pay for her need for speed. Holsten sat around all day waiting for the trash to show up to buy 10 pieces. He then put most of the profits and then some in a glass stem and toked until he was just barely even, the stupid fuck. All these street bitches knew Donna was with him, but that never stopped them from knocking on the door and pointing their pale toothless cocksuckers at him and since he was a man, she really didn’t expect much different from him anyways.
As she pulled the cowering girl out of the tub, she sort of laughed and muttered to herself, but at the same time started feeling bad for her. Not necessarily enough to stop abusing her but enough to feel for her a little bit. She too had done some terrible things over the years for drugs, for money, for a place to crash, she had been in her shoes, she had been naked and desperate, hated, beaten, abused in all sorts of ways.
Donna let go of the girl’s hair and slumped down against the closed bathroom door. She was exhausted from a 72 hour run and the blood dripping from Gwen’s nose made her want to puke.
“Put your pants on and go”, she said in a low defeated voice, almost a whisper, almost a plea, as she lowered her head and started to weep. Big throbbing sobs tore through her no longer youthful body, ravaged by so many years of every kind of abuse. She hated herself so much, she hated being stuck in this god forsaken city, knowing these horrible people, living with the fucking cowardly man in the next room.
Gwen wasn’t sure what to do after wiping both her ass and her face and then pulling up her pants, as Donna was blocking the only exit. She asked in a soft voice, “you okay, hon?”. Donna lost for a moment in her grief, looked up at the now dressed girl and didn’t know what to say. She tilted her head and while fishing her right hand in her purse that lay open on the floor asked, “you wanna smoke a joint”. Gwen nodded and slid her back down the wall, tucking her feet towards her ass, knees in the air and also exhausted she rested the side of her face against her left leg and looking at the older woman said “I’m Gwen, what’s your name?”
The night was warm for the beginning of March and the crew were dressed head to toe in black clothing, hoods up, no visible logos and black cloth masks covering their faces. They all had black oversized backpacks slung over themselves, bulging at their seems, packed with the tools of their creativity. They snuck around on the east side of the yard, knowing that there was an imperceptible hole in the fence. Malik had cased the perimeter on three different nights last week. Each time making a couple of snips in the fence and covering it up by bending some wire he brought along, so that it would appear that nothing was amiss. He had done these stealth forays after midnight and made note of where the cameras were, as well as the timing of the security patrols. Having grown up dirt poor in Darfur in western Sudan, Malik had learned how to survive by occasionally raiding government and NGO storage facilities to feed both his family and his friends while earning a little on the side to buy some extras on the black market. When he was eleven his family immigrated to Canada as refugees, to escape the ongoing genocide.
Here in Toronto, he no longer needed to break into warehouses in order to survive, but the skills he honed doing so were paying off now, providing him with some serious street cred and props from the crew that he now ran with. They were known as the East End Elevators, EEE or simply E3, which was the most common tag they used. The name was an inside joke as they had all met, coming of age in a decaying Toronto Community Housing building in Scarborough, known locally by its address, 400 McCowan Rd., or simply 400. One of the things they got up to and bonded over was climbing through the trapdoor of an elevator and riding on top of it for hours, often dangerously jumping from one car going up to another car going down, getting greasy from the cables and having a very dangerous blast. The reason they started tagging was simply because they would steal black spray paint from a nearby hardware store in order to black out the elevator cameras and started doing little tags around the building.
Now that they were in their late teens, they had shifted from elevator riding to being an All City Graffiti Crew and left their tag from Neilson Rd in Scarborough to Dixon Rd. in Etobicoke. They had both friendly and hostile rivalries with other Crews across the city. Some of which could get them beaten or killed, if they fucked around tagging in the wrong neighbourhood. In order to show their prowess and get the props they felt they deserved, they needed to do something epic. So they decided to break into a TTC subway yard and do a couple of throw ups on the trains in the layup.
At 1am, they gathered in a snow covered but melting parkette on the north end of the yard. Four of them had made it out, tonight. Nina, who tagged as 9a was the only female on the crew, she continuously tagged twice as much as the guys because it was really difficult to get any props in a scene dominated by boys. She held her own painting and was never found without her skateboard, a few cans of premium paint and a pride worthy selection of clean caps. She came down on the blue night bus with 2tone, who listened to ska and only used black and white paint, but with it he could make the most incredible Wildstyle pieces that tripped out even old skool, local artists like Spud, Poser and REN. Also along for tonight’s raid were Sidecar (Scar) and Forehead (FRHD), both quality writers and crazy enough to seek out dangerous heaven spots on the regular and they were dying to go tonight and rep the crew. The rest of the crew couldn’t make it, Paycheck had to be at work tomorrow morning, JohnnyJohnny (jJ) was stuck at home with his two year old son because his girlfriend July had finally gotten into rehab and Books got picked up for racking Montana Gold cans from the Curry’s Art Store on Queen Street West a couple of days ago. So the crew was only four strong, tonight.
After smoking a blunt in the Parkette, the four of them made their way over to where Malik had set up their fence entrance and took turns sliding through the chain link. Once they were on the inside Mal did a quick seal of the fence using extra wire he brought, so they could easily bust through if needing to make a hasty exit, but if a guard walked by they most likely wouldn’t notice that anything was amiss.
The plan was to pick a couple of midsections of a few trains and bomb them with quality pieces, hoping that they would roll through a few stations before getting noticed, though the likelihood of them getting that far was slim. Toronto did not like graffiti on their subway card and would pull a train out of service if any pieces were seen. This made it kind of pointless to bomb trains as the risk of getting caught was high and the duration of the pieces survival was short. That said, social media and cell phones are two tools that now made it worthwhile, because even if no one saw the live piece, it would still be available indefinitely online and would show the world E3’s supremacy in the Toronto graffiti scene.
It was decided that two of the crew would work on the throw ups while the other two acted as look outs. Then they would switch off until they ran out of paint, got chased off or the sun came up, whichever came first.
Malik and Nina got right to work. They both laid down outlines across the entire length of a car, sweeping letters and the symbols they had been painting for years, pot leafs, crowns, lightning bolts, AK47’s and of course the CN tower and shadows above water that represented the Scarborough bluffs. After about an hour they traded off giving Forehead and Sidecar an opportunity to get their names and symbols in the mix, while filling out what was already laid down.
At about 4 am Nina saw some movement down the track and made a low pitch slapping sound that they were all familiar with as it was used by the crew when they used to sling dime bags of weed at the front of 400. The building itself was only 10 stories high but it was shaped like a squared off lightning bolt that did 90 degree turns in the middle, where the elevators were, making like two buildings connected at that midpoint. It sat at the end of a really long U shaped driveway. Cars would pull into the drive way stop at the end by the building, a runner would ask what they wanted and leave, then two more would approach, the first one taking the cash and the second one dropping the desired amount of dime bags in the car occupant’s hand. With the driveway so long, it was easy to see if “Babylon” was coming. The first to spot them would make this particular sound by slapping their thigh with a cupped hand. It took a bit of practice to get it right and loud enough, but once you had it down, it was simple and the sound it made wasn’t replicated by anything else, though it also didn’t sound out of place in most environments.
Once Nina made the sound, she ducked under a train car and very quickly the other three did too. In the silence they could hear a guard wandering through the yard, having a phone argument with his girlfriend or wife.
“Fuck you Jackie, I had to take this shift to pay for the damage you did to the car”. He huffed into the phone. “I told you you had too many glasses of Rose, you’re fuckin’ lucky the cops didn’t give you a breathalyzer, last time I let you drive my fuckin’ Camero”.
He then turned on his heels and headed back to the guard house.
Once they heard the creak of the cold metal door open and close, they all crawled out from under the trains and spent another 45 minutes finishing up. It was now about 6:30 in the morning, the day shift would start showing up at the yard in half an hour or so and the sun was starting to creep out. After repacking their backpacks they pulled out their phones and started taking pictures and walking around videoing their masterpieces. In total they had painted six cars over four different trains, leaving the windows free of paint, so Byatt to not be too obvious. hoping that at least a couple of cars would make it out into public before the day was done.
The four of them headed out through the fence the same way they came in, sharing a couple thick grape flavoured blunts. Tired, hands covered in paint and jubilant that they had pulled this off without having to run from either guards or cops. They walked north on Greenwood but as they approached Danforth Avenue they saw a couple of guys they recognized from the KPD (Konstantly Painting Danforth) crew. These guys were tough and they had been having beef with them for a few years. If they tagged an E3 anywhere between if Park and Broadview, it would only take a couple of days before it was X’d out (dissed) and had KPD written above it. These guys guarded their turf with both spray cans and fists. Turning on to Danforth the crew heard, “Motherfuckers we’re gonna kill you” accompanied by the sound of feet hitting pavement. The four of them bolted across Danforth and ran with all their might along the avenue making a sharp left at Lindsmore. Fifty feet away was the entrance to the subway, they ran through the open doors, Nina kicked the wooden wedge as she ran by and the heavy door closed as they vaulted the turnstiles and slid down the handrail of the escalator, dodging left and down another set of stairs. They could hear a train pulling into the station and prayed it was the Eastbound one.
As the Eastbound train pulled in they continued to run to the far end of the platform, the doors opened and a few people got off while the ones waiting got on. They made it to the last car. Forehead was in front and held the closing door for the other three, who shouldered themselves in. They could see the two KPD guys just hitting the platform as the train started to pull out of the station. Eight middle fingers were against the train window as it passed the red puffy faces of the guys on the platform.
The eastbound train took them to Kennedy Station, which was definitely home turf for the crew. Then a short trip on one of the many buses that travel east on Eglinton to McCowan. With July still in rehab they knocked on JJ’s door. He had just returned from dropping his three year old daughter, Kyana, off at her grandmother’s on the eighth floor of the building when the crew showed up. They showed him the photos and videos of their train raid and started editing and updating their social media accounts on his computer, because nothing is real until it’s on your instagram.
Growth Plan
Hiding in plain sight, was often a great strategy, an under-utilized one actually. So when he rented the empty paper clip factory he felt safe, knowing that the occasional plume of smoke out the tall chimney and the constant removal of green weed odour wouldn’t draw any unwanted attention.
He had been doing this type of work for a long time. Find a space, tap into the hydro, use the chimney to exhaust the smell and in 4 months the crop will be ready for harvest. He estimated he would get 2,000 plants in the space. A good yield would give him 4 ounces per plant which would work out to 500 pounds. At $1,500 a pound he would gross, $750,000. Half of that would go to the triad that bankrolled him and provided the distribution. In the end after expenses he would net about $300 grand. Not bad for 4 months work, which would allow him to put his growing equipment back into storage and spend the rest of the year on a beach in the Caribbean.
The only thing left to do today was to shovel all that snow off his car, so he could go to Homedepot and buy some new tubing for the hydroponic setup as well as a couple more exhaust fans. He sparked up a preroll he picked up from one of the government licensed dispensaries and contemplated the task ahead of him, as the smoke from his joint curled towards the open door of the incinerator.
A Room With No View
He woke and looking around, everything was were it should be. He felt safe when everything was where it should be. The concrete floor was still cold, still hard, the paint cans still stacked, the gas cylinder exactly where it was supposed to be. All this familiarity made him feel safe, made this storage closet feel safe. It had been several weeks since he turned the random door knob and found the room open. He made sure to take all of his things when he left for the day, leaving a quarter in the door jamb, in such a way that the door wouldn’t appear unlocked by a casual turn or pull.
Mohammad mostly moved through the city invisibly. On one hand he stood out, with his disheveled clothes, worn out, duct taped shoes shuffling along. Often draped in his dirty sleeping bag. His hair and beard were matted and natty from too long without a brush or a comb or even hot water. Who could not notice him crossing against red lights, weaving in and out of traffic. But in many ways he felt he was invisible, when he asked for change and was ignored, when he saw people cross the street to avoid him, when random people seemed to look right through him.
One could often find him gesticulating and making small talk to his reflection in the windows of businesses up and down Yonge St. The conversations were generally civil though on occasion he would take umbrage by something he said and appear aggressive to those passing by.
Every now and then he would show up at St.Mikes, ED and tell them he was planning to kill himself. He had a long convoluted story that involved rope and the Bloor viaduct. This would usually get him on a 72 hour Form 1 and provide him with a few decent meals, a shave, a haircut, clothing and a new pair of donated shoes.
For now he had a place to call home so he would avoid St.Mikes. He enjoyed locking the door and bedding down on the floor, knowing that everything would be in its place when he woke up. He felt safe.
I stood there.
I just fucking stood there, not sure if I was headed in the right direction. Gripped by something from deep inside of me. I felt paralyzed, incompetent and afraid nebulous feelings that I couldn’t control.
Having spent so many years in therapy, I knew it was simply a response to my early life trauma. I knew I was in a dissociative fugue of one sort or another. Fight, flight or freeze were the trio of options my limbic system was providing, even though a part of me knew what was happening, I was still stuck in freeze, as usual.
My brain was shutting down, my hearing had become muffled, vision blurry. People were jostling around me with their shopping bags and over sized purses. Bumping and bashing into me, though not enough to make me move. I could hear the torrent of abuse coming at me,
“get the fuck out of the way”,
“Hey asshole you’re blocking my way”.
But there I stood, looking up, tears in my eyes, like my 7 year old self, looking for his Mother at Fairview Mall, that fall day long ago when I got lost in the Simpsons store.
My trance was finally broken by the scent of a familiar perfume, that was both comforting and repulsive at the same time. I heard the question, “Are you okay?” and saw the kind expression on an elderly Asian woman’s face, her clear dark eyes brought me back to ground.
She was walking around me to get on the escalator, our eyes locked as she appeared to magically move up and away from me without the assistance of human propulsion.
I was back and as I smiled towards her diminishing figure, I thought, “ What the fuck am I doing at the Eaton Centre, anyway”.
Everything is Nothing but Everything 