Texting at Sorrelle's, SE corner of Avenue Rd & Yorkville
Nice restaurant. Upscale. A little beyond us. But now and then, when we’re in the mood for something special, we change our clothes and go out for a treat. The people at the other tables are beautiful. Bright smiles and perfect hair. Gleaming eyes and posture that never flags. The brighter the smiles, the more Barb tells me not to slouch. I want to tell her that, unlike the other people in the room, I’m subject to the laws of gravity which drag me down toward the ground, and one day under it, but I hold off because the waiter has magically appeared beside our table. I realize he didn’t magically appear; it just seems that way. It’s more like he was a predator stalking our table from the long grass when he suddenly pounced. He asks if we’d like a drink to start. Or an hors d’oeuvre? We both ask for cocktails. Barb asks for some duck pâté while I settle for something from the vegetable realm. Two minutes later, the waiter appears again at our table, this time without the magical aura, and announces they have no more duck pâté so madam will have to select something else.
An underling arrives with our drinks, a sub-sub-bartender, someone who lost the latest round of dominance contests: head butting or chest thumping or whatever it is the wait staff do to decide who gets to wear the smartest clothes. Me Tarzan, you busboy. We smile at one another. We clink our glasses. We watch the hostess seat a couple at the adjacent table. Your server is Raoul and he’ll be right with you, she says, and she sashays back to the entrance. Our neighbours are young, hip, unsullied the way Brad and Angelina were unsullied before the tabloids turned them into twisted freaks underneath a Barnum & Bailey circus tent. He wears tight-fitting pants and reminds me of a flamenco dancer. She wears a black dress with a V cut so low we can see the diamond stud in her navel. Raoul creeps from behind a pot of tropical plants and asks if they care for a cocktail or an hors d’oeuvre. They order their drinks and tell Raoul they will be sharing a plate of duck pâté. Raoul says very good and waddles away.
Did you hear that? I whisper. And Barb whispers back that, yes, she saw how Raoul nodded and didn’t advise that they were out of pâté. It isn’t long before our neighbours are swiping dollops of pâté across their crackers and stuffing them into their mouths like kids with popcorn at the movies. I wave the waiter over to our table and challenge him, pointing to our neighbours and the dainty bits of pâté stuck in the corners of their mouths.
You told us you were out of duck pâté.
That is true.
Yet you served them duck pâté.
No, that is not pâté.
Of course it is.
Raoul looks to our neighbours and shakes his head. That is a spreadable meat made from duck liver.
Which is the definition of duck pâté.
You are mistaken, sir.
Increasingly, I find myself experiencing vertiginous moments like this when I grip the edge of the table and gaze across it to Barb and beg her to assure me that the table is real. I don’t think this is me growing old; I think this is the world turning on it’s head. Should we stay for the rest of our meal? I worry they’ll set coq au vin in front of me and try to persuade me it’s the aged bison I ordered. Carrots are beans. Water is wine. Jolly fascists will march from the kitchen, singing the national anthem, and serve my head on a silver platter while telling everyone it’s wild boar.
Greg didn’t think it was a coincidence he shared his given name with the famous movie star who inspired his best idea to date. Like Gregory Peck posing as a Jew so he could report on what it’s like to get the short end of the cultural stick, Greg thought he could work up an amazing exposé by posing as a front line health care worker. Greg wanted to know what it was like to live with the exhaustion, the stress, the heartache, of working as a medical professional in the middle of a global pandemic. An opportunity like this doesn’t come every day, you know.
Greg had stolen hospital greens from a cleaning truck parked on Bond Street on the east side of St. Mike’s Hospital, and his buddy, Gordy, a digital artist, had agreed to make a fake ID. While Greg posed for his fake employee mug shot, Gordy confessed that Greg’s scheme made him feel uneasy. Gordy thought it was unethical. Greg told him to chill. It was a standard journalist thing, going undercover to find out what it really feels like to be on the front lines. Besides, he said, it’s not as if I’m gonna do anything medical; I’m just there to feel the vibe. As Gordy laminated the fake ID card, he made Greg promise not to touch any patients and, for god’s sake, don’t catch anything. Greg promised, then went home to binge watch old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy so he’d be up on his medical jargon.
Greg rationalized his plan by saying it was in the public interest to know about the suffering of health care providers, but he had to admit that he was equally drawn by the desire to know what it felt like to be called a hero. Normally, nobody would ever call a schmuck like him a hero. He heard how people leaned out their windows at night and banged on pots. And he heard how newscasters talked about their extraordinary sacrifice. Who wouldn’t want some of that recognition? On the subway for his first shift, ID dangling at the end of his lanyard and glasses steaming above his blue medical mask, he couldn’t help but notice the way people looked at him and the way it made him feel. He would have to make a note of this for his exposé. As he got out at Queen Street, a couple guys patted him on the back and thanked him for his sacrifice. He said thank you back and told them how he was just doing what anybody in his position would do.
Walking east along Queen Street toward the hospital, Greg kept his head low, trying not to draw attention to himself, especially as he got close to the entrance where a group of security guards stood in a row, arms folded and looking stern. When he crossed Victoria Street, he noticed the news van with the dish on the roof and big logo on the sliding door and the cameraman and the talking head with perfect hair and microphone. This wasn’t the only news van. There was a whole row of them lined up behind the first van. And a whole row of reporters standing along the curb opposite the row of security guards.
The two rows—reporters and security guards—formed a gauntlet and running the gauntlet right down the middle of the sidewalk was a group of protesters shouting and waving signs. At first, Greg had no idea what the protesters were going on about, but as he got closer, he saw they were a bunch of whack-a-doodle conspiracy theorists who said the whole thing was a hoax perpetrated by the global elites to keep ordinary people under the boot. They were spreading the disease with cell phone towers. The whole thing was a big eugenics project. It was the product of covert biological warfare.
The marchers drew up to where Greg stood and they stopped. Greg was astonished at the number of marchers who needed major dental work. Another observation for his exposé. Somebody in the back yelled how health care workers were complicit in spreading the disease. That just set Greg off. He couldn’t help himself. He had to respond. It was a matter of honour.
Greg tore into an impassioned speech about being an ordinary working guy who suddenly found himself with a difficult choice: either play it safe and sit at home collecting welfare, or step up even though that meant risking infection. Well, virtually every one of his colleagues had chosen to step up and take the risk. Not because they’re special. But because it’s the right thing to do. What’s not the right thing to do … And Greg lit into the marchers, calling them ignoramuses and selfish buffoons, and giving all the news services terrific sound bytes. But Greg wasn’t about to go easy on the news services either, taking a step towards one of the cameras and pointing a finger at the lens and calling them irresponsible for their hackneyed bothsideism which tried to give legitimacy to a side populated by ignoramuses and selfish buffoons and …
Greg reached the climax of his set piece when a fist magically emerged from the crowd and flattened him. Stars burst like fireworks in a black sky. The copper taste of blood seeped down the back of his throat. He heard the sound of crunching bone and, afterwards, as he lay on the sidewalk, he felt a throb across the left side of his face that made him wonder if maybe rodents hadn’t burrowed into his head. Christ, he thought, I’ve taken things too far.
A police officer tackled the owner of the fist and two orderlies attended to Greg while one of the security guards ran off for an ice pack. The news services did what news services do best and made an indisputable record of events from seven different angles. When the police officer had cuffed the assailant and read him his rights and left him to cool off in the back seat of a cruiser, he returned to the scene and knelt beside Greg. The more the police officer leaned in to him and spoke in sympathetic tones, the worse Greg’s face throbbed. When the police officer explained to him the charges against the assailant and how they’d like Greg to make a statement if he was feeling up to it, Greg waved the man off. He struggled to his feet and wobbled a bit, then, unrecognizable beneath his purple eye and swollen face, he turned to the same camera he had accosted only minutes before, and said he bore no ill will for the man who punched him in the face. These are difficult times for everybody. For extra effect, he spat blood into his shirt sleeve. I’m sure that guy’s got it tough already. The last thing he needs is criminal charges against him.
Greg hoped that would diffuse the situation and give him a chance to slip away before someone recognized him. But it only made things worse. He heard one of the security guards shout that he was a hero. And one of the news people started rehearsing lines in front the camera: Now, folks, this is what real heroism looks like. Only moments ago …
Someone called for his name. Someone else asked what department he worked in.
Greg wanted to run away, but his legs felt like rubber bands. He wanted everyone to leave him be; he’d be fine if he sat here alone for a while. He wanted to tell them all to fuck off. But he couldn’t do that. One thing he knew for certain is that a real hero doesn’t tell his admirers to fuck off.
I heard a couple bangs like slamming doors, then I saw a couple plumes rising from the pavement at my feet, looking for all the world like miniature Old Faithful geysers. Someone further down the sidewalk screamed at me to get down but I stood in a dissociative befuddlement, doing my best to interpret the rising chuffs of dust, and failing. It wasn’t until long afterwards, when police questioned me, that I understood someone had been taking pot shots at me from the other side of the street.
Know why anyone’d wanna hurt you?
I’m a conveyancer.
That’s a reason?
I shrugged and floated away like an empty plastic bag pushed around by an afternoon breeze. The breeze didn’t have far to push before it found the door to a pub and pushed me right through and onto a vinyl covered stool where the bartender was all too happy to pour me a lager even if I was only an empty plastic bag. A couple mouthfuls of lager was all it took to set me off on a philosophical meander whose basic theme was meandering itself, or at least the randomness that a good meander depends on.
Although nearly an hour had passed since a stranger shot at me for no discernible reason, an image of the rising plumes stayed fresh in my head. And the feeling that went with it, too, the feeling of utter randomness. The stranger hadn’t been shooting bullets, but quantum particles. They had hit me. They had missed me. They were Schrödinger’s bullets. In law, the bullets had missed me. But in every way that mattered, the bullets had pierced my flesh and lodged deep inside me.
I stared at my pint glass and watched how the bubbles rose up through the straw coloured liquid, some bursting when they hit the air, others clinging to the inside of the glass. When I bent my ear close to the mouth of the glass, I could hear the tiny bubbles screaming. Maybe they thought I was their god and they were either screaming in pain as they burst out of existence or they were screaming in supplication: let this cup pass from my hands. As with my rising plumes, there was a randomness to the bubbles. Who’s to say which bubbles burst and which clung to the inside of the glass? I could make no more sense of the bubbles than I could of the bullets.
There was a feeling of randomness, too, in the sensation that rose to my brain each time I drank another mouthful of lager. It was as if, once inside me, the lager continued to release bubbles and they rose through my blood/brain barrier and attached themselves to neurons where they whispered subtle instructions to my soul, some of rage and some of consolation, some of fear and some of wistfulness. I had no idea which feeling would prevail. To be truthful, I’m not sure prevailing was their game. In keeping with the quantum bullets that had/hadn’t come hurtling at me that afternoon, I was inclined to think these were Schrödinger’s feelings. I felt angry and I felt at peace. I felt consolation and I felt desolation.
I ordered a second. It would take me all afternoon to figure out what I was feeling. Even then, I had no confidence I’d be any further ahead. I’d figure things out. I’d never figure things out.
Soooo…It sez on your profile that you’re passionate.
Ordinarily, Janice wouldn’t be so forward, but it was only two minutes into the meet-up and already they’d fallen into an awkward silence and Janice was desperate to move things along so she didn’t drift into her usual daydream about an alien spaceship that beams her aboard and whisks her away to the planet of men who are actually interesting.
Yeah, passionate.
That was it. Nothing more. No elaboration. No self-aggrandizement. At this point, Janice would’ve been happy for some straight-up bullshit. But nothing. Christ, she couldn’t even remember his name. She was afraid he’d coalesce into a generic cardboard cutout. She’d toss him onto the heap of generic cardboard cutouts she was collecting in her bedroom.
The boy pulled off his beret and began to fondle it nervously on his lap. Janice noted that—Oswald! That was it! The improbably named Oswald. With his goatee and receding hairline and his cup of dark roast diluted with half a cup of milk and five packets of raw sugar.
What’re you passionate about, Oswald?
About?
Yeah, what about?
Was that a shrug? It was hard to tell. He’d raised his shoulders, but that could’ve been him shifting in his seat.
Maybe I’m wrong, Janice said, but I don’t think of passion as something that happens in the air. It’s attached to other things. Passion for justice. Passion for poetry. Passion for synaesthesia. See what I’m saying?
I suppose what I meant is that whatever I commit to I commit to with passion. No half measures. I dive in. All of me. That sort of thing.
So, Oswald, what’re you committed to? Right now?
Again with the shoulders. He may have been shifting in his seat, but this second time around was pushing the needle more to the shrug end of the scale.
I guess I’m passionate about being passionate.
Oh, come on.
Why not?
It’s…it’s… (Janice knew there was a word to describe what Oswald was doing, and not a complimentary word either, but the word eluded her in the moment.)
This is the world we live in, you know. Where people are expected to be passionate about things. What’s wrong with being passionate just for the sake of being passionate?
But listen to you. We could have a good argument about this, but you don’t even raise your voice.
As an answer to her spaceship daydream, Janice had a passionate argument daydream where she and her coffee date get into a blistering disagreement, practically strangling each other across the table, and the whole thing leads inevitably to the kind of sex that sets the world on fire.
Oswald shrugged. This time it was definitely a shrug. An indisputable shrug. She could get others in the coffee shop to swear affidavits attesting to the shruggishness of the shrug.
I don’t know, Oswald said. It just seems like the sort of thing you’re supposed to put on your profile. Most of the time, I couldn’t give a shit about what’s going on.
Saturday night poker. It was Norm who hosted these things, but given his unspecified underlying condition, he had decided to suspend our weekly ritual until such time as the local public health unit declared it safe to hold in-person gatherings. Nearly eighteen months had passed before he phoned and said he felt comfortable sitting with five others around a felt-topped table in a close room. On the side, a couple of us speculated about the nature of Norm’s underlying condition. We doubted it was respiratory given Norm’s custom of puffing on a fat stogie from one end of the evening to the other. Had it been fear of respiratory complications that prompted Norm to cancel his weekly games, he wouldn’t have answered the door, as he did tonight, in a haze of smoke. That would have made him a hypocrite and Norm was too principled a man for that. So, for the first time since the pandemic began, six of us gathered for a night of stud poker, all while knocking back shots of whisky in our own strange communion while cigar smoke settled over us like the tailings of an old censer lately swung through our holy chapel.
Aubrey got the first black jack, so she began to deal while the rest of us ante’d up. I wouldn’t call this a high stakes game. But it wasn’t a penny ante proposition either. It sat somewhere in the middle as did its players. Our host, Norm, was a retired history teacher and his wife, Hanna, was librarian at the school where Norm had taught for years. In fact, that’s how they met. Norm had presented himself at the counter, asking if the library had a copy of Jack Layton’s book, and it was love at first sight. Together, they had retired to healthy pensions, active in their respective unions, and remained relatively unaffected by whatever financial strains the pandemic had imposed on others.
By contrast, there was Aubrey’s husband, Sergei, who worked in a meat packing plant and, when things were at there very worst, was deemed an essential worker. It sounded noble, but really it was just another way of saying expendable. He tried to wear a mask at work, but the mask kept slipping below his nose. Inevitably, a sick co-worker who couldn’t afford to take time off infected Sergei who came home and, in turn, infected Aubrey. Both were miserable, but never so badly off that they had to go to the hospital. Even so, they were both too sick to work and lost their jobs. When she recovered, Aubrey found a new job soon enough. But Sergei’s was a case of long Covid and he had such aches and pains and feelings of malaise that he still struggled to get out of bed in the morning. That’s why he hadn’t joined them this evening.
In Sergei’s place, Norm invited an old buddy from university days named Grant who, in before times, had been a sports writer for a national news organization. Sports writing of course had dried up during the pandemic, so they shifted Grant to medical reporting since there were so many breaking stories about the WHO and the SARS-CoV-2 virus and vaccine development and conspiracy theories. It wasn’t as much of a stretch from sports to medicine as you might think. Grant used to write all the time about concussions and soft tissue injuries and doping, so he already knew some of the medical lingo. Most importantly, it meant he went blithely along without a blip in his personal income and since he could do much of his work from home, his employer was grateful for the savings and gave him perks along the way.
Finally, there was Janice, younger than the rest, someone Hanna had met while shopping for clothes at a leisure wear store. The pandemic had been hard on retail and Janice’s employer had boarded up the windows when the government first declared an emergency. They promised that her job would be waiting for her when things opened up again but, in the meantime, they couldn’t afford to keep her on the payroll. As a gesture of goodwill, they helped her file her application for the government handout. It wasn’t enough to pay all the bills, but with the occasional cheque from her parents, she’d survived. She shared with everyone that she was hoping this evening to win enough to cover next month’s rent.
It was a good evening and the time vanished in a fog of whisky and smoke. We enjoyed catching up with old friends and getting to know the newcomers. We told stupid jokes. And we shared our unique stories of life in the time of Covid. Sometime in the early hours of the morning, we decided to bring the game to a close with an all-in hand. Grant and Aubrey were already tapped out so there were only four of us in the final hand. In a strange piece of good luck, I took the kitty with a pair of sevens. I reached into the centre, but before I could draw all the chips to my corner of the table, Norm wagged a raised finger as if I had done something naughty. I saw in Norm’s expression something of the teacher he used to be: he had caught me doing something I shouldn’t and he was going to send me to the principal’s office.
Not so fast, Dave, he said.
I withdrew my hands, unsure what to make of Norm’s wagging finger. These past months, I’ve had a lot of time to think about our poker games, and I’ve decided we should do things differently. Sure, this pandemic has been tough, but if all we do is talk about how tough it’s been, then we miss the opportunities it’s given us. We can build back better, you know. Even when it comes to poker games. So I’m proposing a reset here.
I eyed the pile of chips waiting for me in the centre of the table and thought about how that would translate into a couple of bottles of really good Bordeaux wine.
Aubrey asked Norm what he had in mind.
Well, I was thinking: no more winner take all. The fact is, Hanna and I, we’re all right, and Dave there, well, financially he’s okay too. I don’t know about you, Grant, but you give the impression you have a good income. So I’m thinking we should split the kitty between Aubrey and Janice. To each according to their need. That’s how I’d like to do things from now on.
As you might expect, I objected to Norm’s idea. It didn’t seem natural. It sucked all the fun out of poker night.
Norm gave me his sternest look. Fun? You didn’t have any fun tonight? Laughing with friends? Catching up? Good drinks? Good company? That didn’t do it for you? Not until you could take everyone’s money, too?
But those are the rules, I whined.
And I say: Fuck the rules. It’s time for a reset.
Christ, I said. Those World Economic Forum types have really sunk their teeth into you, haven’t they?
I could’ve stood on my rights and demanded the kitty, but the whole evening had faded into a fog of whisky and cigar smoke and didn’t feel real. I’d wake up in the morning with fuzz on my tongue and a dull ache behind my eyes, and maybe I’d have more cash in my pocket or maybe not, but whatever Norm said, at least I’d have the satisfaction of knowing, in my deepest truest self, that I’d played a better game of poker than the rest of them. It’s not how you play the game. It’s whether you win or lose.
He stood in the hall, dressed only in his scuffed bedroom slippers, white T-shirt stained down the front, and tartan pyjama bottoms with the frayed cuffs. Muffin-top isn’t how he would’ve described the way his gut hung over the slack elastic waistband, but Elaine was given to using the term and he’d never come up with decent rebuttal. His only hope for self-respect lay in the possibility that his T-shirt would obscure the girth.
He stood in front of the adjacent neighbour’s door—#2307—and listened to the sounds of a party raging from the other side: an indistinct thrum of voices and music punctuated at random by a piercing laughter or the bark of a dog. Elaine had sent him next door to tell them to tone things down since tomorrow was a work day and she needed to get a decent night’s sleep if she wanted to be on her game. It was a matter of consideration. If the neighbours didn’t quiet down, then Elaine said they’d have no choice but to speak to the concierge and, from there, maybe the police.
He’d never met the neighbours. They were new. He’d seen them only from a distance and so had formed no impression. But Elaine thought she had a good idea what they were like: young, she said, barely more than teenagers, recently let loose in the world and still a little wild. It was like parenting, she said, draw clear lines and then demonstrate that you mean to enforce those lines. He thought Elaine’s parenting comment ironic given the way their own children had turned out. And now she wanted him to inflict his prodigious parenting skills on neighbours he’d never met, who may or may not be young, who may or may not be straight, who may or may not be sober, who may or may not be in a hostile mood, who may or may not be skilled when it comes to wielding baseball bats. So went his thoughts, skittering off to the very worst corner of the mental room where he organized his vast collection of horrible outcomes.
He’d knock on the door and after some yelling from the other side, a muscled man in a wife beater would pull the door back and laugh at the pathetic figure in shambling bedclothes. He’d stutter his way through a badly prepared speech after which the new neighbour with the giant biceps would tell him to go fuck himself and then slam the door. He held his fist poised at eye level, readying himself to rap on the door, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter.
Fuck it, he thought, and he returned to his own apartment. He held his fist poised at the level of his muffin-top, readying himself to turn his own door knob, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter. But he paused, and in that instant, however brief, he discovered that he had no idea which confrontation he dreaded more: the one with a neighbour he’d never met, or the one with a woman he’d called his wife for 35 years.
The building had a common terrace on the 4th floor, so he rode the elevator down in his bedroom slippers, gazing at his shabby reflection in the elevator’s mirrors. It was dark on the terrace and he was alone. He settled onto a lounge chair, tilting it back so he could gaze at the few stars still visible through the city’s light pollution. But that meager collection of stars was enough to set his mind adrift to far worlds and alternate realities, places where men could wear fresh up-to-date clothes and knock on a stranger’s door in a way that sounded confident.
During the pandemic, Dave had let things go, sprouting a salt and pepper stubble on his face and wearing a “Peaky Blinders” cap to hide the sparse growth on his scalp. Ordinarily, Dave would shave his head to the smooth sheen of a cue ball. But there was something about the pandemic that sapped his will. These days, he saw no point keeping up his appearance. He lounged on his deck in the early morning light, taking in all the glorious songs of suburbia, the lawn mowers, the gas-powered grass whackers, the soccer moms yelling at their snot-nosed children to get into the friggin van, while his dog poked around in the shrubs at the far end of the yard.
Still in her pyjamas and housecoat, Dave’s wife stepped onto the deck and informed him that there was a stranger asking for him at the front door. Dave asked for details, but his wife had nothing more to offer. He dropped his newspaper on the low side table and rose from his deck chair, abandoning a cup of coffee while he ambled around the side of the house.
Dave approached from the west and the man stood on the front porch with the rising sun behind him, and while the effect was dramatic, suggesting a messianic glare, it made it impossible for Dave to discern anything more about the man except his shining outline. The man called to him by name, a question, and even as Dave answered that, yes, his name was Dave Barker, and shook the man’s hand, he couldn’t see enough detail to say if he knew the man.
— Sorry, you have me at a disadvantage. Dave shaded his eyes while looking up at the man.
— Ah, the insufferable glare. The man leaned down from the porch and offered a hand and announced that he was Richard Garfield, the story’s Black character.
— Huh? Dave might have offered something more articulate had he finished the cup of coffee that was growing cold beside his newspaper.
— And you must be that shallow stand-in for the Author, pathetic for the fact that the character you’ve written for yourself is so utterly one-dimensional that we have no choice but to assume the absolute worst of the person you represent. Simple. Transparent. Banal.
— You’re Black?
— Jesus Christ in a bat cave! You’re the one who wrote me.
— It’s hard to tell from where I’m standing. Morning light. Retinal afterimages.
There was a pause as Dave struggled to navigate the social niceties of the situation. Should he step up to join Richard on the porch? Or should he stick to his mark and draw Richard down onto the lawn? Richard appeared to struggle with the same questions, settling at last on a compromise. The man gave a nervous cough and, descending by two steps, proffered a manila envelope.
— This is a letter from my lawyer. A demand really. That you cease and desist, you know, from representing characters in your stories, Black or otherwise, who don’t share the historical experience of your personal identity. White. Colonizing. Cisgendered. Privileged. You know. That stuff. And let me say, our encounter this morning only confirms that this is the right course. I mean, if the best you can manage by way of self-representation is, quite frankly, a dull cardboard white bread mealy-mouthed version of yourself, then how can you be expected to offer full-bodied representations of people who aren’t the least bit like you? You have no business putting Black characters in your stories.
Dave wasn’t sure what to say. He stood in the morning light, turning the envelope over and over, letting his housecoat fall open to reveal an embarrassing hole in his pyjama bottoms. He wondered what his dog had found in the far corner of the yard. Last weekend it was rats in the composter. The weekend before it was the remains of a dead raccoon.
Without taking the risk of writing anything further about the Black character, Dave ambled back around the west side of the house and returned to the deck and the newspaper and the cold cup of coffee. His wife brought him a fresh cup and asked what the stranger had wanted, and after he’d explained and after he’d shown her the cease and desist letter, she observed: if you take this demand to its logical conclusion, then fiction becomes impossible; at best, all stories end up as thinly disguised autobiography.
— Maybe it’s a temporary thing, Dave said. A moratorium. Until we can to treat one another with more respect.
— How long do you think that’ll take?
Dave sipped his coffee and shrugged.
— Not in my lifetime, hon. That’s for goddam sure.
He folded the pages of this story and set it aside, unsure what to make of it.
Melvin phoned his mother and, as always, she asked if he needed money.
No, Ma, I don’t need money, he said.
Why not? Is something wrong?
It was hard to say who had the more annoying voice: Melvin, with his unctuous wheezing, or his mother, with her whining rasp. Between the two of them, they could have vocalized all the sound effects for a film shoot in a car parts manufacturing sweatshop.
Afterwards, when Delores had time to reflect on the conversation, she told Melvin’s father that it was the most bizarre conversation in a lifetime of bizarre conversations with the boy. He told me he loved me, Bert. Can you believe it?
Bert shook his head and agreed that it was a strange thing for the boy to say.
He said he was grateful for all we’ve done for him through years. For being his parents. For giving him life. I mean, what kind of crap is that?
Bert shook his head and wondered if Melvin was using again.
Delores didn’t think so. The boy’s voice sounded clear and he strung his words together in an orderly way, not like when he was at his worst.
And he didn’t want money?
No. All he said was how he didn’t need anything from us anymore on account of him winning the lottery.
Well that’s a load of bull. You sure he isn’t using?
Delores gave a helpless shrug and fell to silence. With great effort, Bert hoisted himself out of his easy chair and announced that he’d visit the boy, check to make sure everything was copacetic, take a look around the apartment for the familiar paraphernalia. Delores didn’t join her husband on these visits. Not anymore. The “G” diseases kept her confined to their home: gout and goitre. Gout affected her mobility, and goitre affected her sense of self-esteem. There was also the “B” word. Not a disease so much as a physical state. Breasts. Between the goitre and the breasts, Delores was so top heavy that the consequences of a fall could be devastating. As a precaution, she passed most of her waking time on the living room couch and relied on Bert to run errands. Of course, the trip to Melvin’s apartment wasn’t an errand so much as a duty.
Bert frumped his way across town and burst in on his son doing not much of anything at all. The boy lay on a student’s equivalent of an easy chair, a canvas cloth slung between the slats of a wooden frame, and he was watching YouTube videos on the laptop that rested on his bare stomach. Bert found no paraphernalia. All he found was a lottery ticket stuck to the fridge door with a Bart Simpson magnet. Beside it was the latest list of winning numbers torn from somebody else’s newspaper, a strange anachronism in an otherwise digital life. Bert checked the ticket’s number against the numbers on the strip of newspaper and saw that Melvin hadn’t won anything.
How come you told your mom you won?
I tell my mom lots of things.
But winning the lottery?
Melvin paused a video of skateboarders destroying their genitals on railings.
I dunno, he said. I guess I wanted to know what it’d feel like. You know. To win something. To be more than just a fucking loser.
Bert didn’t know what to say. He never liked speaking with his son. The boy had a voice almost as annoying as his mother’s. Bert shrugged and took his leave and backed out the door. Dolores would need help getting supper ready.
When he showed up at the office ten minutes late on a Monday morning, everyone noticed. They didn’t notice that he was ten minutes late; they noticed his general appearance. No one came right out and said: Geez, dude, you look wasted. Instead, they stabbed him with their judgmental, Puritanical stares and that was as good as coming right out and saying what he already knew. He’d seen it reflected back at him in the subway window as he rode to work: the bags under the eyes, the coarse stubble that made him look apathetically desperate, the tie that never quite settled into place. All in defiance of the office ethos and its strict professionalism. But most striking of all was the shock of white hair. On Friday afternoon, he’d left the office with a thick head of dark brown hair, and on Monday morning, he’d shown up with the scalp of a man thirty years his senior.
His office colleague (the one people assumed was his friend) approached and put an arm around his disappointing shoulders: Geez, dude, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.
That is precisely what had happened, but he was afraid to say anything. The ghost had arrived at midnight, teetering on the fulcrum between Sunday and Monday. He wasn’t sure whether he was awake when the disparate wisps coalesced at the foot of his bed or whether he’d been dreaming when it first assumed its form. He had thought the ghost was there to scare the bejeezus out of him since scaring people seems to be the point of ghosts. But things didn’t play out that way. They shot the shit for a while—this and that—and things grew comfortable enough that he excused himself to get a beer from the fridge. When he returned, he found that the ghost had cracked a cold one, too, and was lounging with its feet up on the spare night stand.
He wasn’t Roman Catholic, so he couldn’t be sure, but he’d say the ghost was in a limbo situation. At one point, the ghost mentioned the bardo, but that could’ve been the brand of beer. Limbo. Bardo. Whatever you call it, the ghost had unfinished business on this plane and he expected that, as the night progressed, the ghost would ask for help concluding whatever it had to conclude in order to release itself from its entrapment in the netherworld. But the request never came. The ghost had another drink, and then another and another. The ghost was having too much fun to ruin it with talk of unfinished business, preferring instead to ramble on about the joys of a full life, the love of a good woman (or man, as the case may be), the passionate pursuit of interests, a deep curiosity about the world at large.
As the earliest light began to unfurl itself across the city, he interrupted the ghost and asked: but aren’t you going to frighten me, you know, say boo or something?
The ghost laughed and swung its feet from the night stand: Really? You want me to say boo?
The ghost excused itself to take a piss and when it came back it said: You know, I’ve been thinking about what you asked and, to be honest, you don’t need me to say boo. You have enough to be afraid of as it is.
As the first light slipped through the cracks in the window shade, the ghost vanished. He was angry. This was the best the ghost could do? He’d stayed up all night, talking, drinking, baring his soul to an apparition. And this? This? He slapped on a rumpled shirt and didn’t bother to shave. He skipped breakfast and ran to the subway station. Riding into the office, he stared at his reflection and noted that he looked like hell. He rode the elevator to the 33rd floor, coffee in hand, and steeled himself for his office job, noting the semantic detail that he didn’t actually work in an office, but in an interior cubicle with no view of anything except a stupid screen saver of his employer’s corporate logo jittering across the monitor.
Pride events offer the perfect opportunity to shoot street portraits. This is especially true on overcast days when shadows are soft and natural sunlight is kind to photographers. But the enemy here is not light so much as time. Interactions are so fleeting that you may have only a second to make a connection and take the shot. Everything has an ADHD vibe to it. Catch someone’s eye; raise the camera as if to ask “mind if I take a shot”; get the nod; frame the shot; click; move on to the next person.
This year, there was only one person who declined to pose. That’s exceptional. Most years, the number is zero. In the fenced-off portions of Church Street, consent is assumed, although that consent is given to Pride Toronto and not to the thousands of unofficial photographers roaming at large. The release notice says that “you consent to the use of your image” etc. for eternity. That strikes me as optimistic. Eternity is a long time. A lot can happen between now and eternity.
For example, on some views of inflationary cosmology, the universe expands forever and the distribution of energy within an infinite universe means that the average temperature approaches absolute zero. In other words, eventually it will become too cold to care about the rights we’ve assigned to Pride Toronto.
But there are other issues to consider before it ever gets to that. For example, after about 5 billion years, our sun will become a red giant, expanding well beyond Earth’s orbit, which means that our home planet will be consumed in a great ball of Jerry Lee Lewis. In that scenario, assuming our genetic progeny still exists but hasn’t figured out how to migrate elsewhere, it will become too hot to care about the rights we’ve assigned to Pride Toronto.
Somewhere between hot and cold, there is a lukewarm position occupied by smaller stars that consume their fuel more sparingly. Although the universe is too young for us to gauge the potential lifespan of such a star, it is plausible to suppose it could continue to burn for hundreds of billions, perhaps even trillions, of years. Assuming we escape our solar death trap and migrate to one of these smaller stars, we could carry on for a long time. But somehow I think that, after evolving for the next trillion years, we might grow bored of staring at old photos of pride events from those early days when we’d barely learned to walk upright.
West side of Yonge Street, south of Bloor, Toronto
For the first time since the beginning of the global pandemic, the city of Toronto has not cancelled Pride celebrations. We so needed a party! For one thing, the city needed a reason to cut loose. Just because. For another thing, it gave us a chance to celebrate the fact that we enjoy freedoms here that the rest of the world seems hellbent on demolishing.
The festivities were mercifully free of the freedom rhetoric that our gaslighting friends from the anti-mask, anti-vax, trucker convoy movement have been tossing around so flippantly. It was such a relief to shut out all that noise, even if only for a few days, and to fill the city with noise of a different sort, the pumping bass of dance music and people cheering and laughing and filling the air with a positive energy.
It’s a funny thing, all that noise. While I like the idea of noisy celebration, and while I like to lose myself in the crowds, I do have my limit. I am, after all, an introvert, and if I spend too much time in dancing screaming throngs, I go mental. So I go out for a few hours, and then I retreat to my fortress of solitude to recover a sense of equanimity.
This tension between celebration and solitude finds its analogy in my photographs. Pride is about rainbows and glitter cannons and wild splashes colour. But the auditory overwhelm that finally drives me to silence has its correlate in the visual field. The colour fills my eyes and my answer, in the quiet of my post-production space, is to desaturate my photographs. It calms my senses.
During Sunday’s parade, people had climbed the scaffolding around the construction site on the southwest corner of Yonge and Bloor Streets. Behind them was a broad white swath that served as an obvious background for a photograph. For a black and white photograph. Although colourful (for example, a person in the front row sits on a trans flag), the image plays just as well without colour.
This gives me pause for one last thought: does the act of desaturating a photograph have a political dimension? A rainbow flag means something. A trans flag means something. But in a context where colour is an important signifier, can the removal of colour be construed as a hostile act? I remove colour for a cognitive reason, to avoid overwhelm, but my benign intentions may be a pale excuse.
If I were a multi-billionaire who chaired the board of a company that was developing a privatized space program, I wouldn’t bother launching cars into orbit around the sun or sending people to Mars. Instead, I’d develop my own Voyager probe with my own Golden Record. That, I think, is a safer bet for achieving immortality.
Under the leadership of Carl Sagan, a team developed The Golden Record, a durable greeting that included music, maps detailing its origins, voice recordings in many languages, images, and of course technical drawings that would allow alien creatures to decode The Golden Record. Sagan’s brainchild was fixed to the two Voyager probes and launched in 1977. Voyager I has now traveled 155 astronomical units making it the first human-made object to exit the solar system. Someday, technically advanced aliens might retrieve one of the Voyager probes and decipher our greetings.
What interests me are the images Sagan’s team selected. Puzzling (at least to me) is the fact that the images include a photo of Terminal One at what was then Toronto International Airport. It was a Brutalist hunk of concrete that has since been dismantled. Theoretically, the image could last for 2 billion years or more, while the structure represented in the image lasted all of 40 years. Only 45 years after the launch of the two Voyager probes, it has become painfully obvious how politically fraught and culturally contingent the Sagan team’s photo selection process was.
But if I was a multi-billionaire and not beholden to committees, what kind of photos would I select to introduce myself to an alien civilization? Would I load my selection with selfies and photos of the people and things I care about? Or would I make some effort to represent the wider world I inhabit. In other words, would I be motivated by narcissism? Or would I hold to loftier aims?
Another question I might ask myself is: how much do I care that my photos make sense to an alien civilization? Do I take a Mark Rothko approach to image making and include only images that require a deep immersion in human culture to understand? Or do I make things more obvious, like the house on the fridge with mommy and daddy and the dog?
Take for example today’s featured image. I would suggest that it sits somewhere midway between abstract and obvious. A human looking at the image might understand that it represents a bicycle rack casting a shadow in late afternoon sunlight and receding into a shaded distance. But we might not notice all that the image assumes. It assumes bicycles even though bicycles don’t appear in the photograph. How would an alien infer the existence of bicycles from an image of a metal spiral?
Beyond that, the image assumes the idea of property. The purpose of a bicycle rack has as much to do with security of property as it does with bicycles. And further beyond that are ideas of manufacturing and economy and social organization rooted in ownership. We assume all of this when we read the photograph. But we have no reason to suppose that aliens would be able to access any of these ideas. Alien social organization may have no concept of property at all.
Given that metal spirals are probably indecipherable, it’s not the sort of image I’d include in my personal Golden Record. In fact, a selfie might be as meaningful as anything else: “Hey, look at me, a white guy, the only person on this planet to accumulate enough property that he can afford to fling meaningless crap into your corner of the galaxy.”
Apartment building on Douglas Street across from Beacon Hill Park, Victoria, B.C.
We celebrated the end of the pandemic with a trip to visit family in Victoria, B.C. That was last November just days before the omicron variant arrived and forced us to rethink the idea of an “end” to the pandemic. For a brief few days, we got to pretend life had returned to normal. Our worries were restricted to minor issues like flooding, washed out infrastructure, and food and gas shortages. Ah, those were simpler times!
On my second morning there, the rain let up so I walked down to Ogden Point where I caught the sunrise. To get back to the hotel, I went up Douglas Street with apartment buildings to my left and Beacon Hill Park to my right. About half way along the park, I paused to admire an apartment building probably built in the 1950s. In particular, I found myself mesmerized by a simple retro design feature: square white-washed concrete blocks with a star motif in the centre, stacked to form a low wall in front of the building and repeated on each of the balconies. Apart from UFOs and drive-thru burger palaces served by bobby-soxers on roller skates, I can’t imagine anything more emblematic of the 1950s.
I paused to take a shot, then continued along the sidewalk where a sign came into view: Beacon Tower, a 55+ building. I stumbled a little. You see, it isn’t so long ago that I passed that 55+ threshold. I turned back to the building and stared at the retro blocks. Christ, I thought, I qualify to live in an “adult lifestyle” building.
The fact is: I graduated from high school only two or three years ago. Mentally at least (my wife insists I’m far more immature than that and have only graduated from junior high). Because I’m still in reasonably good shape, don’t suffer inordinate aches and pains, and don’t experience shortness of breath when I exert myself, I’ve never come up against anything that challenges my admittedly distorted view of myself. My rational brain tells me I need to grow up which means I need to worry about cholesterol and book an appointment for a colonoscopy. But my rational faculties have always been the smallest part of my brain.
I wonder if the posted 55+ threshold isn’t an artifact from the days when the apartment building first opened its doors. Our perception of what counts as old has changed. In 1888, Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backwards, 2000 to 1887 imagined life in the year 2000 where workers retire at the age of 45 so they have at least a few good years left to enjoy life. No doubt, Bellamy’s threshold was influenced by the deplorable working conditions in Victorian England and their impact on average life expectancy. In the 1950s, we could push that figure along by 10 years. Now, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at 55 and drifting from there into my sunset years. In fact, I can’t imagine putting up my feet at any age.
The gradual deferral of what counts as old age also finds a correlation in changing expectations about when one should start a family. That decision determines how old an infant’s grandparents are. When I was born, my grandmother was 41. When my son was born, his grandmother was 50. As for me, I’ve surpassed them with no prospect of becoming a grandparent. That’s just as well, as I’m only a couple years out of high school and hardly fit for the task.
The global pandemic has given me object lessons in mathematical concepts like exponential growth (as when people go maskless to indoor settings and the reproduction rate of the Sars-Cov-2 pathogen rises above one) and exponential reduction (as when people follow basic protocols like mask-wearing and the reproduction rate of the Sars-Cov-2 pathogen drops below one). We see it, too, in situations where people lose their jobs but have to carry consumer debt at exorbitant interest rates. Seemingly small increments end up having huge consequences.
We can apply the same concept to feelings of well-being on social media platforms. Take Twitter for example. A tweet only gets traction to the extent that it deals in outrage. A politician says something beyond the pale so you tweet a video clip of the offending comment plus a few words about how outrageous this is and before you can say “your mama is a woke bitch” you’ve got a thousand retweets and ten thousand likes. Meanwhile, Gandhi tweets about non-violent resistance and Martin Buber posts a thread about the value of engaging one another with a loving gaze, but these tweets attract zero attention and soon the @gandhi and @martinbuber accounts wither and die.
From the very outset, programmers gamed Twitter to reward engagement that deals in outrage. Whether they mean to or not, users adjust their habits to optimize their role in the game. More likes. More retweets. And, of course, more followers. @jesus had only 12 followers. What a loser. No wonder. His message was boring. Love one another? Give me a fucking break.
It may not seem like a big deal. A few “idiot” and “moron” comments scattered throughout a day’s posts. What difference could that make? But scale that up by the number of daily active Twitter users (206 million at the beginning of 2022) and these seemingly insignificant expressions of disgust and outrage take on a force of their own. They become our cultural norm.
But as with reproduction rates below one, it is possible to reverse a trend. Don’t like or retweet posts that fuel further outrage. Don’t follow people except as they deal in kindness. Post images that make you feel happy. Promote a different economy of social exchange.
I’m surprised at the number of fledgling street photographers I follow on social media who complain about being nervous when they shoot strangers. They’re reluctant to shoot them straight on. They’re afraid something bad might happen. The person they’re trying to shoot might get angry or punch them out.
I think of the scene in The Godfather when Johnny Fontane, the Vegas crooner, is speaking to Vito Corleone. He whines to the Don that his voice is getting weak; he’s all washed up; a Hollywood director has passed him over for a good part. Don Corleone yells at him that what he can do is act like a man, then he smacks Fontane in the face and mocks him. That’s what I want to do to people who complain that it’s too hard to stand in front of people and take their photo.
Act like a man, godammit! You think you’re somehow unique because you feel nervous? Everybody feels nervous. Feeling nervous is a good thing. Only psychopaths don’t feel nervous. If you feel nervous, at the very least, it means you’re not a psychopath. More than that, feeling nervous puts you on edge. It gives you a heightened sense of your surroundings and a greater feeling of immediacy in the moment. You make better images when you feel nervous.
As for making people angry, it happens. Some people will regard you with suspicion, as if you plan to do something nefarious with their image. It’s a fact of contemporary life that a strong strand of paranoia winds through our public engagement. As a photographer, it’s part of your job to allay those feelings of paranoia. If you find yourself channeling Vladimir Putin, maybe you should find other ways to spend your time.
And as for fears that someone might beat you up, exercise common sense. Don’t shoot late at night outside the local Hells Angels clubhouse. Personally, I’ve never found myself in a situation I couldn’t talk my way out of. In my experience, some of the meanest scariest looking people have proven to be some of the most receptive to my photographic overtures. I suspect their appearance means most people avoid them and so these mean scary looking people are excruciatingly lonely. The minute I express interest in their lives and demonstrate that I’m not afraid, they open up to me and are happy to pose for my camera.
