Hogtown
By David Allan Barker
Hogtown by David Allan Barker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada License.
ISBN: 978-0-9869412-4-5
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Table of Contents
1. How to store an AK-47 in the trunk of your Mercedes Benz
22. What Makes the Lake So Fake
Openings
Although set against the backdrop of a real locale and the unfolding of real events, Hogtown is a work of fiction. Its characters are fictional and any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental. This is subject to two caveats:
1. Well-known political personages appear in this novel. However, they form part of a character's fantasies. An attentive reader will immediately recognize that these appearances are whimsical and do not portray anything said or done by real people. If you wish, you may choose to receive them in the spirit of political cartoons.
2. I once met a woman who was, in fact, known as Maria the bag lady, but that was twenty-five years ago. She sometimes stole our lunches from the student lounge at the Faculty of Law. Our torts professor, J. Robert S. Pritchard, confirmed that she had been his classmate. Not everyone thrives with a law degree. I chose to retain the name for a similar character in this novel, not so much out of deference to a homeless person, as out of convenience. The name, Maria, is crucial to this story's religious subtext. Hogtown rests on the bedrock of the Jesus story. While I am not a particularly religious person, the parallel cries out to be named. The Jesus story, especially the part following the rabbi's entry into Toronto—I mean Jerusalem—is a story of protest against power and a radical identification (even to the point of death) with those oppressed by it. For Caesar, we have Obama. For Herod, Harper. For Pilate, the man who refused to take responsibility, we have Toronto's Chief of Police or Ontario's Premier (take your pick). The point is: after two thousand years, little has changed.
I wonder if Maria the bag lady is still alive. Unless there was a radical change in her life, I doubt it. But I have not forgotten her.
I dedicate this book to the protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Think of the Toronto experience as a test run.
I must have been dreaming when I had my head on the keyboard. The memory of my dreaming returns to me as a catalogue of sounds. I don't know why that is. I have the impression that most people remember their dreams as a succession of photos or as a video that jitters from scene to scene. For me it's all about the sounds I hear. It's through sounds that I know I'm real. The fact is: I don't believe in my eyes. They see only what lies on the surface. But I can believe in my ears. The sounds they hear come from deeper.
Take this office as an example. What I see is order. Above my head are the lines of the ceiling tiles which intersect at right angles. These match the right angles of the partitions which mark out our cubicles. There are hallways laid out with laser precision from one end of the building to the other. Filing cabinets hold client matters alphabetized and colour coded. Staplers hold staples. Clipboards hold clips. Everything in perfect order. But if you were to crack open my skull and peek inside, you'd find a gooey mess. I'm finishing my third week of articles and still I have no idea what I'm doing. I have even less idea why I'm doing it. I try my best to look confident, to be assertive, to walk with authority and to speak with the assurance of a knowing mind. I keep my clothes crisp and conservative for the job: blue skirt, white top, hair up, simple jewelry. I look like a flight attendant.
The world of inarticulate sound is less inclined to tell me lies. Ambient murmurs draw around me like water around a body in a stream, a natural flow that doesn't demand anything from me. The problem now is that I hear almost no ambient noise. The silence is unsettling. Usually, I hear all sorts of things:
Memo To Self
Date: Friday June 25th, 2010
RE: the top 10 things I usually hear when I'm in the office
10. the hum of the laser printer which is never turned off;
9. the buzz of the fluorescent lights overhead;
8. the whirr of the fan inside my desktop computer;
7. the ghost-like wooo of wind rushing past the office tower windows;
6. the clack-clack of venetian blinds driven against the windows by air blowing from the ducts;
5. the squeaky wheel of the tea trolley rolling along the carpet in the hallway;
4. the vague moan of a living city rumbling the building's foundations;
3. the hopeless frail beating of my heart;
2. the almost whistling of my breath rushing out between open lips;
1. the tick ticking of the second hand roaring down from the wall where an old-fashioned analog clock sits in judgment.
These are the sounds I usually hear in the office, but there's nothing usual about the office this week and my ears confirm it. I first noticed a change last week when big flatbed trucks rumbled into the downtown core and offloaded segments of concrete and chain link fence. When I settled into my chair after lunch on Wednesday, a deeper rumbling rocked the building and sent all the things on my desk shuffling sideways like timid line dancers. I'd never been in an earthquake. Things like that don't happen here. My first impulse was to tweet about it. Within thirty seconds, the St. Lawrence valley was buzzing with news of the tremor. I could have found the epicentre by triangulating all the tweets I got. At the same time, people I follow from San Francisco and Tokyo told me to relax; earthquakes happen all the time. Someone in the office said, in mock seriousness, that it was a sign; all we needed to do now was to sacrifice a goat on Yonge Street and sniff through its entrails.
By Thursday, the tea trolley had stopped squeaking up and down the aisles. There weren't enough people in the office to justify the expense of catering. O'Toole called it G20 flu. He ordered the remaining staff to shut off the office equipment. For long stretches now, even the phones lay silent.
There was the city too. I've been living here almost seven years now and always the sounds of subway and traffic and voices coalesce to produce a ceaseless white noise. I can't remember a time when it was so quiet. Elaine, the receptionist, was walking at lunch and said it reminded her of the movie Omega Man; she half expected Charlton Heston to pop out from behind a building and wave at her.
But there's that damnable tap at my shoulder. I start awake and gasp like a woman pulled from the water before she drowns. A strand of hair has come loose and hangs across an eye, and my shoes have disappeared under the work station. I swivel my chair around, hoping I haven't been drooling, hoping no one sees the stream of blether-letters on my computer monitor. Standing there is O'Toole, my boss, my nemesis, my principal, but more than these, my opposite. If I am sharp on the outside and jumbled on the inside, O'Toole is built the other way around. He lost his suit jacket five minutes after he arrived this morning and without it, the rest of him was left to rumple. Tie loose and twisted half way around. Buttons undone. Sleeves rolled past the elbows. Hair mussed. Shirt tails sprung loose over the belt. Trousers skewed to the right and falling off the hips. But inside lives an ordered soul whose thoughts are stored and indexed, and whose ideas have their proper place.
O'Toole has come asking about the gun storage memo. On the first week of my articles, O'Toole introduced me to Willie Getz and Owen Pendergast. Not in person, of course; O'Toole didn't know yet whether he could trust me with his clients. Instead, he ushered me into a small board room which he had commandeered as a war room for the Getz/Pendergast action. Banker's boxes covered half the far wall. O'Toole pointed to the boxes and told me to familiarize myself with the facts of the case. Oh. And one little thing. O'Toole wanted to know if it was okay for him to drive around town with an AK-47 in the trunk of his Benz. It would be nice if I could whip up a legal memorandum on the matter.
Getz and Pendergast were partners. The police union had retained O'Toole to represent the dynamic duo in the matter of a complaint filed with the Toronto Police Services Board. The complainant was a sex trade worker. Nobody in the firm could tell me the woman's name. Nobody thought she was real. I dug into the boxes and discovered that her name was Elizabeth (Lizzie) Nunziato. Lizzie Nunziato alleged that almost three years ago she was walking at midnight near the intersection of Rosedale Valley Road and the Bayview extension when officers Getz and Pendergast forced her into the back of their cruiser and drove west along Rosedale Valley Road to a place where the trees are dense. They drove off the road and parked. They dragged Lizzie out of the back seat and up the hill into the trees. There, they took turns raping her and left her for dead. Early in the morning, a homeless man found her and took a turn for himself. When he was done, he dragged Lizzie naked down the hill and dumped her beside the road. A taxi driver found her lying on the asphalt and called the police. Getz and Pendergast were the responding officers. When they got there, Lizzie became hysterical and the paramedics gave her a sedative.
Allegedly.
There's a union for sex trade workers. Who knew? When they heard Lizzie's story, they enlisted the help of the Civil Liberties Union and the lives of the two men in blue got a lot more complicated. A complaint to the TPSB became an appeal, became civil litigation, became a criminal trial, became suspension with pay, suspension without pay, reinstatement of pay, full reinstatement, and so on ad nauseam. After one of their little victories along the way (I think it was a motion to strike testimony from the record) O'Toole and his clients celebrated with a pub crawl and got piss drunk. While O'Toole had his head in a toilet, Getz and Pendergast borrowed his plastic and a couple days later presented him with an AK-47 as a thank-you. Since then, O'Toole had been driving around with an assault rifle stashed in his trunk. He was feeling uncomfortable. He thought the Law Society might frown on such things so he came to me scratching his head and wondering aloud just what were the gun storage laws in this town anyhow.
Sifting through the banker's boxes, I got to know Getz and Pendergast: service records, commendations, wives, kids, a divorce, support payments, apartment in the suburbs, trailer up north, fishing with the buddies, beer and Sunday afternoon football, monthly visits from the kids, a string of girlfriends. They were stand-up guys, the kind of guys you could count on to lend a hand if your car broke down on the highway, the kind of guys who voted for tough-on-crime politicians, the kind of guys who slept with Glocks under their pillows.
There were photos in the boxes too. Getz. Blond-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed, with a boyish grin and dimples that made your heart stop. Pendergast. Stern, mustached, hair close-cropped, not so friendly and open-looking as his partner. Good cop, bad cop? They both looked so clean and the lines of their uniforms looked so straight-edged. It was hard to imagine the two of them grubbing around in the dirt with their pants around their ankles and a dark canopy of trees overhead.
Deeper into the files I found photos from the emergency room at St. Mike's: scrapes and bruises, black eye, broken nose, leaves and twigs tangled into the hair. There was a mug shot too, probably taken by a friend a few months before the incident: a sly grin as if she had been sharing an off-colour joke with the person taking the picture, dirty blond hair pulled around one shoulder, gaunt cheeks, white tank top with the hint of a tattoo above the left breast.
As I delved file by file into the Getz/Pendergast action, an ambivalent feeling took hold. I wanted to believe in my clients, in the purity of their hearts and the falseness of the accusations against them. I wanted to believe in righteousness and integrity. At the same time, I wanted to believe in solidarity with the marginalized. I wanted to believe all the higher principles I'd read about in my women's studies courses when I was an undergraduate. The conflict I felt didn't sit on my shoulders like a conflict of interest, at least not in any official sense of the phrase. It was a conflict that sat lighter than the law but fell harder than ethics.
That first week I did something stupid. At the time, I rationalized it as research, but even as I was planning to do it, I heard my mother's voice sounding deep inside my head. My mother has lived all her life on rural route concession roads. For her, the city is a dark and dangerous place. Although I pretend to be adventurous—and compared to Mom I'm Marco Polo—nevertheless I've inherited a trace of my mother's anxiety. Every time I go home, I reassure her that the streets are safe even at night, that people are generally helpful, that chocolate bunny rabbits cavort in Queen's Park. I laugh and do my best to contain the fears that jostle loose if I let them.
But there are more compelling things than fear. Curiosity for instance. After a day in O'Toole's boardroom browsing documents and reviewing transcripts, I set the lids back on the boxes and went to see for myself. It was only seven o'clock and I could make it to the scene of the alleged crime before dark. Although I couldn't bill my time to the client, I felt it was important to see with my own eyes the place where Lizzie Nunziato said our clients had raped her.
I rode the subway five stops to Bloor Street, then east to Sherbourne station. The subway isn't bad, but it leaves a gritty metallic taste in my mouth. If the subway were an artery, it would be covered in plaque and belong to a pudgy middle-aged man with no personality. Following the map on my iPhone, I walked east along the north side of Bloor Street. For a city street, this is a sparse stretch of road. Looking back west, you can see a corridor of buildings leading to the infarctic heart of the city. There are insurance companies with their Doric columns and solid respectability. There are large city churches with neogothic façades looming over the sidewalk. Maybe law school has given me a cynical edge. I've come to regard these two institutions as interchangeable: churches are obsessed with mission statements and balanced budgets while insurance companies go from door to door with a proselytic zeal. I never come here. Either I stay close to Yonge Street or I go east across the Bloor Viaduct to the Danforth where all the Greek restaurants are. But this is an in-between place, a limbo. To the south is the St. James cemetery; to the north, a narrow scrap of grass and, beyond it, bush descending steeply to Rosedale Valley Road and a few stray headstones.
When I saw the "Nature Trail" sign, I caught myself thinking "How lovely!" and heard my mother's voice sounding delight inside my head. That voice drives me crazy. I hope someday it goes away. I crossed the grass to the opening behind the sign, a parting between two trees. Standing on the threshold, I stared down the embankment. The sky was overcast and this compounded the darkness under the trees. There was nothing I could see that looked like an official Toronto Parks & Rec Nature Trail, no groomed and graded path, no railing to prevent a tumble down the hill, just worn dirt between the trees and fallen branches.
I hadn't brought proper shoes for a hike in the woods. Those on my feet were leather dress shoes I'd been wearing at work. They weren't high heels, so it wouldn't be impossible to negotiate the path, and the ground was compacted enough I could get a firm footing. I angled down the hill in an easterly direction with the traffic on Bloor Street rumbling above my head. The further I went, the darker it got. I had to climb over a tree that had fallen across the path. When I hopped off the dead tree, the ground began to shake and I wondered if there was an earthquake. In retrospect, that was a curious thing to think given what happened a week later. It was the subway. I was walking beside the tunnel between Sherbourne and Castlefrank. Further along, the concrete casing of the subway tunnel emerged from the hillside. It was covered in graffiti: huge murals, abstract designs, bubble letters spelling words I didn't understand, giant portraits staring into the valley. Mosquitoes buzzed around my ears and bare arms. I swatted them away and held my ground. I stared at the walls the way I'd stare at an exhibition in an art gallery—in wonder and ignorance. Why? Why create something no one would see? And what did it mean? I picked up an empty can of spray paint someone had discarded near the wall. What kind of people had done this? I leaned in to the wall and noted the unmistakable tang of piss rising from the dirt. Someone had arranged a chair and side table next to one of the murals as if this space was a living room. All it needed was a lamp. When I stepped around a tree, the ground rumbled again. I followed the sound from west to east, drawing my eyes along the flank of the fat concrete tube. Through the trees, there were flecks of white, traces of the single broad arch that spans Rosedale Valley Road and bears the subway on its back. Staring down the slope, I could see the western footings of the arch. A man stepped from the shadows. I withdrew behind the tree and held my breath, worried he might have seen me. The man had come from between two wooden pallets that were laid on the ground and covered with cardboard and blankets. He had a full beard and shaggy hair. Although it was June and warm, he wore baggy sweat pants and a flannel shirt. His hands were cracked and dirty. He wore Nike running shoes. Even though he was at least fifty metres away, the swooshes on his shoes were as bright as the graffiti on the wall beside me.
Closing my eyes, I pressed my hands flat against the tree and gazed west back along the path I'd come. How long would it take me to run up the slope to street level? Could I even run in these shoes? If I walked quickly, did I have enough of a lead that I could beat the man there without breaking into a run?
I don't remember much about my climb out of the ravine. The gloom, the canopy of leaves, the wild messages on the concrete, the bed of dead leaves and low scrub, the ground rumbling its low tectonic shudders, the man emerging from the shadows, all of it filled me with a momentary dread. As I scrambled over the fallen tree and tore the pocket on my pants, I let a panic sweep over me. It felt like a swarm of rats rushing past my feet. It felt like plague. The dread I felt wasn't a dread of being attacked. It wasn't the dread that, if attacked, no one would hear my screams. The dread I felt was more general. It arose from the unexpected discovery that I inhabit only half a world. I inhabit a world of straight roads and clean sidewalks, of GPS devices and Google Earth, a world of Ontario Gazettes and by-laws governing garbage collection. The dread I felt is the dread that comes from eyes forced open.
Whenever I go home, I assure my mom I'm safe in the city. Although I can't be certain, I think my mom has a notion that life in the city conspires to tempt people away from their better natures. It starts in dark corners and seeps outward like a film of oil over the surface of the Don River. I had never believed in the dark corners, but when I stepped again onto the grassy stretch beside Bloor Street, and when I looked west at the churches and insurance headquarters, I decided there are some places I should not go—not unless I want to get caught out in a lie the next time I visit my mother.
"You're safe there in the city?" she'll ask.
"Of course," I'll answer.
I felt self-conscious riding home on the subway with my torn pocket and dirt-scuffed shoes. I worried that people might be watching me.
2. The radical writer
I thought O'Toole had come to ask about the gun storage memo but when I mention it, he pauses, struggling to recall what he asked me to do. He waves it aside; Monday will be fine. I want to throttle him. Last Monday it seemed as if the fate of the Western world depended on my research. I neglected everything I had been assigned by the other lawyers and poured myself into the Getz/Pendergast action. Now, O'Toole acts blasé. Maybe he's ADHD. Maybe he's in the early stages of dementia. Maybe he's trying to rattle me as a test; he wants to see how well I cope with contradictory and irrational instructions.
After O'Toole pretends to think for a minute about the gun storage memo, he pulls a brown, kraft-wrapped parcel from under his arm and tosses it onto my desk. Doesn't hand it to me. Ignores my outstretched hand and tosses it. The parcel strikes the desk with a bang and sends a picture frame clattering backwards into a container of pens and pencils. I leave everything where it falls and stare at the parcel. The sender has taped it round and round at either end and has written the address in a childlike hand. It is addressed to Randy O'Toole, not to Randall O'Toole, Barrister & Solicitor, not even to Randall O'Toole, Esq. as I sometimes see on his letters, but to the improbable and informal Randy O'Toole.
"If you had plans this weekend, cancel them. You've got a book to read."
I pick up the package and feel its weight. It isn't a large book. No War and Peace. But it seems a decent length. Maybe there are illustrations or bar graphs that will make it a faster read.
"Ever been to discoveries?" he asks.
I am about to say that I've been articling three weeks now and all he's given me so far are the scraps from his table, but it sounds too much like complaining so I shut my mouth.
Like a litigator, he answers his own question: "Of course not. How could you?"
I'm supposed to be in the office Monday morning no later than 8:30 so I'll be ready to meet Mikey by nine. No earlier. "If he shows up early, let 'im sit. Let 'im stew. Let 'im know you're in charge. It's just like sex."
I'm beginning to fret about spending an entire year with O'Toole as my principal. Nobody told me I'd have to subject myself to this in order to qualify for the bar. He never crosses any lines—at least no legal lines. No harassment. No inadvertent brushes past in the hallway. Nothing you can build a case on. But he is annoying and annoying has lines sui generis (as they say) and when it comes to crossing these lines, O'Toole has no scruples.
Mikey, he explains, is his big brother. (Oh God. My first client contact is going to be with another smart-mouthed O'Toole.) Mikey likes to write books. He's bright enough, with a head full of ideas and a big heart that doesn't belong in this particular iteration of the world. Maybe the books are his way to make the world a more hospitable place for his big ill-fitting heart. He is an activist, a shit disturber, a fist-shaker, a wild-eyed prophet, a ranter on street corners. Randy has never seen his brother rant on street corners, but that is the impression he has of his brother. Mikey is bipolar. A few years ago, he went on a Big Pharma tirade and stopped taking his meds, convinced They were trying to control his mind. They were trying to make him passive, like a gelding, so that he wouldn't buck the system. They were forcing him into the mold of the good consumer. Don't ask questions. Obey rules. Feed the beast.
Mikey got himself into trouble when he self-published a book. If he'd gone to a respectable publisher, they would have vetted his claims and proofed him against litigation. Then again, if he'd gone to a respectable publisher, his manuscript would never have made it to the vetting process; it would have ended up in a recycling box under some poor reader's desk. Mikey thought publishers were all part of a big media conspiracy anyways, so as a matter of integrity, he borrowed money from their mother and printed two hundred copies of his Big Pharma rant through a service he found online. To Randy's astonishment, Mikey sold all two hundred copies. An alternative zine even gave it a good review. That was enough exposure to attract the attention of a mid-sized pharmaceutical company whose legal department brought a motion for an injunction and sued for damages in libel.
"My brother." Randy shakes his head. "Christ."
Randy would have left his brother writhing in the maw of the beast. Mikey was judgment proof anyways, so it would have been both humane and practical to let the company win a worthless judgment. But years ago, in a moment of weakness or integrity (depending on your point of view), Randy had promised his mother he'd look out for Mikey. Michael Sr. was no longer around to take care of the family, and Mrs. O'Toole had been feeling strange aches and pains these last few weeks. If she should steal away to Jesus—or wherever the fuck she thought she was going—Mikey wouldn't be so judgment proof anymore, now would he?
O'Toole despised the liberal do-gooders who preyed on his mother's sentimental nature. Fucking vultures! he said. And there was his brother, drawn to them like a moth to a magnet—or whatever. That's what liberals get when they fling open the doors to the whole fucking world in the name of tolerance. They get all the crazies mixed in with the sane, but it gets so confused that even the sane start talking like crazies. There was Mikey, banging on his keyboard whenever he got himself worked up, spewing all his shit about WIPO and patents and globalization, when he didn't know enough to take his own meds. How can a guy take on the cares of the world but let his own brain turn to mush?
I try my best to sit still while O'Toole lets his smart-ass mouth ramble on, but I'm hoping to finish work before it gets too late so I can meet up with the other three for drinks. After our first week on the job, and suffering from an overwhelming sense of dislocation and insecurity, we had all gone to a pub on John Street where we let loose our frustrations. We harangued all the partners and associates at Gordon, O'Toole & Spence, LLP. There was a wonderful energy amongst the four articling students and we had agreed (like a Tontine pact turned on its head) that we should go for drinks each Friday when our work was done. I wish O'Toole would shut up so I can turn back to my desk and finish by early evening.
It's nothing at all, barely a shift of the eyes, off to the right and up a bit to the old-style clock on the wall. But I can see from the way O'Toole looks at me, from the way the skin around his eyes has dropped away (pulled tight to the corners only a moment before), from the sudden evaporation of mirth, I can see he has noticed my stolen glance. Shit! I think to myself: I've blown my chances already.
Articling is a game. In theory it's just another stage in your education. But everybody knows that if you impress your principals they'll hire you back once you've passed your bar ads. So it's best to treat your articles—all twelve months of them—like an extended job interview with the chance to launch a stellar career. Long before reality TV there was articling. But here I sit not three weeks into my stint and already I've committed stupid infractions that might get me voted off the island.
I have this nasty habit—not a habit really—more the dictates of an unruly subconscious. As hard as I try to polish my pragmatic exterior, to make myself glossy and inscrutable like all the other coifed and coutured women I see rushing up and down the busy streets and poised on escalators and sipping their fancy lattes, as hard as I try, other things pop to the surface like mud splashed on chrome. There's no deliberateness to the ways I undermine myself; they just happen. Laertes may have had fine advice from his father, but really it was no advice at all, more a statement of fact: we can't help but be true to ourselves; the truth of ourselves percolates to the surface whether or not we want it; the thing that proves us is whether we choose to acknowledge it. Here I go waxing privately personal while the crimson spreads across my face as if to prove the point.
Being good comes easily and the good (or at least dutiful) part of me is screaming that I should do everything in my power and more besides to guarantee myself a hire-back. But how far should I go to guarantee that hire-back? There is something repugnant about the prospect of kissing ass for a whole year. Meanwhile another part of me is screaming to pay attention, to mind the little slips—like the eyes wandering to the clock or the offhand remark that skirts dangerously close to sarcasm. These things that moil from below are not stray blunders of a girl with her guard down, but are filled with meaning and so they have to be honoured. What does it mean that I should let O'Toole see my impatient glance at the clock?
O'Toole must have an unruly subconscious too. With a simple twitch, our roles reverse. O'Toole averts his eyes after an almost confessional glance, while I draw myself up in a self-righteous "Aha!" I catch him trying to peek down my top. Now he looks up at the ceiling, off to the left at the analog clock, through the window and across the city, anywhere but into my eyes.
To be fair, it isn't a lecherous look. It's more the look of a twelve-year-old boy who is curious about something he doesn't understand and can't think of a subtle way to satisfy his curiosity. He reminds me of my brother, Jay. That may seem a far-fetched comparison given an age difference of thirty years and the fact that one manages a law firm while the other runs heavy machinery on a family farm. But it's not so far-fetched when you consider that once a male of our species reaches puberty, not much changes until senility sets in. Differences in education and work and experience are like clothes on a manikin—strip those away and it's sometimes hard to tell one dummy from another.
O'Toole tries to suppress a smirk and looks again at my chest: "So how's that new tattoo working out for you?"
Even O'Toole knows about it.
"It was Rosen, right?" (Stupid prick.) "He's the one who told you, right?"
3. Ralph's
In my first week—on a break from the Getz/Pendergast files—I ran a shit errand for one of the other lawyers. I had to go up to the county courthouse on University Avenue and warm a bench in a courtroom, waiting for a clerk to assign a trial date for a matter I knew nothing about. It was the end of the day when the clerk called the matter and I almost missed it because I'd forgotten the names of the parties. The clerk spoke to me as if I should know what I was doing. When I explained I was just an articling student and had started only that week, the woman gave me a sour frown and refused to look at me for the rest of our exchange. I had never felt like such an ignoramus.
As I sometimes do when I want to recover a sense of self-respect, I retreated to a library—in this case, the courthouse library. The library adjoins the courthouse on the south side of the building. It reminds me of a giant pot on a fondue stand. At street level, people can walk underneath it, and if they have a special security pass, they can enter through glass doors to a tubular elevator that will take them to the third floor. If the elevator wasn't so slow and clunky, you could almost imagine yourself being sucked up a tube into a space ship. As a lowly articling student, I don't have a special security pass, so I won't ever know the pleasure of entering from the street. Instead, I have to enter through the third floor of the courthouse, having already passed through security on the main floor.
According to O'Toole, things haven't always been so tight-assed here in the city. Even ten years ago, the public could move freely through places like the county courthouse, the Court of Appeals in Osgoode Hall, the provincial courts in Old City Hall. But the mood of the times has acquired a whiff of paranoia. Now, everywhere you go, there are metal detectors and Kevlar vests and tasers and mace. "It seems," said O'Toole, "we've all gone a little bit crazy trying to protect ourselves from the people we think are a little bit crazy." He takes a perverse pleasure in being Mikey O'Toole's kid brother. He uses that fact like a diploma. When people speak about the need to guard against the crazies milling outside the courtroom doors, O'Toole laughs and tells them how he grew up with such a person. "Our fears are overblown," he says. "It's just a matter of knowing how to speak to them. Their thoughts are disorganized." He makes mental health sound like housekeeping.
The courthouse library on University Avenue is an odd room—a large circle with all the book shelves running like spokes from the centre of a gigantic legal cog. I'm convinced the room was configured by Druids who positioned the shelves according to secret factors—angle of the sun at solstice, light of the harvest moon in a leap year—so that if an aspiring jurist stood in the exact centre, her clouded mind would clarify and she would be swept away by waves of pure legal reasoning. I tested my theory but it didn't work.
On that afternoon in my first week of articling, I slumped at a table and stared at the clock above the door: 4:29 p.m. A librarian approached and said it was time to leave.
"But it's only 4:30." I tried not to whine.
"I'm sorry, but we keep courthouse hours."
A security guard stood behind her, hulking on the other side of the glass doors. He carried a taser on his hip. I stood and smiled and gathered my belongings. What if I refused to leave? How would a confrontation play itself out here? Had there ever been a library take-down? Maybe they'd zap me between the stacks. My body would crumple against a shelf and the whole works would come tumbling down on top of me. They would rush to help me but it would be too late. After fifteen minutes of frantic digging, they would pull my broken body from beneath a heap of books: Dominion Law Reports and Canadian Criminal Cases.
When I left the library, the security guard smiled and pushed the elevator button for me. He didn't speak. He wore black trousers with a clean crease, crisp white shirt, razored lines around a narrow beard. He had dark skin. Not black. More a middle eastern coffee colour. When I stepped into the elevator, he nodded with a gravity that looked silly—a boy playing security guard rather than a man keeping the peace. He couldn't be any older than me. I suppressed the urge to laugh as the elevator cabin rattled to street level.
It was too early for dinner. Maybe I could get some take-out to eat at the office. Even though the office was east, I walked west to Spadina. Rosen had told me about a Chinese restaurant near Queen and Spadina that served good take-out. When I placed my order, they told me it would take ten minutes. I went outside and looked through the windows of neighbouring shops. That's when I discovered Ralph's Body Art—Tattoos, Piercings & Henna.
Although Queen and Spadina is not an intersection I can claim to know with any intimacy, I've had reason to visit the neighbourhood from time to time. There's a pub where I've shared pints of bitters with friends, and the Horseshoe Tavern where I spent a disastrous date. Ronnie Hawkins has never sounded the same since then. There's a clothing store where I bought some things I've never shown my mom, and there's Criminal Records—every law student should buy music from Criminal Records. Despite my wanderings through that intersection, I had never noticed Ralph's until that evening. That still puzzles me. I read that when Christopher Columbus was approaching an island in the Caribbean, the locals couldn't see him coming even though his ships were in plain view. Maybe they couldn't see because their seeing needed language to describe the seen. Without a word for ship, the ships couldn't exist. Or maybe they couldn't see because they couldn't analogize the sight of ships to anything they knew. It was easier to deny the existence of ships than to expand the categories of their experience. Whatever the reason, something similar had passed between me and Ralph's. Until that evening, it had never occurred to me that I could get a tattoo. The word didn't belong to my vocabulary. Girls who grow up on farms in southwestern Ontario don't get tattoos. Cattle get tattoos. Girls get husbands.
My approach to Ralph's was tentative and roundabout. It began with a walk past on the far side of the street, then again on the near side of the street. There was a casual glance through the window, then hands pressed against the glass to see what I could of the interior. There were hundreds of samples posted on the walls: skulls and runes, iron crosses, devils, roses, Betty Boop and Groucho Marx, a geisha, a dominatrix, da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, an eagle, a lion, and a griffin for those who couldn't make up their mind, and logos, hundreds of them, all the brands of the galaxy, from running shoes to computers, breakfast cereals to soft drinks. Some were simple monochromes; others were elaborate with delicate shifts in tint and hue. I stepped inside for a closer look and a clanging bell called a man—a boy really—from the back where he'd been leaning in a doorway and smoking a cigarette. The boy was lank and lean, the kind of boy you'd want to sit down and feed a solid farm-cooked meal. (Shit! There I go talking like my mom again.) He had a dark mop and big billy-bob sideburns that grew down to his jawline. He wore a gold ring through his left nostril and three studs through his right eyebrow. I winced just to look at him. Curling around his left arm was a Chinese dragon, and around his right, a Celtic pattern. He saw me staring at his arms so he raised them in the air: "East … meets west." He grinned, then gave a chortle, sort of a yuk yuk that got me to thinking maybe the billy-bob part of his look was authentic.
"Are you Ralph?" I asked. I felt awkward in my flight attendant clothes. They didn't belong in a place like this.
"Naw." Again the yuk yuk. "I just think Ralph's a funny name for a shop."
"But you're the owner?"
"Yeah." He offered his hand. "Name's Johnny. Johnny Braskovitch."
I took his hand and shook it. "So, Johnny Braskovitch, how much?"
"Depends. How big? How many colours?" Johnny joined me in front of the wall of samples.
"How much for a rose?" and I pointed to a simple red bud with a thorny stem.
"That'd be one eighty—no—two hundred—no—damn!" He stepped to a low table beside a barber chair and picked up a pair of dark-framed glasses. When he put them on he looked like Buddy Holly's bad seed. "All my friends think I look goofy with these things on so I never wear ‘em."
"You wear them when you work I hope."
"Don't need to. They're for distance. When I'm working in close I'm real good."
"Glad to hear it."
"Anyways, it's two hundred bucks."
"Is that where I have to sit?" I pointed to the barber chair.
"Oh, yeah. Cool, eh? Found it. They have these junk yards down on Commissioner's Street." Johnny looked down at his canvas hightops and picked grime from his cuticles.
"Does it hurt?" I asked.
"Hell no! Though I wouldn't really know. Cuz whenever I get it done I have some help from my friend Jack, know? Jack Daniels? And his li'l sister Mary Jane?"
There seemed no end to the kid's goofiness as he yukked and grinned his way in a half circle behind the chair.
I'm not sure how it happened, but after I had asked all the questions a good consumer is supposed to ask—questions about sterile needles and risk of infection and the danger of mistakes and the problem of changing your mind after it's too late—the conversation turned to the more general question of why people get tattoos in the first place. A shift to the meta, a retreat into the abstract: a typical move when I'm feeling awkward. Johnny didn't see the point of the question since, well, there I stood, and if I didn't know why I was there, then maybe I shouldn't be thinking about a tattoo. In his experience, most customers (he called them clients) don't philosophize about their motives; they walk in the shop and say "I want a tattoo" and that's all the discussion there is.
"Most people couldn't tell you why they piss when they wake up in the morning much less why they come to me for a tattoo."
"I guess not."
"Without knowing you better, I'd say you're the sort to overanalyse things."
"I guess so."
"Which makes us kindred spirits."
"Intellects."
"Huh?" He looked at me over his glasses.
"If we both overanalyse things, then it's not really our spirits that make us kindred."
"Why don't you go for it?"
"The rose?"
"Turn off your mind."
"Maybe a saying instead of a rose?"
"Choose something just because."
"Something that moves me."
"Choose and don't flinch."
"Like jumping off a cliff."
"Don't think."
"I don't know," and I bit a fingernail.
Johnny pulled the finger from my mouth. He held me by the wrist, my fingertip glistening between us.
"There was this once," he said. "A woman. Sat right there. I doubt she could've said why she wanted a tattoo, but—Christ, I could've been her therapist. The situation practically analysed itself." He planted his hands on the back of the barber chair and squeezed the black padded vinyl. He stared at me across the room, across the grimy tiled floor, across the faint traces of cigarette smoke that drifted into the light of the late afternoon. There was a seriousness in his eyes and he squinted so that if you looked only into his eyes you might think you were staring at a monk—or at a prophet even. "She comes to me wanting I forget what. Maybe a bunch of lady bugs or stars or something. She wants them I forget where, but wherever it is, she's got to take off her top. And—I'm not shittin'—my sister was there; she can back me up; she's my partner in this business by the way; always keep her around when I'm inking a woman—anyhoo—I'm not shittin'—you could see the hand-shaped welts all over her. After she left, I wanted to smash things I was so angry. It was all Maureen could do to calm me down. I wanted to call the cops but Maureen said no; they only make things worse. Guess she should know with all she's been through. So there is this woman in the chair. No. She was laid out on the table cuz I was doin' her back. So there she is on the table and welts the size of Gibraltar. Guess she'd been nickel and diming her old man for months, saving up for something nice.
"If I was a shrink—not that I know a damn thing about therapy—but if I did, I'd analyse it like this: the welts aren't permanent; bruises fade away; even broken bones heal; the wounds that last, the one's that really worm into the marrow, those are the ones that come from hearing day after day that you aren't worth jack shit to nobody. So she comes in here with this money she's been hiding away, as much as saying to me: even if I'm ugly and even if I'm worth nothing but dog shit, even so, at least I can put something pretty on my body and no man's gonna take it away from me without ripping off my skin. I think she wanted a tattoo because she wanted something more permanent than a bruise, but more beautiful than a scar. That's how I'd analyse it."
The boy pulled off his Buddy Holly's and dropped them on the table. He looked up at me and gave an awkward half grin.
I couldn't believe what I next heard coming from my mouth: "Johnny Braskovitch, you're gonna give me a tattoo."
He gave no notice one way or the other. He didn't back away, but he didn't come closer either.
I said: "But I've got takeout waiting for me at Young Lok's."
Johnny Braskovitch shrugged. "I'll put the ‘Closed' sign up and pull down the blinds. You pick up that food of yours and we'll get started."
And that's when I got my tattoo at Ralph's, or at least the outline. The rest of it came a couple weeks later.
To Johnny Braskovitch, a tattoo was as holy as a stigmata, a special sign, something you might kneel before or kiss like a cardinal's ring. But to O'Toole it's just another excuse to stare down my top.
"It was Rosen, right?"
O'Toole's eyebrows shoot up, pretending not to understand the question.
"It was Rosen told you about the tattoo."
O'Toole shrugs. "I think that conversation was privileged."
I skimp on the gun memo. I wonder if O'Toole will notice? I imagine a confrontation. I imagine him storming into the cubicle and slapping the sheaf of papers onto the desk in front of me and declaring that it's substandard work for someone of my alleged abilities (implying that my school transcripts are a lie). How will I answer? I play the scene out in my mind, rehearsing all my lines. I'll tell him I've made an executive decision. I'll tell him I've reprioritized my workload. I'll tell him from now on I'm giving my best work to his clients and if there's anything left over for his personal shit then, so much as there is, that much I'll give. But really … and here maybe I'll raise a finger. (I won't point it directly at him; that would be rude.) I'll point my finger towards his quadrant of the universe. But really (I'll say) if he doesn't have the common sense to recognize that a man shouldn't be driving around with an assault rifle in his trunk, then no legal memorandum (no matter how finely researched) is ever going to help him. After I proofread the memo for the bazillionth time, I run off a copy and drop it onto O'Toole's desk as I pass by on my way to the elevators. He'll see it on Monday morning.
4. The Eternal Flame of Hope
After I pack everything into my satchel and slip on my shoes, I peer over the partition that hides my desk from all the others. The office is empty. Three quarters of the staff didn't come to work today. The quarter that did went home early: one partner, two associates, three support staff, and all four articling students. The articling students showed up because they were afraid not to show up. One of the articling students, Golding, showed up for only five minutes, long enough to receive instructions, then he took off for the day, running a crazy errand in Woodbridge. It's been the quietest day in the firm's forty-five year history, and now, at 6:30 in the evening, the office is silent save for my breathing and the buzz from the fluorescent lights. After I turn out the lights, I hold my breath and close my eyes. It's so quiet I might as well be standing on the moon.
When I ride down in the elevator, there's no one for me to ignore. In the lobby, the concierge says he's surprised there's anyone left in the building. Most nights when I finish work, I go downstairs from the lobby and burrow into the Path. I read somewhere that if you go underground here, you can connect with more than twelve hundred shops without ever having to step outside. Mostly I use the Path to cover the better part of the distance between work and my apartment building, which is especially convenient in the wintertime or during rain storms. But the Path can be tiresome. Most nights going home, I feel like a corpuscle squeezed through an artery, jostling against a million other corpuscles. This densely packed human traffic is disconcerting for someone like me who grew up in wide open spaces and walked to a soundtrack of wind in the trees. But more tiresome than the crowding is the sameness of everything. At every node along the Path, you see the same shops, the same merchandise, the same brands, the same cosmic lustre, the same plastic smiling faces, and all of it accompanied by the promise that if you buy this stuff then, by a mystical transformation, it will give expression to a longing hidden deep inside. You will be a unique individual like everyone else. There are times when the simplicity of my clothes seems bland and I feel self-conscious, but there are other times, especially when the merchandizing glitz overwhelms me, when I catch a reflection of myself in a shop window and the sight of my plain outfits soothes me. I breathe deeply, say my name like a prayer, and move on.
Of all days, today would be a good day to take the Path because it's quiet. It wouldn't feel so close and all the shops would be locked up. The concierge has shut off the escalator for the weekend. I pause at the head of the stairs that lead below street level. At the bottom stand four police officers decked out in midnight blue. The Kevlar vests make them look pompous; they walk around with puffed out chests. Looking down on them from this distance, I see proud cartoon characters from Saturday morning TV. One of them has pulled off his baseball cap and is wiping his forehead. Even from this distance, I can hear him complaining about how hot it is to be wearing all this gear.
I change my mind and back away from the stairs. I'm supposed to meet the others at seven for drinks and a bite to eat. Normally we meet at The Advocate, but everything near the security zone is closed for the weekend, so we moved our gathering further north. As I step out onto the street, the concierge wishes me a good weekend. I smile and wave at him through the glass of the revolving door. My friends will have to wait. Curiosity has taken hold. I've been holed up all day in a boardroom full of files and haven't been outside to see for myself what things look like around the security zone. There's a point-and-shoot digicam in my purse and my fingers are itching to reach in and pull it out.
I walk south down Yonge Street. I heard the police are roving in packs of four. Not that they would call it roving. Not that they would use the word packs either. Are they details? Outfits? Units? Whatever they call themselves, they aren't moving in fours anymore. Approaching from the south is a group of eight walking in twos with a lockstep military precision. All but one wear wraparound sunglasses to guard against the glare reflected from the office buildings. All wear enormous utility belts with helmets slung from the hip and tasers and mace and plastic straps for binding hands. For all I know, their gear includes jet packs and inflatable life rafts. I have to step off the curb. They don't make way for anything or anyone. I try my best to look indignant. As they pass, they stare ahead, stony-faced, all except the officer closest to me at the rear, the one who isn't wearing sunglasses. As he passes, he turns and grins and winks at me. Maybe he's a rookie, not yet fully indoctrinated, not yet jaded enough that he would fail to notice how silly his cohorts look in their overblown goose-stepping gravity. Maybe there's hope for this one. That's my wish, so I nod and smile back at him. The others remind me of boys playing war games. They remind me of my brother when he was seven.
All down Yonge Street, the shopkeepers have boarded up their windows. If I had been snatched from somewhere else and blindfolded, then released onto these streets without being told my location, I might have guessed I was in a tropical town bracing itself for a storm. A few of the venues are still open—McDonald's, Starbucks—but most closed long ago. From what I hear in the news, the few remaining indie store owners threw up their hands earlier in the week and retreated to their suburban homes.
At Wellington, I see another group of eight. As I pass, I feel a weird energy in the air. I want to act natural. I want to believe the police are there for my personal safety. But with eight standing beside me in midnight blue, an electric paranoia crackles in the air above my head. I'm afraid the sparks might make me twitch in jerky awkward movements. I'm afraid I might draw attention to myself. I expect they are already watching me, assessing me as a risk. Overhead and fixed to a light post is a green sign warning me that a video surveillance camera is recording my every timorous step. As much as I want to act natural, there's nothing natural about any of this.
Moving west along Wellington, I come to the northeast corner of the security zone. A concrete barrier topped with chain link fence stretches west down the middle of Wellington Street for as far as I can see, and south down the middle of Bay to Front Street at the corner of Union Station. There isn't much traffic, mostly police cars and a handful of taxis, but the taxis have no fares because most people have abandoned the downtown core for the weekend. There aren't many pedestrians and the few remaining carry big cameras with fancy lenses, probably media. Performing a rough count, I estimate that if you were to gather up all the civilians—the media, the stray business people going home for the weekend, the taxi drivers, the gawkers, the homeless who have been displaced from their usual haunts—the police outnumber them two to one.
Stuck out in the middle of the intersection is a gap in the barrier. A trickle of civilians passes through the gap, but the police are making ready to seal it for the weekend. There are forty police officers clumped in groups of five or six. One officer drives around on a golf cart with cases of bottled water and pop in tow. He stops and tosses bottles to his buddies. They laugh. They shoot the shit. Writing up parking tickets would be more exciting than this.
I want to snap photos but am afraid to pull out my camera. Looking south on Bay, I see a cluster of photographers. They give me courage. I could hide in the safety of their numbers, snapping pics of Union Station, the golden glass of the Royal Bank buildings, the concrete barrier, the metal fence, the police telling people to move along, the people pointing, the people talking amongst themselves, the people puzzled at the transformation of their city.
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