Indifferently Duelling Theatres of the Absurd

            On Saturday morning I went to the food bank for the first time in three weeks. I assume I missed the Thanksgiving turkey handout but it had been unavoidable because I had an essay to write and couldn’t spare the time to go and stand in a lineup.

            After locking my bike I asked the African guy standing off from the back of the line if he knew who the last person in line was. He told me it was the guy in the black baseball cap. I guess though that I should have confirmed that with somebody else just to be sure.

            Both Wayne and Bart were further ahead in line and each was ranting as incomprehensibly as ever, except that Wayne is louder, funnier and he dances while doing it. Bart is a little more grotesque in the things he blurts out but instead of dancing he sometimes assumes Hip-hop poses. They never seem to interact or respond to one another in any way through their coprolalia and so having them both in the same place at the same time is like hearing the blasting of two different radios tuned to two separate broadcasts of two distinct monologues from two unrelated branches of the theatre of the absurd.

            My position in line seemed to be very close to the epicenter of that line-up’s smoking community, and so I wandered off to breathe cleaner air while reading Nella Larsen’s “Passing” for my 20^th Century United States Literature course. Set in the late 1920s when segregation was in full force, the novel is one of the classics of the Harlem Renaissance. It centers on a Black woman named Irene, who could pass for White but has never tried. Irene reencounters after an old friend named Clare who had disappeared from Irene’s community for several years. It turns out that Clare has all this time been fully passing for White and is somewhat trapped in the lifestyle. She is married to a racist White man who does not know she is a Negro and who in fact despises people of African descent to the point that he would never even sink to speaking to one of them. Clare has reached out to Irene because she is the only bridge to her own past. It’s an interesting story but I find Larsen’s writing to be full of bad, poorly used adjectives and amateurish compared to other writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

            When the tall man who seems to, at least on Saturdays, manage the food bank came walking slowly up the street, Wayne called out, “Everybody on their knees and bow down!” I doubt if Wayne made the same association, but the man really does carry himself like a Nubian king.

            It seems to be a new and welcome trend that the food bank opens on time on Saturdays. I stayed parallel with my position in line as it moved, but further out on the sidewalk, to avoid the smoke. When I finally stepped into my spot I had to affirm to an older Polish man and a young Black woman that I was indeed ahead of them. The Polish man though shed some doubt on my having been there before him. When he shrugged and declared that he didn’t care I decided that he might be right so I told him he could go ahead of me.

            I looked over at Wayne and saw him with his head back, holding an empty plastic wine bottle vertically in his mouth without using his hands. Then he walked to the garbage can near me to drop it in the slot but the man in front of me held out his hand for the bottle. Wayne pulled the bottle away from him and shook his head, saying, “You don’t want that! It’s got germs!” and then he dropped it in the slot. Wayne didn’t understand that he wanted the bottle so he could cash it in at the Beer Store for the twenty-cent deposit. It seemed a waste to throw good money away.

            The Tool Library had an A-frame blackboard sign on the street in front of the entrance, near where the food bank doorkeeper was standing. From a little further back in line, a skinny older man who looked like he might be either Somalian or Ethiopian came forward to ask her about it. She only had the patience to tell him that it wasn’t a book library but a tool library. When he came back to sit down I explained to him that if one pays $50 a year to the Tool Library they can come and borrow any of their tools, including some musical instruments. He was impressed and thought $50 to be a reasonable price. He said he’d like to learn to play guitar. I told him that he could also borrow musical instruments from the Toronto Public Library but I assumed that might be only at certain branches. I found out later that it’s only our very own Parkdale branch of the library that lends instruments. That’s another of the many reasons to love Parkdale.

            The man I’d just spoken with noticed that the shopping cart belonging to the young woman behind me had a list of major European cities such as Rome and Paris. He proudly told her that he had traveled to most of those places. He said he had worked in Dubai where salaries are tax free and where once a year one gets to fly for free to anywhere in the world. I guess that’s how he went to all of those cities.

            I was curious later to find out if a renowned rich country like Dubai had food banks. There are two, and they not only coordinate with several supermarkets, food factories and farms, but also with eighty mosques that each have charity fridges to which worshippers are encouraged to bring donations. The food banks in Dubai not only feed the local poor but they export food to refugee camps outside of the country.

            At one point the man slipped through the wooden gate that leads to the alley between 1499 and 1501 Queen Street West. While there he spent at least a minute shooting off snot rockets with long and loud sonic trails. The woman behind me let out a disgusted groan.

            Downstairs I got number 30.

            Angie’s meat and dairy section had no eggs for the first time in months. She gave me two half-liters of milk, four small fruit-bottom yogourt cups, two cans of club soda, and two cans of Rubicon soda, one of pomegranate and the other of pineapple-coconut. Finally she gave me a tube of frozen ground chicken and asked me how my reading was going. I said, “Pretty good.”

            Samantha was minding the vegetable section. I turned down the offer of a bag of frozen peas because I still had two from before and my freezer is in severe need of defrosting to the point that, if I don’t chisel the ice away from time to time the storage area is in danger of shrinking to the size of single slice toaster slot. She gave me a handful of oddly shaped carrots, another of potatoes, two apples, five radishes, two cobs of corn and a yellow pepper.

            There was a bit of a backup for the shelves, despite the fact that there were four volunteers helping people shop. While we were waiting, the Polish man ahead of me turned and handed me a tube of frozen ground chicken. I thought that I must have dropped mine and he’d picked it up, but I realized when I got home that I had two.

            I had hoped that one of the other volunteers would serve me because I didn’t want to deal with the woman who’d told me to “hurry up” the last time I’d been there. Sure enough though, it was her I got. Before we started I wanted to make it clear to her what she had done and that she should never do it again. I told her that if she were working in a supermarket she would not be allowed to tell her customers to “hurry up”. She told me she didn’t remember saying what I’d recounted but she apologized if she had. I stated that as long as she’d confirm that she’d never talk to me that way again we could proceed. She agreed and we went through the shelves.

            The only cereal they had were boxes of vanilla flavoured Special K, so I took one. Under those were tubes of wasabi-flavoured potato chips.

            There was plenty of pasta and rice but as usual I didn’t take any. I did take a can of pasta sauce though.

            There were hand packed, half-kilo bags of flour and a choice between white or whole wheat, so I took the darker stuff.

            The shelves were fairly well stocked for the first time in several weeks, with more protein than usual. There was peanut butter, though the kind with sugar added, so I passed. There was canned meat and tuna and so I took the fish. There were a variety of canned beans from which I grabbed some chickpeas. From the soups I chose a can of organic lentil.

            From the bin of snack bars she gave me four sweet and salty peanut bars, a blueberry fruit crisp bar, a peanut breakfast square and a small bag of duck shaped cheddar crackers.

            One shelf offered various boxes of crackers, one brand of which she recommended, but I chose a bag of sweet chili whole grain tortilla chips flecked with sprouted flax, quinoa, chia, broccoli and radish seeds. I was curious how they got all of that stuff into one chip.

            She directed me to the bread but I told her I was fine in that regard and that I was done. On my way out she called, “Sorry again about last time!”

            When I got home, since I hadn’t planned on going out again once my boots were off, I went back out to the liquor store to buy a couple of cans of Creemore to go with my Saturday and Sunday dinners.

            That night after putting some Italian sausages in the oven I took the garbage out back. As usual, my next roof neighbour, Taro was sitting outside and enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. We chatted a bit and then he asked me, “What’s with the old guy on the third floor?” He said he’s always looking out his window at him and taking pictures. I explained that Caesar is a bit of a curmudgeon and that he’s always taking the landlord to court, including our previous landlord, Henry. I told him that there was a time a few years ago when he thought that I was using my computer to screw up his television reception.