It felt like I had food poisoning on Saturday morning and suspect that it came from the left over frozen falafel from the food bank that I’d cooked the night before. That fowl falafel made me feel awful. There were two more bags of the stuff in the fridge but I decided to throw them in the garbage. I’d rather live without feeling sick.
Since
last Saturday the food bank handed out the random numbers at around 10:30, I
decided that I’d go there this time fifteen minutes later than usual. But when
I arrived the doorkeeper (I think her name is Martina) had already handed them
out. I asked her for a number just as she was going back inside with an empty
box. She came back a minute or so later to hand me number 21. Then she and the
manager, Valdene, got into the food bank van and drove off. One of the
volunteers who came out for a smoke said they couldn’t open until they couldn’t
open until they came back. They returned 45 minutes later with a load of food
that looked like it came from donations to a food bank barrel in one of the
local supermarkets.
It
was another bitterly cold day and I hadn’t dressed warmer because I’d stupidly
expected their new system to make things go more quickly. In actuality,
eliminating the line up does not stop most of us from having to wait in the
cold. It just makes it unnecessary for some regulars to show up super early
just to be first in line.
There
were a lot of people smoking and two classes of cigarette addicts: the ones
that buy their own and the ones that always either bum smokes or scavenge them.
It seems that as soon as a two thirds smoked cig hits the ground someone has
already picked it up again and started smoking the rest of it. One guy that was
given a fag inhaled it so hard and fast that there was still a cigarette-shaped
cylinder of ashes sticking out from the butt when he was finished.
There
was a used coffee mug hanging from a nail in a wooden hydro pole by a piece of
twine that had been tied through the handle.
There
was a woman with two children of about 5 and 7 that arrived in front of the
Parkdale Activities and Recreation Centre at around 10:45 and looking very out
of place. She was carrying three new sleeping bags rolled up in plastic
packages which it looked like she intended to donate. When she found out that
PARC wouldn’t open until 11:00 she stood waiting, but after a while I saw three
people, each with one of the sleeping bags and the woman and her kids were
gone. There are homeless people that come to PARC every day but I don’t think
that a single one of the people that she gave the sleeping bags to was
homeless.
After
11:00 a tall guy in shorts came out of the apartment building next door to the
food bank and went into PARC. I didn’t recognize him until he came back out and
called my name. It was Justin Zaza, whom I’ve known since the 90s when he used
to come to my writers open stage at the Gladstone and some friends of mine
called him “Little Baby Mummy”. A few
years ago he was living in an expensive studio on King Street, just west of
downtown. He was shooting an experimental film and he’d invited me to
participate. I took the trouble to memorize my lines and came to do my part for
free but later I found that he’d forgotten to take the cap off the camera lens.
He asked if I would reshoot it but I told him I didn’t have the time. He
offered me $25, so I said I’d do it, but then he decided he didn’t want to pay anything.
I told him at the time that he was a douchebag for backing out on an offer. So
now he’s living at 1501 Queen and he says it’s nice. He says he takes advantage
of all the amenities that are being offered in the neighbourhood. He was
holding a large Tim Horton’s takeout cup and told me that he gets free refills
at PARC all day long. I’d always thought that Justin came from a rich family.
It
was almost 11:30 by the time my number was called.
At
the top of the first set of shelves were cake mixes and white plastic bags full
of garlic seasoning. I took the garlic stuff. From the bottom I was given two
cinnamon-brown sugar oatmeal squares and a handful of single servings of
strawberry jam.
The
second set of shelves had lots of canned beans. I took a can of beans with
maple syrup and another can of mixed beans. Further down was the canned fish
and peanut butter shelf. I took a tin of “East Coast style” Millionaire
sardines but on the back it says they were caught off the west coast while on
the side it says they are a product of Thailand. I guess they’d have to be
millionaire sardines to be able to afford to travel that much. The bottom shelf
had apple juice drinking boxes but there was one larger bottle of organic 7-11
apple juice from concentrate.
There
was no broth in the soup section and no sauce on the pasta shelves, so I moved
on to the cereal. There were mostly boxes of Cheerios but I got one of All Bran
Buds.
Angie
had a lot of milk to offer of various percentages but I had to turn them down.
There were also yogourts and some kind of fruity cream cheese dip, which I told
her I could'nt eat until Easter. She said, “I see what’s goin on now!” and gave
me an extra bag of four eggs. I put one back in my right jacket pocket and the
other in my left and only one egg broke by the time I got them into my fridge.
She gave me a litre of “not from concentrate” apple juice. Once again I
eschewed the usual tube of frozen ground chicken and the pack of frozen chicken
wieners. I did take the box of frozen tandoori chicken “samosas” with the both
annoying and clever name of “Snak Man Doo”. The company is owned by Bellissio,
which is owned by a mega food-producing corporation headquartered in Thailand
called Charoen Pokphand Foods, which owns large animal and fish farms. They
were accused in 2014 of buying fishmeal for their prawn farms from boats that
use slave labour. The mostly Burmese and Cambodian slaves are supposedly bought
for $455, are given drugs so they can put in 20-hour workdays and non-compliant
slaves have been allegedly executed. It’s possible that the sardines for
Millionaires were also caught by slave labour. I wonder if there’s a retirement
plan.
Sylvia’s
vegetable section had a fair variety of items. She gave me a bag containing ten
potatoes; a small cabbage; two cucumbers; four small zucchini; an onion; two
and a half carrots; an apple; a bag containing a medley of frozen carrots and
beans; a lot of little non-bell sweet peppers: 11 red, two orange and two
yellow; and five soft tomatoes.
So there was still
lots of standing around in the cold despite the food bank’s new lottery system
of handing out numbers. While decent meat is still scarce, dairy seems
plentiful, the shelves are well stocked and for the most part there were lots
of veggies. When I got home though I had to toss every one of the tomatoes that
I’d been given, because I can live without any more food poisoning.
After
the food bank I’d wanted to go down to No Frills to pick up some fruit, but I
was so cold that I decided to go home to warm up a bit first. After putting my
food bank groceries away I headed back out. At the supermarket I didn’t get a
lot of stuff, just some black sable grapes, strawberries, bananas, soymilk,
naan, and a loaf each of cinnamon-raisin and multigrain bread.
That
night I turned off my lights and lit candles during Earth Hour. It was very
difficult to cook dinner by candlelight because I couldn’t see very well. I
made a kind of chilli with two cans of beans, a can of tomato sauce and a can
of chipotle peppers. Canned chipotle peppers are spicy but they don’t taste
very good.
I
watched an interesting Alfred Hitchcock Hour that took place mostly on a
university campus. Hitchcock’s lead in to the story was funny as well. It shows
him standing in front of an ivy-covered wall as a branch of ivy begins creeping
onto his shoulder and gradually starts to wrap itself around him. He says, “Due
to the population explosion and the need for more and more institutions of
higher learning, universities seem to be springing up overnight. Since everyone
prefers to go to old established institutions we have developed such products
as fast growing ivy. We can also, in a matter of months provide a campus with
hundred-year-old traditions picked up at very reasonable prices from colleges
that are sick of them. Aging the faculty has not yet presented any problem.”
A straight “A”
student named Doc has a reputation for performing practical jokes while his
roommate, Skip has a drinking problem and tends to go extremely overboard with
wild behaviour that he forgets about the next day. The story begins in a
lecture hall where the professor is about to introduce the class to the
dissection of human cadavers. A corpse is wheeled out, but then suddenly it
sits up and a female student screams. Emerging from under the sheet, Doc begins
to laugh. The angry professor punishes Doc by giving him a stack of papers to
spend all night marking. Later, at the residence, Doc is marking the papers at
around midnight when he hears someone shouting “Woman in the hall!” The door
bursts open and one of the guys tells Doc that Skip is drunk again and is going
to throw Barbara in the shower. Skip comes charging down the hall with a young
woman over his shoulder. He takes her into the men’s shower and puts her and
himself under the spray. Doc tries to pull Skip away but Skip begins to beat
Doc up until the other boys pull him off. A few hours later an alarm clock goes
off. Doc is just finishing grading the essay and Skip wakes up to find he tied
to his bed.
Later there is a
Halloween party at which, besides dancing, one of the activities involves, for
25 cents being able to push a cream pie in the face of an honour student, of
which Doc is one.
Skip is trying to
break a beer drinking record of 63 cans in one sitting, but he passes out after
42. The guys talk about how Skip almost got kicked out of school earlier that
day. Doc says that it’s a good thing Skip passed out because he could have
killed someone driving back to the dorm. The Doc gets an idea. Wouldn’t it
sober Skip up if he thought that he had killed somebody? The unconscious Skip
is taken back to the residence. Doc goes to the lab and steals a cadaver. He
puts a blonde wig and some earrings on it that were left over from the
Halloween party and when Skip wakes up in the morning he tells him that he
strangled and killed Ruby, the new waitress at the tavern. Doc says he has to
go help the professor set up the class but he’ll be back in half an hour. He
leaves Skip alone with the corpse. But the professor needs Doc for the entire
lecture and Skip is going crazy. Finally he wraps the cadaver up in the carpet,
puts it in his car and goes looking for a way to get rid of it. As he is
driving an elderly woman is rolling her garbage can out to the curb. It gets away
from her and goes in front of Skip’s car. He gets out to help her pick up her
garbage. She says, “I told my husband before he died he ought to buy me a
garbage disposal. But the dog was alive then and he’d eat anything. Then the
dog died. I can’t get out of the habit of cooking for the three of us. Nothing
that you cook for just one person tastes nearly so good. I don’t know why that
is. Are you all right? Would you like a drink?” “A drink?” “Would you like to
come into my house and have a drink? I’m 67 years old, my intentions are
honourable.” “Can I park my car in your driveway? I have a rug and I’d feel
safer if it was off the street.” “Yes, of course! You can put it right in the
garage. I don’t keep a car in there anymore. I told my husband before he died
he ought to teach me how to drive. But then they came and repossessed it. I
wouldn’t make payments on anything I didn’t know how to use.” Once the car is
in the garage he looks at the electric saw and the blades that are on a bench.
She explains, “This used to be my husband’s workshop.” Inside the house she
calls her newest neighbour to remind her that it’s garbage night. She explains
that when they come around with the truck they throw things in the back and
they are all ground to a pulp before the truck’s halfway down the street. Skip
and the old lady are drinking gin and they both get drunk. She tells him that
every Tuesday night she has to put on a dress, fix her hair, put on a little
lipstick and take the garbage out. Then suddenly the lady pitches forward,
unconscious on the dining room table. Skip goes out to the garage and begins to
cut up the body with the old lady’s late husband’s saw, then he wraps the parts
up in paper and places them out on the curb. He’s relieved the next morning
when the garbage truck comes and grinds it all up. For breakfast she makes Skip
a chicken liver omelette. He tells her he has to go to class. When Skip gets
back to campus he finds out that he’s been cut from the football team. He goes
to the tavern and while he’s having his first beer, Ruby comes in to work. She
comes up to say hi there to Skip and he is in shock. Suddenly Doc comes in.
“You said I killed Ruby, didn’t you?” “Where’s the body?” “If it wasn’t Ruby,
who was it?” “It wasn’t anyone! Now where is it?” “How could it not be anyone?”
“It was a cadaver from the medical lab. It was just a joke to sober you up.
Where is it?” “Come on, I’ll show you.” The next scene shows dissecting class
in the medical lab. One of the students pulls out a cadaver and thinks it’s Doc
playing another prank, but Doc is dead.
Michael Parks put
in a strong performance as Skip and I thought the old lady and the lines they
wrote for her were hilarious.
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