Blah Blah Blah

            On Saturday morning I got up with no backache for the first time in three days. My other sciatica symptoms in the hip area were less pronounced than usual as well.

            It was foggy, which in my experience indicated that was going to be a warm day.

            I finished working out the chords to my song “Hungry Hippunk Goes to Work”, which I used to sing with Tom Smarda in my band back in the 90s but never learned to play it on my own. I think I started writing the poem in Vancouver in 1979.

            I translated a couple of verses of “Pour des haricots” by Serge Gainsbourg:

The soldiers under the flag of our nation

battle valiantly for legumes

and then to add to their heroic legend

for dessert they fight over prunes

For me with only two sardines, I imagine I’m

with the army holding the Maginot Line

I’d like to toss back a bottle of Beaujolais

but only have a glass of anxiety

            I wore shorts and sandals to go to the food bank. Before leaving I needed to work out a mnemonic in order to remember two things that I'd forgotten recently and that I wanted to do after the food bank. I had to go to the post office to mail my application for the OAS and the GIS and I had to buy toilet paper. At first I broke it down to "mail-toi" but I wasn’t sure if that would stick so I needed a rhyme. Since a homophone for "mail" is "male" and "toi" could be "toy" I was pretty sure I would remember what I needed if I just kept the phrase “boy-toy” in an outside mind pocket.

The line-up was about as long as the week before when I arrived but less people showed up later on.

            A woman was sitting on her rolator knitting. Later on she told someone that it was something for a baby although she didn’t know anyone with a baby.

            I started reading Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “La Corde” or “The Rope”. It is told from the point of view of Baudelaire’s lifelong friend, the painter Edouard Manet. The story is based on a real occurrence in Manet’s life.

            The old man came along and put his bag down behind me, and then he went and threw up on the crosswalk. "I’m not gonna drink beer anymore! I only had two beers last night!" He walked further west to Beaty and spit some more. Later he came up to me and asked if I had a single filter Pall Mall Gold special light that I could sell him. That was the most specific cigarette bumming I’d ever heard.

The artist has often hired a certain boy as a model for his paintings and finds him so inspiring that he asks the child’s poor parents to let him live with him so he can pose and do chores in his studio. This life for the boy is like a paradise compared to the impoverished surroundings of his family. After a while the boy becomes addicted to liqueur candies and begins to steal them. The painter threatens to send him back to his parents if this behaviour continues. The painter leaves to run some errands and returns to his studio to find that the boy has hung himself. At the halfway point of the story he is just undergoing the difficult task of cutting the boy’s rope when my reading was interrupted.

            The man behind me asked if I was reading in both English and French. I told him I was and he wondered if I speak French. I said that I’m working on it and that I’d already completed second year FSL at U of T but found it very difficult. I explained that I am doing all my other courses first and saving the French for last while I study on my own.

            He said his name is Riadh and told me that he is fluent in French because he’s from Tunisia where French is the second language after Arabic. He’s been in Canada for ten years and likes it but finds the winters hard to get used to.

            Riadh asked me what new French word I’d learned that day. I knew that I’d learned words that I would recognize the next time I read but I couldn’t remember one of them at that moment. He advised me to make notes of the new words that I come across and to study them later. That’s not really the way my mind works and it would take the fun out of reading the stories.

            I told him that I also learn French songs and he wondered which ones. I said that I’ve learned and translated over a hundred songs by Serge Gainsbourg starting from his first recordings in 1958 and that I’m currently working on his songs from 1972. I said that I’m also learning the songs of Boris Vian.

            Riadh told me that he’s familiar with Serge Gainbourg but he’d never heard of Boris Vian. I informed him that it was actually Boris Vian that discovered Serge Gainsbourg but that Vian was more than just a songwriter. He wrote novels, plays, short stories, poetry, essays, articles and translations, played trumpet and he helped to organize the first concerts in France of several famous jazz musicians like Duke Ellington and Miles Davis. He wrote a detective novel under the pseudonym Vernon Sullivan and claimed to only the translator. When it was discovered that Vian was really the author it became a best seller because the French loved the scandal. In 1959 when that novel was made into a movie Vian hated it before it was released but came to the premier to heckle it. While he was shouting at the screen he had a heart attack. He died on the way to the hospital.

            Riadh thought it was strange that a Frenchman would have the name “Boris”. I told him that French are just like any other culture in that sometimes they like to give their kids exotic names from outside their own culture. For example, my sister’s name is Sibyl and that's not a very Scandinavian name. I looked it up later and learned that Vian’s mother gave him the name “Boris” after her favourite opera “Boris Godunov" by Modest Mussorgsky. It occurred to me then that the name of the bad guy from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Boris Badenov might have also been inspired by that opera.

            Valdene, the food bank manager came down the line with a big bag of mostly Danish pastries. She barked orders as she went along like, "If you touch it you have to take it!" I said, “No thanks”. She asked, Riadh, "Would you like a pastry?" He took two and Valdene said sternly, "I said 'a' pastry, but okay!"

            Marlena gave me number 24. The guy ahead of me informed me that the little ponytailed Tibetan guy who was supposed to be two places behind me had gotten number 23. He actually approached me later and said, “I don’t know why she gave me the number before you”. It would have to have been because he was standing in front of me at the time. He didn’t offer to switch numbers though.

            A guy with two rambunctious prepubescent boys moved his cart in front of me. I’d actually forgotten that we’d already gotten or numbers and I told him that he had to move back. He started shouting at me in another language. When I tried to calmly respond he got even louder but this time just repeated, “Blah blah blah …” in a mocking tome while tilting his head back and forth from side to side, looking like a caricature of someone about the age of his kids. It was around then that I remembered that we already had our numbers and it didn't matter where he was in line and so I let it go.

            Downstairs the two little boys were running around and playing out of control. Their father seemed indifferent until Larissa, the older of the regular volunteers came up to him and spoke in his language. I’d thought that she was Ukrainian but what she was speaking didn’t sound Slavic. Maybe it was Hungarian, but whatever she’d said caused him to rein in his children and have them stand with him in the line-up for the desk.

            Hunter was behind the desk enjoying a bag of Ruffles. When Riadh showed his card Hunter said, “I’m not gonna share my potato chips with you.” But then Hunter hesitated and extended the bag to offer him some, but Riadh didn't want any.

            Larissa was my volunteer.

            The first shelf had the usual taco kits. There were individual servings of pancake syrup, bags of “donut” cookies and they still had bags of those white meringue candies. I grabbed two more of those little cans of green salsa, three maple-pecan protein bars.

            There were two kinds of crackers: some flavour of triscuits and Salmas oven baked corn crackers. I tend to go with the unfamiliar and so Salmas won out.

            From the shelves to the left I took a can of chickpeas and two small tins of “baked” beans. Larissa gave me four fruit punch drinking boxes.

            There was soup for the first time in a long time in some variety and so I picked a carton of roasted potato and spring leek.

            Angie asked if I wanted soymilk or regular milk and I said neither. She offered me some small containers of fruit bottom yogourt but I told her I didn’t want any. “Eggs?” I said I had enough. “So why are you here? I know, you’re here for the cheese!” She gave me a 450-gram brick of mild cheddar, a pressurized container of whipped cream and a bag containing a Cajun chicken with pearl barley and kale meal in two pouches meant to be boiled. From the bin beside her I grabbed a bag of frozen pocket pastries. Angie told me they have to be baked for ten minutes on each side.

            From the bread section I took three spinach pastries and although I’d brought a plastic bag just for that type of thing I‘d let it get buried at the bottom of my backpack and so I just put the pastries in my shopping bag with the hope that they wouldn’t get torn apart by anything else I put in.

            The vegetable station was being minded by Sue, who I hadn’t seen volunteering at the food bank for over a year, although I often see and hear her outside my place because she lives around the corner and knows and talks to everybody. I also used to see her regularly out for her morning run while I was rehearsing songs. I asked her if she’s still running and she said she is but she goes early now. 

            Sue gave me six red potatoes, four zucchini, a pack of cherry tomatoes, three oranges and two and a half orange peppers. The half pepper was a small one that I found later to be falling apart.  The final item was another large pizza. This one was pepperoni, sausage and red onion. Sue wanted to put the pizza in my bag for me but was having a hard time. She said, “I could never work at No Frills!” I said, “They don’t bag groceries at No Frills.” She thought for a second and said, “They do it at Metro, but who can afford to shop there?" That reminded me of when I ran into George Elliot Clark at Victoria Park and Danforth last summer when he was about to go shopping at Metro and he’d commented that one can really see the class division in his neighbourhood between those that shop at Metro and those that shop at Loblaws. I thought that was hilarious since in Parkdale the class division is between the poor people that buy their food at Freshco and the gentry that patronize Metro.

            On my way out I passed the Tibetan guy who was still lingering around the “take what you want” boxes near the door. His cart was more than full but he was trying to balance a mound of beats on top of everything else and some of them kept falling off. I’d overheard earlier that he shops for himself and five other people in his home.

            I took my food home and unpacked everything. The spinach pastries mostly survived. Before heading back out to No Frills I remembered my “boy-toy” mnemonic and grabbed the envelope to I could mail it on the way.

            At No Frills the grapes were part of the $0.88 sale and so I got several bags. I bought a bag of cherries, a pack of strawberries, coffee, abrasive cleanser, baking soda, yogourt and a reusable shopping bag to replace the on that broke last week. I also remembered the toilet paper.

            For lunch I had a slice of pizza with chipotle sauce and a sliver of berry pie with yogourt.

            I worked on my journal.

            I did some exercises in the late afternoon but didn’t take a bike ride since I’d already been out riding.

            I had three slices of pizza and a beer for dinner while watching episode two of the Untouchables. It was only the pilot that was based on Eliot Ness’s book and so the actual Untouchables series was made up of fictionalized stories of Eliot Ness and his squad taking on various historical gangland figures of the 1930s.

            This story was about Ma Barker and it begins with the final standoff of her and her boys against the feds in Florida but then it flashes back to how it all began. It starts with Ma Barker’s boys sneaking off to commit crimes. Herman is shot and killed during a break in and then there are three. At the burial their father threatens to leave the family if they don’t go straight. He leaves and then Ma becomes involved in their crimes, planning their bank robberies down to the last detail. After they make their biggest haul from a kidnapping the oldest son Doc gets married but Ma refuses to accept an outsider and so Doc and Eloise leave for Chicago with Doc’s cut of the ransom. The problem is that the ransom money is marked and so he is caught when he tries to spend it. He reveals where the others are located and so everybody but Doc dies in the shootout.

            Ma Barker was played by Claire Trevor, whose career spanned seven decades of work on stage, in radio, television and film. She was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar in 1937 for “Dead End”. In 1939 she co-starred in "Stagecoach" the movie that made John Wayne a star. In the 1940s she found her niche in film noir and won an Academy Award for her part in Key Largo.

            Eloise was played by Louise Fletcher, who later became famous and won an Academy award for her role as Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. During her acceptance speech she thanked her deaf parents in sign language. She has said that when she was growing up she never cried when she hurt herself because her parents couldn’t hear her. She played Kai Winn on Deep Space Nine.

            According to FBI records the Barker boys were all mostly illiterate. The oldest son, Herman got arrested for highway robbery at 17. The boys got their education in bank robbery in the 1920s when they joined the midwestern Central Park Gang. On August 29, 1927 Herman shot a policeman point blank in the mouth after a robbery. While escaping, after crashing his car and injuring himself he committed suicide to avoid capture. In 1928 Lloyd, Doc and Fred were all in different prisons. The father, George left the family in 1928 but Arizona “Ma” Barker stuck with her boys no matter what. Without her husband or her sons Ma lived in poverty. In 1931 when Fred was released he formed a gang with another former inmate. When they killed a sheriff in Missouri they went on the run and Ma and her common-law husband Arthur joined them. Arthur joined the gang when he was released in 1932 and they went briefly to Chicago. To stay there they would have had to join Capone’s mob and so they went to St Paul where they came under the protection of police chief Big Tom Brown who directed their move from bank robbery to kidnapping. The gang escaped capture in St Paul and believing Arthur to be a rat the gang murdered him in Wisconsin. They began operating out of Menomonee, Wisconsin. They put Ma in various hotels and kept her in the dark about their activities, mostly because she resented any girlfriends the boys had and tried to break up every relationship. In 1933 they went back to St Paul where they did two kidnappings and made a total of $300,000 between them. They went to Chicago to launder the money but Arthur was captured and the rest escaped to Florida. The feds found with Arthur a map to their Florida hideout. When the agents surrounded the house only Ma and Fred were inside. Gunfire kept up from the house for several hours. Fred was found riddled with bullets and Ma was dead from a single slug. There is no proof that Arizona Barker even fired a gun or that she had anything to do with any of her sons’ crimes. It has been speculated that in order to save the FBI's reputation and to justify killing an elderly woman, J. Edgar Hoover exaggerated Ma Barker’s involvement. Her greatest contribution may have been simply giving the gang the appearance of a family. Famous bank robber Harvey Bailey, who knew the Barkers well, wrote that Ma Barker couldn’t plan breakfast, let alone a criminal enterprise. The real force behind the gang was police chief Tom Brown, without whom the Barkers would have just been a bunch of bumbling hillbilly burglars.