Public Urination

            Just like the Saturday before, my place in the food bank line was behind the African woman with the snow-white cart that was lined with the Christmas bag. The next person after me was the angry guy with the prematurely grey hair, who slapped down his blue gym bag on the sidewalk behind me and then stormed away. The line was already longer than usual, as we were just west of the steps of 1501 Queen. Brenda and Tammy were sitting on the steps and Angie came out from downstairs to show them some photos of her sons and grandchildren. She said she’d been married for six years, long enough to have two kids, but he was very quiet and she was very loud and it just didn’t work out.

            I was about to start reading my book when Moe walked by, said hi and continued on. I felt the urge to pee and so I went downstairs to the washroom. When I came back Moe was chatting near the entrance with a guy in sunglasses who looks like P. Diddy and whom I’ve seen many times at the food bank line-up. I walked over to them and Moe was talking about his plan to go backpacking in South America after his eye surgery is finished. I suggested that he wouldn’t be going to Venezuela but he wondered why not. He said it’s right next to his home country of Guyana. I said, “It’s pretty rough down there right now” but he responded by advising me not to believe the media. He said the US has its own reasons for painting Venezuela in a negative light. He said it’s safe as long as you keep your eyes open, mind your own business and don't act like you're from a different class. He said he would first go home to Guyana and travel from there with a bodyguard and a gun. He said you’re allowed to carry guns down there. According to my research, this isn't true for most countries in Latin America and especially not in Venezuela. No citizens are legally allowed to own guns now in Venezuela. Even if his bodyguard has a gun permit in Guyana he’d have a hard time bringing it anywhere else in South America. I think you need a work permit to get a gun permit in most places. Moe said he was in Venezuela in 2008 and I think he mentioned knowing people there. From what I’ve read, in addition to needing to be extremely aware of one’s surroundings the most important thing for someone visiting Venezuela is to know someone there because it’s absolutely essential to have a native to exchange money on the black market for you. It’s considered to be a great travel experience but more for seasoned adventurers than for tourists.

            I asked Moe if he’d ever been to Peru and he answered no, but he’s had a couple of Peruvian girlfriends. He said that Peruvians are the best counterfeiters in the world. This is apparently true. Sometimes entire neighbourhoods are supported by some sort of counterfeiting industry, whether of money, driver’s licenses, passports or university diplomas.

            I told him that when I lived in Parkdale in the late 80s there was a Canadian born woman named Judy across the hall from me who’d just come back from living several years in Peru. She’d been in a common-law marriage with a Peruvian man who was both a general and a judge and had two children with him. When she left him she brought her 14-year-old daughter, Mia, to Canada. She told me the story about Mia having been kidnapped and held for ransom by a Peruvian gang but that the police had caught the crooks and saved her daughter. Instead of trying the kidnappers in a court of law, the police asked Judy for the appropriate punishment. She told them to take them over the jungle in a helicopter and to push them out, so that’s what they did.

            The guy that looks like P. Diddy said that he is looking into applying for, unless I didn’t hear him correctly, an IMF grant so he can open a studio, though I didn’t think to ask what kind of studio he has in mind. If he really thinks he can apply for an International Monetary Fund grant he’s the victim of a scam, since the IMF doesn’t give grants to people, but only to countries. Maybe he said “CMF”, which is the Canadian Media Fund. Moe said he might have a problem getting a grant if he has a criminal record. The guy said he got into trouble when he was younger but when he asked the police recently to call up his criminal record they couldn’t find anything.

            Just then, a skinny and disheveled old man whom I see every Saturday wandering around zombielike as he waits for PARC to open, walked to the far left corner of the slightly set-in sheltered area on each side of and above the entrance to the food bank, unzipped his fly and started urinating. While the stream of piss flowed into the crack between sidewalk tiles, traveled west and then ran north towards us like a precise irrigation canal, the guy that looks like P. Diddy walked over and gave the old man a kick in the behind. He began to chastise him about children being around and why didn’t he just go downstairs to use the washroom. The old man zipped up and calmly admitted, "I should've done that." As the elderly man was walking away, Moe asked him, “You want something from me too?" I suggested that he doesn't know any better. "Moe said, "Well, at least he won't do it around us any more!” I said that I doubted that would have any impact on him. I argued, “He’s an old man. If he’s doing that kind of thing at his age he’s probably done it a hundred times, with similar reactions. I doubt very much if you taught him any kind of lesson here.” The guy that had kicked him nodded, it seemed in agreement.

            I don’t know why he implied that what they old man had done was particularly wrong because children might see. The idea that children should be sheltered from seeing someone urinate on the street reflects something sicker about our society than does an old man taking a piss in a public place. We don’t seem to mind our kids seeing squirrels squashed on the road but a carelessly exposed penis is something that they should never behold? We have warped priorities.

            It was after 10:30 and so I decided that I’d better take my place in line, though Marlena hadn’t let anybody in yet.

            I started reading my book but I heard someone call out, “Christian! What are you doin here?” It was Dennis, one of the keyholding volunteers at Bike Pirates. I told him I was there for the food bank and I guessed that he was there for the Tool Library. He said he was almost late for work and I was surprised. “You’re not going to Bike Pirates today?” He explained that he’d gotten a job through another volunteer at Bike Pirates. He said, “I got hired by the Kensington Market Business Association to walk around with a broom and a bag and sweep up garbage!” Then he came up close to tell me, “And they’re paying me $17 an hour to do it!”
            Dennis left his Norco bike with the trailer on the back leaning against a pole and didn’t bother to lock it when he went downstairs to the Tool Library. When he came back five minutes later and was putting the netting back over his trailer, I commented that it sounds like a pleasant job, to just walk around Kensington Market on a Saturday. He responded in almost a whisper, “I check out the ladies!” I don’t know why he lowered his voice at that point as if it was politically incorrect to be attracted to women. Dennis pedaled east for the Market.

            I returned to my book but then a guy from the back of the line came up to me and asked what I was reading. The first time that I’d spoken with him was a few weeks ago and he'd approached me then to ask the exact same question. I showed him the cover and then specified that I was reading Flaubert. He responded with, “Ooh la la!” Then he declared, “I don’t know why I'm here!" "You don't know why you're here?" "Maybe it's because I'm drunk!" He went on to explain that his freezer recently became packed with steaks and salmon that somebody gave him and so he shared, “I don’t really need anything from the food bank, except for maybe some onions." He decided to leave.

            I managed to read a page of the story, “St Julian the Hospitaler”. After Julian ran away from home out of fear of fulfilling the prophecy that he would kill his parents, he joined a band of Christian mercenaries and soon became the general of his own army that wandered the world defeating evildoers and the enemies of Christianity, including Troglodytes. He was always cautious though never to kill someone without first seeing his face for fear of accidentally slaying his father.

            Whenever the line moved and I stepped forward the bitter guy behind me would get up long enough to kick his gym bag forward, often hard enough that it would hit me, and then he would sit down again.

            It was after 11:00 by the time I got downstairs.

            This time I remembered to return the Atkins peanut butter-chocolate bars, sweetened with sucralose, that I’d forgotten to bring back over the last two weeks. The best before date is for the end of November of this year, so there was no reason for them not to give them to someone else. Unless of course one takes into consideration that sucralose was discovered accidentally by scientists that were employed by the military to develop chemical weapons.

            There was even less stuff on the shelves this time than last week. The top shelf had some Nabob coffee pods and a fancy box of chamomile tea, but I didn’t need any coffee badly enough to break open pods to get at it and I have enough tea.

            The only granola bar type snacks were more Atkins bars of different varieties. There was also no cereal and no tuna.

            I took a bag of chipotle wheat and potato chips.

            On one shelf there was a wide variety of spices in those little jars that tend to fit onto spice racks. My volunteer made sure to let me know that she had lined up along the front of the shelf every type of spice they had, so I didn’t need to dig around behind to see if there was anything else. I've got a pretty complete collection of spices at home but I ran out of black pepper a few weeks ago, so I looked for that but found none. The only spice they had that I didn’t were spearmint leaves, so I took a jar of those.

            As usual I took a can of chickpeas and as usual I didn’t take any pasta or rice.

            The final item I got from the shelves was a 355 ml bottle of honey water with lemon.

            Angie seemed surprised that I didn’t want milk, although I've been turning down the 2% for several weeks now. I explained that I was trying to watch my weight. She said, “You're watchin your figure eh?" and gave me four extra small containers of fruit bottom yogourt. Angie was about to offer me a choice between two flavours of sausage when she suddenly realized she’d forgotten that she'd been in the middle of serving someone else. Dana said that I could finish but I insisted that she and Angie finish their business. Then Angie asked, “Now, where were we?" I told her she was about to give me some spicy sausage. It was a sizable hunk of sausage that was as wide as bologna. She also gave me three extra eggs because I hadn't taken any milk.

            Sylvia offered me a bag of potatoes but I still have lots. She gave me two fistfuls of plum tomatoes, a cantaloupe, a dark red delicious apple, two cucumbers, a 680 gram bag of sugar snap peas and a small bag of what looked like frozen hand chopped squash.

            There was no one minding the bread section this time and Lana wasn’t there. Neither was the young woman she'd had the argument with last time. There wasn’t much of a selection this time, as all of the loaves were white, crusty and boring. I found a bag of apple-cinnamon breakfast buns though and left.

            There were still about twenty people in the line-up when I unlocked my bike and headed home.

            After putting my food away I rode down to No Frills where I bought two baskets of nectarines and a bag of cherries. I remembered to buy peppercorns and I got some milk and a few other items.

            For lunch I heated up the fettuccini alfredo with chicken that my upstairs neighbour David had given me on Friday.

            I didn’t take a bike ride that afternoon because it had rained and there was a good chance of it raining some more. I went out to the liquor store that evening to buy two cans of Creemore. On my way home, at the corner of Dunn and Queen I met Barrie Carleton, who was on his way to buy beer too.

            I made eggs and toast for dinner but when I tried to play an episode of Mike Hammer, Private Eye but the video only appeared as about the size of a CD case on my screen. I did a search of the problem and someone had offered the solution to someone else to delete preferences in VLC so I did that. It still didn’t work but after I restarted it did, so I don’t know if it was the restart alone that did the trick of if it was the deleting of preferences plus the restart. I had the day before made adjustments in VLC in order to flip a video, so maybe that messed with my set-up.

            The Mike Hammer story had a detective story writer hire Mike Hammer to help him solve the murder in his unfinished novel. While Hammer was working on it the writer was murdered. Hammer figures that the writer had really wanted Hammer to prevent his own murder. The suspects are the writer’s publisher, his agent and his wife.

There’s a stupid scene where Hammer’s assistant Nick is investigating a book warehouse and all of the books are in boxes far larger than one would use for packing books because books are heavy. These boxes would fit a clothes dryer and so full of books they’d weight at least 100 kilos. A guy with a forklift was chasing Nick through the warehouse and knocking over stacks of these boxes like they were empty, which they probably were.

Halfway through I figured out that the writer’s wife had been the real writer of his successful novels.  She was also his killer.