Other People's Choices

            On Saturday when I got up my right hip was still sore from the long bike ride I’d taken out to Scarborough on Thursday afternoon. I was wondering if my jaunt just as far as Yonge Street on Friday had been pulling back enough but it didn’t seem all that bad once I left for the food bank.

            When I got there the line was a little longer than it had been the last two times I’d gone there and it extended to just in front of the apartment building at 1501 Queen Street West. The two people sitting on the steps were the guy who looks like Charles Manson but seems like the opposite and the talkative old guy with the falling down pants with whom I’d been talking two weeks before. There was a gym bag marking a place in line behind a row of carts and I asked if it indicated the last person before me. Not Charles Manson nodded but the old man said in his mumbly low voice, “I’m the last in line!” I said, “Then I’m behind you” but he shook his head and told me I was ahead of him. I asked him if he’d just gotten there. He answered that he’d been there for quite a long time. I asked, “Then how can you be last in line?” He said, “I’m always the last in line!” Not Charles Manson explained that the old guy always likes to wait until the end before going in to the food bank and confirmed that I was behind the gym bag.

            Just then a big man came with a cart and asked whom he was behind. I informed him that he was after me but that I was going to leave a space between the gym bag and my place in line in order for tenants to be able to freely enter or leave the apartment building.

            I took out my book to read and the old man excitedly asked me what I was reading. I showed him that it was a book of French stories and he suddenly remembered that we’d already talked about it last time. He asked if I speak French and I said a little. He said it was good that I was learning French at that it would help me when I go to France. I commented that I didn’t know if I’d ever make it to France because that would be an expensive trip.

He declared, “France is the greatest country in the world!” I asked, “You think so?” He said, “Look how they survived the Nazis! The French aren’t wimps! France is the greatest country in the world and North America is the greatest continent in the world!” I inquired, “Shouldn’t France be in North America then?” He shook his head and insisted that France should be where France is.

I pointed out that where we are used to be part of what was called New France. He said, “New Found Land” and repeated it a couple of times.

Someone came and sat down to chat with the old man for a few minutes.

I continued reading the story in French and English of “St Julian the Hospitaler” by Gustave Flaubert. Julian is returning from an unsuccessful hunting trip that has turned into a horrifying mystical experience in which he is followed and mocked by every animal that he has ever killed. He does not seem to have learned anything from the experience, as he is still feeling violent when he gets home. He enters his bedroom and approaches his bed to kiss his wife when he feels against his lips the beard of a man. He does not realize that while he was gone his long lost parents arrived at his home. For some dumb reason, despite the fact that they live in a castle that must have guest bedrooms, Julian’s wife had put his parents in their bed. Feeling next to the bearded head on his pillow the soft head of a sleeping woman, Julian assumes that it’s his wife and that she has betrayed him with another man. He begins angrily stabbing the two sleeping figures. His wife comes to the bedroom door with a torch to find out what the commotion is about. She gasps, drops the torch and runs. Julian picks up the torch and sees that he has fulfilled the prophecy and murdered his own parents. In the next few days Julian leaves everything, including his clothes to his wife. He attends the funeral of his parents disguised as a hooded monk and afterwards leaves for the mountains, never to return. There are six pages left so I assume he becomes a saint before the story ends.

When the person that had been chatting with the old man got up from the steps and left, the old man said to me, “I don’t really want him to die of cancer!” He got up and went to the edge of the sidewalk, looking across the street at three middle-aged men that looked like they probably wear suits during the week. The men were waiting for the light so they could cross Queen. The old man held his hands together in the prayer position and murmured in a very low voice over and over again, “Forgive me! I don’t really want you to die of cancer!” As the men reached our side of Queen and passed the old man, he turned to them and said the same thing in a voice that would have been very hard for them to hear even if they hadn’t been ignoring him.

The big man behind me chatted quite a bit with the red headed man behind him. The red headed man said that he lives in one of the West Lodge apartments and talked about the struggles the tenants there are having with their landlord. He said that anyone that has been living there less than a year is having their rent jacked up to an impossible amount in an attempt to force them to leave.

I assume he’s referring to the high-rise buildings at 103 and 105 West Lodge, which were bought by Timbercreek Asset Management a year ago. Apparently it is Timbercreek’s modus operandi to buy old buildings and evict the low rent tenants so they can renovate and rent the units out to the much more affluent gentry. Hundreds of tenants at West Lodge have received eviction notices.

The big guy behind me was vaping pretty much the whole time we were there and I was also smelling pot, so I asked if that was what he’d been vaping. He said he wasn’t vaping cannabis but he does have an aunt who vapes hash oil and it’s pretty potent stuff. I told him that years ago an ex-Montreal cop gave me half a cigarette dipped in hash oil. I took two tokes and hit my head on the kitchen counter as I blacked out and collapsed on the floor.

Now that pot is legal so much work is being done to develop different strains with different qualities that for someone that still smokes it seems like it must be a very good thing. When I used to smoke one had very little choice and had to buy whatever happened to be going around. I recently heard comedian Chelsey Handler talking on the Daily Show about how she’s financing the development of her own strain that would get people high but wouldn’t cause the user to overeat as a result of getting the munchies.

The big guy said that he’s a musician and he’s been in the same band since he was in high school. He looks like he’s in his late 40s. He declared, “Today’s music is shit!” I commented that Arcade Fire is a pretty good band and he admitted that there are some good bands but most of it is shit.

A woman stopped to chat with the red headed guy and then she went inside 1499 Queen. She came out a few minutes later with groceries from the food bank, even though the line had yet to move. The big guy wondered how she got ahead of everyone else. The red headed guy explained that certain people with disabilities could order their food on Friday and then pick it up later.

Valdene, the food bank manager walked down the line holding a ripped open bag of white, swirly meringue pastries, stopping in front of each person to offer some to them. I said “No thanks” and Valdene moved on, coughing on the open bag as she went.

After the line began to move it was still several minutes before I got close to the front. The big guy behind me commented that it was taking so long because clients downstairs were busy deciding between the peas and the cream corn.

When I was third in line Martina the doorperson confronted the guy at the front because he was standing in front of the door. She accused him of having jumped the line and told him to go to the back. He calmly refused and seemed quite indignant that she would say he was not in his proper place. He did not have a cart to mark his place and I certainly had not noticed that he’d been standing in line during the hour that I’d been there. But then most people sit inside the entranceway having marked their spots so it was hard to know if he had established his place in line from memory and also spent the time inside. Martina complained that this man was always giving her a hard time and that she didn’t like him. I’d actually never seen her that upset before and she seemed to start speaking in an accent that I hadn’t known she’d had. When Valdene came out the man appealed to her, trying to explain his side of the disagreement. She told him that she would go downstairs and get him some groceries but that he couldn’t go down himself because he didn’t seem to be able to get along today with others today.

When I got downstairs my volunteer at the shelves was the older Hungarian lady who’s there every week. She told me that I should think about my choices. To tell someone to think about the choices of things that are on the shelves implies that there are bad choices on the shelves, which is the fault of the food bank and not the client. I responded, “You don’t have to tell me to think about my choices”. She said, “Okay, I won’t talk to you at all!”

From the first set of shelves I took a box of vanilla almond flax granola and a bag of three Danish pastries. From the other shelves I got a can of chickpeas and two fruit punch drinking boxes. She offered me a couple of packages of ramen noodle soups but I didn’t want them and I also passed on the pasta and rice.

From Angie’s section I didn’t want any milk or eggs because I had some at home but I did take two small containers of Greek yogourt. She asked me in a low voice if I wanted some ribs and I said I did. She quickly passed me something frozen that was shape of a rack of ribs and packed in the same kind of plastic, but it was smooth and I couldn’t see or feel any actual ribs. It looked like meat that had been cooked, ground up and moulded into the shape of a strip of ribs. I guessed I’d find out later on what it was.

She also gave me a bottle of a Happy Planet cashew and almond milk coffee smoothie. A volunteer from the back brought her a whole case of them. She opened one for herself and drank it with great enjoyment, exclaiming, “Happy planet!”

I grabbed a round loaf of what looked like dark grain raisin bread.

Sylvia gave me five very nice, firm tomatoes, which is a rare treat from the food bank bcause they're usually a bit squishy. She also had 454-gram packages of strawberries but it took her a while to find me some that weren’t overripe. I think she was successful. She put a couple of green peppers in my bag. On the other side of the door were some boxes of items from which people could take as much as they wanted of mini-potatoes and carrots, and there were also bags containing three each of organic romaine hearts. The guy ahead of me was loading his cart with handful after handful of potatoes and carrots and Sylvia had to ask him to move on to make room for others. I grabbed a bag of the romaine hearts on the way out.

As I walked down the hall with the potato picker, Martina came in the other direction and told us to have a great long weekend. I’d totally forgotten that Victoria Day was coming up. It would be easier to remember if they didn’t always do it on the second to last Monday of May and just fixed it on her actual birthday of May 24, which I always remember because it’s the same as Bob Dylan’s birthday and two days before mine.

After the food bank I took my things home, put them away and then headed down to No Frills. I bought a couple of small packages of strawberries, a few bags of grapes, a pint of blueberries, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, mouthwash, a bottle of 2 in 1 shampoo-conditioner, and some yogourt. I only had about $63 in cash and the bill was over $69, so I paid by debit.

After I got home I went back out again to buy a small case of Creemore from the liquor store.

I had a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich for lunch.

I spent a lot of the rest of the day writing about my food bank adventure.

For dinner I had an egg, a piece of toast and a beer while watching two episodes of Sea Hunt.

The first story begins with Mike fixing an underwater pipeline and then surfacing on an urban waterfront pier where he hears a boy crying. I recognized the boy right away as one of Lloyd Bridges’s sons. I thought it was Beau, but it was Jeff again. Jeff played a kid named Jimmy, who’d lost his bicycle when it fell off the pier. Mike dives to retrieve it but a diner owner named Leona sees him and calls the local mob boss, Arnie. He arrives with his men and when Mike surfaces with Jimmy’s bike they rough him up. When they realize that Mike was just retrieving a bicycle they let him go. Mike figures there must be something important hidden on the bottom and so he returns after dark with a light to dive and search below. But Mike unknowingly wakes up a homeless man who is sleeping on the pier. The man immediately goes to sell the information to Leona, who calls Arnie again. At 3:00 Jimmy wakes up, sensing something is wrong. He lives across the street from Leona’s diner. He sneaks near the thugs and hears them say that they may have to kill Mike when he comes back up. Jimmy runs to the cops. After a long search Mike finds a gun on the bottom. When he comes up and goes to his jeep to remove his tanks the thugs surround him. Mike grabs his tanks and releasing 1500 kilograms of air pressure into their faces, then he runs and dives off the pier. They are shooting at him when Jimmy arrives with the cops. The gun that Mike found is a murder weapon that disappeared as evidence in a recent trial.

Considering that Mike and Jimmy are supposed to be strangers, the way he hugs Mike for finding his bicycle would probably not be considered appropriate nowadays.

In the second story, Tom, an old diving buddy of Mike, who happens to be a police lieutenant calls for Mike’s help. A man named Tyler is in custody because his wife has disappeared. Tyler says that they were exploring a wrecked ship and taking photos when his wife Maria decided to go deeper. Tyler says she never came back up. Tom wants Mike to listen to Tyler’s story to see if it fits with what he knows about diving. Tyler is brought in and shows the photographs that he took of Maria at various depths of their dive. The last picture was taken at 21 meters. Tyler is asked to wait in the hall. Mike shows Tom the last picture and tells him Tyler is lying. Maria’s head covering is yellow in the photo but the colour yellow does not appear at that depth. As one descends certain colours are filtered out of the visible spectrum by the water. They are absorbed to become shades of blue and green. At great depths they become greys and blacks. The picture couldn’t have been taken below 10.5 or 12 meters.

Mike tells Tom that in a couple of years diving technology may allow for the recovery of Maria’s body at 152 meters, with special gasses and a pill. Tom suddenly gets an idea to trick Tyler into believing that Mike has access to top-secret navy diving technology. They take Tyler out to recreate the dive and Mike says he’s going down to 152 meters. Mike descends until he's out of sight at 30 meters, but Tyler is worried that Mike will find his wife's body and discover that he’d murdered her. He severs Tom’s breathing tube with a shard of glass and heads for the surface. He gets on the police boat and when Mike surfaces he tries to back the propeller into him. Mike stops the propeller with his tanks and climbs into the boat. He pulls Tyler into the water and defeats him after a short struggle.

Tyler was played by Leonard Nimoy.

Maria was played by Zale Parry.