The Homeless Next Door

            My hip muscles felt a little better when I got up on Saturday and so I'm starting to feel hopeful that this problem is on the mend.

            I use two yoga mats for a little more cushioning every morning. One is the foam mat that I’ve had for twenty years and the one on top is the more common vinyl mat. The bottom mat has been torn for a while but this morning about half a meter came off the end. My back and behind are still cushioned but I do notice it’s slightly harder against my knees when I’m doing poses on my stomach. I can usually find a yoga mat at Value Village and sometimes at the Salvation Army, so maybe I’ll check them out on Monday.

            I wrote another verse and a half of the Frankenstein song.

            I almost decided to wear shorts for the first time this year when I was getting ready to leave for the food bank. All my windows were open but until it’s hot enough to turn the fan on it doesn't seem like shorts weather. If my long bike rides hadn’t been waylaid because of my piriformis muscles I probably would have worn shorts because I would be used to putting them on.

            The line-up was a little longer than last time. I was behind the young guy of East Indian descent with whom I’d chatted a couple of weeks before. Graham was a few places ahead of us but walking around with a slight limp. I asked him what was wrong and he explained that he has a couple of very painful corns on one of his feet that he has to keep filing off.

            He told me that he’d gotten turned away from the food bank last Saturday because he’d been there on the previous Wednesday.

            He asked if I knew about the respit site near Lamport Stadium. I said I didn't and so he told me about it. It’s a large and long single story prefab tent structure in the parking lot of Lamport Stadium at 69 Fraser Avenue. Respite sites are extensions of Toronto’s homeless shelter system with the difference being that coming there or staying there is unconditional. No personal information or even names are taken but there are social workers available for those that want to enter the shelter system towards finding permanent housing. It’s open 24 hours a day but if someone wants a cot for sleeping they have to book it eight hours ahead of time. There are people sleeping there during all hours.

            Graham said he only recently discovered it when he was looking for a place to have meals when he missed out on the food bank. There’s no kitchen there but they are catered and he says the meals, especially the breakfasts, are excellent. There’s also free wifi and lots of places to plug in a laptop.

            It's right on the edge of Liberty Village and I wondered how the gentry there feel about the respite centre. I later checked out a comment section in response to the respite site on the Liberty Village website and found that long term residents of 17 years or more are behind the respite centre but those that have been there five years or less are extremely against it. One person who’s been there 35 years responded to one of those 5-year residents and told them to go back to the suburbs where they belong and to take their nimby attitude with them.

            I commented to Graham that Liberty Village deserves to be uncomfortable because it’s a fake neighbourhood and only slightly more of a village than Value Village. Ironically the presence of the homeless makes the non-village much more village-like.

            The old man was a couple of places behind me and he blurted out, “They threw out all my books!” I asked him where this had happened and he said in his room. I assume he’s in the shelter system then but it seems unreasonable for them to take away his things. He said he thinks he still has all his poetry books at least.

            The young man in front of me told me that I’d been right in telling him two weeks ago that there must be something wrong with the brakes on his bike. He’d complained that his brakes didn’t work in the rain but had thought that to be natural. He went to Bike Pirates and got them fixed.

            Like me, he built his bike at Bike Pirates but he had a Peugeot road bike turned into a one-speed. He said he likes it that way because there are fewer parts to have to replace. I told him that as far as I could tell, based on the unique lug work and the placing of the serial number on the dropout, my bike is probably a 1972 Raleigh Grand Prix.

            We talked for a while about bike accidents, injuries and winter riding and then when the conversation subsided I took out my dual language book.

I finished reading “St Julian the Hospitaler” by Gustav Flaubert. In his old age Julian has become a ferryman helping people cross a wide and difficult river. One night he is woken by a voice like a church bell calling his name from the other side. There is a hurricane raging but Julian crosses anyway. The passenger is an emaciated leper with red eyes, a hole for nose and a body covered with pustules. With great difficulty the boat returns to Julian’s side of the river and Julian offers the leper shelter in his hut. He gives him all of his food, drink and his bed. The leper asks him to become naked and warm him and then the leper transforms into an angelic being. Julian ascends into heaven and that’s the end. There is nothing in the story about hospitals but the real St Julian of 12^th Century France did build hospitals and he is the patron saint of hospitality.

I’m looking forward to the next author in the book as it is Charles Baudelaire and there are three selections from his "Spleen de Paris”. I’ve already translated one of his poems, which has been made into a song that I sing every morning.

I finished the story just as it was time to go downstairs.

At the desk the young volunteer asked the guy in front of me what his ethnic background is. He said he was mixed but the volunteer was curious what the mix consisted of.  He said his father is British and his mother is Indian by way of Malaysia and New Zealand. Then he asked me for my background and I said I was Scandinavian. The volunteer held up his hand for a high five and said he’s Finnish. I said that some people don’t consider the Finns to be Scandinavian and see them as Russian. On looking this up later I see that the Finns are not Slavic at all. They are closer to Estonians but the genetic difference between Finns in the east and west of Finland is wider apart than the difference between the English and the Germans.

The first set of shelves still had some of the bags of spices that were being offered last week. There were cookies, taco kits and marshmallows but the only things I found attractive were a 900-gram jar of cheese whiz and a box of Loads of Raisins cereal, a rip-off by President’s Choice of Raisin Bran. From the canned beans section I took a can of Pomilia lentils from Italy. Pomilia is a big manufacturer of canned good, specializing in tomatoes and headquartered in Nocera Superiore in southwestern Italy.

There have been plenty of different kinds of canned beans for quite a while but I haven’t seen canned tuna on the shelves for at least a month.

In the soup section was a misplaced small can of baked beans with bacon and my volunteer also gave me three peach-mango drinking boxes.

Angie was offering 500-gram containers of strawberry bottom Greek yogourt, two-litre containers of soymilk, two small bottles of drinking yogourt, three eggs, generic frozen ground chicken and three Jamaican patties. I took the Greek yogourt, the eggs and the patties.

I grabbed a bag of six whole-wheat English muffins.

Sylvia was still serving the young guy in front of me when I got there. She offered him potatoes and he commented that he’s growing potatoes in his back yard. I know he rents a basement apartment, so it must be in a house where the landlord is kind enough to let him have a little garden. I told them I was raised on a potato farm. Sylvia mentioned that the potatoes she was offering were very hard. He said they’d be good for French fries. She asked if hard potatoes are better for french fries but he said he didn't know. Unusually cold weather during the growing season can cause potatoes to get hard and difficult to cook. These were probably Russetts, which are good for baking, mashing and they’re the kind McDonalds uses for their fries.

When Sylvia started serving me she commented on how dirty the potatoes were. I said that it wasn’t a surprise that they’d be dirty since they are grown covered in dirt. She started putting double handfuls of spuds into my bag and kept on going when I said it was enough until I had twenty-three. They really were exceptionally dirty and after I’d unpacked them at home, when I turned my bag inside out and shook it there was a cloud of brown dust.

Sylvia also gave me a bag of small red, yellow and orange sweet peppers and a plastic container of Boston lettuce with the roots attached. From the “take what you want” section near the door I picked a seedless cucumber.

I looked at my food bank visit of the same week last year and found that this year there were more and fresher greens. The big jar of Cheese Whiz was a better score as well.

            When I got home from the food bank my landlord was in the second floor apartment at the top of the stairs. Nicky moved out months ago but he’s only gotten around to renovating the place now. After putting my food away I was on my way to go to the supermarket but found Raja was blocking the stairs with a ladder as he changed the fluorescent light above it. He said to me he was getting a bill from the Coffeetime for the water damage of a few days ago when my sink overflowed. Since it only overflowed for a minute I doubted if it was much of a bill but I told him I wouldn’t be able to pay for it anyway. He said three times is too much. I asked when were the three times. He only named one other time and said it was six months ago when my toilet overflowed. I told him a toilet overflowing is his responsibility because it’s a failure of his equipment. He shouted at me for a while, told me I was talking nonsense and said he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. I looked it up later and it’s a fact that sewage and drainage are the landlord’s responsibility unless the tenant puts something in the toilet that shouldn’t’ have been put there. Since I haven’t flushed anything that I shouldn’t have then the overflow was his fault.

            At No Frills I bought two half pints of raspberries, four bags of grapes, a wedge of two year old cheddar, three bags of milk, a can of dark coffee and some mouthwash.

            I had a toasted cheese, tomato, cucumber and lettuce sandwich for lunch. >

            I did some exercises for my piriformis muscles.

            I worked on my journal. I had a fried egg, a piece of toast and a beer for dinner while watching two episodes of Stories of the Century.

            The first story was about the Wild Bunch of Wyoming led by Butch Cassidy and his right hand man The Smiling Kid. The Smiling Kid was played by Slim Pickins. They are presented as being a dangerous but fun loving gang of bandits with Butch being dead set against any killing. They steal some bank notes that are supposed to be worthless because there are no banker’s signatures on them but since no one ever reads the signatures they put fake on them like “Joan of Arc”. They buy a saloon but when the law seems on their tail they move and buy a bigger saloon with showgirls. They get arrested and put in jail but Dogface, one of Butch’s men is posing as the sheriff and they get out. Butch and Smiley go to Uruguay and are living it up when they are gunned down by the local police.

            Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch was also known as The Hole in the Wall Gang.

Butch’s real right hand man was the Sundance Kid. I don’t know why they called him the Smiling Kid in the TV story. The gang and especially Butch tried to avoid killing people but shootouts did happen resulting in death. Ann and Josie Bassett were friends and sometimes lovers with the gang and would sometimes help them out with fresh horses from Ann’s ranch. The gang had a hideout in Utah called Robbers Roost, which was in difficult terrain and positioned for easy detection of intruders. They were also friends with other ranchers in the area. They robbed some trains in Utah and Wyoming and a bank in Nevada. In 1901 Butch, Sundance and Sundance’s girlfriend Etta Place moved to Argentina.

The rest of the gang were tracked down and either killed or captured in various locations. Butch and Sundance were killed in a shootout with the Bolivian Cavalry. Etta was last seen in 1909 in San Francisco.

            The second story was about the Doolin Gang led by Bill Doolin. The story begins with the gang robbing the paymaster of the railroad. The paymaster manages to shoot d Brinkley as they are getting away. He gives valuable information to the lawmen just before dying in exchange for his wife Sarah getting some of the reward money. But Sarah comes for her share of the robbery, which Doolin gives her. When the law comes after them Sarah steals all the money. Doolin catches up with her and gets it back, says, “If you were a man I’d kill ya” then he punches her in the face and leaves. The law arrives and Doolin is put in prison. He escapes to a cabin where he has a shootout with the law and is killed.

            Sarah was played by Joan Shawlee, who started out as a model at 14 and was singing in New York nightclubs at 16. She was proclaimed one of the six most beautiful girls in Manhattan. She got a contract with 20^th Century Fox but they found out she was under age before she did any films. She went back to New York and was rediscovered at 19 singing at the Copa Cabana by Lou Costello. When she got back into films she began to specialize as wisecracking comedic tough girls. She was Sweet Sue the leader of the all girl band in Some Like It Hot; she was the prostitute Amazon Annie in Irma La Douce; she was Momma Monahan in The Wild Angels; she played Pickles, the wife of Morey Amsterdam’s character on the Dick Van Dyke Show.

            The real Bill Doolin was the founder of the original Wild Bunch that robbed banks, trains and stagecoaches in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Doolin started out as a cowboy but then joined the Dalton Gang. Two teenagers named Little Britches and Cattle Annie followed and helped out the gang. In 1893 Doolin married Edith Ellsworth and soon after that was shot in the foot while robbing a train. Later that year 14 deputy marshals came after them and in the Battle of Ingalls three deputies were killed. Doolin went with his wife to Eureka Springs, Arkansas in 1896 to relieve his foot in bathhouses there. He was captured in a bathhouse. Doolin escaped and hid out with his wife in Oklahoma Territory until a deputy killed him with a shotgun. Doolin had one son Jay, who changed his name to Jay Meek. Jay died in the 1980s but had four children who also had children.