When the Mentally Ill Think You Are Crazy

            Saturday was the hottest day of the summer so far.

            Yoga makes me feel younger but I feel old while doing it.

            A couple of nights ago my landlord interrupted my dinner to come in and dump chemicals down my kitchen drain. He said that there was still some water leaking into the donut shop and I guess he thought that it might have been caused by blocked pipes. He asked if I’d been dumping oil into the sink. The stuff he poured down the drain smelled like hair perm chemicals and the odour is still lingering two days later.

            I translated the last verse of “Je suis snob” by Boris Vian:

I'm snob... I'm a snob

I have been ravaged by the bug

I have accidents in my Jaguar

I’m in bed from July to September

It's little details like that one

that make one a snob or not one

I'm a snob... more now than when I started this song

and when I’m a snob no more

I want a death shroud by Dior

            When I arrived at the food bank line-up I saw that Robbie was sitting on a rollator. This new acquisition seemed to have put him in an uncharacteristically good mood because he said “good morning” to me for the first time ever. When his sister arrived to join him in line he got up and let her sit in it.

            The Rollator was invented in 1978 by a Swedish woman named Aina Wifalk who was also a polio sufferer. She deliberately didn’t patent her invention because she wanted it to be available to as many disabled people as possible.

            I took my place in line leaving a space between the last cart and the steps of 1501 Queen West. Engraved at the top of the building is its year of construction, which was 1912. I was surprised that it’s over a hundred years old because it doesn’t look it. My place must be older than that.

            I finished reading the prose poem-story “La Corde” by Charles Baudelaire. It’s based on a true occurrence from the life of Baudelaire’s friend Edouard Manet. The painter had hired a boy to live with him as a model and a houseboy but one day he came home to find the boy had hung himself. When the boy’s mother came to retrieve his body she asked for the rope that her son had used. He gave it to her thinking that she wanted it out of a perversion of grief. But later he began to receive requests for the rope from his neighbours and from others that had heard of the suicide. It turned out that there was money to be made from the sale of pieces of the rope that someone was hanged with because it was considered to be good luck.

            There was a young man behaving erratically around the line-up. He was walking up and down the block gesturing wildly and talking to himself. He would often grab his head with both hands and at one point he got down on his knees like he was praying. He often made eye contact with me and once in the middle of a rant he stopped to smile at me and say, "Hello, how are you?" and then returned to incoherence. At another point he told me that he didn’t understand and I responded that I didn’t either. Then he said something about not being able to see the demons and something again about hiding in the closet from the monsters and somebody having a gun. Certain people in the line found him annoying and those that did tended to be people that have also shown signs of mental illness but to a more manageable degree.

            Valdene the food bank manager came down the line handing out packs of Trident fruit gum but I didn’t take any.

            Marlena started giving out the numbers but ran out just before she got to me and so she had to go back downstairs to get some more. While she was gone the woman sitting on the rollator behind me asked if she could go ahead of me temporarily because the woman behind her was smoking. When she moved forward the smoking woman thought the line was moving and so she advanced as well. The woman with the rollator turned to protest and the smoking woman moved out to finish her cigarette on the edge of the sidewalk. When Marlena came back she gave the woman with the rollator number 24 and so I had to remind her that I was ahead. She apologized, gave me 24 and took 25 from Marlena.

            Downstairs they seemed to be low on staff. Valdene was at the desk and Larissa was the only volunteer at the shelves.

            I took a snack from Thailand called Coco Riz jasmine rice and coconut crispy roll; a box of wheat thins crackers, a handful of maple-pecan protein bars, and a can each of chickpeas and tuna. There was peanut butter and I leaned down to pick up one of the jars to read the ingredients to see if it was natural. Larissa said, “No, I can’t let you take that! My boss …!” Suddenly Angela called her over, said something to her and then she came back, grabbed the peanut butter and put it in my bag, saying, “Angela says it's okay! My supervisor ..." Later at home when I had a chance to read the ingredients I saw that the peanut butter had sugar in it and so I wouldn’t have taken it if she'd just let me look.

            I took a litre carton of organic creamy butternut squash soup and a 1.5 litre jug of simply pure pressed apple juice.

            When I got to Angie’s station Sylvia was there looking at the frozen generic ground chicken and said she didn’t want to take any. I commented that that chicken was really bad. Angie asked, “It’s bad?” I clarified that I meant it’s gristly and not a very good quality of meat. She said, “That's true". I turned down the milk, the yogourt and the eggs but I took a 1.65 litre carton of not from concentrate orange juice and a packaged frozen mystery dinner with no label but through the clear cover I could see a cut of meat on top of what looked like maybe vegetables and sauce.

            From the bread section I picked a long cheese bun and a loaf of whole wheat bread.

            Sylvia gave me a handful each of white, red and purple small potatoes. She put two onions in my bag and said, “Someone told me these are sweet onions but I don’t know”. I got a half overripe orange pepper, a bag of mushrooms and a bag of red grapes. She asked if I wanted the little cucumbers and I vacillated, "Yeeeah ... nnnnn ... yeaah ... no ..." She gave me two handfuls.

            In the “take what you want" section by the door there were net bags containing three avocadoes each. I took one with not much hope that they’d be good inside, since last time they were all bad. But later when I made a sandwich for lunch I cut open the softest one and it was a beautiful bright green inside.

            There were about ten people still in the line-up when I left, but more than half an hour later when I rode home from the supermarket there were another ten people here. I guess some people find it more convenient to come later on because obviously there is less of a wait and the food bank probably doesn’t run out of most items.

            I took my food home, emptied my bags and headed back out to the supermarket. At the bike post ring in front of the No Frills at King and Jameson I realized that when I’d emptied my bags I’d forgotten to put my bike lock back in my backpack. I rode home, got it and came back.

            The cherries at $3.64 a kilo were extremely cheap and so I got three bags. I also bought a few bags of grapes and three tomatoes on the vine. My only other purchases were two containers of Greek yogourt.

            For a little more exercise I detoured my way home by riding along King to Roncesvalles. There are a lot of beautiful Victorian houses on the north side of King between Jameson and Roncesvalles, especially where the view of the lake opens up. Many of them have yet to be gentrified and still serve as rooming houses.

            For lunch I made a sandwich with one slice of bread that I eschewed toasting because I didn’t want to turn the oven on. I added old cheddar, avocado, tomato and sausage and washed it down with apple juice.

            That evening I made a pizza with the pre-baked crust that I’d gotten from the food bank a couple of weeks before. I added sauce, sautéed onion, mushrooms and orange pepper, cheddar cheese and sausage. The crust got overly toasted on the bottom but it was pretty good. I had half of it with a beer and that was too much.

            I watched an episode of The Untouchables. This story was about the Tri-State Gang” that robbed trucks in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. They hood the drivers and chain them to trees and even though they can’t identify the robbers, the gang’s leader Wally kills them anyway. When Wally hears that one of his gang, Big Bill has a girlfriend he goes to intervene. He doesn’t want any leaks in the operation and so he only wants his men to have one night stands. But Big Bill is in love with a young woman from Quebec whose name is Lizzie Dauphine but Big Bill calls her his “Alouette”. Wally arrives, treats Lizzie like a prostitute by leaving money on her stand and takes Big Bill away. On the gang’s next job Big Bill gets killed in a shootout but before he dies when Eliot Ness asks him for the name of the gang leader. Big Bill’s last word is “Alouette” but Eliot Ness thinks he’s saying the name of his boss is Al Ouette.

            With Big Bill dead Wally is worried about Lizzie talking and so he sends one of his men to kill her. She tries to get away and is shot in the back but she survives. After she wakes up from a coma she does have lots of information that Big Bill had for some reason told her. The gang is in hiding and it’s driving Wally crazy. There are three of them left and he figures they need a quick $60,000 to all get away and change their faces. They decide to kidnap a bookie they know named Willie Weinberg and get his wife to pay $60,000 ransom. The snatch goes smoothly and a call is made to Willie’s wife Flora. She says she can get half the money but needs to get the other half from Willie’s brother Sidney and there’s a delay because Sidney is out of town. The arrangement is for her brother to make the drop at the zoo near the monkey cages the next morning. Wally decides that there's too much of a chance that Willie will talk and so he plans to kill him. They are on their way to a spot where they can dump Willie in the river with weights and he won’t be found. Wally shoots him along the way but before they can get to the river they see a roadblock up ahead. They veer into the woods and leave the body there but the feds find it within an hour. Ness goes to break the news to Flora and Sidney that Willie is dead. When he finds out about the drop he asks Sidney to go through with it anyway so they can catch the gang. After a shootout Wally is still alive after having broken his legs from a fall into the polar bear cage.

            Flora was played by Florence Halop, who had a prolific career in radio comedy from the age of four before working in television. She played a patient on St Elsewhere for 17 episodes and was a bailiff on Night Court for one season before dying of lung cancer.

            The real Tri-State Gang first made a name for themselves with a series of cigarette truck robberies. On March 8, 1934 they hijacked a Federal Reserve truck but ended up with nothing but sacks of cancelled cheques. But mail robbery made it a federal issue and so they suddenly had the FBI on their tail. The feds tracked them to a house in Baltimore and after a shootout they were captured. They were sentenced to the electric chair because of the many murders they’d committed during their robberies but one of the perks of being on death row is that one can have food delivered. One particular can of chicken contained two revolvers with which they escaped. They went to Philadelphia and kidnapped a former bootlegger named William Weiss. They demanded a ransom of $100,000 and only got $8000 but they’d already killed Weiss anyway. Their hideout was raided, Mais was wounded and Legenza broke both his legs jumping down an embankment but they still made it to New York. Wallie Legenza checked into a hospital under a false name and the others rented apartments. The weak link was gang’s moll Marie McKeevor. The feds followed her until they learned all the hideouts and they were all recaptured. Legenza and Mais were sentenced to die as soon as possible so they had no chance to escape again.