TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 54



While his two spiffy subalterns were poking gingerly at their hot hamburg sandwiches, Mayor Cass had been tucking into his western omelette, and was now swirling the last fragment of egg into a rivulet of dusty ketchup that edged his plate on its eastern side.
     “No sirree, not a bad western omelette!” boomed Cass.  “I guess you make a ton of these things in a day, right?” he asked Homer. 
     Homer shrugged.  “They’re pretty popular.”
     “Ever make a Reuben sandwich?’
     “I don’t think so.”
     “Oh, you’d remember if you had.  Smoked meat—like pastrami.  Sauerkraut.  Russian dressing.  On dark rye.”
     Homer shrugged again.  “Uh huh,” he said.
     “So what do you do when you’re not frying up the chitlins here?” Cass asked him.
     “I paint.”
     Cass was rather taken aback.  So were the two subaltens, who looked at one another in something between bewilderment and amusement.
     “You mean like houses?” said Cass.
     “No, I mean like paintings,” Homer replied in a distinctively stony voice.
     “So what do you paint?” asked subaltern One.  “Like clowns on velvet or something?  Or children with big eyes?”
      Homer looked as if he were going to the kitchen for a meat cleaver.
     “Old Masters,” he said.
     There was a bewildered silence. 
     “But haven’t the Old Masters already painted the old masters?” Cass asked him, grinning at his luncheon companions.
     “Not my way,” said Homer.
     “And what’s your way?” asked subaltern two.
     “Smaller, usually.  But just as good.”
     “So you copy the Old Masters?” Cass asked him.
     “I copy them to start, and then I sort of bring them up to date.”
     “How?” Cass asked.
     Homer was beginning to chaff under the rubbing of all these questions.
     “You guys want more coffee?”
     They all did, so Homer passed from uplifted cup to uplifted cup, pouring out refills.
     “You don’t by any chance have any of your things here with you do you?” Cass inquired.
     “I got a couple in a portfolio out in the kitchen.”
     “May I see them?”
     “I’ll show you one, I guess,” said Homer, without much enthusiasm.  He sauntered out to the kitchen and came back a few seconds later with a small painting on paper, clearly based on Raphael’s Saint George and the Dragon.  He held it up for Cass to see.
     The Mayor was dumbfounded.  He stared at the little painting for a long time in total silence.
     “What’s the matter, your Worshipfulness,” joked subaltern one, “you like this thing or something?”
     “Or hate it?” asked subaltern two.
     “Or are you afraid of it?” suggested Homer helpfully.
     Cass’s face had turned an unhealthy shade of beige.  He looked again at the little painting and back again at Homer’s oddly impassive face and then back to the painting again.
     “And you painted this?”
     “Yep, I did.  This and a couple hundred others.  You oughta see my Boschs.  They’re my best ones. Very nice and creepy! Organs and body parts everywhere!”
     “This one’s creepy enough,” said subaltern one.
     “But this looks just like the paintings I was getting in the mail with death threats scrawled across them,” said Cass, his voice anguished enough to alarm both subalterns at once.
     “Yeh that’s right,” replied Homer.  “Those were the ones!  They were my paintings.  Well, okay, photocopies of them.  And my death-threats.”
     “Jesus,” said Cass.
     “Scared you, huh?”
     “”Fuck, they scared the beejesus out of me!  What do you think?!!”
     “I think they scared the beejesus out of you!”
     “But why?  Did you really want to kill me?  Do you now?”
     “Well, to tell you the truth, it sort of wore off—as a plan.”
     “I’m glad to hear it,” said Cass, beginning to perspire profusely.
     Subalterns one and two looked at one another in dismay. The Mayor seemed distressed, they observed, but not panicky. 
     “Should we call the police?” subaltern one asked Cass. “Or an ambulance or something?” suggested subalten two.
     “An ambulance?” said Homer.
     “No, no of course not for chrissake!” Cass barked at them.  “Why would I want an ambulance?”
     “Well, you know…for him,” said subaltern two, pointing at Homer.  “You know…like with straightjackets and all that stuff!”
     “Restraint,” muttered subaltern one.
     “Balls!” said Cass.
     “That’s right,” said Homer, grinning broadly. “Balls!”
     “I don’t understand,” said Cass.  “What‘ve you got against me?”  The two subalterns glanced quickly at one another and tried to suppress smirks.
     “Well, I dunno,” Homer replied, “where do you want to start?  First of all, everybody hates you, not just me.”
     Cass looked unhappy but not angry.
     “Yeh,” he said wearily.  “I suppose so.”
     “So lots of people probably want to kill you, not just me.”
     “You really think so?”  Cass turned to the subalterns.  “You think that’s true?”
     “No question,” replied Subaltern one.
     “No question at all,” agreed subaltern two.
     “Listen,” Cass said to Homer.  “You got any pie or anything”
     “There’s one slice of cherry left and two slices of apple,” Homer told him.
     “Fine.  I’ll have the cherry and they,” he said, pointing to the subalterns, “can have the apples.  With ice cream,” he added.  The subalterns looked trapped.
     “We don’t have ice cream,” said Homer.
     “Without then,” said Cass. 
     “Okay.  I gotta tell you, though,” Homer added, “they’ve been sitting there for a while.  They’re not real fresh.”
     “What do you care?” Cass asked him.  “You’ve been sending me death threats!!!  And now I’m supposed to be frightened of stale pie?”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 53



Homer Rubik was slid the 68th western omelette of the day onto a plate and toted it the length of the counter to the only customer in the place—officer Brice Sweetman, who was perched heavily on the stool nearest the window.
     “Where’s Bliss today?” he asked Homer in as affable a voice as he could manage, now that he was actually thinking of Homer’s gigantic female friend.  “I almost miss not having that stupid dog of hers piss on my pantleg!”
     “Fish really is a dope,” said Homer.
     “And Bliss?”
     “Back in her subway station, I guess, hanging around the payphone in case somebody calls her about the dumb dog.”
     Office Sweetman lifted a great forkful of fraying omelette to his mouth and washed it down with a swallow of cold coffee.
     “I’ll give you this, Homer,” he said.  “You make a pretty decent western omelette.”
     Homer nodded moody thanks and thought about how much he disliked cops—including Brice Sweetman—and Bliss and Fish…oh gawd especially Fish…and omelettes and the dishwater that Nick’s restaurant had the balls to offer up as its daily soup, and the gypsum pies that lay about calcifying in glass cases, and the vat of soy-based gravy mix on the back burner of the stove, with which Homer would glumly anoint the innumerable plates of fries and the Hot Hamburger sandwiches (a ground beef patty, white bread, gravy all over everything, french fries and a spoonful of dead canned peas) which had remained steadfastly popular since Nick’s had first opened in 1946. 
     What Homer hated the most about cooking up all this stuff was that for some cruelly perverse reason, it reminded him of painting.  And painting was all he really ever wanted to do. 
     Homer was just blue-skying increasingly impractical ideas about how to blow Nick’s to Kingdom come when the door swung open and in walked the Mayor of Toronto, the fatter-than-life Cass Tamburlaine.  He had two guys in suits in tow and, much to Homer’s annoyance, the three of them seemed intent upon scoring lunch.
     “Gentlemen,” muttered Homer.  “What can I get you?”
     The mayor looked quickly at Officer Brice Sweetman and his western omelette.
     “I tell you what,” said Cass Tamburlaine, stuffing himself into a maroon naugahyde booth, and gesturing that his two subalterns should join him there, “that omelette the officer’s having looks alright.  Make me one of those.  With white toast and coffee.”
     The other two looked slightly panicky and, in a momentary reversion to childhood dinners they had both endured with estranged fathers in southern Ontario bus terminals —circa 1972—simultaneously ordered Hot Hamburger sandwiches and diet cokes. 
     “You going to drink something, Mister Mayor?” Homer asked Cass.
     So you recognize me!”
     “Pretty hard not to,” said Homer.
     “Sure, I’ll have a Tab,” Cass told him.  “No wait, make that a Fresca.”
     “Fresca, right,” said Homer, repairing to the kitchen to extricate two frozen beef-like patties, a plastic bag of frozen fries, and two eggs from the refrigerator. 
     “I’m normally in search of a perfect Reuben sandwich,” Cass told his companions, “or even an adequate Reuben sandwich,” but they’re so fucking hard to find now!” 
     The two men nodded in a vaguely understanding way.
     “You know what a Reuben sandwich is, right?” Cass asked them.  They both looked mildly embarrassed.  They looked identically embarrassed, as a matter of fact, like Tweedle-Fucking-Dum and Tweedle-Fucking-Dee.   Cass sighed.  He decided not to bother explaining.  “Anyhow,” he told his luncheon companions, “There’s no point in trying to get one here.”
     The two nodded sagely, full of sense of appropriate regret for the losing of a sandwich neither of them knew anything about.
     “Well, be seeing you, Homer,” said Officer Sweetman, mopping his mouth with a paper napkin and throwing eight bucks onto the counter. 
     “See you,” Homer called out from the kitchen.

*********************************************
     Across the city, in the penthouse of a stunningly transparent condo building near the waterfront, Coal Blackstone was slowly readying herself for an upcoming photo-shoot.  This time it was for a magazine layout, a deliberate ripping-off-of-or-homage-to—depending how bitchy or charitable you felt—of editor Stephanie LaCava’s recent and influential insistence, in her magazine, Elle, that the “Lolita look” was back.  “You can be Lolita forever,” La Cava had written—or words to that effect.  Coal felt she had never encountered a more exhausting idea in her entire life.
     The photographer for the shoot was not to be her inamorato, Linc Ford—as she had hoped—but a guy named Gregory Ehrenburg, whose work Coal detested.
     Coal idly wondered if LaCava has ever actually read the Nabokov novel, or whether Ehrenburg had.  She doubted it. The book was sad and funny and wise and dispiriting and incandescently brilliant.   She knew the opening by heart:  “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
     Lo. Lee. Ta.
     Just then, Linc strolled into the bedroom, holding a slice of last night’s pizza in one hand and a can of Orangina in the other.  
     “Going out?”
     “It’s that ‘Lolita Look’ shoot,” she told him.
     Linc smiled.
     “It’s sort of a compliment to you, wouldn’t you say?”
     “You think so?”
     “Well,” said Linc, biting off a chunk of pizza, “Lolita was supposed to be pretty young, wasn’t she?”
     “Fourteen.”
     “Well, there you are!”
     “Where?”
     “Being able to pass!” grinned Linc.
     “Maybe with makeup and banks of lights and judiciously arranged shadows.”
     “Ah c’mon, Coal, you’re the very essence of Lolita!”
     “Linc, I just hate that idea!  I’m two decades older than Nabokov’s nymphet, and I want to look like that!”
     “Geez, Coal,” Linc sighed, “it’s only fashion!  Lighten up.”

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 52





     Rory was coming to regard this long walk he was taking through Toronto with Bongo Bearance—his newly-acquired muse—as a genuine journey of discovery.  It was a rather compressed way, he decided, both of getting to know Bongo better, and of learning an awful lot about writing in a remarkably short time.  Bongo, he decided, was a good bargain.
     She was also cute as heck.  They were walking east along Hoskin Avenue, drifting past Trinity College and, at Bingo’s insistence, were about to turn north and stroll up Philosopher’s Walk to Bloor Street. 
     Rory reached over to take Bongo’s hand in his.  Bongo smiled sweetly and gently disengaged it from his tender, proffered grasp.  Rory looked unhappy about this.
     “It’s just that I don’t think muses ought to hold their authors’ hands, or…” she giggled, “anything else belonging to them.”  Rory looked crestfallen.
     “How come?”
     “Because if I’m supposed to be your Muse,” she told him, “we have to keep the channels clear.”
     “Channels?”   
     “Yes.  I guess it’s sort of like what happens in a séance.  We can’t permit any sort of interference between us!
     “And you think erotic attraction would count as interference?”
     Bongo punched him playfully on the upper arm.
    “Oh my, yes!” she laughed.


     Violet Dollop found to her dismay—as well as to her delight—that writing was beginning to take over her life.  What was both absurd and beguiling was the pressure—an intoxicating pressure but a pressure nevertheless—to get everything down: everything she saw, heard, tasted, felt, read about and pondered.  She had never experienced this kind of archival imperative before.  It bothered her a little, but not as much as it infused her with joy.  What was so compelling about being a recording angel, she wondered.  Was it really about leaving a trail behind you made up of everything you were and continued to become?  Was it really, in the end, about mortality?  Was she building a stout wall around her own vulnerability--as if the grim reaper might not recognize her if she were disguised as a bulwark, as a fortification.  
     What a strange image this Grim Reaper figure was, she suddenly thought to herself.  So pastoral.  The harbinger of a leisurely country death, cutting you down as if you were bloomed wheat.  She made a note to herself to write an essay about the Grim Reaper.  She would call it “The Old Man and the Scythe.”
     But was the figure really a man?  How could you tell?  It was mostly black cloak.  With a skeleton’s hands.  What  would today’s version be?  A skeleton in guerrilla fatigues, waving around a…what?  She took a moment to google for help.  “Newest machine guns?” she typed into her laptop.  Then she continued to write in her notebook: “a skeleton in guerrilla fatigues wielding a Korean Super Aegis 2.”  Cumbersome, she noted, but probably accurate.
     Violet wrote and wrote and then read and then wrote again.  She became so utterly dedicated to her labours that she didn’t even hear Tom come in.
     “Still at it?” he asked as cheerfully as he could, trying to mask the slight irritation he felt by passing it off as mere surprise. He hung up his coat and rubbed his hags together—a peculiar gesture, when you really look at it (as violet immediately did), that apparently announced a genial and hearty “what’s next?” kind of inquiry.
     “I’ve been at it all day,” Violet told him.  “I rather lost track of the time.”
     “So there’s no dinner?”
     “Well, not yet anyhow,” replied Violet, “but there soon could be.”
     “Like what?” asked Tom suspiciously.
     “Well, I could make a pasta,’ said Violet.  “And a salad.”
     “Okay.  What kind of a pasta?”
     Violet thought for a moment.
     “How about a nice spicy Fettuccini Puttanesca?” she asked him.  “Tomato sauce, onions, red peppers, chillies, black olives, anchovies, artichoke hearts, capers, oregano….”
     Wonderful!” said Tom, cheering up somewhat. “You got all that stuff?”
     “I think so.  So listen, I’ll start getting things ready and you put on the water for the fettuccini, alright?”
     Tom rather sullenly out down the newspaper he had just picked up.
     “Violet, I’ve had a really long, demanding day,” he told her.
     She looked at Tom, sitting heavily in his favourite chair. “Fettuccini Puttanesca, which is to say, fettuccini as the whores like it,” Violet thought to herself.
     “I know dear,” she told him.  


     May was sitting in her workspace at the School of Architecture, trying to come up with a more elegant solution for the design of a central atrium for a Mediterranean summer home than she had managed so far.
What he had done was pedestrian, heavy, without nuance.  
     Her T.A., a gaunt young man wearing severe Le Corbusier spectacles, hadn’t been very impressed either.  His name was Hugo Hayden and he was still, in this new age of architectural détente and “healing,” an unregenerate post-deconstructivist.
     Your scheme is too resolved,” Hugo told her.  “What you want,” he insisted, “is something that seems more unsolicited.  Your idea shows too much agenda,” he insisted, taking a pencil and scribbling “TMA” across the bottom of one of her drawings.  May looked at the three letters and then at Hugo and then down at the three letters again.  “TMA.”  Thanks Mister Asshole! she thought merrily to herself.
     “Do you understand what I mean?” Hugo asked her, looking for just a second too long down the front of her blouse.
     “Oh yes,” said May, in a tone so steady you could check it with a spirit level.  “I think so.”  She immediately felt a little better to think that the lofty Mr. Hayden had merely been reading the back issues of Volume magazine again.  ‘Unsolicited’ indeed, thought May.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 51




Rory and his suddenly acquired muse, Bongo Bearance, were strolling east on Queen Street—past the street’s viral breakout of semi-chic restaurants, and its scattering of fast food outlets and clothing stores.
     “There used to be used bookstores all along here,” Rory observed. 
     “Tons of them!” said Bongo. “I especially miss Abelard Books.  I miss it very much.”
     “Me too.”
     “I once bought a really gorgeous three-volume set of Boswell’s Life of Johnson there.”
     “Nice,” said Rory, thinking it was a pleasantly odd sensation to be walking through the city with a woman who had read Sam Johnson.
     Bongo suddenly smiled rather puckishly at him. 
     “Do you know Johnson’s definition, in his Dictionary, of ‘sonneteer’?”
     “Johnson wrote a dictionary?”
     “He did.  In 1755.  All by himself!”
     “And so what is a sonneteer?” Rory asked, feeling he really didn’t want to know very badly.
     “Sonneteer,” writes Johnson.  “A small poet.”
     She laughed merrily, as if this revelation was the most amusing thing she’d heard for a long time.
     “Why is that funny?” Rory asked her.
     “Because,” said Bongo, poking him sharply in the chest with her right index finger, “that’s you, my poetaster friend!”
     “A small poet?”
     “Not in stature of course,” Bongo giggled, looking at him admiringly from head to toe, “but in poetic ambition, aspiration, vista, and all that, you are, so to speak, housebound.”
     Rory sighed.
     “Housebroken,” he added.
     Bongo smiled.  “So what are we going to do about it?”
     “We?”
     “Well, I’m supposed to be your muse, aren’t I?”
     “I was half kidding.”
     “Well I wasn’t,” said Bongo gaily.  “I’m on the job.  I’m taking this muse business very seriously!”
     Rory didn’t know whether to be pleased or apprehensive.  He decided to allow himself to be both.
     They had reached University Avenue and turned north.
     “I hate this street,” said Rory.  “It’s wide and civic and hard and impersonal.”
     “I bet you’d like it better if it had a big whacking Arc de Triomph straddling it somewhere.  Then you’d think you were in Paris and you’d feel all noble and exhilarated!”
     Twenty minutes later they were turning into the University campus.
     “Let’s go to Hart House and have tea!” said Bongo.
     “Hart House?  I haven’t been there for years.”
     “I go there all the time,” said Bongo happily.  For me, it’s still fragrant with the effluvia of Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson and Emily Carr and Carl Schaefer and Northrop Frye all those brilliant, larger-than-life people!”
     “The last time I was there,” said Rory glumly, somebody had backed a chair into a painting by E,J Hughes and put a dent in it.”
     “That’s awful,” said Bongo.
     “What’s more awful is that nobody seemed to notice—or care.”
     “Well,’ replied Bongo, “that’s where you have to locate your poetry.”
     “What do you mean?”
     “In the realm of damage and remembrance—among other carefully chosen locales.”
     They had their tea.  Rory ordered a cinnamon roll, but it was stale, and he threw it in the garbage.
     “More poetry,” said Bongo.