Humans Of Toronto

While buying some guacamole at a store in Kensington Market, I asked the cashier how she was doing. She was perhaps thirty, wore big, round unfashionable glasses, a dull and fading sweater, and had long hair that looked like she might have felt it was a nuisance. Her hands were a kind of grayish purple, as if dyed from the cash register’s ink, and cracked in a really extreme, painful looking way. She responded to my question with great brio and confidence, “Amazing,” she said with disarming sarcasm. I said something like, “Wow, lucky you!” She shrugged, and as I was leaving she shouted after me in a voice still dripping with the sarcasm of a Ghost-World-Girl, “You have a magical day!”

At Sanagan’s Meat Locker the guy working the cash wore a baseball cap that said Jimmy’s Coffee. It had brownish, indeterminate stains and smudges on it, and somehow this made it look deadly cool. I told him I liked his hat, and he said, “You like all the meat stains on it, don’t you?” I nodded. “Yeah, whenever I’m in the back room I’m constantly getting banged about by all the hanging carcasses, it’s like getting whacked in the head all the time by those pugil sticks on American Gladiators!”

Later, I went to Mackenzie’s Pub on Bloor. The man sitting to my left had a shaved head and haunted eyes. He stared straight ahead, his right hand slowly, almost tenderly caressing the sleeve of his jacket. He never looked over at anyone or up at the bank of TV’s above the bar, but straight through the skyline of liquor bottles in front of him and into his fragmented image staring back at him from the mirror. He seemed intense, maybe even angry, as if immersed in a circumstance that was overwhelming and forced– Led Zepplin playing chaotically in the foreground, as if emanating from his head and not the sound system all around us.

When I got the bill from the bartender for $19.89, she exclaimed, “Good year!” I didn’t know what she meant and said, “Sorry?” “Oh, 1989, I was in high school then, it was a good year,” and then a small, embarrassed, maybe even somewhat melancholy laugh, before she turned to another task.