As fate would have it, actress Chloe Sevigny was sitting at the table directly beside us.
Subtly, like a panther at night, I went back to the patio, had a look around, came back to the bar, stretched a few times, and then discreetly took a photograph of Sevigny as she ate lunch.
This is what happened after I returned to my seat and sat down:
Chloe Sevigny: I know what you did.
Me: Sorry?
Chloe Sevigny: I know what you did.
Me: Last summer?
Chloe Sevigny: (Dripping with sarcasm) Oh, you’re so clever! You should write for Hollywood! Look, I know that you just took a picture of me without permission. I saw you, asshole.
Me: Lady, I don’t even have a clue who you are.
Chloe Sevigny: Don’t give me that bullshit, you know damn well who I am!
Me: Are you a homely 16 year-old boy dressed up like he’s in some metal hair band for Halloween?
Rachelle: (Urgent whispering) Pickle, just apologize and the shut-up so we can move on, okay?
Me: (To Rachelle) I didn’t do anything wrong! I just went to the patio to see if they had better looking servers out there! I’m not apologizing for that!
Chloe Sevigny: (To Rachelle) I feel sorry for you. Your life must be a real challenge.
Rachelle: Oh, I know, it is, it is. He did the same thing when we saw some actress from Law & Order at the airport. He said he was taking photographs of the luggage for a gallery show, but of course…
Me: It wasn’t some actress, damn it, it was Angie Harmon!
Rachelle: And then her football player husband came over and asked what was going on, and my husband’s nose began to bleed!
Chloe Sevigny: (As if this was the most hilarious thing she has ever heard in her life, Sevingy does a spit-take the way you would expect from a bad, over-rated actress.)
Me: It was the dry air from the plane trip.
Rachelle: We were getting on a flight, not off.
Me: No we weren’t.
Chloe Sevigny: (To her friend) I think it’s time for us to leave.
Me: You know what? A real fashion icon would want her photo taken, she’s be flattered, and you know what else? Hilary Swank carried you in Boys Don’t Cry, she carried you! Your careers have really gone in different directions since then, haven’t they?
01 Jan 1999 — FILM ‘BOYS DON’T CRY’ DIRECTED BY KIMBERLY PEIRCE — Image by © CORBIS SYGMA
Chloe Sevingy: (Gives me the finger, drops a bunch of cash on the table and leaves without finishing her meal)
( I have saved Chloe Sevigny’s unfinished burger and am in the process of selling a photograph of it to the fetish site, Unfinished Celebrity Burgers. However, I will be putting the real leftover, which is in a ziplock bag in my fridge, on Ebay, but am happy to take offers from anybody reading now. )
]]>They were doing grunt work, now inhabiting the sort of job where you show up in the morning at some inconvenient location and then get taken by a van to go off and do some heavy lifting, receiving cash at the end of the day, and no expectations that you might return tomorrow. The immediate necessities of the day:
Rent.
Beer.
Car payment.
Gambling debt.
One guy, the meatiest, lounged on an abandoned sofa eating take-out rigatoni from a tin container. Others lined the periphery, less sure of things, smoking. In the middle of them sat a girl, wearing a hoodie and jeans, she was posed in a masculine way, but you could see the flutter of femininity in her young, pretty face. She smiled broadly, happy in her day, reminding me of Hilary Swank’s character in Boys Don’t Cry.
As we walked through them, I asked, “ So, what’s going up here, another great, glittering palace?” The guy on the sofa, the confident one, answered quickly, saying that it was going to be a brothel. They all laughed, the girl harder than she meant to. The guy went on, constructing a kind of fantasy that included the university students that inhabited the building across the street. “A Bunny Ranch, full of rich Daddy’s Girls gone bad,” he said, looking at the girl in the hoodie for about two seconds too long.
A little closer to Bloor a man spotted our Miniature Dachshund and became animated. He knelt down and stretched out his arm, upon which I could see three or four primitive tattoos. A diamond. A knife. A heart. Tattoos without imagination or intent, crudely carved into his flesh as if only because there was nothing else to do.
“Hey, you wanna smell me?”
Heidi, our dog, seemed uninterested.
“You wanna smell something good?”
I looked at his fingers, dirty and hard, his long fingernails.
“Ah, it just smells of beer anyway, I guess she don’t care.” And then he ambled away with a wave.
Later, on our way back home, students were moving into the building across the street from the house that was being renovated. The guy I had spoken to earlier about the house becoming a brothel full of sorority girls, was now wearing a protective mask and was throwing some sort of ashy drywall out the window. Twenty yards away, a pretty girl in yoga pants, her hair protected beneath a fashionable kerchief, was just starting to unload a truck with a big smile on her face. She was ready for her new life to begin, for it to stretch gloriously into the future, so happy in the sun of this new day.
