Middle-aged men, guys getting off work and who are still in their FedEx or Hydro uniforms go there. Each night, as part of a promotion, the bar host’s a card came which takes place at the back on one of those poker tables you can buy at Canadian Tire. The other night it was Texas Hold ‘Em they were playing, and although it’s a cashless game, since it’s poker, people felt heavily invested.

As I was sitting at the bar drifting through the sports section, a fight erupted at the back of the bar. It was extraordinary how quickly rage, explosive rage, swept in and over the table. Men, something now ignited within, had pushed back their chairs and were standing. Screaming and swearing, they waved their arms about and stiffened into fighting posture, fists clenched. A woman, who seemed to be at the centre of it all, had a voice that was a black, untranslatable hiss, more the unearthly vocalizations of possession than language. She threw a glass against the wall, her long hair waving in fury, as the men shouted. It seemed the very manifestation of mental illness, that from the collective interiors of these people, a dark, stormy cloud of violence had been summoned.

But the thing that struck me the most was how quickly it all passed, and how everybody seemed to enjoy it. It had been fun for them. What, I wonder, does that say about us? On a frigid, lonely night in February a group of strangers go out looking for something. They find one another at a card table in a bar, and what they needed was this, to wake up and experience that jolt of electricity spiking through their bodies, so that for a moment each one of them was alive in the streaming arteries,  heroes on a battlefield, the lion’s roar that answered back to the night.

It was here, at a pub called Roosters, where we became last-call drinking acquaintances. Ever since that time we’ve maintained sporadic contact, usually in the form of late-night messaging whenever one of us is drunk and alone, but recently, as Ford’s problems have escalated he’s asked me to take on a more strategic role in the maintenance of his public image.

I just want to let everybody know that although I’m not a political or even personal supporter of Rob Ford,  I do have some sympathy for him, which is why I help out. I grew up around guys like him, boys who came from wealthy families but preferred sports to school. They liked to party, mostly, and as the years advanced a kind of self-loathing typically settled in right next to their sense of entitlement. Pressured by family toward a measured, presentable career they never wanted, these men hated the pretenses and expectations of the rarified culture from which they were bred, and soon enough felt victimized and angry. As if having tumbled from their family homes up on the hill, I would see them at last-call in marginal bars, places where their peers would never dream to inhabit, places where predictably being able to pay for your own drinks was sufficient to earn you a kind of social capital. Rob Ford is one of these men. He’s a guy who should have become a gym teacher, but propelled by an instinctive fury and a certainty of both his victimization and superiority, he’s lurched swinging into a job for which he’s completely over-matched.

It’s the sort of thing that simply can’t end well.

As the story of the video of Ford allegedly smoking crack cocaine was detonating the news cycle, I got this message from Ford:

MUR:

THE FUCKING SHIT IS HITTING THE FUCKING SHIT FAN!! THERE’S SHIT EVERYWHERE!!! IT’S SHIT STORM CENTRAL!! THE FAKE VIDEO OF ME NOT SMOKING CRACK IN LITTLE SOMALILAND WITH 5-STAR AND CHICKEN WING HAS TO BE DESTROYED. WE NEED TO BUY IT BEFORE THE SHITSTARTER ASSEHOLES DO! IT’S THIRD AND LONG!! GIVE ME A PLAN, LITTLE BUDDY, YOUR BRAIN IS LIKE A RUNNING BACK!!

ROBBER

Slobber:

This is what we do.

Remember that guy who used the Internet to trade up from a paper clip to a house? Well, we do the same thing. We’ll create a shell, a grassroots organization that just wants to see the people who report crimes punished rather than those who commit them. We will call it CITIZENS UNITED AGAINST BLACKMAIL, and we refer to ourselves as Cubs For(d) Justice.

The first item we put up is a Rob Ford fridge magnet, just like the ones you were running around putting on cars in a parking lot, when you weren’t high on coke, while that meeting you were supposed to be attending was taking place.

As the drug dealers you don’t know want $200,000 and to move to Calgary, I say our end game is to trade them an expensive home in Calgary for the video you’re not in.

I see the trading (which we will manipulate through CUAB) breaking down in this way:

Rob Ford Fridge Magnet = Hamster = Crack Pipe = Don Bosco Football Helmet (Collector’s edition) = A Vaporizer = Mobility Scooter (you still have the one from the cottage, right?) = Weekend In Niagara Falls= Probable Sex date With Toronto Argonaut Cheerleader= Seat on Toronto City Council = Senate Appointment = $450,00 Home In Calgary With Rental Unit in Basement That Is Near To Inadequately Defended Drug Territory.

We will then trade the house for the crack tape that doesn’t exist, snookering the media elite and winning one for the little guy.

This is the link to the post I have created on Craig’s List:

http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/tor/bar/3818830265.html