Taking the dog for a walk through the Annex
On Tuesday I took the dog for a walk. Along our journey we passed a large home that’s being gutted in preparation for massive renovations. It was lunchtime, and the half dozen or so workers who had been throwing things out the windows of the house and into the dumpster down below, were on break. They were all youngish, maybe around 20, and each one had varying degrees of confidence written into their faces.
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.
Michael:
Because I love your writing, I’ve a tendency to deny myself the pleasure of reading your work for several days so that I can enjoy several pieces in one sitting. The sheer volume of wit, humor, biting sarcasm, self-deprecating hilarity and, yes, heart-breaking pathos you commit to these pages is well worth the wait. You have the rare ability to see the world as it is and/or as it should be that many authors will never possess. Your words create finely detailed photographs that perfectly capture the world you live in and allow me to, briefly, inhabit that world.
I wish you great success and I am proud to know you as a friend.
Jon:
You are without a shadow of a doubt, too kind, and excellent sir, I thank you for that great kindness!