Yonge Street is the hungriest street in the world. Hot-dog carts line up along the curb like taxis. I stop in front of one stand boasting BEST SAUSAGES IN TOWN. Its neighbour proclaims: BEST SAUSAGES IN THE CITY. Clearly one is lying. Either would be gastrointestinal suicide. I halt instead at a newspaper kiosk and buy a bar of happiness and a can of rotten teeth.
I’m still not sure where Cabbagetown begins and ends, so I check my map, stop a passerby, and ask, “Excuse me, is this the best way to Cabbagetown?” I trace my proposed route on the map.
“Yeah, that’s right,” the man says as I lean into his bad breath.
“Okay, thanks,” I mumble as the guy ambles away. In my experience there’s a fifty percent chance people will answer yes or no to any given question, regardless of what the truth actually is. You used to be able to ask directions from gas station attendants. But now that none of them are actually from Toronto, one might as well ask the pump.
I stroll into a restaurant to get detailed directions. It could be a diner off the highway. Small Formica tables. Yellow flycatchers. Everyone in baseball caps. There isn’t a nonsmoking section. A bus driver, teasing the waitress about her new hairdo, is getting the usual. If I buy something, maybe they’ll help me. I glance at the menu, which dangles over a long hot plate. Eggs and hamburgers are being fried together.
“What’ll it be?” the cook asks. A greasy Band-Aid hangs from one finger.
“Thanks, I’m just looking.” Even the carrot cake seems greasy. Now that I’m a working model, I guess I should listen to the boys and watch what I eat. “Could I just get some toast, brown, no butter, and a glass of water?”
He hands me a plate of cremated bread and a paper cup of warm, brown-smelling stuff from an open jug. I think I see plankton. I throw them both out and head outside, directionless.
On Carlton Street I meet more white trash in track suits and ill-fitting tattoos. The obese zip around in mechanized chariots. Construction workers operate heavy machinery in their underwear as I glide by a pawnshop. In the front window little black men with thick red lips and cheap red vests clutch lanterns and pool cues. Nigger art.
Eventually I reach Cabbagetown. The streets are lined with apartment buildings featuring pastel aluminum balconies. The better-looking ones have graffiti spray-painted on their lower walls. The worst are being decorated as I stride by. It seems to me that most of Cabbagetown’s inhabitants must only be able to afford cabbage. One half-decent building has a BACHELOR FOR RENT sign in an upper-floor window. There’s a basketball court nearby and a small restaurant downstairs. On the lawn by the main door a sign announces: IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW. Except somebody has changed HOME to DEAD. I’m not sure what that means, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.
A grey man is doing tai chi in the parking lot. I recognize a few of the forms: White Crane Spreads Its Wings, Push the Boat with the Current, Cloud Hands, Yellow Bee Returns to Nest. I took a couple of tai chi classes by mistake in college. By mistake because I confused tai chi with tae kwon do. When I didn’t hit anybody by the third class, I dropped out and took karate until somebody chopped me. The man teaching our tai chi class always talked of being effortless and yielding, quoted the Tao Te Ching, taught us the proper way to embrace tigers and repulse monkeys, but he was only a master’s student, no older than I was, had pimples, and was failing Introduction to Neurobiology and Behaviour. So what could he know of yellow bees and white cranes? In the class all our movements were rusty, jerky, as if we were breakdancing, popping and locking, doing the Robot. The man in the parking lot is a crane, actually possesses cloud hands. I don’t want to interrupt him, but it’s getting dark and I need a home.
“Sorry to disturb you, but do you live in this building?”
He doesn’t answer. Golden Cock Stands on One Leg.
“Maybe you could tell me what this building’s really like.”
I watch him go through the forms: Wind Rolls the Lotus Leaves, Swallow Skims the Water. Maybe he doesn’t speak English. Maybe he’s one of those monks who’s achieved the Tao and is no longer ruled by his senses. Maybe he’s trying to answer my question another way. I look for hints, a hidden message disguised in the movements—Roaches Scuttle Along the Floors perhaps, or Faucets Drip Through the Night—but he’s inscrutable.
I can’t wait forever. I need a place to live, and this one looks as good as any I’ve seen. There are no police cars outside the building, no laundry strung from the balconies. The address is 555 Munchak Drive. In tai chi, five is a magic number. Five Repulse Monkeys. Five Cloud Hands. To me the magic number is $650 a month. That’s my budget. It’s not much, but I’ll be lucky even to afford that. Bottom line: I’m desperate. As the Tao Te Ching says, “What is firmly established cannot be uprooted. What is firmly grasped cannot slip away.”
The monk’s now into Snake Creeps Down. He’s a personification of the form, a philosopher in motion-yielding, supple, balanced, rooted. Soft, not hard. Always moving. According to the Taoists, stagnation is the cause of disease. Nature moves unceasingly. Movement prevents stagnation. The healthy always go with the flow. So I will, too. If a Chinese monk watching a fight between a bird and a snake led to the development of tai chi, in which symbolism is religion, who knows what my watching this monk performing could lead to? I move toward the door. Every step is slow, effortless, yielding. The symbolism isn’t lost on me. I’m conscious of the delicate balance. Life is like pulling silk from a cocoon. Pull slowly and steadily, the strand unravels nicely. Pull too slow or too fast, it breaks.
FIVE
Humans are trusting creatures by nature. We throw car keys to guys dressed in red, hire children to look after ours, allow strangers near our throats with blades. Crispen has one hand on the razor, the other on my chin. I’m not sure if he’s holding himself steady or preventing me from inching away. I wince every time he rasps the blade past my jugular. His touch is firm, his strokes bold. I wonder how long it would take an opened artery to pump me dry.
“Relax! Stop jumping around or I’ll slice you. See, you gotta use long, straight strokes—even pressure. When you were doing it, it looked like you were chopping at your face with an ice pick, going over the same place fifty times and shit. Where’d you learn how to shave?”
“I didn’t.” I try to talk without moving my jaw. A ventriloquist.
“Didn’t your dad ever teach you?”
“He left us when I started growing peach fuzz.”
“That’s hard. What about your mother?”
“She tried to teach me, but she had no clue. We spent hours in the bathroom trying to figure out how to work the electric razor. Eventually we gave up and used her depilatory cream. I went to school for three days with a rash on my upper lip.”
Crispen shakes with laughter but doesn’t stop shaving. Closing my eyes doesn’t make it any better. “There. All done.” He pats me dry. My face is so smooth it’s sticky. Crispen strolls out of the bathroom.
“Hey, where are you going?” I call after him. “Aren’t you going to fix my bikini line?”
“We’re going to the gym. Coming?”
It’s more of a statement than a question. Personally I can think of better things to do with a day off. Reluctantly I toss shorts, socks, and a T-shirt into a plastic shopping bag and follow the boys out the door.
We all fold