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Cropduster 02
======================================================
CROPDUSTER -- Issue 2
Copyright 1993 by Steven Meece and Chris Woodill
======================================================
This is the ASCII version of the zine. It contains everything you would
receive in the real zine except for pictures and the feel of authenticity. If
you would like to receive the paper edition, send $1.10 for the United States
or 86 cents for Canada to:
Cropduster
79 O'Hara Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M6K 2R3
All other enquiries should be directed to that office as well. The editors are
also available by international e-mail at:
ad522@freenet.carleton.ca (Steven Meece)
cwoodill@epas.utoronto.ca (Chris Woodill)
Naturally permission is granted to distribute Cropduster in any way you would
like, but please leave it as it is so that others can see our mistakes as
well. If you have a problem, don't take it out on a text file: Tell us.
==================
First Issue Update
Steven Meece
==================
Cropduster was first published at the end of the summer of 1992 by the Crop
Dusters, Steven Meece and Chris Woodill. The premiere issue was a review of
three teenage girlie magazines - YM, Seventeen, and Sassy. The zine was a
standard sheet size folded lengthwise to make it tall. It was six inside white
pages plus an outside cover printed on heavier purple paper. The cover star
was a mirrored picture of Alyssa Milano, who is the female teenage figure in
the television show WhoUs the Boss?. A good question. It consisted of
twenty-five quarter pages of text (two quarter pages on each side). There were
some spelling errors, a few times where we missed titles to underline, the
outside margins were too wide (the text ran right into the gutter) and my
handwritten notes did not reproduce too well. The stapling was done by hand
and therefore varied in quality.
Unfortunately in one round of mailings my mom put the wrong postage on it, and
without a return address they were shredded or destroyed or given away to
Canada Post people. We apologise to those who never received their issue. As
was mentioned, there are still a few leftovers, so write if it is important to
you.
The production run was fifty copies, with the first ten signed by the authors.
As of this date, seven copies are in excess. Distribution was limited to friends
and acquaintances of the authors, most of whom were centred around the hamlet
of Mississauga. However some traveled as far as New Brunswick, Brampton, and
Edmonton, as well as Ohio, Washington state and Boston in the United States.
Residents of the ninth floor of Glengarry House at Carleton University in Ottawa
also received issues. In addition, an issue was sent to Factsheet Five in San
Francisco, USA, for a review that never appeared.
We take back what we said about Mary Ann at Sassy: It turns out that she is
from Lexington and went to UK for a time.
For those further interested in the subject matter of the first issue, we
recommend the zine Spit, which is a few cuts better than Cropduster. It has
the aspect of reality that ours does not because it is written by someone who
is going through the things that we can only condescend about. Write to:
Spit c/o Sharon Chow
8867 Blitsen Road
North Canton, Ohio
44720 - USA
Issues are $2 American; if you are hassled for American currency she will
accept something else of worth or curiosity or maybe a personal letter if you
can compose one. DonUt send stamps.
================================
Brush with Greatness
Margie McIngall and Steven Meece
================================
It turns out that representatives from Sassy have their own E-mail address via
the Internet. I sent them a short message about the Cropduster, and the next
day they sent me this...
Date: Fri Jul 30 18:33:34 1993
From: sassy@mindvox.phantom.com (Sassy Magazine)
Subject: Re: Sassies
To: ad522@freenet.carleton.ca
"our kind"?
feh.
seventeen and most certainly YM are not "our kind." they just happen to be
magazines for teenagers. maybe utne reader plus ben is dead plus ms. plus
mirabella. maybe.
thanks for writing.
(yes, it's us.)
--margie
I sent a more comprehensive reply, but received nothing in return. Guess the
Sassies don't want to corroborate their claims... truth in advertising.
=============================
Liner Notes for Cropduster II
Steven Meece
=============================
The prospects for Cropduster Issue 2 are a little less aggrandized. The main
reason for this is that our opportunity for free printing has dried up. As
well, ideas for what to write about were also scarce. The state of the
Cropduster is very much like the state of the Crop Dusters -- we do not know
what to do, and even if we did, we couldn't afford it.
But we will persevere anyhow, using whatever embarrassing resources possible.
Unable to be economically prosperous in an Anthony Robbins bull by the horns
fashion, we will scrape together various bits from various sources, a little
government assistance, a little parental assistance, and do what is necessary
to stay alive for the next six months, as well as squeeze out another edition.
This must be the meaning of life.
The price remains free as always and we are still largely relying on the
mailing list of our ex-girlfriends and former friends. Many of the people on
the list hate me by this time. You shouldn't try to read anything into this,
and I'm not trying to give you a secret message or anything. If you would
like to receive more than just one copy, or would like to receive no copies,
dare to write the editorial office address given at the end of this article.
Special thanks to Julia who accepted a large batch and distributed them to
various shemps of her peer group in and around Boston.
The inspiration for this issue came from the "Three Bitches" section of the
first issue. This was a section in which we pared each magazine down to one
basic metaphor, and then paired each magazine up with a different item that
also expressed that same metaphor or signal. Therefore Sassy was matched with
Pepsi, YM with creme soda, and Seventeen with 7up. The title "Three Bitches"
had its origins with a matchup of three members of our old peer group to the
respective magazines. Coincidentally, these three people were also called "the
three bitches" by another member of that old peer group. We had our title.
This section was later removed after we were contacted by legal representatives
of certain offended parties.
Anyway, we looked further at this section, and realised that it was possible
that a magazine might have a counterpart in a neighbourhood. We found
similarities in character between Sassy and East Cooksville, Seventeen and
Lorne Park, and YM and Meadowvale. So if it is reasonable to create a simile
between neighbourhoods and magazines, there must be some core thing, neither
magazine nor neighbourhood, found in both that is the basis for this likeness.
The idea for this is a product of my obsession with time and cultural
geography. It has long been an obsession that I can hardly explain, but much
of it is nostalgia for something that can't exist anymore and possibly never
did. What seems so foreign to our eyes this year was natural and hardly
noticeable to us when we participated in it yesterday. What makes this change?
Having history pass through your hands is like watching a tree petrify: Every
day, and in a very gradual motion, the animal cells are replaced by minerals,
but it is impossible to say just when it ceases to be wood and becomes stone.
This is especially affecting for me at this time because I am currently
undergoing a lot of change with family structure and the difference between
living places and homes. An old friend from highschool is beginning to take
the formative steps towards marriage, and the main reason she has decided to
live with him is because it would give her a sense of family and a sense of
home, something she hasn't felt since infancy and perhaps not even then. It
made me do a semi-large amount of thinking about time, aging, neighbourhoods,
lifestyles, and how we all belong to many different families on different
planes at the same time. And how everything changes as it stays the same.
It seemed right for the next Cropduster, so I asked cw if he wouldn't mind
writing a few bits about the places he's lived, what he saw there, what made
it different and the aspects which it fulfilled or failed, by his own biased
viewpoint. He agreed and we set out to write this.
It would seem that this entire expedition is very narcissistic, because it is
taken up with rantings about what we were, what we saw and did, and so on. But
neither of us claim to be a young Goethe, so we don't say that these
neighbourhoods were unique and inspiral and we were budding geniuses. You are
the important person, and one of the reasons we did this was to utilize our
need to express our Personal Bullshit, something that everyone needs but not
everyone does.
The history of a neighbourhood is the history of its residents, and the
residents we know best and the most honestly are ourselves. We know that what
we did wasn't important but for the fact that someone did it. It could have
been anyone. It turned out to be me, but that isn't the issue. That could have
been you just as easily. We're writing about the things that we did and saw,
but it should be triggering your brain in your head to think about what you
went through and are going through, just like the certain Elton John ditty
that seems a perfect summation of your experience with your Significant Other.
We remain:
Crop Dusters
79 O'Hara Avenue
Toronto Ontario
M6K 2R3
================================
On the Subject of Neighbourhoods
Chris Woodill
================================
I have been given the task about writing about my neighbourhoods, both the
ones that I live in now, and the ones that I have visited when I was younger.
I say visited because until recently, if at all, I felt little connection to a
neighbourhood at all, for I always felt like a visitor. It is one to write a
confession about one's old house, about how good things used to be, about how
it was our house, but for me, it was never my house. Nor was it my street, my
city, or my world. For many years I hated my neighbourhood, the people in it,
the culture that engulfed it. I felt persecuted by my house.
In this issue of Cropduster, we are discussing neighbourhoods, which is
basically an excuse, I suppose, to rant about our childhoods, and our friends
(if we had any of either), and to say our philosophy concerning the poor and
the rich, and so on. So just like the last issue was more than just a mere
analysis of teen magazines (Cropduster issue #1), this will hopefully be more
than a document on the merits of urban planning techniques and municipal
politics.
To anyone who has been to my neighbourhoods:
I apologize for any inconsistencies that you may perceive to be evident, but
neighbourhoods are not based on buildings and other monstrous creations but by
subject experiences, and my idea of neighbourhood can only reflect the
inherent defective nature of our memories.
============
Rexdale
Steven Meece
============
My parents, after they were married, went through a few apartments early on,
first on Kingston Road in the East end of Toronto, and then at Jane and
Wilson, in the dreaded "Jane and Finch" neighbourhood in the Northwest end.
With steady work came more cash, and the opportunity to move into a townhouse
on Auburndale Court, in the general area of Islington Avenue and Albion Road,
in the north part of the Borough of Etobicoke called Rexdale. This was again
in the northwest area of Metropolitan Toronto. I was born there in the summer
of 1973 and everything came from that.
The townhouse was part of a strip in a low middle class neighbourhood, which
back then was still white-skinned but not necessarily Angles and Saxons. It
was a general mishmash of old people, blue collar types, singles and
divorcees. The strip of Auburndale Court was two long unbroken blocks of
attached two-floor townhouses, perhaps 20 per structure. We had one in the
middle, with a stone tile patio outside and tall wooden dividers. Just behind
our townhouse was a deep gorge with a pitiful creek trickling amongst the
abandoned shopping carts, tyres, dead shrubbery and other miscellaneous
refuse. There was always a good deal of foam bubbling around down there and
one time my sister and her best friend Adrienne Patrick made picket signs
expressing their outrage and paraded along Islington for about a half hour.
Across the road and down the way was the famous Rexdale Mall, a real beast
built around 1962 and dying very slowly. What was once a great community hub,
an "experience" had become a dingy pit as early as the mid 1970s. It was very
decrepit and matched the neighbourhood, both experiencing that feeling of slow
decay, like crumbling shale. It had been bypassed by most of the chain stores
that populate most malls, so there wasn't much to dilute the local flavour.
My mother worked there, in Towers, for a good amount of time. Towers is a
thrift-type department store much like Zellers or KMart in the USA, perhaps a
cut or two below KMart. I have memories of her in a yellow and brown uniform,
with her long stringy blonde hair, going off to work in the early evenings. I
remember stumbling after her down the hallway, always sad to have her leave.
There isn't much to say about the neighbourhood of Rexdale, because I didn't
goto school and didn't fraternise with anyone other than the friends that my
sister brought home. I was incredibly smitten by Adrienne, who appeared to my
eyes as a full grown voluptuous older woman, although she was only nine years
old at the time. I really liked to look at her feet: they really excited me.
(I've since outgrown the foot fetish.) Our across-the-complex neighbour's
father got a role in a series of TV commercials; it was for Neo Citran cold
medicine and he played a sick guy in bed with the sniffles and a thermometre
in his mouth. The commercials played for years and we always screamed when we
saw them.
My playmate was a girl about my age named Catharina, whom I called Cats. We
would play for hours up and down the hills and in the ravine, riding our
matching plastic tractors. Both of our parents were friends, and they sailed
together frequently. (My mom and dad came "this close" to qualifying for the
1976 Olympics. They were good.) Everyone in each family mixed in, and Cats was
surely my first love. But sailing turned out to be her dad's downfall as
during one expedition a sudden gust of wind caused the mainsail to swing about
and hit him in the head, crushing the whole half of his skull. Soon after
that, Cats and Frannie-ups (the widow, Francine) moved away, to Smith's Falls.
This is more of a family history than it is a neighbourhood history; the two
are always intertwined of course, but in this case there is a scarcity of the
latter. This is to be expected, because I was hardly more than an infant at
the time (a toddler at best) and I was too busy crapping in my diapers and
eating mushy peas to notice the atmosphere beyond my needs and desires. Babies
and near-babies are always very egocentric. Even if I could comprehend the
world around me, I probably wouldn't have cared. My memories of that time are
pictures, events, sounds, and whatnot, all distinct from each other. Kiddies
don't have the cranial capacity to string them together and recognise the
culture they were witnessing.
The Rexdale thing didn't last too long after that, as the parents were
divorced in the winter. My dad wanted to go back to the USA and live like a
poet, my mom preferred a more sedentary domestic life in the burbs. We stayed
with mom; my sister was seven and I was three and a half. My mom pulled my
sister out of grade two, and we moved to an apartment even deeper into the
west end, so that she could live near to her sister.
=============
Orillia
Chris Woodill
=============
There was once a mythic land, with quiet streets, and a community which
allowed one to cycle through the streets and play road hockey in the school
yards, a community where one was not bothered by racial intolerance (mainly
because there were no other races to tolerate besides the white British
settlers who lived there), a community that sleeps in peaceful slumber, glad
that they are not like that crime ridden metropolis one hundred and fifty
kilometres south on the 400. This is where I grew up, (although not born), in
two separate occasions. Although the two periods that I lived in this little
town were separated by a year in the great pimple of Barrie (I'll get to that
later), the memories and the nature of Orillia are largely unruptured, leaving
a memory of constant naivete.
The first thing about Orillia that you should understand is that nothing
changes there, including every building, every person, and every attitude.
The culture is constant and absolutely stable, and they have been pumping out
pristine girls and athletic boys from ODCVI (Orillia District Collegiate &
Vocational Institute) or Park Street Collegiate or Twin Lakes Collegiate for
decades, if not centuries. It is an ideal community in all respects, a
community that any North Yorker would worship if was just a few kilometres
closer to the big city. It is like one of those families houses which we all
knew of where everything went right, where the Mom kissed Dad as he went off
to work, and the kids went to the school down the street, and they all went to
Church on Sunday not to hear the sermon but to go to fellowship hour
afterwards. That was Orillia, an entire community based on the principles of
the United Church: eat lots, talk lots, know nothing. Everything was
absolutely stifling comfortable for people like me, just like the feeling we
all get when we walk into one of these perfect homes and end up walking on the
carpet or sitting on the good furniture or making a rude remark (as supposed
to "Oh, crumbs!"). That was how it was for us, living in the poorest end of
town, on a budget of nothing except mock chicken loaf, Salvation Army clothes,
and a house labeled the "chicken coop" because it was so small.
I could talk about our house, for there are many illustrations of its
smallness (my sister slept in the bathtub when guests came overnight), or I
could talk about my school experiences (about as abysmal as anyone else's, I
suppose), but it will just turn into melodramatic mutterings used to replace
boring realities. Instead, I will try to talk about the things I remember
favourably, and in this way I will show you what I mean by a community based
on innocence.
If anyone is familiar with Orillia's geography, one knows that it is
centralized around the beach. It is not a beach like any other beach, not just
a swimming hole. It is a beach like one you could see in a children's story
book, one perhaps illustrated with water colours. The beach environment had
everything that you could think of to fit in a white man's story: a baseball
diamond for the amateur Orillia baseball team, an amphitheatre to hear local
folk artists and even more local politicians (Do you know what an alderman is?
We used to see ours constantly) It had a cafeteria on the top of a little
hill, where one could get hot dogs and Pepsi (no endorsement intended) and
every year there was a marathon for all the forty year olds to run through
the city while we all worshiped our Orillia men. One lives in Orillia for long
enough and one realizes why feminism is doomed.
One of the nice things was when I got a ten speed bike for the first time. It
allowed me to cycle all over the city, and it allowed me to bike to school,
which was a big deal in grade four. I got in an accident once: I was rear-ended
and sent to the hospital with scraped knees and a totaled bike. What was good
about it was that I got a new bike and I got my name in the paper.
The Orillia Packet is part of the phenomena known as community news. Most
small cities have a community news paper, which people read as a substitute
for the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail. In the Orillia Packet are the
things that one would expect to find: a lot of photo-opportunities for various
small-time politicians, a lot of stories about schools, and a lot of bits on
various community sports teams. On average, at least one member of our family
would get our picture in the paper every year, usually for just being at the
right place at the right time. Whether it was a picture at the library's
annual flower/produce market, or a picture of my sister singing at the Kiwanis
singing competition, there was always an excuse to put smiling faces in the
paper. In fact the Orillia Packet has been an invaluable asset because of
this: in trying to figure out what has changed since I was living there I had
only to look through this years issues of the Packet to see familiar faces:
various pictures of kids I went to school with in grades 4 & 5, who are now in
their last year of high school. What is freaky about it is that they look
exactly the same, and you can tell by what they are doing that their
personalities have not changed drastically since I knew them when we were eight
years old. The Packet is the chronicle of Orillia's modern history, and one
finds that it is largely repetitive.
In the winter, the whole city skates. Skating parties, skating field trips,
skating lessons, all because of a little known Canadian olympian who came from
Orillia named Brian Orser (almost as famous as Stephen Leacock). What I
remember about skating was that it was not just centralized around the game of
hockey, like it is in most cities. You did not go skating because you wanted
to play hockey, and most people did not really care about it except for the
players and their overzealous parents. We would skate as a way to communicate,
like a school dance. I remember we would have field trips to the Orillia
Community Centre (incidentally, this is where the first Mariposa Folk Festival
was held) to skate, and it was like a school dance, a type to let loose and
metaphorically fornicate in a safe environment, while the teachers chaperoned.
I remember one time I forgot my skates and I was so ashamed that I hid in
the bathrooms for two hours while the rest skated. I did not want to appear
disloyal, or unsocial, or something like that.
School had a lot of innocence to it as well. I remember the vice-principal or
the Principal would stand on the top of the steps as people would file in
after recess or what-have-you, and he would always wink or wave or say Hi to
people he recognized. The particular vice-principal I am thinking of was
totally sensitive, no hard nosed discipline was coming out of this guy. I
broke into tears once in front of him, after lying to him. I had gotten into a
fight with a friend Stephen Cox, and so we were both reported to the
principal. I was called out of class and accused of my crime, and I denied
that there was ever a fight. After about ten minutes of, "Well, he said you and
he fought," I broke out in tears and pleaded for mercy. I never felt more
humiliated in my life. I cried a lot back then, up until about grade seven.
After that I did not cry at all.
The other thing I can remember about school in Orillia were assemblies. Every
school has them, but we seemed have them every other week. There was always an
excuse to go to these things, "Oh, it's the Christmas assembly," or "Oh, it's
the Easter assembly," and so on, but in fact each classroom was assigned a
month to do their assembly, and the teachers just made up an excuse to put one
on. I was an actor at that point, because I was the only male who could sing.
This was also small-town, singing was a much bigger deal, and everyone did it.
However, the males were always ashamed of their talents, and the females were
always prima donnas. It was this type of behaviour that caused me to generally
fit in with females more than males. But back to the assemblies: we had to do
the Christmas assembly one year and I got to be the narrator, so I became the
Linus who came on stage and read the refried version of Luke.
The other fundamental aspect about Orillia was church. Everyone went, whether
they were Christian or just bored, whether they cared or not. Church was like
it was about a hundred years ago, something you did to meet people and hear a
few ethical principles. I went to St. Paul's United, and both my sister and I
were in the choir. The people in my class also went to my church, so I saw my
classmates not only in school but in rehearsals, Sunday school class and so on.
I am glad I was only in grade 4-5, because if I had been in grade 8-9, I would
have been quite destroyed by this, for I would have fallen in love with 90% of
the people in my class and actually would have thought there was a chance with
at least half that number. But I guess that is also the charm of Orillia: it
was a place where I generally made less of a fool of myself
Anyway, this is getting far too long, and I could talk about this town for
days, but you get the picture. It was a town surrounded by innocence and myths
of perfect families. And a lot of birthday parties, if you could afford it.
We never got one that was acceptable to the social norms, although Mom tried
hard to convince us that she was doing her best. And the kids even had white
names: Sarah Papple, Sarah Carol, Andrew Bell, Catherine Jeffries, Amy Barnes,
and so on. I remember there was black kid in our class, and he got into a lot
of fights. And this is a town that has no gender crisis, for they ostracize
anyone who doesn't conform to the Orillia Packet mythology of living.
=============
Barrie
Chris Woodill
=============
The rationalization for moving to Barrie was that it was closer to work: in
the first time, it was closer to Georgian College where my father taught, and
in the second, it was closer to my Mother's therapy clinic. We were shipped
from the small town of Orillia to the medium sized town of Barrie. It was not
a pleasant time, and the neighborhood reflected that change in mood.
While the time in Orillia can be generalized as overly sugary bliss, Barrie
was like withdrawal. It was a time when I was labeled, shamed, classified and
generally rejected by most facets of my social neighbourhood. The
neighborhood that Barrie consists of is absolutely contemptible because it is
like a teenager who has just learned to drive, full of pompousness and power.
It was a society based on consumerism, not community, a city based on
manufacturing for the big city of Toronto. Barrie's dream is to become to be
able to be as great as Toronto, which means that it supports a lot of toxic
corporations like Radio Shack (anyone purchased a Tandy Product lately?) and
Molson. The people are small minded and yet ruthless, unlike Orillians who are
just small minded. It was like the difference between a regular teacher and a
gym teacher: most teachers are small minded, but a gym teacher is small minded
and also has the power to make you run laps. That is what Barrie is like:
running laps, competing, in an endless attempt to prove itself. I suppose this
is an overt generation, and "Of course, there are nice people in Barrie", but
there were about forty years old and I did not have lot of companionship with
forty year olds at the time.
There are actually two neighbourhoods that I experienced, the one in which I
got divorced in, and the one in which I went through puberty. Neither was an
enjoyable experience.
The house in which I was divorced was on Blake St. which is on the outskirts
of town. It was a large but terribly ugly shack of a house. I was five years
old, and my parents fought constantly, and we almost burned the house down
once when Dad was trying to weld something together and he lit the insulation.
I had to take the bus to school, and I remember little of it except that it
was very isolated. There was a Bowlarama down the road, and I would hang out
there if I could get out, and there was a street off the main highway where we
would roller skate with those baby-style skates with the thick wheels and
adjustable sizes. There was also a field filled with apples, and we had
rhubarb in the back of our house. We had a Newfoundland Dog named buddy, who
also died that year. I went to Shanty Bay School, and I remember shitting my
pants and getting stuck in the mud, and crying a lot. I was not a happy kid,
and my mother used to volunteer to do lunch room supervision. When I got stuck
in the mud, (It was muddy because they were building a gymnasium), my sister
was walking with my mom in the schoolyard, and so I got rescued by little
sister. I moved back to Orillia a year later, and returned to Barrie in 1985,
ie. grade six.
It's difficult to say a lot about this first visit to Barrie, because it was
1979 and I was barely conscious at the time. I was five, and trying to get
through the ordeal of divorce, most of which I do not remember all that well.
Because of my mother's poverty, we took on "borders" (That's what they were
officially called) to help pay the mortgage. I can remember only a few of
them: there was this guy named Mike who just moped around, and there was Ann
Marie and her boyfriend who had a drum set. And there was Charlie, who ended
up moving to Mississauga and so showed up intermittently throughout a ten year
period. He was OK, although he had major woman problems. He ended up going all
the way to Russia in order to find someone to marry him, and she already had a
sun and thought suburbia was pretty stupid. I do not know how they are doing
now, whether his wife has dumped him and his capitalist ways and gone back to
the motherland.
After moving back to Orillia for four or five years, I returned to Barrie to
live in a slightly more stable household, at 66 Sophia St. This would be about
1984, and I went into grade six. I never liked the place, and I did not have a
happy home life either. My mother was now an active lesbian, and her partner
was an authoritarian petty-minded bitch who I could never get along with and
could never trust. Come to think about it, I could never trust any of my
mother's lovers. That was part of the neighbourhood I suppose.
It was also a time of realizing that I was poor, and lonely, and creative. The
difference between the children in Orillia (and, I guess, the adults that
taught them) is that Orillia people would never go out and say that you were
poor because that would be impolite and unchristian. In Barrie, there was
little care about being polite, in fact it was more popular to be rude. Of
course, again we can assume that in my case, it was the difference between
being in grade 4 and being in grade 7, but I think that the culture was also
different, although perhaps not as drastically as I would have you believe.
The few things that I really enjoyed about Barrie were the things that I had
started enjoying in Orillia, namely the beach, the library and video games.
Going to the mall in those days was a big deal, not only because we were only
ten but because it was much more of an ordeal than it is in the suburbs or in
Toronto. There are no buses, and even if there were, we could not really
afford them. You did not wait for a that came only every hour, you walked half
the afternoon to the Bayfield Mall. This mall was home to an arcade (I cannot
for the life of me remember the name of it), but I would walk there and stay
in that arcade until sundown. I was like that: I would go somewhere and stay
there for hours just trying to escape into nothingness (Other places were the
library, the donut shop, Woolworth's, and record stores). At this period of
time arcades were just appearing in Semi-Northern Ontario, although we had
individual games popping up for a number of years. But this arcade was the
peak of video game development, a combination of low level lights, EGA
graphics, and tokens. The rest of the mall was fairly dingy, like Westdale
(see Mississauga), but that arcade was worth the walk. Another activity that I
brought over from the Orillia days was the YMCA, where one could swim for
hours for nothing if you had a membership card. We would get kid membership
cards for about $50, and then we could pick as many parks and rec activities
as we wanted. Just as it was in Orillia, I would pick out all the girlie
things like pottery and cooking, and end up cooking with a bunch of 10 year
old girls.
One of the big things that categorized people was style, and unlike the city
where there are many styles to choose from, in the hamlet of Barrie they could
only think of two: the prep and the metal head. I remember this guy in our
class named John Enns, and he was the stupid kid, but a gifted artist. He
would listen to the latest metal groups from Sam the Record Man, things like
Twisted Sister and Ratt and WASP. He would proclaim the great strengths of
head banging, and one time he banged his head repeatedly into a desk to prove
that he was telling the truth. The other people were Preps, those who listened
to Wham and Duran Duran, whose wore shirts with the collars up (I never
understood that one at all), and who were generally rich and jerky. I
certainly didn't fit into either one, for I could not afford prep clothes and
did not particularly like preppy music, although my first record that I really
owned by my own money was Wham's "Make it Big!" (Remember, "Wake me up before
you Go GO!!"?) so I tried to pass as something like a prep, only because it
was easier than banging my head, and who paid attention to those guys anyway?
I remember there was this one kid name Jamie Urquart, and he could have been a
great kid if he had not been eaten by these other kids (Mike and Mike, and
this guy named Chris something, who I hated more than anybody: they were the
tyrants who would run up to you and pull you onto school dance floors), but he
ended eating up the perks of being a prep. He was one of the few who had a
girlfriend (one Julie something, whose mother worked as a secretary for my
mother's therapy clinic), and who got nice clothes. I got Julie's binder when
she was throwing it away, and in the inside it said, "I love Jamie Urquart",
and I got angry at that.
One of the important part of my experience of the neighbourhood was my paper
route. Now, it is not usual for a boy of 11 or 12 to have a paper route, in
fact in is almost comically typical. But in my case, it was not because I
wanted to buy nice things, but because I wanted to survive. The first time I
ever had a paper route was when I was seven, because my mother could not
afford to give me an allowance. We were experienced paper routers when we got
to Barrie, and we delivered the Barrie banner (by we I mean my sister and I).
We would walk up Peel St. then do Wellington as well as we passed it by. It
was a free paper, ie. everyone got one, so the pressure was not as bad as one
would imagine because we did not have to collect in the same that a Star
carrier would. But it meant that we would have to deliver a lot more papers,
to make for the fact that we were not being paid by our "neighbours". I
remember that it took us six months to save one hundred and fifty dollars. And
that was after scrimping and saving. There was a girl in my class that was on
my paper route, and we would always smile at each other when I knocked on her
door and gave her the community news. She was a semi-cute girl, but I remember
as extremely tall. I guess most females were in grade 7.
The neighbourhood in which I lived was one where all the other school kids
lived, unlike later schools where people came from all over the city, or in
university where people come from all over the world. There was something very
nice in that provincialism, in the fact that the kid who sat next to you in
class was also on your paper route or lived next door. A girl in my class
named Simone lived two doors down from me, and her family was Jehovah Witness.
Nobody paid attention to that much, except that they found it amusing that
they would not stand for Oh Canada or the Lord's Prayer. And we had bus
patrols, which I was one, which allowed you to go to the bus patrol dances
(They allowed grade 6's there!! - I never went to one but heard wild things
about them) and a one day trip to Canada's Wonderland.
My house was bigger, which meant that I finally had a place that was
semi-private. I lived in the basement, and had a computer (a Coleco ADAM). I
did not come out a whole lot, (which you might say, is why I had no friends,
and was a loser, and so on), just being content to stay in the depths of my
house. My Mom, full of the latest therapeutic techniques would kick me out,
telling me to "Stay out for at least an hour", so I would go to the library a
lot to waste time until I could come back home and waste more time.
Obviously, I was not happy here, nor was Barrie an ideal neighbourhood for
someone like me, or anybody I suppose. But people acted like it was the
greatest city north of Toronto, and people praised the modern conveniences of
a city of 50,000. It was much like the advertisements of the 50's or 60's
where people reach nirvana (no, not the pop group) over a washer dryer or a
Commodore 64 and claim that they are now in a period of change, even though
they have not freed themselves of the things that keep them stable.
=============
Mississauga
Chris Woodill
=============
I have written many pages on the culture of Mississauga, and my fellow
classmates, and my relationships with them. But most of these are absolute
drivel, filled with overzealous melodrama. But that is what suburbia is about:
creating fictions which don't exist. I was remarking about this to Robin the
other day (one of my girlfriends best friends), as we were going to the
drive-in. I was talking about North York, as we were passing through an upper
class neighbourhood, but I could say the same about Mississauga. The suburbs
are about people who want more luxuries than they can afford, a neighbourhood
based on credit if you will. These people live in the neighbourhood because
the housing is cheap enough that they can now afford to buy into a myth: a
myth consisting of a "nice" neighbourhood, a place to raise the kids, ethnic
diversity (but no racial riots), and flowerbeds, private schools and old
churches. Yet, they want to retain the closeness to the downtown core: that is
why they don't want to live in Orillia. So we have the ghettoization of the
Downtown centre, as the suburbs suck up the resources from the centre as the
people who can't afford to leave the downtown are left to starve.
And the fiction of easy living comes a high price, because it has be
constantly updated and protected; many of the houses are either brand new or
renovated, and they have high fences and security systems (We would not want
one of those poor slobs who live in the slums to invade our space). The city
is run with an iron fist, both in terms of its governmental policy and its
culture. The councellors have not changed, and incumbents are always
re-elected. Furthermore, Mississauga is a Police State, where the people who
have any ideas at all get killed. ("I stopped him for speeding and I fired
three warning shots into the back of his head..." - Jimmy Croce) The people
want to keep the criminals off the streets that they will wipe out anyone who
is out past 11:30pm. The suburbs is a fiction whose citizens pay for law and
order, and if that means beating the crap out of a few innocent teenagers, so
be it (At least I'm not black). Mississauga is intensely multicultural, and so
there were many times when we would be shocked into other cultures that did
not fit into our own. However, it is in some ways monolithic in that even
though there are many immigrants from various parts of the world, they have
almost all made it, and usually with the same, "If you work hard, Johnny, then
you will be rewarded" type of ethic. So it may appear on the surface that
there is this great ethnic diversity, but the people who have wealth in the
city of Mississauga are mostly the same after a few years of making it rich as
auto dealers, accountants, or car salesmen.
As for me, on the other hand, I lived in the poorest part of town, in a
trailer park. My mother picked up this great bargain of a place for $25,000, a
trailer with two small rooms, about the same size as the "chicken coop" in
Orillia. In other words, we had left the semi-middle class of Barrie's cheap
housing to dropping back down to the lower class of greater Toronto. This
trailer park was unusual in that it was dumped in between a Petro Canada (a
gas station here, for you Americans reading this), and a neighbourhood street.
It was as if somebody took a slum and dumped it into the downtown core.
Because Cooksville is like the downtown of Mississauga, it is where the
fastest buses travel, where the largest libraries are situated, and where the
best arcades are located. It was in Cooksville I lived, but I went to school
and later moved to the Credit Woodlands (I know, is this not the most suburban
name that anyone could have come up with?), a slightly more upscale
neighbourhood (not rich, just better than where we lived), and so again I was
going to school in a neighbourhood which I could not afford, in a culture
which in which I could rarely compete. Fortunately, I was fairly lucky in that
the people who I would become friends were mostly poor, although we did have a
few rich ones in our bunch. For by that time, I had friends, in fact a whole
system of friends (read about this system in a future issue), and they were
people who I could control and trust (again, more on this in a future issue).
Living in a trailer is not what it sounds like: you cannot move them. It is
not like living in an RV or something of that nature: you can't just take off
in the middle of the night. The only real difference is how they get there in
the first place: instead of being built on site, they are pre-made and then
moved in. That is why they are called Mobile Homes: not because you can move
them around. But the lack of stability is not desirable: we had constant
sewage problems for example. In the winter, the pipe that went from the toilet
to the ground would freeze up, creating an environment where sewage would just
billow up out of the toilet. Worse, you cannot just go to another place in the
house to get away from it: there is no other place to go. Heat worked in a
similar way: the furnace was run on oil of all things, and when it ran out in
the winter you would just freeze for a couple days until the furnace guy would
come and fix it. But what was cool about it was that my mother moved out of
our trailer for about a year and a half, because she had gotten a new partner
(for all you who are not experienced in lesbos language, that is what they
call their lover, wifey, whatever) and they bought another trailer just across
from ours. So my sister and I lived in one, and Marcia and Anita would live in
another. And because my sister was scared of sleeping without mama breathing
in the next room, she would sleep over there was well. It ended up being a
trailer that was mine, a space, although shitty, that I could hang out in. We
would have little get-togethers there, and no one would bother us. When we
wanted to have a sleep over that involved sleeping with girls, we planned to
have in my trailer because no parents were going to disturb us. This was what
was good about it, the fact that it was free space. Sometimes free space is
better than good space.
The people who live in trailer parks are like any other lower class
neighbourhood, although they tend to be more transient. A lot of them were
families, with kids about my sisters age or younger. Most of them were fairly
annoying, not because of anything to do with living in a trailer park, but
just because most kids are annoying at the age of 10. There was a big German
shepherd at one end of the trailer park, who was constantly tied up to its
master's trailer. It was named Harley, which I suppose says something about
the owners.
Also, every once in a while the power would go out for no particular reason.
If we put the microwave and the kettle on at the same time, that kind of
thing. If the power did go out, we would have to go to a fuse box for the
whole trailer park, which had a breaker for each trailer. I was always tempted
to turn them all off just to see what would happen, but I never actually did.
We also did our laundry in a common area, in the back of the building in
which the landlord collected his utility fees. We did not rent the trailers, but
we had to pay for the land that they were sitting on and the utilities.
It was also in that trailer that I was a "virgin united in flesh".
Steve has asked me to write about the Cooksville experience, since I was the
official resident there while he just visited from Credit Woodlands. One of
the ways that I got to know Cooksville people well was by working at the Tim
Horton's across the street from my trailer park. Lloyd and I would work there
from 7am to 3pm, serving up tasty Timbits and delicious donuts to our faithful
customers. At that time we were getting $4.25 an hour, but we also got free
food. We would eat there for breakfast, even if we did not have to work. As
long as somebody new us, it was cool: they did not care if the business fell.
But the people who entered into that place were very ordinary working class
people, mostly contract workers or mechanics. That was about where Cooksville
(and still is) at: a central core of working stiffs. We would serve them
coffee, and they would come and sit and drink they coffee and read the Toronto
Sun. There was this guy named Dale, and he would always ask for a "medium
double double", and he would always ask me or Lloyd to lend him money. I always
refused, being sensible, but Lloyd sometimes gave him a dollar or two. There
was also this couple who would sit at the front and badger all the hosts and
hostesses (that was our official titles), and they would always ask for coffee
with double cream and a sweetener. They justified getting twice as much fat in
their cream by having artificial sugar. The wife was some housewife type, and
the husband, get this, was an Elvis impersonator. These were the people who
populated the Cooksville Tim Horton's. There was also this guy who would come
in at night named Carmen, who did not trust the cleanliness of the store so he
would put napkins on the chair that he was sitting on. He would also demand
that when you were getting his donut that you did not breathe in the direction
of his snack, because he would get malaria or something of that nature. This
guy was the only crazy guy in 'Saug, and he lived in Cooksville.
Cooksville is probably the poorest and most interesting part of Mississauga,
with the least amount of renovated houses or prefabricated subdivisions. I
would walk to the Cooksville arcade (and bowling alley) a lot, where I would
spend afternoons playing video games. I play them long enough to get good at
them,and because there were a lot of kids around I could usually get an
audience of at least 4 or 5 kids who wanted to see how far I could get or
whether I could beat the high score. That was life in Cooksville, getting the
high score. It was for the most part a separate part of living in Mississauga:
there was school/girls and there was home. I did not bring a lot of people
home in the first few years, both because of my paltry living conditions but
also because of my mother's lesbianism. (SURPRISE!!)
Consequently, I spent a lot of time in other people's houses and/or
neighbourhoods. I spent a lot of time around the school, which because a place
for walking, thinking, mythologizing. It was a separate reality than home, it
was like going to boarding school or something of that nature ("The home away
from home"). But I spent a lot of time around Mississauga Valley/Applewood
(again, very suburban names here) because David Lloyd (the third member of
what was named by others as the "Gumby gang"), lived in a high rise apartment
there. It was like Credit Woodlands, semi-middle class, but with a lot of town
houses and apartments. I also spent time in the rich neighbourhoods, in the
houses of the Barnes (she had a pool!) and Farah. I knew Farah was rich when I
saw her basement had black and white checkered tiles. She also had oppressive
parents, which usually comes with new found wealth. There was a constant fight
between adults and children, especially when some of these parents were from
Asian backgrounds and did not want their kids being influenced by their lazy
Canadian boyfriends.
There are many neighbourhood things that I cherish about the 'Saug though,
although most of them revolve around the seduction of females. There are many
parks in the 'Saug, and many of them because mini-mating grounds for budding
teens around the town. The Credit River runs north-south through Mississauga
by what was our high-school neighbourhood (hence the name Credit Woodlands),
and we used to walk through there a lot with prospective females, either in
mass groups or as couples. I frightened Fiona in the Credit by blowing on a
blade of grass (or swinging at her with a baseball bat, according to some),
and that river always has very mystical memories, mainly because the social
system revolved significantly around it. We would walk there, or have picnics
there with friends, or I would go there alone. I would also bike through it on
my way north to Stacey's house.
Springfield school was a similar setting, filled with old memories of grade 9
romances. Schools were just like parks after dark, with playgrounds and
shelter if it rained. Springfield was unique in that was close to our high
school and it had an open playground connected to it. So it was like a school
and a park all rolled in one. We went to that school once after a school
dance, and I decided I was in love with somebody that night in that school.
Many of the actual "love" ideals have come back to haunt me, but the place
still holds emotional value, not because I declared my undivided love there
but because I expended a lot of emotional energy, I was in tears on a number
of occasions at that particular place. So it is not the fact that it was a
terribly romantic or love-making place: it was just a convenient place to
shout at another person as you were trying to convince them to be your
girlfriend.
It was in Mississauga that Steve and I met, and where both of us developed a
neighbourhood culture. Remember how I stated that I never felt at home in
Barrie? In the 'Saug it was different. I bought many of the fictions of the
suburbs, mainly because there were people there who cared and a culture that I
could dominate in my own local way. However, I have lost a lot of the strings
of that, which proves that I was not really there at all, for I do not miss it
like Steve does, and I do not feel whimsical when I visit. It is like any other
city now, like any other burb, say Hamilton or North York or Scarborough. I
still miss people, but excluding the Credit the people I interacted with did
not revolve around the neighbourhood environment. There was no attachment to
Square One, (what else could it be but a shopping centre?), or the local donut
store. There was not one location where we "hung out", and the hang out place
was usually at someone's house and not around the city.
When I moved to the Credit Woodlands in March 1990, I was fortunate enough to
live next to the Westdale Mall. Westdale is a the biggest mall allowed in a
residential area, and it cannot expand. Therefore, thanks to the zoning laws
it is kept at a paltry size, and it has grown ever worse since I first walked
through it. It was always bad: the anchor stores are Miracle Foodmart and
Zellers, and the stores are mostly bargain stores. I worked there for a year,
at a little WHSmith situated beside Zellers. It would be enjoyable when I
could work there on my own, because it would become my store. I would do my
work, straighten the pens, and then sit back as the mall would quiet down. At
about 8 pm the mall quiets down, although it doesn't officially close until
nine. I would then be able to read or do homework or some such thing in order
to amuse myself. The pay was poor, but acceptable for the time. I would get a
fifteen minute break, and I would usually go to the pizza shop and get a slice
for $1.25, which was the cheapest slice you could find anywhere in town.
Just north of us, at Creditview and Burnhamthorpe, was a Mothers. It was just
like any other Mother's, with the patio style table cloths that would cover
the chipboard tables, and the cheap utensils that would bend if you had to
prod at anything harder than a piece of pasta. But this particular Mother's
was unique in that the three major females in our social group, Carlile,
Fiona, and Stacey, all worked there for a time. Furthermore, it was the centre
for the meetings of the Gumby hang, a social net consisting of myself, Steve and
Lloyd (he died at a later date). The reason we would partake of refreshments
there was because they had bottomless coffee, and so we could sit for hours
just chatting and drinking coffee. Thanks to corporate take-overs, it was
converted to a Little Caesar's (You Americans will know this name better than
Mothers, I would think), which meant little except now they had crazy bread,
which we labeled "kooky cacky", and we would order kooky cacky and some sauce
and drink coffees, billing ourselves for about $7.00 over several hours. What
I remember the best about it was that in December they would always play
Christmas music, which would make me feel sad and lonely. When we were
hanging out there, Carlile and her boyfriend were working there, and we would
always say Hi to Carlile and Chuck, and Chuck would offer us a ride home.
I must also mention "the tracks", which formed an essential part of the larger
neighbourhood in the last couple years that I lived in Mississauga. Steve
first discovered them, and also found a sewer just off these tracks. The
tracks were the railway tracks that connected GO stations together, and we
would walk on them from his place to mine, or we would just hang out there
late at night. We would climb on the light towers, and drink Pepsi and eat
free donuts, and Lloyd would get freaked out because he thought it was going
to fall under his own weight. The sewer was something else: a perfect place
for just hanging, it was a storm sewer used to drain off rain water from that
area of the neighbourhood. Evidently, other people liked the place too,
because on the walls were written various philosophies and stories: "NO Fat
Chicks", "Too Many Bugs", "KKK", and so on were written at the entrance.
However, we had never gone into the sewers, and we only stayed at the entrance
until one day Lloyd and I went decided to explore it. We just started walking,
heading vaguely north. The tunnel went on for miles, but after a few
kilometres we grew bored. So we found a manhole cover and pushed it up. We
escaped just south of Square One, about three or four km's due north. We
smelled like sewer water, and we were caked with mud, but we had conquered the
public sewer system!! The next day when I told my girlfriend of my exploits
she got hysterical: "YOU DID WHAT?! YOU WENT IN THE SEWERS!?!?! That's where
Pennywise lives!!" Who the fuck was Pennywise? It turned out that my
girlfriend was having trouble staying out her Steven King reality, and thought
that the three of use were too much the characters in IT, and so did not want
us going there ever again, because Pennywise would come and get us. The only
thing we really worried about was a flood of water, and one time Lloyd thought
he heard rushing water and so we ran out. It turned out that Lloyd just got
spooked.
Mississauga, for the most part is a way for poor people to act richer. We did
it ourselves: we moved to Mississauga because we wanted to live in Toronto but
could not afford the city. In the same way, rich people save a few hundred
thousand by buying a housing on Mississauga Valley Road, and thus they can
take that money and invest it into their "dream" home. There are few people
who live here for generations, for the city has only existed since 1974. It is
a town for people with their own businesses, who are striking it out on the
road to wealth for the first time. One great example of this is the Carliles,
whose daughter Jennifer was in our class (again, another story for a later
issue). Big Bob Carlile worked for a printing factory, making ends meet until
in about 1988 he started his own printing company called Alpha Graphics. It
was located at the corner of Creditview and Burnhamthorpe, and when you walked
past, you could see Big Bobby Carlile or his wife Judith selling print
materials to customers. Most businesses were like this: either new independent
or part of a chain (these would fill the various malls). There were few family
businesses, and so their was little old wealth to dictate and older culture.
Again, Mississauga is a teenage city, like Barrie but not as idiotically
pompous. Mississauga has benefits to brag about, but they are bought on the
neo-conservative "no new taxes" type of economic philosophy.
========================
Mississauga / Cooksville
Steven Meece
========================
We moved to an apartment in the city of Mississauga, an upstart community
which at that time was at the western frontier of the Toronto expansionist
movement. It was outside of Metro Toronto, being situated in the county of
Peel. It had nothing officially to do with Toronto at all; the Metro buses
didn't run out that far, it had a separate postal code prefix (L as opposed to
M), was not represented in the regional government and felt like Siberia. It
was isolated. Mississauga didn't have much going for itself; real life was at
least an hour away by bus. Even today, half of the routes run by Mississauga
Transit merely shuttle people in and out of Toronto.
Newcomers and those unfamiliar with the town always called it "Mis-sis-saw
-gwah" while the "real" pronunciation is "Mis-sis-sog-ah". The locals refer to
it as "Sauggy" or "Saug" or "The Saug" and occasionally "Mr and Mrs Sauga" and
sometimes "Pississauga". This is a fairly common thing in the west end, as
Oakville is called "Jokeville", Etobicoke is "Etobicroak", and Brampton is
"Crampton" or "Cramptown" or "Compton", the latter of more recent vintage, a
second generation putdown, having been born out of "Crampton".
The Mississaugas were a small Ojibwa tribe that was displaced many years
earlier. When the city was created they chose this name over the alternative
choice, which was Sheridan. Mississauga means "The people who wear puckered
mocassins".
There was a great building boom going on out there, due to low prices and easy
freeway access for the station wagons. Mississauga itself was a totally
arbitrary and artificial city created by provincial planners. Toronto was
undergoing very rapid development at the time (all the hippies were getting
married and having kids and houses) and the government feared that the Toronto
agglomeration would resemble the Montreal Urban Community, which consists of
over sixty bloated small towns. The government decided to lump towns together
and create regions. The city of Mississauga was created by grouping together
all the land bordered by Lake Ontario, Derry Road, Winston Churchill Boulevard
and Highway 427. This land was mostly empty. Until that point, other than the
fact that they were all part of Peel county, the towns had nothing to do with
each other. On January 1 1974, the city of Mississauga was created. The
borders were put up and the towns of Cooksville, Erindale, Streetsville, Port
Credit, Malton, Clarkson, Lakeview, Malton and Lorne Park were erased from the
map. They waited, and soon enough the empty fields and farms began to sprout
condominiums and apartment complexes; the towns were obsolete and the city of
Saug matured. Twenty years later all but the northern fringes are populated
and the towns are long swamped.
The area that would become Mississauga was of mixed use before civilisation.
The shoreline had been developed since the 1800's, and the rest was mixed use
agriculture. The north end was standard cows & corn, but around the middle of
the town the predominant crop was apples. There are still one or two orchards
left. Shades of Huck Finn: Around 1981 or so my best friend Jason Coggins and
I used to run into the Adamson orchard on the other side of the road from the
church and steal green Granny Smiths. Naturally we would take three or four
bites and then throw them away.
Mississauga is also the location of the airport, Lester B Pearson. This
roaring complex is a result of a gradual expansion of the old Malton Air
Field, a landing strip since the 1930s.
Real life began as we lived in a two bedroom apartment on Forestwood Drive.
There were two apartment buildings in the complex called the "Twingates". We
lived in 804 in the Westgate. Ironically enough Westgate was the more opulent
of the two. They were mirror images of each other architecturally, but the
Eastgate was more run down, due to the many and continual trashings it
suffered by its inhabitants. There was an above ground parking level and a
below ground parking level that was perfect for biking. I wrote my name
"Steve" with tempera paint on the side of the platform, it is still there.
We had a small line of goldfish who died frequently; my sister and I shared a
room. It was very small but cozy and not that bad. The years of the late
seventies came and went pretty fast. I had a Big Wheel but it was stolen after
my mom made me leave it out in the hallway due to the fact that it was caked
in mud. Yet again, and in a pattern that continues to this day, my best friend
was a girl from down the hall named Carrie, or "Squeaky" as my mom called her.
She did have a rather squeaky voice, but it could be that my mom was a secret
fan of Fromme.
Carrie was a strange girl, quite unclean and not very bright. But she was
always fun to be around. We were both gangly and ugly, uncouth and poor, and
so we fit together well. Our apartment building was twelve floors, and in the
stairwell each floor had a small landing. We named these after holidays in the
year. We had the Christmas Room, the Valentine's Day Room, the Easter Room,
and so forth. Somehow she learned of French kissing, and we would climb from
room to room and swish tongues on each. As I say, she was a strange girl.
I learned to ride a two wheeler there, a purple thing that my mom had saved
from the dump.
My sister and I were both attending McBride Avenue Public, which took a small
amount of tinkering by my mom. In actuality we were outside of the boundaries
of McBride, and should have been going to Springfield. It was better this way,
as we could goto school with our cousins. Both my sister and I had a cousin
each our age. They were the reason we were living in the Saug. They had a
house and a father and lived a bit farther east of us; there were no apartment
buildings in their immediate neighbourhood.
McBride was a strange, wonderful, scary, shitty place. In Kindergarten Chris
Engler and I were the only two who could read, so we were allowed to read
dinosaur books during climbabout time. Kindergarten consisted of fucking
around: There were blocks to build "skyscrapers", a garden to grow beans, a
painting table (you had to wear smocks, which were the teacher's husband's old
shirts put on backwards), multicoloured construction paper with scissors and
white glue, and my favourite, a plastic tank of
water with sponges and cups
and whatnot.
The library was very small. My interests were any book on space travel or the
moon, Superstar Ken Dryden, Siss Boom Bah, the Curious George series, and
especially anything by Dr Seuss.
The library had a cardboard "castle" which smaller kids could fit in and close
the door after them. Everybody wanted in. They kept it for a long time, and
still had it when I graduated in grade six, although it was almost in tatters.
The class whipping post was a girl named Deborah Something. She was even more
ruffian than Carrie and everyone, including myself, picked on her incessantly.
She was supposed to have the cooties. The class clown at the time was Kenny
Gratemyer, a real perverted and disgusting little wretch. He loved to make a
show of picking his nose. He was a great tormenter of everyone, especially the
girls, and was constantly in trouble. He became a fast friend of mine. One
winter we stood at Forestwood and Stainton pelting snowballs at cars until the
cops swooped down on us. Or on me, because Kenny saw the pig and took off,
leaving me dumbfounded with a snowball in my hand. One time I went into his
apartment with him. His father was quite alcoholic and nearly beat the crap
out of him right in front of me.
We had television time as well. They brought the classes into a corner of the
library, let them sit on pillows, and showed various things on huge 3/4 inch
VTRs. Charlotte's Web was a favourite. In the semi dark I would sit next to
Julie Martin, and we would hold hands. It was the most amazing thing.
Somewhere in there Chris Williams set his apartment on fire while playing
with matches and his infant brother died in the blaze.
My mom attained a significant other and they decided to live together in a
condo on the south side of Dundas Street, the main drag. It was a complex
called "The Partridge Place" and was one of the first developments on the
south side. It was in the same district as the apartment, so neither of us had
to change friends or schools. I now had two brothers and another sister and
became more social and less scary. We had things, there was much to do. I
collected a tonne of hockey cards and in the process obtained the famed
"rookie card" of Wayne Gretzkey, which has come to be worth a lot of money in
the by and by. All the males gambled for them in the schoolyard. We went out
for Halloween.
We once had a massive mudpie fight with the rest of the complex. It was every
kid in the complex versus our family. It was no game, they were all out for
blood for some reason unknown. I remember I came home from playing to find my
pseudo stepbrothers Rickey and Marc running around pelting mudballs at the
neighbourhood yobs, my pseudo-step-sis-ter Carole-Anne and real sister
Stephanie in the garage making new ones. They were all very serious and I was
recruited for the war effort. The field behind ours was being torn up for
development, so there was much ammunition. Again, this was some kind of honour
fight, because the mud there was mostly clay, my sisters were putting rocks in
them, and everyone was aiming for the face or balls. I never found out the
reason for that fury.
There was a lot to do there and much to explore, as Dundas was in the midst of
change. One time a group of half-built houses burned down to the ground. It
was an amazing experience. Every kid in the neighbourhood came to watch. The
smoke was thick black, the heat and light tremendous, and burnt ashes came
wafting down from the sky.
Everyone always played street hockey. No-one had a net or sticks, so we kicked
around a tennis ball and used piles of garbage to mark the posts. I was always
the goalie and my cousin David the forward. We didn't have pads, so we held
out our coat. David and I were both very good at what we did. We were a
dynasty, really. It would be he and I versus perhaps five other people and we
would cream them.
In television we liked That's Incredible and Those Amazing Animals on Sunday
night, the Dukes of Hazzard especially, Battlestar Galactica, the Flintstones,
Real People, and the Bionic Woman. I was also very hip to music. I had a
transistor radio and listened to CHUM-FM, which in those days was a renegade
thing to do as it was quite a rebellious station. I liked Pink Floyd, the
Vapours, the Monks, Blondie, the all-girl group the Raincoats, the Buggles,
David Bowie, the Village People, and most other New Wave stuff. One afternoon
my friend Brent Galloway decided to become a punk and stuck a safety pin
through his earlobe.
My mom enrolled me in little league baseball, as well as Beavers and Cubs, so
that I could be masculine and learn how to be a man. Little league did the
exact opposite, as I was shitty and everyone knew it. The pitchers couldn't
throw, so if I didn't swing at all I'd usually get a walk. They put me in
right field, because no-one in little league at that time was of the calibre
to hit as far as the outfield. In my baseball career of three seasons I
participated in perhaps two plays. I sat down in the grass and the coach
always hollered the same thing at me: "Look alive out there!"
The Scouting programme wasn't much better. I loved the weekend camps, but
there were only four of these per year. The rest of the time was like gym
class - a lot of dodgeball, king of the court, and so on. Nevertheless we
stayed in it until grade seven. In that last year Scouter Ted was removed from
the troop for giving Nazi classes to some of the kids. Also at this time the
camps had little to do with camping, because the cool thing to do was skip the
events and go back to the tents and circlejerk with the girlie magazines that
Neil stole from his dad. The thing had no direction and I quit. I've been told
that if I had persevered as far as Venturers it would have become enjoyable
but alas...
Meanwhile, back in 1980, the fights between my mom and her SO became quite
numerous and he decided to throw us out. They met at work, and she did not
want to work with him after such a nasty split. This was 1980 and finding a
job was not an easy task. We were quite homeless, and ended up living in our
aunt's basement for a period of about six months.
We found our apartment across the street from the old Westgate, back in the
old neighbourhood. The part of Mississauga that we lived in did not have a
specific name. It was never part of anything special, being west of Cooksville
and east of Erin Mills and Erindale. It was developed in the mid 1960s. The
west half of it was shitty and poor, and contained a grouping of about ten
apartment buildings, which were originally built to create low-cost housing
for students at the nearby University of Toronto's Erindale College, which
opened in 1967. However the kids never came, and it became low-cost housing
for whatever scumbags drifted into it. Further east, and away from the
apartment buildings, the neighbourhood got progressively richer, although not
by much. The south side of Dundas was started major development in about 1981,
and wasn't finished until as late as 1987. It is much more opulent. Standing
at the intersection of Dundas and Erindale Station Road especially you can
witness the great division between the north side and the south side. The
wrong side of the tracks.
We obtained a three bedroom apartment (#701) in the building at 3100 Erindale
Station Road. It had a name too, although it hadn't been used in the past
twenty years: "The Westview Apartments". My sister was 13 before she had her
own room. The advantage of this place was that it was across the street from
the Westdale Mall.
The Westdale Mall played a big part in the lives of the neighbourhood kids. It
was the central hub and something that you encountered frequently, for various
reasons. It reflected the neighbourhood well, as it contained Zellers, Dollar
Bills, Bargain Harold's, and a group of other independent stores with names
like "M&H Fashions". It was and is very much like the Rexdale Mall. It has
perhaps no more than fifty stores and is not much of a tourist attraction.
For upscale shopping you would make the trip to Square one at the northeast
corner of Burnhamthorple and Hurontario (Highway 10). Square one is a massive
complex and there is hardly a Mississaugean who is not touched by it
constantly. Most of the bus routes feed into it, and it is the main transfer
station. When it came time to build a city hall and a central library, they
built them as attachments to Square one. Square one is the only example of
pan-Mississaugean unity, as it draws together residents from every part of the
city as well as parts of southern Brampton. The only competition it has is
Sherway Gardens, which is in Etobicoke, but receives cross-border shoppers
from parts of southeast Saug.
Square one is a great structure currently experiencing a renaissance. It was
previously an unattractive large mall with department and shoe stores. It
never really showed the potential it had until the mid 1980s when the mall
culture thing exploded and Square one started building additions, which they
are still doing. It has been Mecca for almost ten years now. Square one is the
peak, Square one is... square one when it comes to the Saug. Square one is the
great titty that has enough to feed us all.
This is no hyperbole. Square one and the airport constitute about 70% of all
commerce and human activity done in the city of Mississauga. It is difficult
to overestimate the importance of this building and one has a hard time
struggling for the proper verbs. Square one is how we stay alive. We buy
clothes there, we eat our frozen yogurt there, we shop at HMV, we get our hair
cut, we find bathroom fixtures and books and cigarettes and makeup and lawn
furniture and gyroscopes and computers. It contains a Lutheran church, several
pharmacies, doctors, dentists, lawyers, and orthodontists. It is difficult to
name any Mississauga teenager, myself included, who has not held a job there.
Square one defines the Saug the same way that the St Lawrence defines Montreal
or Disneyworld defines Orlando Florida.
Square one is the hub from which all other things emerge. It has many faces
and many uses. To chronicle a list of Square one experiences would be futile
and ever incomplete. They go on and on.
If Square one wouldn't do, the main alternative you had was "the Credit".
Solikah, what do you want to do? I don't know, we could go down to the
Credit...
And you went down to the Credit because the Credit River, about twenty
centimetres deep and fifty metres wide, was located in a huge valley that cut
a deep gash right through the city of Saug and the west extreme of our
neighbourhood. The Credit was an area that was left alone and showed only
rudimentary amounts of civilisation. Because of the valley (so high that you
could not see over it while you were at the river) you felt as if you were
"down in" something. It was a closed in space, very separate in feel from the
traffic that is Mississauga. Except for weekend afternoons, it was deserted,
and it was very unlikely to find someone other than yourself down there after
dark.
It differed from Square one because you were always alone down there and could
do things that were not acceptable in malls or your parent's houses.
The pain gravel path along the river is called the "David J Culham trail" but
there were many other footpaths up and down the ravines and through the brush
that also saw constant use.
Thus is was perfect for escape because it offered isolation that was only a
ten minute walk from home. I went there alone many times, but most often with
friends. It was always a heavy experience. There was a lot of breeding going
on. The stuff that I personally knew of was not too alarming, but there were
rumours of wild bush parties in there, with a double meaning on bush. (Excuse
me, but it's what happened, this is only honesty. I'm only reporting what I
heard.)
The Credit was safe and a place to retreat to when you wanted to get something
done. It was the locale of great social development and had power. It was
intently personal; too personal for Fiona one time as she experienced an
apparition in the face of cw that sent her screaming.
The Credit was a place for doing, dreaming, touching, drinking, kissing,
talking, writing, swimming and fingering. It is one of the few places of
Mississauga that was genuine, and was not corrupted by so much suburban
bullshitty.
In the rest of Mississauga, the fix was on and there was very little room for
peace. It was a very pressurised place. The Peel County Police were a very
zealous bunch given the duty of protecting the stereos and VCRs of law abiding
citizens. In December of 1988 they killed Wade Lawson by shooting him in the
head as he was attempting to flee police custody.
There was a lot of ugliness and the police were jingoistic and enthusiastic
about making the most of whatever opportunities they were presented with. They
did eat a lot of doughnuts, but they did some other things as well. In the
span of one summertime I was stopped and questioned by at least five police on
different occasions. They viewed me as a suspicious character because I was
using the streets after 11:30pm. They flagged me down and questioned me about
my name, address, criminal record, and why I was out at such a nefarious hour.
After this process all they could say was "well, go on home son..."
cw and I were once arrested in Streetsville. We were there at 3am walking on
the main drag when a parked cop sounded his horn and proceeded to badger us
for up to forty five minutes. We were absolutely clean at the time and there
was nothing that he could pin on us -- but this did not daunt him, as he
continued interrogating us for no reason. He said that he had reports of
"house B&E's" but this was a very flimsy excuse. Even if we were stupid enough
to walk away from a crime along the main road, he examined our bags and
clothes in a pat-down to find that we had nobody's diamond bracelets.
In the end he locked cw in the back of the cruiser, and asked me a few
telltale questions about our activities that night. He later went into the
cruiser, closed the door, and asked cw the same questions, in order to
corroborate our stories.
He asked "Do you think this is funny?!?!" when I wasn't even smiling. The
whole thing was absurd, and there was nothing we could do but submit to the
pig's every whim. He was simply toying with us, making us dance at the end of
his string. He drove off and let us walk home when he was tired of playing
with us. We were only a pawn in his game, as was Wade Lawson.
Mississauga was still a city of regions and neighbourhoods, with very little
interaction (except for Square one, as was mentioned). The towns that I am
most familiar with are Cooksville and Streetsville, because I lived in the
former and went to school in the latter.
Cooksville is a small cropping that grew up at the intersection of Dundas and
Hurontario, in the dead centre of the city. Cooksville is still called "Five
and Ten" after the numbers of the two highways that pass through it.
Cooksville has a few delicatessens, supermarkets and dry cleaners, but among
the youth of the city it is favoured for its pizza shops and arcades.
TL Kennedy Secondary, called "TL" or "TLK" by the locals, is the highschool
for this area. It had a reputation as "rough" in the early 1980's but has
since cleaned up its act. Cooksville is the only place in Mississauga that is
open after 10:00pm. It is the only place to go once Square one has closed, and
is the playground for TLK kids on their lunch breaks or skips.
Cooksville is famed for its two arcades, one doughnut shop, and three pizza
parlours. This is how you whoop it up. This is the nightlife of Mississauga.
Of the two arcades, the Dundas Arcade is a cut above Silvertips. It features
more recent videogames and fancier pinball. It is the hangout of a lot of very
dingy arcade babes who are run-down and gritty Madonna wannabes. Silvertips,
across Dundas and down Hurontario, is a basement full of pool tables and
older, less impressive videogames. The Dundas Arcade closes at 12:30am every
day, and Silvertips staggers its closing time, starting at 12:30am on Sunday
night and growing by little bits each evening to close at 4:30am on Saturday.
cw lived in a trailer near here.
The only other arcade in the area is located in a strip plaza at the southwest
corner of Dundas and Erindale Station Road. It is the haunt of St Martin's
Catholic school nearby, and the place is thick with uniformed Catholics during
the daytime, and neighbourhood cornerboys at night. It opened in the spring of
1991 to widespread parental dismay and youth joy. It has a real name that has
been co-opted in favour of "The Comrade X Memorial Arcade," referring to a
young local who was a friend but then revealed that he was a "fink," in
Mahatma's words. He still hangs around there, and in the Baker's Dozen donut
shop immediately adjacent.
There were other places to go as well. The Huron Park complex was a grassy
stretch south of Dundas that contained also a swimming pool, skating rink,
exercise rooms, and coffee shop. The swimming pool was a favourite of mine in
my younger years thanks to the free passes provided by my uncle, the
aforementioned trail namesake.
The skating rink was also the site of the lustful awakenings of the McBride
crew. During most of the week it was taken up with minor bantams and peewees,
but on Friday night at 7:30pm and Sunday afternoon at 2:30pm it was offered up
for public skating sessions. The kids of the sixth grade of McBride (also a
bunch of peewees) decided that this was to be their mating ground. They were
too embarrassed to do it at school or in person, so it was somehow decided
that it would take place on skates at Huron Park. That was where everyone
goofed about and flirted around and then had their mom pick them up at 10pm.
Michelle Semenyk and Billy McDougall were the first BFGF that we saw, but they
were eleven at the time and BFGF is a relative term.
After the Credit flows south of Dundas Street it becomes the private property
of the fenced in Credit Valley Golf & Country Club. Trespassing there after
dark is a fairly common thing to do. For a short time it was also the "cool"
place to work. Other places having fame as being fashionable included
McDonald's, Druxy's Deli, the CNE, Tim Horton's and Mother's pizza shop, all
of these going through renaissances when several people from the extended peer
group worked there at the same time. The golf course was favoured by Charles,
Viren, John Jaques and the rest of those guys for a short while. They were
employed driving golf carts and retrieving lost balls. One time Viren drove
the cart into a rock and somehow nearly tore his ear off. As of this writing
and to the best of my knowledge, Charles is the only person to have come out
with his homosexuality. There are at least two others, perhaps more, that have
remained in the closet and will not be named here.
At the west end of the village stands Erindale College, a satellite campus of
the University of Toronto that serves the outflow of students from local
highschools. Erindale is a rather depressing place, because it resembles a
highschool more than it does a university. Erindale serves Mississauga teens
who are too poor or too scared to move away from mom and become real people.
No-one in the history of Mississauga has ever referred to it as a university
town, except Hazel McCallion, the colourful mayor for the past fifteen years
or so. She has spoken many times of having Erindale secede from the U of T and
become the University of Mississauga. There is not a resident of the Saug that
does not know that McCallion is a heavy duty alcoholic, who often shows up for
council meetings stone drunk. No-one is bothered by this, and she is
re-elected term after term. The four ridings of Mississauga are mostly Liberal
provincially, and mostly Progressive Conservative federally.
The Canadian Pacific Railway also cuts a wide swath through the eastern parts
of the Credit Woodlands area. The commuter rail service runs Erindale station
at Creditview & Burnhamthorple, and Cooksville station on Hurontario just
north of Dundas. The rail line is mostly ignored by the populace, but a few
people end up scrambling along the tracks on occasion.
There weren't many other places to go there. But as people progressed in age
they participated in less community events and ended up doing their own thing
most of the time. Everything became less formal, and when you would go out,
you would either go into Toronto or over to someone's house. No longer would
you go out to the neighbourhood to "play".
The highschool for the area was called the Woodlands, but it was also known as
"Hoodlands" by some and "Cock and Balls High" by others. It was called this
because it was a very sleazy place, very lustful and obnoxious. During one of
the grade nine dances, someone threw a used maxi-pad onto the dance floor and
it was kicked about and at people for a bit.
There was one guy in the grade ahead of us (Travis Seale) who many girls
wanted to fuck and no doubt did. He was big news on the walls of the girls
washrooms because of his claim that his penis resembled "an unpeeled banana".
There was another guy named Derek (who ended up involved with cw's
ex-girlfriend Stacey) who liked to talk at length about the fact that he was
"hung like a shetland pony". Big donkeydicks, vomit, heavy metal, alcohol,
fighting, that was what students of the Woodlands aspired to. Actually, that
is a pretty good summation of the underlying ideal of the Woodlands - the
search for the ever bigger better prick, either to fuck one or become one.
Woodlands had weapons, police, drugs, pregnant teenagers and there was a very
tense racial situation. The militant blacks kept to themselves and only mixed
with whiteys to beat the crap out of them. The society was very intimidating
and very polarised. The drop-out rate was close to 66% and many people just
disappeared for no reason.
But my time there was cut short by two years after a strange set of
circumstances. A group of people, lead by cw and his allies, set about to
blacklist me from playing any more of their reindeer games and allowing me to
come to their houses on Saturday night to engage in VCR parties. No more could
I partake of their pop and chips. This was a little difficult to accept at
first, but it soon became less of a deal: I always knew that highschool peers
were going to dissolve, so it wasn't much of a horror that it ended a few
years before graduation rather than a few years after. This prediction turned
out to be correct, as one by one the remaining members got sick of each other
and by this time almost ties have been dissolved.
There was nothing irreplaceable about the Woodlands, and I could have just as
easily left as stayed. The opportunity came up for a switch, and I decided to
take it. What was to keep me at the Woodlands? We decided to transfer into
Streetsville Secondary School, called SSS by the locals, which had also
accepted two of my cousins when they became tired of the Woodlands. Woodlands
had very little left for me, so this gave me the chance to see a little bit of
Streetsville, Ont. from the inside for a few years.
Streetsville is a smaller town in the northwest part of Mississauga, and is
further from Toronto than Cooksville, and subsequently is not as mired in
suburbs. The suburbs it has are very rich and naturally very white. The only
non-white faces you are likely to see at SSS are those of enterprising Asians.
The wealth creates a boyous enthusiasm, and there is a thing called "school
spirit" which they take very seriously. It is quite a rah-rah place and they
get quite excited over the damn Tigers. They have pep rallies that succeed,
even though the sports teams, for the most part, usually failed.
Streetsville was founded in 1820 by the namesake Timothy Street. It was a
large regional centre that faded in prominence because it could not attain
rail access until a relatively late time, at which time the limelight had
already passed it. Queen Street has charm and is a generally pleasant place.
It offers many small-town-ish shops, your choice of Mac's or Becker's, and the
"Adults Only" shop, which is a porno rental place but also offers rentals of
magazines, perhaps for just fifteen minutes, just long enough for a quick dash
into the alley.
The Credit River runs on the east side of the town and again is largely
untouched. It is green, wet, and overgrown and a nice place to go during lunch
hours. In addition to this hangout, there were also two boarded up houses
awaiting demolition at 156 Church Street and 20 Barry Avenue that I used to
squat in. The Church Street house was slowly being ransacked by a group of
little kids, but the Barry house was quite tight and I believe that I was the
only person to occupy it.
In an act that belonged back in the Woodlands, a Streetsville student was
sexually assaulted in the boys washroom one afternoon after school had ended.
It turns out that there were about ten visiting soccer players from Applewood
Secondary who were loose in the hallways when they found their victim. The
principle sent a letter home to parents in which most of it was spent assuring
mom and dad that it was the Applewood players who were the guilty parties, and
that none of our Streetsville boys had misbehaved in any way.
There are a few genuinely nice people in Streetsville, and I am grateful for
what time I did spend with them, but after the end of the first year I was
growing tired and weary of the antics of the youngsters of Mississauga.
Nothing ever went on that I hadn't seen so many times before. Why have I
wasted so much time on people who fuck each other over for sport? Why did I
let myself be manipulated for so long? I was so tired of the highschool scene
which had been going on for five years without let. I was sick of the lies,
deceit, self-service and general bullshit. I generally kept to myself and
didn't bother too many people. This was not paranoia, this was mere common
sense. But I had decided to talk to one girl, and approached her in a
condition of fear and trembling. She didn't do anything for about a week, and
then she went to the vice-principle and asked him to discipline me, any kind
of discipline. After he talked to me he realised that it was nothing and sent
me back to class, but that was enough for me. What had I done? After that I
decided to call it quits on all Mississaugeans and keep the lowest of all low
profiles in the interim until I could leave for real.
By this time, cw had moved to Parkdale and I spent a great amount of time with
him, almost all of the summers and about half of the weekends during the
school year, because I liked his company and it was someplace other than Saug.
I've stayed here for days and weeks on end. It got to the point that I felt
more connection with Parkdale than Mississauga, and began to act like a
Parkdalian and dress like a Parkdalian. When I went away to school and people
asked me where I was from, and I had to tell them Parkdale. It certainly felt
true. It felt more right to say that than say "I'm from Mississauga", because
I no longer was. The school year passed by quickly as I kept to myself, either
in the apartment or outside, busying myself with school, work, photography,
music, reading, writing and associated activities. There were still some good
friends left there, but for the most part, all of a sudden the concept of
Mississauga as a place to live had exhausted itself.
After a little more than a year of this, I went out of town for school in
September 1992, and during the year my mom re-married and we rolled up stakes
again, this time for the green green pastures of a home on the range of North
York. But I'm beginning to roll my own stake now, for in a few weeks I'll have
my own apartment, a phreaky one-bedroom place on Waverley Street in Ottawa.
Things are ending and beginning all around.
The lease on our old apartment expired April 30th, 1993, and we moved out at
that time, closing the entire Mississauga chapter of thirteen odd, very
strange years. I've only been back a few times since I left for school, but
these return trips have been contrasting in reflection. The first time back
everything seemed funny to me, incredibly humourous, just a big joke. It was
easy for me to laugh at it all and wonder why I thought it was such a big
deal. The other times have meant other things. But the ironic part of all of
this is that when I am back there, I still feel "at home" and somewhat
contented.
How could Mississauga feel like home? Because it felt like the home I always
knew. It was home because that was where my stuff and my memories were. South
Common Mall, as much of a pit that it is, also has a aura of goodness to it
that only I can see, that only I can register. Why? Because Rachel and I spent
a lot of time there together, and I would catch my bus there after leaving her
house. Therefore it became a holy place. The same thing happened for the rest
of that town, the Credit, Square one, Dundas St, Port Credit, the arcades,
Tim's, Little Caesar's, the rail line, Fiona's house, and even good old Cock
and Balls High. I was there with people, girlfriends, Others, my mom, or just
myself and saw things and was young. In my mind there is a beauty in all of
those places.
The Mississauga portion of my life was generally good, because it was an
accomplishment that I survived and transcended, at the cost of a lot of lives.
It's a Taoist sad grin that I wear when I'm back there, in the vale of tears.
Mississauga is a place where you have to be an existentialist to survive.
But writing all of this, I cannot particularly praise the city. It is not a
great place to live and raise kids, because it takes a great deal of energy to
keep the lid on things there and keep the peace in the neighbourhood. There is
a tremendous sense of control, where everything has a part to play in the name
of perpetuation of the ideals, nevermind the cost. People are specifically
sacrificed so that others can keep their happiness. Practically every female I
knew there had been sexually abused sometime in the past, extremely serious
(ie actual rape) in a couple of instances. Three times people I knew were
hospitalised for suicide attempts. There were so many people there, females
especially, that were just dying inside, screaming from within soundproof
walls constructed by their parents and peers and by the society. There was
always fighting going on. Sometimes the violence was very subtle. It has been
done in a lot of ways and is hidden from view, but I can tell you that the
people in Mississauga are constantly attacking each other.
Perhaps this is the way that it is everywhere now, but that doesn't make
Mississauga feel any better. Last year there was a hit and run fatality on
Burnhamthorpe East. I heard about it on the radio, not on the news but on the
traffic report as the reason for the temporary delay in the rush-hour commuter
flow. About an hour later, the body had been removed and the roadway cleared,
and the process of traffic was again allowed to run unimpeded.
=============
Parkdale
Chris Woodill
=============
I moved to Toronto when I entered University, moving from my mother's to my
father's house in Parkdale. Parkdale is one of the oldest parts of Toronto,
reduced now to a semi-slum. But there is real community here: the first day
that I got here I noticed that people were sitting on their porches, and next
door neighbours were actually talking to each other. This would never happen
in the 'Saug: they would have fences erected to keep the world, including the
neighbours, out. Furthermore, people are generally easier here, and the police
do not have the zeal that Peel Regional Police seems to have. The Police here
have to fight actual criminal activities: they are not hired merely to shut
down rich kids pool parties that get too loud for the neighbour's comfort.
People are more open, more giving. This is a very dramatic shift in culture,
and it part of the poor culture. People don't care about keeping the yard
clean or the neighbourhood clear of criminals: they know that drug dealers and
prostitutes are inevitable. Furthermore, people here do not always blame the
criminals for the neighbourhoods problems: people here don't think, "If only
we could get rid of the drug dealers, our children would be safe". Many people
here are only two cuts above drug dealing, and there are many felonies
committed here daily by people who are trying to survive.
There are real prostitutes here, and the semi-yuppie people who live here get
angry at having to host these night walkers in their neighbourhood. Parkdale
is the dumping ground for prostitutes, the last battle ground if you will. If
prostitutes are anywhere successful, they will operate downtown, and so
Parkdale is where they come to retire. Thus, we not only get prostitutes but
we also get the dingiest breed of them: even the whores here can't make it. On
one night, when SM and I were walking home from the downtown core, we noticed
a film crew shooting a petty criminal scene, complete with fake cops, fake
whores, and other extras. On the other side of the street (Queen St.), an
authentic whore was screaming about her boyfriend ripping her off and leaving
her broke, and the film crew was trying to get police to shut this woman up.
They did not want reality breaking into their scene.
Another aspect of this neighbourhood is the relative insanity of its
occupants. At Ossington and Queen is the Queen St. Mental Health Centre, a real
dungeon built in the 1880's and originally called the "Provincial Lunatick
Asylum." The ones that get out alive often stay Parkdale. So there are lots of
people running around Parkdale with no shoes on, or who are screaming their
heads off about how they have been screwed by Jello products, or who have
pissed their pants. They ride the Queen streetcar often, which is the ride to
school on most days for me. They usually sit in the back of the car, babbling
about how they have been wronged by the system. They swear a lot, and sometimes
they even talk to you (usually, some business suit female who gets frightened
and leaves at the next bus stop). The worst case is when they do not speak your
language, because then they are screaming "Fuck the system" to themselves in
Chinese, and there is no easier way to get a headache than to listen to a crazy
person scream at you in another language. But you never truly know whether
they are crazy or just poor. I guess there is not much difference between the
two.
The businesses here are deplorable, with supermarkets with half rotten fruit
and video stores with more porno movies than regular features. But that is
what people want here: or more accurately, that is what people can afford.
There is a "discount" supermarket down the street called Usher's Fine Foods,
and they sell everything about half the price of regular prices. However, they
do this because they sell the shittiest brands available, with the least
nutritional value. The place brings back old memories of Orillia, because they
have the brands that my mother would cheap out on: old no-name macaroni and
cheese at the price of 4 for a dollar. There are a few respectable places
here, but most are food dispensers: Country Style donuts, Mr. Submarine, 7-11,
etc. People know that even poor people have to eat.
We live in a semi-rich house, with a lot of semi-rich artifacts such as art, a
lot of CD's, a large screen television, and of course, this computer through
which I am writing. In some ways I like it because I have the balance that I
want: I get to live in a lower scale neighbourhood but have the upper scale
intellectual culture. I want to live in poor culture, but I want to also
experience academic culture. Here I get both. I do not like the way this house
is decorated though: it is too suburban, with nouveau riche knickknacks and
various pieces of modern art. This house is really old, and yet they are
trying to appear like modern academics. They (Gary and Karen) get all huffy
when I accuse them of being stupid in their decorating techniques, when I
point out that they have been carrying around a bidet from house to house
without even installing it. They say that I am anti-rich, that I can't accept
people who want to have a nice house. But that is exactly the same mentality
that the 'Saug has: "I have a right to decorate this house and I am doing it
because I want to express myself." When in fact, the people who spend their
time decorating their houses spend less time developing a personality. What is
beyond the make-up? No-one.
One of the nice things about Parkdale is that it is close to the CNE. The
Canadian National Exhibition is a Toronto tradition, but now it is just down
the road. It is also poor and rundown, having slowly lost to other tourist
things like Canada's Wonderland. It gets worse every year, and more out of
date. As people are becoming more high tech, the CNE is still trying to sell
ginsu knives and vibrating arm chairs. People always say that they are not
going to go anymore to it, because it is so rundown, but somehow it still
survives. I think it is because people really like it, but do not want to
admit it as they sip on their bottled water.
Just like in Mississauga, I do not go to school in the neighbourhood in which
I live, for I take the streetcar to the University of Toronto, located in the
down town core. My girlfriend does not live here either; she lived in High
Park (a more posh neighbourhood north of Parkdale) and now she lives in the
east end. So there are several neighbourhoods in Toronto with which I am
familiar, but they all seem to have a similar feel. Toronto is downtown; the
people who live in are people who have lived here for many years. For the poor
people especially, there are families that have lived in Toronto for
generations. You can't say the same about Mississauga. I have experience in
the east end of Toronto, because my father used to live in that area before he
moved here. I would visit him there on divorce visits (you know, every second
weekend type of arrangement), so I was acclimatized to the neighbourhoods of
East Toronto.
But Parkdale is my neighbourhood now, and I think I like it. I like the fact
that the people here are destitute and crotchety. For example, there is this
arcade down the street, where this guy is barely making ends meet. Its just a
little shithole, with a few old games in it. I always get angry at him because
I can, and because his games are not enjoyable. So why do I come back? Why do
I come back to any arcade: because its a place to blow off steam. Pinball is
much better at this than video games, because you have to interact with the
entire machine, and when you get angry at it you can tilt the thing. This
arcade owner always gets mad when I tilt the machine, always asking if I know
how much these things cost. I tell him I would not tilt them if they were not
such a rip off, and then he accuses me of complaining. He always gets on the
verge of kicking me out of his arcade, but he knows that he can't afford to
kick anyone out because he is barely surviving.
The kids here are interesting to watch, because they remind one of those ghetto
movies like "Boyz in the Hood" or some such thing. There are a lot of kids who
buy into that gang culture, who "hang out". And they are sexist: these
teenagers sit on the street corner and call people "Ho's", just because they
have nothing better to do. I definitely feel sorry for any female who has to
grow up here: they are continually abused both in and out of the schools. Most
the males here are dingy, including the younger ones. They run around in
hightop shoes and baseball caps, and they have no idea how they can escape
their culture. They are reduced to gang members, and once they are born into
that world, there is no escape. Now we do not have a lot of gang activity in
the sense that the States does, so we do not have to fear getting killed in a
drive by shooting or anything of that nature. But the culture is still there,
although the weapons may not be.
Speaking of gangs, I must tell you about the Guardian Angels. This gang of
thugs has invaded our neighbourhood and won't leave us alone, supporting their
habit of oppression in the name of protecting the neighbourhood. They are
recruited from within the neighbourhood, and they are trained in various
combat skills (they say its self-defence), and given army pants, a white
t-shirt, and a red jacket and red beret. These guardian angels can't do
anything, ie. they are not supported by the police, so they just act menacing.
They will stand on a street corner in groups of 10 or 12, or you will see
them marching up and down the main street. This is supposed to send a message
to Mr. Drug dealer to get out of our neighbourhood, but I think that this is a
rationalization for the urge in people who join the Guardian Angels to act
like thugs. But like most bullies, nobody can do anything about them, because
they act on terror and not on any real action. The police cannot touch them,
because they have not been caught doing anything criminal. It is not a crime
in Parkdale to terrorize the neighbourhood with your menacing presence.
Parkdale is an adventure, filled with various people with varying degrees of
criminality. But it is real, which is something you can't say about
Mississauga. You don't feel like anything is artificial here, because who
would want to create such a shitty place? People are real, the buildings are
old, and the community is solid. That is what makes Parkdale good. And that
good overrides the apparent danger in living here or the noise or the crazy
people walking the streets. Crazy people are better than cops, and poor people
are much easier to get along with than rich people. I do not feel like I am
getting my hands dirty, that I have to put up with the community. I would
rather live here, I would choose to live here over a more upper-class suburban
neighbourhood. Why? Because I hate feeling like I have to compete through
wealth. I hate neighbourhoods where neighbours try to outdo each other in
their Christmas light displays. In Parkdale, nobody has the time or money to
compete, and people just don't care. You can be rich here, but people don't
care about that either. It is a neighbourhood that is no centred around
materialistic needs, a neighbourhood where the amount of money one makes
matters little to your day to day living. There are people who live in
Parkdale who make more than $100,000 per year, but they receive no special
status in the neighbourhood for doing so. They may have their own status
symbols, like gold cutlery or something of that nature, but the community sees
nothing of this and doesn't ask about it. People neither brag nor complain
about it: they just survive in their own meager way. People who are trying to
get ahead should not live here, for the nonchalance that people show here
would drive them crazy, but for people who realize that materialistic success
is only a measure of how much time has been wasted on shopping for trinkets,
Parkdale is heaven.
--
roasleen:ac174
