There Goes The Neighbourhood
And Other Short Stories
By Jeff Roulston
Short Fiction
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ISBN: 978-0-9920678-4-7
Copyright 2014 by Jeff Roulston
Contents
There Goes The Neighbourhood
A Story To Tell
The Birthday Party
About The Author
Other Books By Jeff Roulston
Connect With Jeff
There Goes The Neighbourhood
Teens' arrests end park protest
It was a strange sight Thursday morning at Roywood Park, tucked in behind two residential high-rises at the corner of Victoria Park Ave. and York Mills Rd. Two teenagers sat up on the rims on one of the park's two basketball courts, their feet dangling. Parks and recreation workers looked up at them; one talked into his cell phone, the others leaned against a truck with brand new basketball rims and backboards laying in the oversized tailgate, waiting, laughing and shaking their heads.
"They're going to take down our rims," said one of the teens, 17-year-old Jerome Wright, in a phone call to the Mirror an hour and a half earlier, "and we're not gonna let them do it!"
Wright said he's been playing basketball at this court since he moved to the neighbourhood as a nine-year-old. He went to play that morning and saw city workers with their new white backboards and orange rims and asked what was going on and they told him they were replacing the old grey steel goals with the new ones. Wright said he tried to explain that the old goals were better, and asked if he could call their supervisor to make his case, but they wouldn't listen.
"When my guy told him what we were doing, he went crazy," said Joe Perruzza, the crew supervisor, in between an on-again, off-again cell phone conversation with his supervisor. "He started ranting and yelling and trying to intimidate my workers, who were just following my orders. And I'm just following orders too," he said, pointing at his cell phone.
"Intimidating?" Wright laughed out loud from his perch. "I'm seventeen! They're grown men with a power tools and I'm intimidating! They’re scared of Black people," he accused. "They watch too much T.V."
Wright is Black—his parents are from the Caribbean, he said—but with a fair complexion, and said last he checked he was six-foot-four and almost 200 pounds with an afro that adds two or three inches to his height, but also accentuates the thinness of his frame.
He said he ran home to his family's duplex around the corner and flipped through the phone book hoping to find someone who could stop the workers, but got only a Parks and Recreation operator who transferred him to three or four different voicemails before he gave up and rang the bell at the house next door and recruited his friend Ahmed Ramgodd, also 17, to help him foil the workers' plan. They ran back to the court and saw them warming up the saw to dig out the pole supporting the south basket.
"The Black kid boosted his little Indian friend up to the far rim and he climbed up and sat on it," Perruzza said. "Then he ran over to this net and jumped up and grabbed it and swung up there like a big monkey."
Annoyed, Ramgodd hollered from the other end of the court, "I'm not Indian, I’m Pakistani!"
"Yeah, and I'm a *expletive* monkey," Wright said. "All Black people are *expletive* monkeys!"
"This is what I've been dealing with for two hours," Peruzza scoffed as he reached to grab his bulky cell phone, which was ringing again.
The two young men were passionate, but looking at the brand new basketball goals in the back of the truck, it was hard to understand what there was to be passionate about. What was wrong with the new nets?
"Those rims suck," Ramgodd said, "look at them!" He pointed toward the second, smaller court that had been erected a year before. One rim was badly bent, the other was missing.
"I broke that one myself," Wright confessed, pointing to the bare backboard. "Not even on purpose, just in the heat of the game. Someone threw me an alley-oop and this idiot tried to undercut me and I grabbed the rim so I wouldn’t break my neck."
"I heard it crack," Ramgodd said. "It was bent so low that kids that can't usually dunk started dunking it and hanging on and it just broke off." He laughed a little, "Some kid took the rim home."
“That would never happen to these rims," Wright bragged, shaking the goal even as he sat in it, "these ones are strong!" He proceeded to rattle of the names of players from the area who had abused those very baskets with powerful dunks before going on to legendary high school, college and pro careers: Jamaal, Marvin, John, Konrad. "And these rims are still here. Why do they need to change them?"
"We identified several neighbourhood parks that needed new basketball courts and we made the effort to standardize the design in all our parks," Melissa Cullen, the Don Mills district supervisor for North York Parks & Recreation said by phone. "The goals at Roywood Park are very old and the paint wore off a long time ago. They're unsightly."
"Flimsy, broken rims are unsightly," Ramgodd said upon hearing the district supervisor's comments.
"Young Black males are unsightly," Wright yelled, "White people don't play basketball and we scare them. There's a whole conspiracy behind this."
The city workers laughed.
They have those new rims at Parkway Forest Park already, Ramgodd explained, motioning towards the highway, on the other side of which sprouted the Parkway Forest neighbourhood’s high-rise apartments. "They put them up a couple years ago and they were broken before the end of July, right before the tournament that was supposed to be the day after Caribana. And,” he went on, “they didn't put them back up until November when no one could play on them and those ones broke before school even got out for the summer this year!"
"That's why so many guys got arrested that summer," Wright said. "Some guys are serious about ball and play here or wherever else, but most were just in the streets.” He proceeded to rattle off the names of friends from that neighbourhood that made their beds at Mimico Correctional Centre for young offenders that fall: Anthony, D-Boy, Fresh Kid, Buffalo. “That’s where they want us," he preached, “in the streets, in court and in jail, not out here working hard to make something of ourselves!”
Toronto police statistics show a week-to-week rise in arrests of young offenders in the census tract including Parkway Forest both the last week of June this year and the first week of August last year, but Captain Joe Hall of nearby 33 Division would not attribute that spike to broken basketball hoops.
"Youth crime always rises in the summer," Captain Hall said by phone. "School is out, jobs for the neighbourhood's young people are few and tempers flare as the temperature goes up."
But aren't sports—especially basketball—a tool the police use to connect with youth and keep them out of trouble? The cancelled tournament Wright spoke of was the annual Cops & Kids Invitational sponsored by 33 Division.
"The basketball court and other recreation facilities are certainly among the more positive things the Parkway Forest and Roywood youth have to be involved in," Captain Hall conceded. "I certainly wish that tournament wasn't cancelled, the young people look forward to it every year."
When the police arrived nearly two hours into the “protest,” Wright began howling, "This is all we have!" The officers conversed with Perruzza and his crew for a few minutes while Wright continued from his 10-foot-high soapbox. "This is all we have! What will we do now?"
The officers didn't bother trying to coax the two teens down, instead they enlisted the crew's help to pull a ladder from the back of their truck and set it up below the rim on which Wright
sat. He was silent as one of the officers climbed the ladder with his handcuffs ready. He placed one on Wright's extended left arm.
"Nothing to say now, eh," Peruzza jabbed while his crew laughed.
"Gandhi said you have to be willing to accept your punishment when peacefully resisting an unjust law," Wright said, quieting the puzzled crew. They watched wordlessly as the officers put him in the back of one of their cruisers, which were parked on the “new” bent and broken court. Ramgodd got down from his basket without being asked and appeared to consider running off, but the other officer placed the steel bracelets on him too, and led him into the back of the other cruiser. The officers turned their vehicles around, wheeled slowly across the grass and down the curb to Roywood Drive, which ends in a cul-de-sac at the entrance to the park, and drove off. Before they'd even disappeared, a city worker had climbed the same ladder the cops had used to bring Jerome Wright down, power screwdriver in his right hand, and began to remove the rim on the north basket.
Ahmed Ramgodd was released without charge into the custody of his angry looking parents within an hour of arriving at 33 Division. "I'm dead," he said on the way out.
But Jerome Wright's parents would not come to get him, and he drank a pop for dinner and slept on a hard bench near the desk officer and wasn't released until the next morning when they realized his parents were serious about leaving him there. "My dad always told me, if yuh do what I say and yuh get in trouble I'll be there to help you," Wright said the next morning, trying to imitate his father's Jamaican accent while sitting cross-legged in the centre of “his” basketball court at Roywood Park, "but if yuh disobey me and yuh get in trouble, dohhn't look fuh me!" He laughed. His dad doesn't care for basketball. Wright said he sees it as a distraction from more important things, like school and church.
He looked toward both ends of the court. The dull steel backboards and iron, double-thick rims were gone, only new steel poles protruded from the ground, reaching up higher than the old ones before curving toward where the new white backboards will go; higher because the old poles curved about ten feet up and were bolted into the backboard at the same point where the rim bracket screwed in on the front—“that's why they were so strong," he lamented. The new poles met the backboard near dead centre of their fan shape. He'd seen one of these backboards in Parkway Forest crack at that exact spot, and right across horizontally, with the rim still bolted in. They'd kept dunking it until it broke clean off and one of the older thugs that hung around the court handed it to his 10- or 11-year-old brother to carry home, a perfectly good rim attached to half a backboard.
The day before he'd said he spent so much time at the park because he was working toward his dream of earning a scholarship to a big university in the United States. The workers laughed and shook their heads. "Yo Ram," he'd hollered at his friend sitting on the opposite basket, "aren't I the best player in the neighbourhood?" Ramgodd hesitated, as if thinking about it, before nodding yes. "Yeah," he'd spat toward the workers leaning on the truck, "I'm gonna get a free education so I don't have to work some crappy job driving around, cutting grass and crushing kids' dreams."
There was no mention of Wright or his team in the Mirror's high school sports coverage the last two years, but you could find him often in the very back of the daily papers' sports sections, where each high school score—in tiny typeface—includes the first initial and last name of each team's leading scorer. Wright said this will be his year and he's optimistic about his chances, but, he asks, what about the kids coming after him? What will they do?
"They might as well not even put the new nets up," Wright said. "Don't make no difference."
There goes the neighbourhood.
Back To Contents
A Story To Tell
Andrew sloshed the bus to a stop and opened the front door. A mother and daughter got on, their colourful hijabs wrapped tightly against the cold, followed by three boys wearing hoodies pulled over their baseball caps and an old man with a tightly packed afro covering his head. The boys had motioned for the old man to go first but he’d smiled and insisted they go ahead.
The 36 Finch West was probably the most crowded bus in the whole city, and ran through several neighbourhoods that were on the news for all the wrong things. But those neighbourhoods were made up of children and teenagers and parents and grandparents with places to go and no time to trouble him, just like where he grew up in the other end of the city. More than the crime and violence that the reporters always focused on, he saw desperation and despair: the Arab man and his two kids wearing only sandals on their feet deep into December; the teenagers dropping half-tickets they’d peeled apart to split into two, their eyes begging him not to kick them off the bus; the mothers with baby carriages packing the front half of the bus during the day when other women who can afford day care are at work.
“Good morning young man,” the old man said to Andrew in a thinning Jamaican accent. “How are you today?”
“Good morning sir,” Andrew replied. “I’m fine thanks, how are you?”
“It’s an absolutely beautiful day!” His eyes shone. “I’m blessed to be alive,” he said, “and happy to see young black men working, providing for themselves and their families. Do you have a family young man?”
“No sir, not yet,” Andrew smiled. He wondered how far the man was going.
“Not yet!” The man smiled. “That means you want one! I’m sure you’ll have a beautiful family!”
“I hope so,” Andrew laughed as he braked toward the Albion Road stop. He lowered the bus to let an elderly lady on and she squeezed past the old man. The man looked away silently as Andrew followed the road’s curve in between the Beer Store and the police station towards Kipling Avenue. The stop was packed and he looked back at the old man expectantly, but instead of retreating into the heart of the bus the man offered his feeble assistance to a young African-looking mom boarding with a baby carriage. She refused and he squeezed into the nook between the fare box and the door to let her pass before reclaiming his spot next to Andrew as several more people boarded and pushed by him. Andrew crawled through the yellow light and the bus descended under the white pedestrian bridge and down the hill to Islington Avenue.
“I was in Jamaica when I found out I was about to be a father,” the old man said. “We got married that very Sunday. I had a good job as a salesman in Kingston and my wife was a schoolteacher. My manager said he’d transfer me to another parish so I could get a home and raise my family away from the danger of the city, but instead I applied for a visa to come to Canada. My mother was already here with my younger sister Bernice and she made it sound like good jobs were growing on trees. When my wife was six months pregnant we got the call and jumped on a plane to Toronto. My mother and my wife told me to take a few weeks to get acclimated to the new country, but I said no, I need to go find a job! That was the whole reason we came here, so we could work and give that little girl in her belly more opportunities than we had: private school, music lessons, university. How could I make that happen sitting on the couch in my mother’s apartment?
“So I got out my suit and tie and hit the road, but in Canada they wouldn’t give you a job just like that. Those people acted like a Black man had never applied for a job at their company before. When I told them I’d generated hundreds of thousands in sales for my last employer they told me I’d have better luck applying for a job loading trucks or delivering parcels, that I couldn’t do any better with no Canadian experience. Let me tell you, I had ten different jobs in the three months before my daughter Chernice was born, and each of them more demeaning than the last. After a month or so I’d tell the supervisor I was leaving and he’d say I was lazy just like all the other Jamaicans. But on the first day at my eleventh job in Canada assembling furniture at a factory by Weston Road and Finch there, my daughter was born and I was so happy that I stayed there for 14 years.
“May I have a transfer please?" Two teenage boys were boarding the bus
at Ardwick, one in a down coat that was too big for him, the other wearing two or three unnecessarily long hoodies at once with a Detroit Red Wings cap over an unkempt afro. The old man nodded and smiled at them. One smiled shyly in reply, the other averted his eyes nervously.
"Those were the days that the pay you earned for a hard day’s work was enough to pay the bills. My wife stayed home to raise Chernice and went to George Brown at night to study nursing. When she finished she got a job at an old folks home and it seemed like we’d made the right choice to move here. When we had our son Charles, we moved into a house. The children played soccer, took piano lessons, went to after-school programs and went back home to Jamaica with us on holiday every year.
“Once, I worked evenings for a whole month and when I came home after my first day back on the morning shift my daughter sounded different, like a Canadian. My wife said that she'd be able to get a good job talking like that when she grew up, Charles too. But it made me feel like an alien in my own house. My wife was right though, Chernice was such a bright student and she was growing up as a Canadian no matter how much saltfish and green banana and yam we fed her. She'd never have to deal with the Canadian experience question in job interviews. She got accepted to Etobicoke High School for the Arts to study music and dance and she went away to university and became a lawyer and married another lawyer—a white man—and had half-white children and moved to a big house in Oakville that she never invites us to.” The old man sighed.
"My son was bright too, they even said he might be gifted. But for some reason they didn’t treat him the same way they treated our daughter. He loved school, but it was as if the school didn’t love him. He’d come home crying that teachers were mean to him and that other kids made fun of him and teachers did nothing to stop it. We couldn’t understand what he could have done to them and he wouldn’t tell us the truth. At parent-teacher meetings they’d show us his perfect test scores and homework, but they said he had a temper and that it would get the best of him one day. Sure enough he was suspended for fighting on the second-last day of the school year and the principal asked that he not return for grade five. Boy, I ran out of breath giving that boy licks, just long enough for him to tell me that five children had jumped him because a white girl had a crush on him. He managed to bust one boy’s lip and they went and told a teacher that he’d started the fight. I didn’t believe that other students and teachers would conspire against him like that and I gave him more licks for lying once I caught my breath.
“Then I lost my job. The supervisor gave me a paper to take to the government office to apply for Unemployment, but I told him I’d have a job within a week and I threw the paper out. But no one would hire me. They hadn’t heard of Arrow Furniture and wanted a typed up resume. I had never used a computer and I didn’t even know what a resume was. My fourteen-year-old daughter took me to the library and typed one up right in front of me and made 20 photocopies, which I carried around in a folder handing out to companies I had heard were hiring. No one called. My wife and I didn’t have any savings and we didn’t want to go back to living in an apartment so we moved into a Metro Housing townhouse back there on Kendleton Drive. It had a basement and a backyard so I was happy but my wife was embarrassed to live in housing and my daughter was too ashamed to invite her new arts high school friends over. She came home late from school every night and slept at her friends’ houses every single weekend.
“Eventually I went to the Unemployment office, but I refused to take the minimum wage jobs they tried to force on me, so they refused to give me Unemployment payments. My wife quickly tired of my stubbornness, my daughter was already smarter than I was and my son had lost all respect for me because I had let him down when he needed me. I hadn’t believed he’d been a victim at school, but he made friends quickly with the unruly boys in our new neighbourhood and he quickly turned from sheep to wolf, fighting, stealing and getting into all kinds of foolishness. His mother held me responsible for moving us to housing and for his behavior, so she told me to deal with it, but when he was arrested at twelve for burglarizing a home and stealing a car, I gave up. He never went to jail like most of those boys eventually did, but he never went to college or university either. The closest he came to accomplishing anything was when he made me two grandchildren, but he doesn’t really see them, so I never get to see them either. I went down to the basement that day and didn’t come up. I slept, drank, watched television and wasted away down there for days until I had finished off the last bottle in my liquor cabinet.
I took my first shower in a week, put on some clean clothes and walked to The Beer Store at Albion Mall. On the way out I was stopped by a young woman inviting me to her church. She was beautiful and spoke with a very posh Jamaican accent. I told her I’d come if she’d be there. She laughed and handed me a flyer. I went. She sat next to me in church and ate with me at the potluck lunch after. Talking with her made me realize that I hadn’t been listened to in months. She made me feel like someone of value. I’d known her for one day and I loved her and I felt like she loved me. I saw her the next day and the day after that and for weeks I loved her with my heart, mind, body and soul.
“Then one day my wife opened the door to the basement and said the phone was for me and it was her. She said she got my number from her call display. I didn’t even know what call display was. She asked, ‘You’re married?’ I said nothing. She said she was pregnant. I said nothing. She made this sound I’d never heard before and hung up.”
As the bus pulled up to the Sentinel Road stop the young African-looking mom walked up to the front of the bus and asked—in perfect English—how far Bathurst Street was. Andrew replied that it was past Keele and past Dufferin, so it’d be about fifteen minutes more. She thanked him and hovered just behind the old man, peering out the window into the brownish-grey whiteness. The man was silent and unmoving until the bus reached Bathurst, where he helped the young woman carry her stroller off the bus, even though Andrew had lowered the step so it was nearly even with the sidewalk. She smiled politely and thanked him and he jumped back onto the step just before Andrew pressed the button to raise it up.
He wanted to know how the story ended, but he didn’t want to ask.
“I called her the next day,” the old man said suddenly. Andrew turned and almost asked, oh yeah? But he held it in and just stared at the red light. “She told me that she really loved me, but if she had the baby, she’d move to the other end of the universe and I’d never see it.”
Green light. Andrew pressed the gas gradually and the bus puffed ahead. The man was silent again. He appeared to be in somber thought.
As they crossed over Yonge Street the old man said, “The moral of the story is not to let your pride ruin you. At church that first day with that woman I fell in love with, the preacher said something they used to say back in Jamaica, “The higher a monkey climbs, the more it gets exposed.”
They turned into the Finch subway station.
“My mother used to say that too,” Andrew remembered aloud.
“You’re mother’s a smart woman,” the old man replied. “I’m sure she’s very proud of you.”
“Thank you,” Andrew smiled.
“Thank you for listening son.” The old man placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder and shone those eyes at him again. “Thank you.”
The old man stepped off the bus and walked into the sliding glass doors and down the escalator to the subway.
Back To Contents
The Birthday Party
I looked out the peephole and swallowed hard. Breasts. Well, cleavage actually, and a long smooth neck sprouting from shoulders with long hair bouncing lightly on them, leading up to a face I didn’t recognize. It was a beautiful face but a foreign one. The face sensed my presence through the door and smiled, causing my blood to speed up and my face to warm. Who was she?
Our doorbell was broken and it more crackled than rang. I was sure my parents hadn’t heard it. I opened the door
quietly because I had a feeling I knew what was going on. “Hi,” I half-asked half-said.
“Hi,” she smiled. Wow. I was only fifteen years old and wasn’t smooth with girls at all, much less girls this pretty. I felt like her coat was open specifically to look seductive through the peephole. Damn. “This is Ramon’s house, right?”
I tried not to shush her. “Yeah, but he’s not home yet,” I answered. “I’m his little brother,” I said proudly but as coolly as I could. This happened all the time.
“Ooh, you’re cute,” she said, stepping inside. She smelled like heaven. I was used to compliments from my brother’s girls, but I really savoured this one and couldn’t hide my smile.
“Follow me,” I instructed. “I think my parents are asleep,” I added, “so be quiet.” She slipped out of her Air Max’s and I picked them up and tip-toed through the kitchen toward the top of the stairs.
My parents were not sleeping. My mom was engrossed in some cable real estate show and my dad was in his office typing something on his laptop with his two index fingers. Our house was a back-split with two bedrooms upstairs and two downstairs—mine and my brother’s. I pointed the way down, motioning for her to go ahead and I tried to follow her step-for-step so it didn’t sound like two people were descending the stairs.
“Come,” I said, heading past my room at the bottom of the steps and toward my brother’s door, which was always locked. I knew how to get it open without even making it look like it was locked—a quick jiggle and a hard push-and-turn at the same time. I went in Ramon’s room to listen to his CDs, watch his videos and “read” his magazines all the time.
“What’s your name,” she asked when we were inside the room. I looked at her quizzically. None of Ramon’s girlfriends had ever asked me my name before.
“My name’s Ricky,” I answered, catching myself. “But Ramon calls me Rick-head.”
She laughed out loud—not one of those “haha you’re a cute kid” laugh, but a genuine laugh that made her perfect hair bounce on her perfect shoulders. I’d never made a woman laugh like that and I’d be lying if I said that moment wasn’t one of the best in my life up to that point, not far behind the day my first girlfriend agreed to go steady and Joe Carter hitting that home run to win the World Series.
I was reveling in her laughter in my head and barely heard her when she said her name was Sasha. I started to stick out my shaking, suddenly clammy hand and she ignored it, threw her arms around me in a tight hug and kissed me on the cheek. My recent growth spurt had carried me past my brother’s five-feet-ten-inches, just above six-feet, so Sasha had to tippy-toe. I felt like a man, holding her while her breasts punctured my heart.
The ceiling creaked and my mom’s voice followed it.
“Ricky!”
I snapped out of the embrace I’d hoped would last forever and made for the door. “I’ll be back,” I told Sasha. “There are CD’s on the bookshelf underneath the boombox.”
I skipped steps up to the main floor and my mom was at the edge of the top flight of stairs. “Was there someone at the door?”
“Nah, I just thought I heard Ramon coming in,” I lied.
“What are you doing?”
“I was just gonna listen to a CD.”
“You need to stop listening to that foolishness your brother is always blasting,” My dad shouted from deep in his office.
Mom just rolled her eyes and walked back into the master bedroom.
I heard a key in the lock for real this time and bounded through the dining room to pull the door open for my brother.
“Yo,” he said.
“Shortie’s here,” I whispered. “Sasha.”
“Oh yeah? Where is she?” Ramon looked around the corner into the living room and peeked back into the kitchen. Usually he would give me a pound and ask something like, “Sexy, eh?”
“She’s in your room,” I told him. He rushed past me and down the stairs. I heard their voices go back and forth happily and he led her back up the stairs and up the next flight to my parents room. She smiled and touched my shoulder on her way past me.
“Mom, this is my new girlfriend Sasha,” Ramon proclaimed. Sounds of excitement and joy streamed out of the open door.
There Goes The Neighbourhood And Other Short Stories Page 1