As I neared the building on a corner of a street near Parliament and Queen, I saw that the most recent sign for the place had been taken down and was propped up against part of a brick wall that was clearly in the process of demolition. The sign, which was still pristine, said Wholeness Spirit Center. It showed an eagle—a very benign eagle—with wings spread, depicted against a stylized circle with its four quarters representing all the peoples of the earth: red, white, yellow and black.
Seeing this sign and the half-demolished building, I started to cry again. I had to stop this, not only for my own sanity, but because an old man standing on a street corner crying is just asking for it.
Thankfully nobody saw me. I collected myself and started to explore, being careful not to trip on the rubble. Except for a few workers on the site, I didn’t see anybody at first.
Then I heard voices coming from down an alley behind the building. I had to climb over bricks and boards and hunks of smashed concrete as well as the spilled contents—including rotting food—of a dumpster that been tipped either by the workers or by people looking for a meal.
After nearly breaking my neck tripping over a bent rusted pipe and a discarded filing-cabinet drawer, I finally came upon four men who were, despite the coolness of the afternoon, sitting on the pavement and leaning their backs against the building next door to the construction.
I didn’t know whether I should be flattered that they recognized me at once. I could see that they couldn’t possibly have ever been in good enough shape to attend Queenie’s funeral, but I was surprised when they offered their clumsy but sincere condolences.
“Sorry, Your Honor,” one of them said in a slurred voice, sticking out his hand for me to shake. It was covered with oozing red and yellow sores. I couldn’t afford to recoil if I was going to get anywhere in my investigation. I held out my own hand….
“Yeah,” said another, rising awkwardly as, I was sure, a sign of respect. “She was a lady and they don’t make ‘em like that, anymore. That’s for damn sure.”
I nodded. And I stooped down to meet them on their own level, if only to prevent them from having to make the obviously difficult effort to stand up unsupported.
But I couldn’t bring myself to actually sit on the ground, though, in a flash, I remembered how it felt to sleep on the pavement without a second thought.
Gradually, respecting the way of the street, I began a slow conversation with these men.
“How’s it going down here?” I asked.
They all laughed. “It’s goin’, man. It’s always goin’….”
“You heard about the Juicer?” One of them said.
“Course he did, you idiot,” another answered. “He was Queenie’s favorite, though only God knows why.” He gave the matter some thought. “Still,” he finally said, “it’s a damn shame what they did to him. He was an asshole, but he didn’t deserve to die right when he finally got a home and all….”
“Remember that time he robbed a nun? Took her purse or something?”
All four of the men found this recollection fairly hilarious. “Yeah, and Queenie made him sit with her at her computer until she found the nun’s phone number and made him take the thing back to some convent or something like that.”
“And,” another added to the story, “When the nun saw him coming, she was afraid to answer the door. She didn’t have no credit cards in that purse or maybe she already cancelled them. Anyway, she talked through the door. She told him to keep the purse and whatever was in it. She said she didn’t need it anymore.”
“Queenie said it was an ‘act of charity,’” someone commented. “But I think that nun didn’t want to touch anything the dirty old Juicer had touched!”
This, of course, was cause for further laughter, to which I felt obligated to add my own guffaws.
“Yeah, what happened to that Juicer is a damn shame. Way worse than he deserved.”
I kept my tone level and my voice low. I also shifted position. My knees were killing me, squatting as I was, “What do you figure really happened?” I said.
For the first time, I felt they were looking at me as if I were some sort of outsider, as if they knew things about this whole “case” that they didn’t think it best to let me in on.
“Who knows?” one said, and they all shrugged their shoulders simultaneously as though they’d practiced the gesture.
I waited for a minute. Then I dove right in. “What about the police? Think they had anything to do with it?”
I watched their faces. They didn’t look at me or at each other. In fact, they seemed to be staring at the air in front of their eyes.
“There’s good and bad,” somebody offered.
Silence.
Behind us, construction workers started jackhammering in a way that set me shaking. I wasn’t going to be able to stay here much longer. My whole body was starting to revolt. In a minute, it was going to refuse to take the abuse of being cold, hunkered down, cramped and doing something that was rapidly proving useless.
I stood up and so did three of the four men. I got the feeling the noise was bothering them as much as it was bothering me. We started down the alley toward the street, but just as I took a step to avoid the man who was still sitting against the building, I felt him tug on my pant leg. He gestured and I leaned down again.
“Listen,” he said, “Queenie thought those cops killed him somehow. You know how many crazy people they killed in the last little while?”
I nodded. There had been three in the very recent past, including one unfortunate young man, armed with a small knife, who had been alone in an empty streetcar surrounded by a cloud of officers, one of whom just let loose and shot him dead on the spot for no reason that anyone was convinced of.
“Seems like the cops are damn scared of the crazies….” I offered, in what I felt was a language not my own. “What’s their game, anyway?”
From the rotten teeth and unwashed body rose an odor that I recognized, a certain smell of the street, a combination of long-dried perspiration, rotted food, unwashed everything. I hadn’t smelled it in years, but I knew it. It was the smell of desperation, of defeat, of the freedom of never having to worry about being clean again. It made me sad and it made me sick. I pulled away, but I believed he had something to tell me, and I leaned down again toward his garbage-can mouth.
Too late. His eye caught what mine did. At the entrance to the alley slumped another male homeless person—not one of the ones who’d been there earlier. This man was dressed in even scuzzier rags than the four, but the minute he showed up, my man shut up.
Because he knew, as I did, too, that this was no homeless person. This was a plain-clothes cop.
CHAPTER SIX
I left the alley, thinking I might as well just go home, but old habits die hard and I found myself wandering the alleys near Queen Street.
I was surprised how little had changed in some ways. I could still tell the spots that would be good for curling up for a night’s sleep in a doorway if it came to that.
But for the most part, the city had been transformed in the ten or fifteen years in which I, myself, had been transformed.
Gone were the old wooden porches that a rat or a man could crawl under for shelter on a night when it was too rainy to sleep on the sidewalk. The porches were gone. The houses they had graced were gone. Whole streets where those houses had stood—sometimes for nearly a hundred years—were gone, too.
In their place stood what in another city would be called skyscrapers. Here they were just called condos. They rose from the sidewalks in crystal magnificence, as though ordinary concrete—let alone wood or even stone—were not good enough for them to be made of.
Their ground floors boasted—according to signs on the not-yet-completed buildings—that the “best in retail” was soon to arrive. Which meant that the little neighborhood shops, often run by families, the skip-out-at-any-hour-for-a-carton-of-milk stores, the newspaper vendors, the lottery-ticket selle
rs, were gone forever, replaced by slick international fashion outlets.
There were no doorways to huddle up in in these buildings, but even so, there were plenty of doormen standing around just in case….
As I walked, I could feel the cool wind of the coming autumn on my cheeks. It suddenly occurred to me that I had forgotten to shave for the past few days. I was stunned, embarrassed. But then I thought that not shaving now, when my beard was nothing but white fuzz, wasn’t same as it had been when I’d had a good, dark beard. Who would even notice my face now?
And as I thought this, that awful feeling at the bottom of my stomach came back. The feeling that was starting to tell me a hundred times a day that Queenie would have noticed how I looked, that Queenie would have understood my consternation at seeing our old city of wood and brick, like the bricks my father laid, disappear.
Maybe I staggered. I don’t know. But I caught myself, breathed deeply and walked on.
So, then, autumn. I remembered the preparations we used to make on the street and in the valley for the coming of winter. I had now lived in a proper apartment long enough to have forgotten a lot of the scrambling for cardboard and plastic and discarded cloth that had filled our October and early November days.
The thought reminded me, though, that I needed to see Jeffrey, my son, and to check on his plans for the winter in the Village in the Valley, the unique homeless shelter that he and I had built together.
As I meditated on these things, I began to lose track of where I was. Suddenly, I heard my name. I turned to see two men whom I recognized as volunteers at a downtown food bank, one of the many projects that Queenie supported and that gave jobs to her “graduates,” as she liked to call former clients who had beat the street.
“Ellis,” one of the men said, “I wanted to talk to you at Queenie’s funeral but you were surrounded.” I’d met this man before. He was about forty, strapping, handsome, but he had a mark that ran from the edge of his left eyebrow all the way to his chin. I knew it had to be from a long-ago knife battle, a constant reminder of his past. “She was wonderful and I’m so sorry we lost her so soon.”
“Thanks, Sam,” I said to him, taking his hand and noting the power of his handshake. “I miss her.”
He nodded. After a moment’s silence, he said, “What are you doing down here?”
“I’m just checking a few things out,” I said. “You have time for a coffee?”
“Sure. Just got off shift.” He nodded toward his companion. “Mind if he joins us?”
The other man fell into step beside us. I didn’t know him, but I figured if he and Sam had known Queenie, the chances were that they had known the Juicer, too. As far as getting information about him, my little trip downtown had been an exercise in maximum futility. Maybe these two had something I could use. The thought made me a little nervous, as if I were falling back into my old mystery-solving mode. As I said, I didn’t want to go there.
As it turned out, it only took a couple of coffees to get both these two to open up.
“A lot of people had the wrong idea about the Juicer,” Sam offered without my even asking. “He was big—not muscles—fat big and,” he smiled, “I’m sorry to say pretty ugly. A lot of guys think it’s cool to be bald today. But the Juicer, he had been bald since he was a teenager. Something wrong with his head.”
The other guy snorted, but he didn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” Sam went on, “he was mostly completely non-violent.” He smiled, “Some of the women at the shelter used to call him ‘Pussy Cat’. He’d pretend to be mad, but you could tell he liked the attention.”
“I heard he was a favorite with Queenie,” I said. “How did the other people who lived at the shelter take that? Do you think they were resentful?”
“Resentful? What do you mean?”
“Well,” I answered. “Maybe they figured the Juicer was getting special treatment. Maybe they thought that Queenie was being unfair.” The very thought of that made the words stick in my mouth, but if I was going through all this trouble to get information, I knew I’d just better keep trying to get it.
“No.” Sam shook his head. “Nobody ever thought that Queenie was unfair. She just happened to bring out the best in the ugly old Juicer and other people caught on and treated him better because of it.”
“What happened to change things?”
“Them damn homeless tickets,” Sam’s companion piped up.
“Homeless tickets?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “Homeless tickets. What happens is the cops can give out tickets to people just for being on the street—just for having no place to live. I don’t know how much each ticket is for. Thank God I never got one myself. But I do know they mount up. And some cops give a ticket every day, seeing as a person is homeless every day…”
“Damn lousy shit-eating bags of crap…” Sam’s friend offered. Presumably his view of the Toronto police.
Sam smiled, “Something like that,” he said.
I had never heard of homeless tickets. I decided to ask Jeffrey about them as soon as I got down to the valley.
“So,” I asked, “what did the homeless tickets have to do with the Juicer?”
“The thing about the homeless tickets is, as I said, they mount up. When they get to a certain number, the cops hand them over to a collection agency, you know, people whose business is to put the screws to people who owe money. And those collection agents are pretty scary dudes.”
“Damn assholes,” his friend added.
“What happened with the Juicer is this. He lived in the shelter for a long time—maybe more than a year. Queenie helped him to fill out an application for what they call ‘permanent housing’. Nothing special about that. It was something the shelter workers did for clients all the time. Only for the Juicer, Queenie filled it out herself. I know this because he bragged about it.
“And maybe that’s the reason he found an apartment he could live in with government help and all that right away. The old guy was so excited we thought he’d piss himself.”
“Probably did,” came the chorus.
“He went down to see the place with Queenie and they came back to the shelter to start planning about when he could move there and how he could get some furniture and where he could buy groceries and things like that. You could just tell how excited the Juicer was.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked. “I thought you worked at the food bank?”
“Right. I do. But I still did volunteer work at the shelter. You got to give back….”
“Of course. So what happened next?”
“Queenie and the Juicer went back to the new apartment one more time. When they got back to the shelter, the shit hit the fan. There was a man waiting for them. He was from the collection agency the cops had given the Juicer’s homeless tickets to. They told the Juicer that if he didn’t give them eight thousand dollars, they were going to turn him over to the police and that he was going to end up in jail.”
I was stunned. “Can this be possible?”
“Check it out, dude,” said the companion.
“Unfortunately yes,” said Sam. “Actually, a lot of us figured the Juicer might have been in jail before. You never know. Somebody said he’d been held by the cops a couple of times in the not too distant past. Again, not a big surprise. You have to expect to meet a con or two in our line of business.”
Both he and his friend laughed. They had a dark sense of humor as did everybody who beat the street in my experience.
“That’s when the Juicer lost it,” Sam said. “He went completely berserk. He was screaming and dancing around like a total nut bar. It got so bad they had to call 911. They showed up right away and hauled him off in an ambulance. And that’s how he ended up in the hospital and a few days later tried to escape and went even wilder and got beaten to death by four cops.”
“Damn buggers.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was a sweet early autumn night, and
as I walked from the garage to the door of my apartment building, I could feel a breeze that seemed to rise out of the valley behind the building as if the river down below were breathing.
I was totally exhausted from the first day of my investigation. My first real attempts at keeping my promise to my gone love. What had I learned? Nothing as far as I could see.
I took off my “work clothes” and threw them in the laundry, making sure the machine was set to the highest temperature. Then I took a scalding shower. At first I felt clean. Then he I felt guilty. I glanced around our lovely living room with its four walls of bookcases, its mahogany tables, its leather chairs. Who did I think I had become?
I didn’t try to answer that question. Instead, I decided to check the messages on my phone and if there was nothing pressing, just to go to bed.
“Dad, you’ve got to return my messages. Either email me or phone, but I’ve got to know how you’re doing and where you are. Call me as soon as you get this, or I’ll worry all night long.”
That was Ellen, my daughter. To tell the truth, I was afraid of her. She treated me like an ancient. She acted as though I were in my nineties instead of what I really was, which was seventy-one. And in full possession of my faculties. I had a horrid image of her storming my apartment, kidnapping me and placing me in some facility—or worse—in her house. The only consolation there was her wonderful son, Angelo, my namesake and heir.
The second message was from Jeffrey. Short and to the point. Jeffrey, unlike just about anybody else in our family, was no talker. “Call me, Dad , or come down.”
Both of my children were constantly warning me that if I didn’t carry my cell phone with me at all times, some dire happening was sure to do me in and they would have no way of knowing that I was in trouble.
But to tell the truth, I never felt comfortable having valuables close at hand when I was out. This meant that the pocket I felt compelled to use for the phone was so secure, so inaccessible that by the time I dug out the phone, whoever had been calling had long since given up and hung up, presumably in disgust.
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