TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 45



Winter had moved haltingly into Spring.  Hyacinths and daffodils were pushing up into the watery sunlight—almost reluctantly, it seemed to Linc Ford, as if they simply couldn’t face one more annual incarnation of floral rapture.  It gets more and more anomalous, Linc decided, to be beautiful in an increasingly indifferent world.  For him, even the new bulbs seemed a little abashed at being harbingers of the bright new season.
     It was Austin-Healey time again—Linc didn’t like to drive the car through the salt-encrusted winter streets—and now his heart leaped up along with the perfect little red vintage sports car, as it came thrashing up the ramp of the underground garage of the condo he shared with fashion model Coal Blackstone.  The car, now having caught the scent of the spring air—at least this is how Linc saw it, given, as he was, to anthropomorphizing everything—sprang out into the street, made an exuberant left turn, and careered along King Street West, heading (the car having correctly read Linc’s mind) up to Bloor Street for a Greek coffee and a heavy slab of custard in phyllo pastry at the Athens-Astoria restaurant.
     He hadn’t seen Peter, the restaurant’s owner, for months.  For way too many months.  He loved visiting with him.  Whatever was bothering him or worrying him was always salved and smoothed away by his old friend’s endless tales of his days as a cook on a Greek freighter, all of them accompanied by lashings of Peter’s thick, rich coffee and slices of his soothing, anodyne custard pastry.  Mother’s milk! thought Linc. 
     He parked the Austin-Healey in the only place he could find—a block away—and strolled over to Peter’s.  He noticed that the window box running along beneath the big front window was already sparsely planted with perky yellow marigolds.  Peter always said he liked their spicy, acrid smell.
     The genial marigold man saw him and met him in the doorway. 
     “You’re being a bit stingy with the marigolds, aren’t you Peter?”  Peter grinned.
     “They bush out!” he assured Linc.  “Come on in, I make new coffee.”
     They passed the steam tables, already rich—though it was only late morning—with the day’s offerings.  There was a huge pan of moussaka—golden brown béchamel sauce on top, richly juicy underneath, down where the sliced potatoes, slices of eggplant and layers of ground lamb resided.  Next to it was an equally large pan of pastitsio—more toasty, semi-blackened bechamel, under which lurked layers of pasta and spicy ground beef.  And there were the usual—delectable—outrigger dishes: green beans in tomato sauce, Peter’s roasted potatoes, glistening in olive oil and tufted with sprigs of rosemary and oregano, fava beans stewed with tomatoes and onions, and the inevitable platter of dolmades---which Peter made better than anyone.  Linc hadn’t felt hungry when he got to Peter’s, but now he was ravenous.
     “So how’s Coal?”
     Linc ceased his lascivious reverie about Peter’s votive food long enough to convey to him that Coal was fine.
     “Still beautiful?” Peter asked puckishly.  Linc nodded.
     “Outrageously.”
     “That‘s good,” said Peter, filling two cups with strong Greek coffee.  “You what custard?”
     “You know what I’d really like,” Peter replied, “even if it’s a bit early for it?  A big helping of pastitsio, with some green beans!”
     Peter beamed. 
     “Not too early!  It is never too early for pastitsio.  Never  too late either!”  He went around to the other side of the steam table and sawed off a big square of the stuff, sliding it onto a warm plate.  Then he shovelled a hearty serving of beans in tomato sauce onto the plate beside the caked pasta, and set it heavily before Linc.
     “Kali oreksi!” said Peter proudly.
     “Which means?” asked Linc, cutting into his pistatsio.
     “Linc, you going to have to learn some Greek.  It means ‘hearty appetite,’ ‘enjoy your food,’ you know….” 
     “Like bon appetite,” said Linc, forking some beans.
     Peter sighed heavily.
     “I guess so, Linc.  But what you say sounds so weak.  So untrue.  Like you don’t want anybody to enjoy anything.  There’s no passion in these words.”
     “It’s French,” said Linc, taking a second forkful of pastitsio and thinking that he’d never eaten more delicious food in his entire life.
    “Oh well,” said Peter, taking as sip of his coffee, “that explains it.”
     “But,” Peter added, “I think you didn’t come to see me just for the pastitsio?”
     “That’s true,” Linc admitted, “though the pastitsio was uppermost in my mind.”
    “And so what is lowermost in your mind?” Peter asked him.
    Linc swallowed some thick coffee and returned his cup to its saucer.
    “I’ll tell you,” he said.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 44



Fashion model Coal Blackstone lay naked in the arms of her photographer-lover, Lincoln Ford—this was one of their weeks to be together—who was, curiously, fully dressed in jeans and his Givenchy Mechanical Graphic Print shirt, a shirt that made him look as if he were wearing interlocking planes of circuit-board.
     Coal ran a tapering index finger from button to button down his chest, pausing at his belt buckle.
     “Why do you like this shirt?” she asked him.
     “For the same reason I like you,” he replied.
     “For its complexity, then?” she laughed.  “For its rationality?  Its dazzling specificity?”
     Linc smirked and gave her bare shoulders an affectionate teddy-bear squeeze.
      “Because I find it funny,” he grinned.
     “It makes you look robotic.”
     “And we both know how far from the truth that is,” he said, stoking her shining blue-black hair tenderly.
     Coal poked him with unnecessary vigour in the stomach.  He was just going to poke her back when the Samsung Galaxy S4 on his night table rang. 
     “It’s for you,” he said handing her the device, “It’s your friend Joy.”
     “Joy? At this hour?”
     “She sounds very upset.”
     “Hi Joy,” said Coal.  “Is there something the matter?”
     Linc signed her a declaration that he was going to the kitchen to make espresso.  She nodded at him and smiled encouragement.
     “Haven’t you seen the news or looked at your phone or read this morning’s paper or anything?”
     “No.  Linc and I were out late last night and we just woke up.  Why, what’s wrong?”
     Yesterday, just before noon, somebody tried to run Cass down with a car—a big black limousine.”
     “Is he alright?”
     “He’s fine, by some miracle or other.  But the car clipped one of his aides, and he’s in the hospital.”
     “Did anybody notice what kind of a car it was?” Coal asked her.  It was a question Joy found marginal enough to be irritating.
     “Cass knew.  He said it was a black 1956 Chrysler Imperial.  He likes cars and so he knew.  He said it was the one with the gun-sight taillights, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
     “Well, it’s just that those cars are pretty rare,” Coal told her.  “Listen, is Cass feeling well enough for me to see him.  Or is he too shaken en up?”
     “No, he’s okay.  I’m sure he’d like to talk with you.  I’ll set up a time and phone you back.” And she hung up.
     Just then, Linc came back into the bedroom, carrying a small silver tray which bore two tiny cups of espresso.  And two miniature biscotti. 
     “Anything amiss?” he asked her, setting the tray on the might table.
     “The Mayor almost got run over.”
Linc laughed. 
     “He really ought to look where he’s going!”
     Coal took a sip of espresso and a nibble of biscotti.
     “That’s not what I meant,” she told him.


     Michael woke up staring up at the exuberant figure of Modulor Man, in the Le Corbusier lithograph May had hung over the bed.  Michael gazed in admiration at the figure’s noble hand raised high over his head in…what? Michael wondered.  Defiance?  Defiance of some onrush of mediocrity rumbling towards him out of the future?
     May rubbed her eyes gently and sat up, her long, straight, ink-black hair drifting slowly down over her creamy shoulders, arms and breasts.  Michael found he was all-too-easily able to disengage from his bout of Corbusier-rapture.  He looked at May and couldn’t quite believe the endless delicacy of which she was composed.
     “The nakedness of woman is the work of God,” Michael intoned smoothly, giving her a low-comedy kiss on the top of the head.  “Good morning, Naked Woman.”
     May smiled sleepily.
     “Who wrote that line about the nakedness of woman?” she asked him.
     “William Blake.  It’s in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
     “Do you think It’s true?’ May asked him through a decorous yawn.
     “No question.”
     “Does Blake say anything about the nakedness of Man?’ she asked, all the while reaching slowly, questingly, down under the duvet to his belly, then lower, letting her hand rest, with apparent innocence, just above the reach of his now pulsing cock.  Michael managed a strangled reply.
     “No,” he told her.
     “Oh” said May, in mock disappointment. “Well, that doesn’t seem fair.”
     I guess not,” Michael ventured, wishing and not wishing that she’d move her hand either upwards or more purposefully downwards. 
     “I think he felt men were simply beneath his notice.”
     “Imagine,” murmured May, first kissing his cheek for what seemed to Michael an inordinately long time, and then giving him a short but delectable, soft, open-mouthed kiss. After which, she sprang back from him, her dark eyes still full of purpose.  Michael felt as if she’d suddenly cut off his oxygen supply.
     “Duty calls!” she said briskly.
     “It does?” said Michael, trying very hard to recalibrate his priorities.
     “I have to get dressed, I have to eat two slices of buttered toast with cottage cheese, and drink some black coffee. Then I have to go to school and learn more about becoming an architect!”
     “Listen,” Michael told her, “stay here in bed with me and together we’ll stare hard at your beautiful Le Corbusier, and get very familiar with his Modulor, and the ways in which he recommended the use the human body as a tool of measurement, and in a couple of hours, after we’ve measured each other with great and delectable  thoroughness—following Corb’s lead—we’ll have given each other more architectural adrenalin by noon than any College in the world can provide!  What do you say?”
     “Michael Michael,” she said wonderingly.
     “Michael Michael what?”
     “You must have something you have to do today as well?”
     Michael thought for a moment, trying to remember.  Then he did—and wished he hadn’t.
     “There is something?” asked May, beginning to prepare the coffee.
     “Yes,” he told her glumly.  “I’ve got to go and see this brutish artist who paints like an Old Master/”
     “He does?” she asked him, pouring coffee into two petal-thin cups. 
     “He really does.  It’s improbable, but true.”
     “I wish I were going with you.”
     Michael groaned audibly at the whole idea.
     “No you don’t” he assured her.

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 43




Just as His Worship Mayor Cass Tamburlaine was about to take the first steamy bite of Chili-dog, he noticed, almost out of the corner of his eye, a long black car screaming along Queen Street, approaching at an unusually high speed from the east. 
     Cass didn’t think much about it—except how there were never any cops around when you needed them—until the car suddenly veered onto Nathan Phillips Square, raising a cloud of pigeons, and, narrowly missing a woman out strolling with a baby carriage, hurtled along the sidewalk in front of the long stretch of chip-wagons, where its front fender clipped the shoulder of Cass’s aide, Jeremiah Flood, catapulting him high into the air, his strawberry-petroleum sundae arcing into the air above his head like a vanilla shooting star.
     Cass had instinctively flattened himself against Maximilian’s chip-truck and watched in panic as the huge black car—its windows tinted black as well—hurled itself by him at what must have been seventy miles an hour, scraping along the side of the aluminum truck next to Maximilian’s and them bouncing back out onto the street, where it somehow negotiated a sharp left turn at York Street and disappeared.
    “A Chrysler Imperial!” thought Cass, his terror turning into outrage, his recent danger now reorganizing itself as nostalgia.  “A 1956 Chrysler Imperial!” he repeated wonderingly, as if he has just been sideswiped by three tons of black metal ghost.
     Maximilian suddenly reappeared at the window of his truck 
     “What the hell was that?” he asked Cass.
     “A 1956 Chrysler Imperial—the one with the gunsite taillights.  You never see them anymore!”
     “I wish I hadn’t seen this one.” Laughed Maximilian.
     “Call for an ambulance, Max,” said Cass.  “I think Jeremiah’s in a bad way.”      

TORONTO: A NOVEL—Chapter 42



“But don’t you want to see Fish?  It’s possible it’s actually your dog I’ve got,” Coal Blackstone told Bliss Carmen over the phone.
     There was a lengthy silence.
     “Yeh maybe,” said Bliss.
     “Who’s that on the phone?” Homer Rubik asked her, not looking up from a Massacre of the Innocents to which he was carefully adding lurid details.  “I told you, I don’t want anyone coming here!”
     “But that might be Fish she’s been looking after!” Bliss said to him.
     “Just tell her to email you the dog’s picture.”

    ******************************************

     His Worship Cass (“The Mass”) Tamburlaine—for that’s what the press was calling him now—decided that, seeing how it was getting to be late morning and time for a little pre-luncheon snack, he would leave his office and stroll across Nathan Phillips Square to the wagon-train of chip-wagons stretched along Queen Street in front of City Hall where, as he had so often done before, he would conduct, with a couple of his cronies, a fast-food crawl from truck to truck, moving judiciously along the length of this mobile smorgasbord of deep-fried things, until he had grazed to his satisfaction.
     “Hand-cut fries,” he murmured to the crony on his immediate right, a portly middle-aged man with a handlebar moustache, whose name, Cass was reasonably sure, was Robert Stackbolt.
     “What’s that, Cass?” asked Robert Stackbolt.
     “It’s a nice phrase.”
     “What is?”
     “Hand-cut fries.  Something homey and…cottage-industry about it.”
     Robert Stackbolt murmured his assent.
     Cass, Robert Stackbolt and three other indistinguishable flunkies in grey suits and beige spring raincoats, were just passing the Henry Moore sculpture majestically moored in front of City Hall 
     “And ‘chili-dog.’
     “Pardon, Cass?”
     “Another heart-warming name.”
     “Oh.  Yeh, right.”
     “Smacks of the comic, somehow.  I mean ‘dog’ is sort of funny anyhow, and then when you hook it to ‘chili,’ it starts to get a bit goofy, wouldn’t you say?”
     Yes, I suppose it does,” Robert Stackbolt replied.  “I don’t usually give much thought to that kind of thing.”
     They had now reached the Queen Street curb, and Cass was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.  The flotilla of food trucks pulled up to the sidewalk seemed to spread their welcoming, encompassing arms to him like old friends.  The deep-fry cooks within each wagon leaned out into the bright sunny morning and hailed him as a fellow fried-food traveler.
     “Good morning, your Worship!” cried out the grizzled man in the first truck.  “What’s your pleasure this fine day?”
     “Good morning, Maximilian!” boomed Cass.  “Fryer all charged up?”
     “Ready to serve your every deep-fry need!” Maximilian boomed back.  “What’ll it be, your Highness?”
    By now Cass’s cronies had caught up with him and a few of them were gazing in some alarm at the vast number of the Vulcan-like fast-food forges stretched out along the street. 
     “You guys hungry?” Cass asked them.
     There were rumblings of indecision.  Robert Stackbolt announced quietly that he might see his way clear to go for a hot dog.
     “Give me a chili dog, Maximilian!” boomed Cass. “And a large Coke.  And a large fries,”
     “Good choices,” grinned Maximilian, turning away then to prepare Cass’s heart-stopping pre-prandial snack.  Most of the others ordered coffees.  One, a vanilla-coloured aide named Jeremiah Flood, walked two trucks to the east and bought himself a large strawberry sundae.  Cass watched him out of the corner of his eye and over the top of his Styrofoam tray of crackling golden foods.
     “Hey Jeremiah!”
     “Yes Cass?” replied Jeremiah, steering his frozen tower of soft ice cream and florescent red sauce to a nearby bench.
     “You know what that stuff is, right?” 
     Jeremiah acknowledged that he really wasn’t too sure.
     “Petroleum!” Cass told him, a huge boyish satisfaction gurgling in his voice.
     “Whatdyamean?” asked Jeremiah Flood.
     “It’s not ice cream.  It’s an edible petroleum product.” 
     “What’s an edible petroleum product?” Jeremiah asked him.
     “I’m fucked if I know,” Cass answered, with a hearty guffaw.  “Another triumph of science, wouldn’t you say?”
     Jeremiah stuck his pink plastic spoon into the petroleum and heaved a sigh so total he almost dribbled red neon sauce on his tie.
     “So I guess I shouldn’t eat it.”
     “Nonsense my boy!” crowed Cass.  “It’s ingenious.  It’s inventive! It’s contemporary.  Ice cream is a 19th century treat.  But we live in the present!!  The urban present!  Eat up, enjoy!!”
     Jeremiah picked up his spoon again and dutifully plunged it into the vanilla oil fields resting on his lap.  Cass smiled at him encouragingly.
     “Well?” Cass asked him.
     “Good,” mumbled Jeremiah, reeling from brain-freeze and wishing he could lie down.