====================================================== 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