Although I continued going to the Coffee Time at Parliament-Street I never saw Mothski again. Most likely, he was busy frightening some poor victim with his Cossack talk. I liked the coffee shop though, because it was usually empty except for the old-timers who mostly stared at each other and coughed and read the Toronto Sun. Every now and again they gazed sleepily at the tight-jeans girls who carried their purchases outside to chat and smoke in little groups. Once the orangeish girl caught me staring at a group and she looked a little angry, which gave me the idea that maybe she was jealous. Even though I never talked with her, just the idea that there was a pretty girl close-by, who was my age, gave me a nice feeling. Off and on, I would imagine that I was sitting on one of the wooden stools in Mrs. Bango’s parlour or the dry goods store that was hooked up to a rumshop, and that the old-timers were fishermen who had just returned with their catch of moonshine and kingfish and bonito, and instead of drinking coffee and staring at the Sun, they were sipping Puncheon rum and quarrelling about some alderman who never returned after the elections in spite of all the bribes they sent his way. Talking and listening and never removing the cigarette from their mouths.
Here, most of the old people ate rice puddings and drank soup with trembling spoons and nearly dead lips. There was a telephone nearby and mostly black men would come in to make calls, waving their arms and sometimes glancing at me surrounded by old-timers. Maybe they were wondering what I was doing there with all these people with brown spots on their pink faces. I pretended I was staring at the faded wall pictures of men with hockey costumes and sticks and masks posing like comic book warriors, or at the old clock that was stuck at three o’clock. Every evening a moleman came in and he too would gaze at the clock as he sipped his coffee. This moleman was neither white, black nor brown and I put him down as a cocopanyol, a mixture of everything. A few times I thought I should go over and talk with him but he was always concentrating so hard on the clock that I felt he might be mad. Sometimes when I glanced at the orangeish girl with her nice jewellery I would wonder how she might decorate the place if she was allowed to. It might be yellow and pink and orange instead of plain cream colour. She might have a picture of her father and mother smiling with each other just above the counter.
Twice a week, I would head for the food bank. My father, when he was around, never asked where the food had come from and I never bothered explaining. Maybe he felt I had bought it with Uncle Boysie’s money but one night he asked me, “You working as yet?” and when I said I wasn’t he added, “I see,” in his mocking voice. A couple days later he asked where I disappeared to every evening and I remained quiet because the coffee shop was my own little secret.
Although the old-timers never talked with me, just being around the same familiar faces every day removed some of my loneliness. But one day, one of the group, a man of about sixty with a big head, which looked like that of Christopher Plummer from The Sound of Music, said something to me in a strange language. He had never spoken with me before and I felt it was to show off to the pretty oldish lady at his side. I had never seen her there before and now the Christopher Plummer man was in a happy mood, laughing and waving around his hands as he spoke.
From then on, she was with him every evening. He began to seem slightly out of place in the gloomy group, but he would wave to me and he would say, “Yaksha mash,” or “Ko-me-chi-wa.” Though I didn’t understand what he was saying to me, his friendliness told me these were greetings of some sort, and I returned them in the Trinidadian fashion by nodding my head quickly, once. And the small pretty lady would pull at his sleeve and tell him that some day he would get into trouble for striking up conversations with perfect strangers. But she always said this loudly and with a mischievous smile, as if she was enjoying my confusion.
Soon, the Christopher Plummer man began dressing like a saga boy, with burgundy and navy blue coats and brown leather jackets and medallions around his neck, maybe to match the lady who favoured these light green and yellowish pants. They seemed so different from all the old people I had ever known, not only because of their stylish clothing but also in the way they held hands and seemed not to have a single worry in the world. Sometimes I would play my old game and place them in a Trinidadian setting and I would imagine everyone staring and mauvais-languing this grandparent couple for carrying on like carefree teenagers. Me, I was just happy to bounce up a happy face every now and again, especially after the sourness in my father’s apartment.
“So where are you from?” he asked about a week after the nice-looking lady showed up. I think this was the first English statement he made to me but before I could answer, he looked at the lady and added, “Wait a minute, let me guess.” She glanced from him to me, smiling. “India?”
“No.”
“Iran?”
I shook my head and felt some of my shyness stripping off with this game of his. I was surprised that the other old-timers just continued staring at the Sunshine Girls in the newspapers. In Trinidad, they would have joined in the game even if they didn’t understand what was going on.
“Are you sure? I had a friend from Iran who looked exactly like you. Could it be Pakistan or Afghanistan?”
“Trinidad,” I told him.
“I was wrong by just a few thousand miles, dear,” he told the lady. “And I think I know why. He’s never spoken to us. Why don’t you say something for us in Trinidadianese.” The lady whispered into his ear and he asked me, “Is bashfulness a Trinidadian trait?” I didn’t tell him that over there, bashfulness was viewed as a kind of sly weakness. A cover up for some shameful secret. Or worse, a sign of pride that was an even worse vice. Now, the old-timers seemed interested and they stared at me as if I had crawled out from a nearby hole. One of them, a short man with a red cap and a nose that resembled a big spreading yam, snorted directly at me. “Just the opposite,” I told them. “Everybody like bacchanal there.” The Plummer man leaned towards the lady and they both stared at me for a good minute or two.
While I was walking back to Regent Park on that cool day in April, I wondered for the first time how all these people on the street and in the subway I was always watching, saw me. A couple with a pram gave me the usual one-second glance. Same with a woman who peeked up from her book, and I wondered if she had made an assessment in just one second. But how could this be? How could all of them notice my clothes and shoes and expression so quickly? Unless these things were not important. In Trinidad the glances were long and questioning; they were like the silent beginning of a conversation.
As I crossed Shuter Street I thought once more of the coffee-shop lady question about bashfulness. Once Auntie Umbrella had called me “an only child” like if it was a sickness, but our old wooden house with its concrete posts, just a half mile from the sea, was sometimes crowded with neighbours, usually women who brought along their children. We would play marbles and top and zwill with flattened bottle caps, and scooch like the game in the movie Dodgeball, and hide and seek between the crotons and ginger lilies in the yard. I grew up with these friends, Guevara and Pantamoolie, and the whole batch of Lopi grandchildren. As we got older, we took these games to the Mayaro High School, and to the beach, where we added windball cricket and football and kite-cutting. At the beach too, we helped the fishermen pull in their seine nets and were rewarded with shining bonito and moonshine with their scales looking like small silvery shillings, and if the day’s catch was good, a nice thick kingfish. We cut classes from school, lackarbeech we called it, to hang out with the old coppery fishermen, not only for the little gifts but because of all the stories they told us about getting lost at sea and bouncing up Venezuelan coastguards and spending time in prison there. They told us, between their sips of Puncheon rum straight out of the bottle, about the sharks and barracudas they had caught, and tapirs that had swum out straight from the Amazon River and manatees that looked like pregnant mermaids. The most interesting stories, though, were about the smugglers who chose the nights and the rough coves to drop off their drugs and guns and tons of money.
When my mother heard from my fourth-form history teacher, Mr. Chotolal, that I was skipping school to hang out with the fishermen, she got in a real bad mood and said I was following my father’s wayward path, good and proper. Before he disappeared completely, my father had been briefly a fisherman who spent many nights and weekends at sea. And when I mentioned the fishermen’s stories to mamaguy her, she said that I was becoming an “ole-talker” just like my father.
But after a while, she had stopped complaining, even the few times I came home later than usual after a crab-catching trip in the mangrove. Maybe she was just busy with her sewing and watching her Bollywood movies from the video player Uncle Boysie had given her.
Just thinking of my Mayaro friends and the fishermen and the drunkards who would wake up the whole village with their loud greetings when they came home late in the nights from the rumshops made me sad. I wondered what Uncle Boysie was doing the same instant I was entering the housing complex, and all of a sudden, I recalled my mother’s funeral service at the Mayaro Presbyterian church and the crowd of villagers who surprised me by showing up at the cemetery half a mile from the church. These thoughts, especially of my mother sitting by the front window and sewing her clothes in the old Singer with the mournful Hindi song broken up by the machine’s clapping pedals, caused a little shock to crawl down my back; and all of a sudden, the place seemed colder and the air heavier and the traffic slower than usual. On my way to our apartment I wondered why my steps seemed so heavy and the distance so long. This mood lasted the next day and thankfully the old couple was not there in the coffee shop because I was in no mood for their scattered happiness.
They showed up the following day, though, and I think the lady must have noticed the new strain on my face because for the first time she lost her smile as her companion was joking around in one of his strange languages.
“Do you have a minute, friend?” The Christopher Plummer man gestured to an empty chair. When I sat, he let loose some foreign words in a fast shouting accent like these Japanese from Bridge over the River Kwai. The red cap man sitting with them was wearing a green blazer that made him look like an ugly macaw. He looked at me crankily before he got up with his Zane Grey western and walked shakily to the door. “Don’t mind Roy,” Christopher Plummer said. “He hates all young people. So?”
“So what?”
“You accepted my invitation. I suppose I should say, “Mum-moon. That’s ‘thank you’ in Persian.”
“How do you know all these words?” I asked the question that had been on my mind since I first heard him speak.
From his reaction, I think that was a smart question. He pulled his chair an inch or so closer to mine. “I listen to people all the time. And when I begin a conversation in their own language, they open up just like this.” He snapped his fingers. “Ja-tory!” he shouted to the orange-coloured girl who was wiping a nearby table, and when she waved to him, he told me, “See. It’s a special talent.”
“So they are all different languages?”
“You must try it sometimes.”
“First, I have to learn English properly.” I didn’t tell them how much I hated Spanish and French classes at school or of a conversation with Pantamoolie. I had told him there was nothing better than comic-book English with the gulping and sighing and constant threatening. Still, I wished I knew some of these languages now so I could impress the girl but the Plummer man didn’t give me much time to reflect on this. First he told me his name was Norbert and then he began his story about how he lived in a place called Cabbagetown. From there he had moved all over the place working as a salesman until he ended up somewhere called Brantford. He and the pretty lady were going to start some sort of Internet business to export Canadian medicine to the States. The lady didn’t say anything much, just smiling and playing with her necklace as Norbert talked a mile a minute and I wondered if she, too, was imagining this strangely named town as a place where cabbages rolled on all the streets like tumbleweed from old Westerns. And children playing cricket with the small ones and football with the bigger ones.
Norbert called out to me every evening and I soon joined the group of old-timers. From a distance they had always appeared like cows grazing and chewing their cud but I soon discovered that they had many adventures in their younger days, and had worked for a while on trains travelling through Canada. They had lived in England and other places in Europe before they landed here. I learned many other surprising facts. I discovered there were places in Canada where mostly Germans or Portuguese or Italian or Chinese lived. “This is what I like about Toronto,” Norbert told me. “Just cross the street and you are in a completely different country. Everybody’s here.”
The way he said this I imagined that all these people had come as visitors and liked the place so much they decided to stay. I pictured them leaving the ships and rushing straight for Cabbagetown, collecting a few of the vegetables on their way. I hoped Norbert would describe this strange town but Roy glanced up from his Toronto Sun to talk about a little girl who was killed while she was waiting for her friends at some nearby street. After this, everybody got quiet and Roy returned to his newspaper.
The next day I felt that he was continuing the topic as he brought up another shooting, this one between gang members. To tell the truth he made the city seem more dangerous and interesting than I had imagined. I remember Uncle Boysie telling me that Canada was so safe the policemen wore nice red outfits and rode on horses but according to Roy the country was like Gotham City with crooks around every corner. When he pushed the Sun before another old-timer and said, “Look at the faces of these thugs and see what they have in common,” I pictured them as shady Frank Miller characters with bulging muscles and machine guns poking out from trench coats but the photograph from the papers was of a group of boys my age. They kind of resembled some of my friends from Mayaro, too.
I soon realized this was Roy’s pet topic as he was regularly grumbling about subsidized housing and criminals who could never be deported and little children running around with guns. All these recent swarms of newcomers were congesting the place and inconveniencing people like himself with their welfare demands. Sometimes, when he went outside for a smoke I would feel that maybe he was a retired policeman who, on the days he didn’t show up, was chatting in the station with old friends.
Even though there were no sharks and manatees and smugglers the conversations were always more interesting whenever the group talked of their old-time days. I tried to imagine how Toronto would have looked before all the tall buildings and congested streets were built. Maybe it was like Mayaro with fields of cassava and plantain and coconut trees. Some of the stories were related by a really thin, trembling man whose name I never got. He was from somewhere called Friezeland in the Netherlands and during the war, he hid many Jewish people in his house. He talked sometimes about his move in 1951 to Canada to work as a cheese maker somewhere in Thunder Bay and then to Kitchener, where he had many run-ins with Germans at some annual beer festival. Later, the Germans became his best friends. A truck driver came in now and again to complain about the long waits at the American border and his encounters with policemen in Florida. He considered most Americans as boldfaced braggarts, which was a big shock, because in Trinidad, I always felt they were not too different from Canadians. His name was Jim and although he was as red as a flask of wine, the way he stared crossly from on top of his glasses reminded me of Uncle Boysie dealing with a troublesome customer. Another man, who from a distance looked completely grey, down to his skin, said he had lost two brothers in the war. They spoke about this war quite often, and as though it had been fought just a couple months earlier.
This was new to me: in Trinidad we had no wars (except the ones from our history texts about Captain Jenkins’s ear and those with Spanish armadas centuries ago). It felt sort of strange sitting so close to people who had some connection with a war I had seen only in the old movies starring Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, and sometimes while they were discussing some battle or the other, I would wonder how my Mayaro friends would react if they could see me with all these pale, wrinkly old-timers who were always wrapped-up in thick sweaters with Christmas bells and decorations. I felt they would shake their heads and laugh and make jokes—or picong—about my new friends who smelled sometimes like stale milk, and who talked with long gaps and stared outside as if they had forgotten what they were saying and who woke up coughing from little naps. I think they, too, would have been surprised that no arguments broke out between those who had lost family members in the war, and Norbert, who boasted about the fairytale cities his parents once lived in like Bavaria and Dresden. In Trinidad there would have been bottles flying on all sides because everyone there seemed to collect and save all the insults thrown at them. Every now and again, someone would mention Cabbagetown and I would pay extra careful attention as if I was in Mr. Chotolal’s history class. Once, Norbert mentioned an Ebenezer Howard fella who had designed something or the other in Cabbagetown. I almost told him that the Ebenezer name made me think of wrinkly, giraffe-neck men in pyjamas with long sock-hats hanging over their ears but when I glanced around the table, I felt that maybe it was a good thing I kept quiet about this.
The orangeish girl glanced over regularly and I felt she was wondering what I was doing with this pack of old people. I wanted Norbert to call out to her again but all of a sudden he seemed to be more interested in a new topic: the scheminess of doctors who were prescribing all kinds of drugs for healthy people, and these drugs companies that were making tons of money by inventing useless drugs, even for dogs and cats. One day I told him about old Lopi who claimed he could cure diseases with secret Spanish prayers and who prescribed fever grass and aloe vera and hibiscus flowers for this and that sickness. Roy stared at me with his coated eyes and said, “Damn voodoo rubbish,” which got me a little mad, not because I disagreed but because he was so quick to criticize. Norbert then began a speech about natural drugs and different types of diets. This topic went on for a week or more, and to tell the truth, I was getting fed up with all this health talk. I believe his friend, judging from her quietness, also didn’t like this new direction. She began to go outside with Roy for a smoke whenever he got onto this topic. During those times Norbert complained to me about the chemicals in cigarettes but never to her.
One day I saw him alone in the coffee shop. He was dressed in his usual dark suit and greeted me in another strange language so I didn’t make much of his friend’s absence. Later, he told Roy that she was on a trip to the States concerning her new business. Roy began to cough and went outside with his western paperback. I waited for Norbert to bring up the cigarette chemicals but he didn’t talk much that day, even when Roy later said that if Canadians didn’t begin to make more babies in a hurry, the country would be unrecognizable in a couple years. “Where did you say you were from?” Roy glanced over as if he had noticed me sitting at the table for the first time.
Just for spite, I told him Regent Park, instead of Trinidad. He shook his head, doubled a page in his western, and went outside again with his dragging footsteps. He was grumbling under his breath and I wondered how he would have reacted if I had said, “Strange visitor from another planet.” Because Norbert was gazing at the cakes on the counter and not saying anything, I asked him, “When is your friend coming back?’
The minute the question popped from my mouth, I regretted it because Norbert took a while before he answered. “She’s met some old friends there.” He said it in a dry voice that came from high up his throat, which made me think that the meeting had taken place on a dark bridge over a deserted tunnel. That was all he said for the entire evening and I decided to leave him alone. In the days that followed, I noticed that although he was as stylishly dressed as usual, he was no longer greeting me in his different languages. He also stopped talking about Cabbagetown and more about his German places. Once when the old grey man brought up the topic of his two dead brothers from the war, Norbert interrupted him to say that in this Dresden place, many innocent people had also been killed. The other fella hit back by saying that it was the same in London where, early in the battle, there were never any advance warnings of air strikes. Norbert said that the difference was that people were willing to discuss one city while pushing the other under the carpet.
This argument didn’t blow up in a big shouting match as it might have done in Trinidad but that day, I felt that something had changed in the Coffee Time. More and more, Norbert took the side of Roy whenever he began his complaints of politicians who were bringing in foreigners just to get more votes, even though these people could barely even speak English. When Roy was listing off the problems in the places these foreigners came from, like Nigeria and Pakistan and Jamaica, I felt relieved that he didn’t know more about Trinidad. I noticed, too, that he always used the old-fashioned names like Ceylon and Rhodesia and Dutch Guiana. He felt that Canada was changing into an unfamiliar, dangerous place, with strange people in unusual clothes walking all over Toronto. Talking about Cabbagetown, Roy said they were lucky not to have welfare palaces like the ones along Kingston Road, and then rattled off a list of posh places for refugees from Somalia and Ethiopia. “Guess who’s paying for all this?” This became their new topic.
I don’t think they were making up this refugee talk but sometimes while they were grumbling, I would think that the Cabbagetown stories of poor families had interested me more because I was in no better condition, and also because these people had turned out so well. I couldn’t understand why they were now discussing these new gold-digging foreigners right in front of me and one night, as I was walking to my apartment, I had to laugh when the thought hit me that they had one of these old people diseases that blanked out colour. That same night I decided that I would cut down my visits to the coffee shop because I wasn’t making any progress with the orangeish girl who worked there.
The next day I began to explore the area beyond Coffee Time and came across other coffee shops with busy young people staring over their laptops and talking into gadgets hooked up over their ears. I would imagine myself like this, maybe five or six years down the road. I looked through the window of a Starbucks place at a girl facing away from me. She was sitting on a stool and there were tear strips on her tight jeans. I began to wonder if she was waiting on somebody when she turned and saw me gazing. I rushed away; it was not a young girl but an old lady with a stiff smile and a pointed chin. I remembered Pantamoolie saying he could tell the ages of all the Mayaro women by how high up on their waists their dresses were, as they went up half inch each year. He would have real problems here because of these thick coats that could disguise any kind of shape.
I decided to visit this Cabbagetown place that evening instead of Coffee Time. When I crossed Gerrard and Carlton streets I tried to ask directions from a boy my age but he backed away and held up his hands as if I was going to attack him. A man with a long beard and dirty clothes pointed to the north and I walked for ten minutes or so before I realized I had not marked the buildings for my return trip. I was about to turn back when I spotted a building that could have been drawn by Gene Colan. The steeples and old-fashioned windows and solid brick walls made it look like a castle. Or maybe the Wayne Manor. I wandered around the compound until I came to a plaque that read, Toronto Necropolis. Necropolis: I had come across the word in horror comics and on my way back I imagined that all the old Cabbagetown ghosts were roaming around the place and also complaining about how much the place had changed.
For the next week I, too, roamed around the place, looking for shops with vacancies advertised on their windows but the owners—in all types of accents, some hard to understand—each asked me about my Canadian experience as if they were setting some trap. When next I went to the coffee shop, Roy said, “Look who’s here. We thought you had gone back to Mexico.”
He laughed in his coughing way and I decided he had made a joke. But that mood didn’t last for too long because they soon moved on to their favourite subjects: high taxes to pay for these welfare immigrants, some useless human rights group, young people crime, and old falling-apart army helicopters and tanks. This last topic set off Norbert and the trembling man about the war, and a museum in Ottawa, and Dresden, and the big holocaust. Then Jim, the truck driver, mentioned another of his trips to Carolina and said that Canada was getting too soft and unimportant, and everybody got real quiet as if this was really what they had been arguing about for the last half an hour. To tell the truth that put me at ease, and during the remainder of that session, I felt that maybe these old Canadians liked to throw out all their grievances just to see where they would hook up. Maybe they were like old people everywhere else, always complaining about how things were turning out and how much better they used to be. Uncle Boysie himself used to say the same thing about Mayaro.
The next day on my way to Coffee Time, I made a list of my own grievances, which was easy because that same morning my father had complained about my idleness. Later in the coffee shop, it took about an hour before I got the chance to mention this big wall concerning Canadian qualification, and immediately Roy asked if I had applied for welfare. When I shook my head, he seemed a little surprised so I didn’t bother to ask about whether I could qualify or not. For the rest of that evening, the only thing all these old people talked about were their long-time jobs as cheese-makers and icecream truck drivers. I don’t know if they were throwing out advice but I was sure no one would hire me to make cheese or drive ice cream trucks. Then Norbert said that nowadays people were more interested in money than in happiness, and everyone got quiet for a while.
I let another week skip by before I returned to the coffee shop and when I got there, the old people table was empty. I ordered a coffee and sat by myself. I noticed the orangeish girl staring in my direction but every time I smiled she looked away and I felt I was wasting all these friendly looks on the bare wall. I concentrated on my coffee.
I jumped and managed to say, “Nobody else is here today.”
“The little one, he …” I saw her lips moving as if she was searching for a word. “Roy, you know?”
“Yes?’
“He feel very … how to say it … very dizzy. So they take him?”
“Where?”
“To ambulance.” She sat at the nearby table and began refilling the silver napkin holder. “He was nice man. Very friendly.”
“To you?”
“Yes, yes. He smile always.” She smiled herself and I wanted her to sit right there for the rest of the evening. “I go now.” She got up. “I have long-long shift. You work?”
A boldfaced lie formed in my head but I told her, “Nothing so far.”
“Yes, but you keep looking.”
I couldn’t tell from her accent whether she was asking a question or consoling me. “Yes, I keep looking.” As she was walking away, I said, “Mum-moon,” but softly because I could not remember its meaning.
I was sorry when Norbert walked in a couple minutes later because now I would have to listen to him instead. Straightaway, he asked if I had heard about Roy and before I could reply, said that he had a stroke and was in the Downsview Hospital. I noticed the grey bristles on his face and the coffee stains on one of his cuffs as he gazed around at the customers ordering coffee and doughnuts. Jim the truck driver came in a few minutes later and both of them talked about Roy and his smoking and his unruly grandson and his wife who had died of cancer ten years earlier. Jim said that Roy was never the same after his wife’s death, and things only got worse when he moved to his daughter’s place. He lived for a while in an old persons’ home and, according to Jim, his daughter wasn’t happy when he left there to return to her place because he was forever quarrelling with her boys.
As they talked about Roy’s younger days—when he owned a cottage near Peterborough and would go drinking and fishing with his friends, could repair all types of engines, and was a smart dresser (which was hard to imagine)—I got the idea they were feeling shaky because they were just a couple years younger than Roy. Then Jim said those days were gone forever and got up.
After Jim left, Norbert’s gloomy mood didn’t change much. He began to talk about his own young days when he played the piano with an old-time band. He gave performances at fancy clubs where one night he met his wife, who had just come from England. I thought he was talking about the lady who had gone to the States, but he described his wife as tall with red hair and a “loud bubbly laugh.” He smiled a bit as if he was remembering something about his wife, and brightened up, even while mentioning how he lost all his money during some real estate crash and how his wife left him to return to England with their son. “What’s gone is gone,” he told me, using the same stiff voice like Jim a few minutes earlier. “At least we have the memories to sift through.”
I couldn’t understand if this was a lament because he had been talking for the last twenty minutes about his bad luck with his wife and his money and moving from job to job. And then it hit me that he was really talking about the small smiling lady. Even when he picked up some of Roy’s favourite topics about welfare and immigrants, I felt his mind was on this lady. It seemed strange but I believed he was somehow blaming these immigrants for his woman-problem. Because we were alone that day, I felt I should console him but he got up and put on his coat like if he was real tired. Then he left.
“Any luck?” I looked up and saw the orangeish girl. I felt she was referring to a job so I shook my head. She sat and I asked her what her name was. “I don’t like to give out name. I am sorry.” I said I understood and she smiled as if she knew I was lying. “Okay, I tell you. It is Dilara. Just for you.”
“Why just for me?”
I hoped she would say because she knew I would soon be her boyfriend but she told me, speaking slowly as if she would change her mind at any minute, “I get in trouble. I live … byself now. I want mother to come here but too far away.” She got up. “But we have to look to future. It is all we have.”
When she left to serve another customer I realized that she was the exact opposite of the old-timers with their conversations about their younger days and how things were changing so much and getting worse all the time. One week later, I got a job at a gas station on Jarvis Street, just a twenty minute walk from my father’s building. At the end of my first day, tired and greasy as I was, I headed for the coffee shop to thank Dilara for her simple advice, which had encouraged me to not give up, but when I got there she was gone.
I wanted to tell her how I had walked from street to street asking all the gas station owners if they needed any help; I wanted to boast about how I eventually told one manager, who seemed fat and oily like if he had just rolled out from an oven, that my father owned a gas station in Trinidad and that me and all my brothers worked there on weekends. Maybe I would have left out the part about the manager—whose pants were unzipped—raising two fingers and saying, “Two weeks’ probation. No pay. Any fucking around and you walk. Unnerstan?” I was so happy I didn’t even care if he knew I was lying about my father’s gas station.
I waited for a while at Coffee Time and wondered whether Dilara had left because she had given me her name or because of the trouble she had hinted at. I hoped, though, she had gotten another, better job. Several days later, I decided to visit on the off chance that Dilara had returned. Another girl was cleaning the table next to the one where Norbert was sitting alone. He seemed older and quieter too. He told me that Jim had returned to Milton but that he often spotted him at the Legion. I was thinking of the Legion of Superheroes when he said Roy had died. We remained quiet for a while and I imagined Roy buried in the Necropolis next to all his old friends. I heard Norbert saying something like, “Jen-kuo-bardso,” and adding, “It’s Polish. It’s all my parents spoke at home.” The foreign language cheered him up a bit and he dropped a couple other strange phrases, so I didn’t say what was on my mind: all his references to German cities and to his German parents. I couldn’t understand why he had changed his own history and I wondered whether he had also made up all the stories about Cabbagetown.
On my way from work I would pass other rundown coffee shops with groups of old-timers reading the Sun and staring at the tight-jeans girls, and I would think of Norbert and Roy gazing back at the good old days, and of Dilara looking forward to getting a good job and bringing her mother to live with her, and I would wonder what, if anything, this knowledge told me about my new country. Maybe the old-timers looked down on newcomers like me because our short airplane trips could not match their long miserable sea voyages during which they had plenty time to remember all their friends who had been killed in some war or the other, while still worrying about how they were going to survive in this new country. I would have liked to throw out this observation to my father but could just imagine how he would react; so instead I settled on the simple idea that all old people were the same, regardless of where they came from. They preferred to sit among their own, polishing their memories and pretending that every change would bring a new set of bacchanal.