I live downtown Toronto amidst all the hustle and bustle. My bed is pushed up against the wall closest to the street which is both a terrible arrangement and all that the shape of my room allows for. Ergo, my R&R comes with a heavy helping of H&B. Ergo, my sleep is often suspended by the sound of sirens; screams; someone sifting through our bins for cans. A handful of times someone has actually knocked on my window. Lately, this guy has been ringing my doorbell and waiting on my porch with his hand already in cupped extension.
I only fell for that once and now I just ignore doorbells past a certain hour. Still, the sound of a doorbell in the dead of night is spooky as shit. Not as horrifying, though, as the indisputable #1 Worst Sound To Hear At Night: a woman’s scream.
It’s terrifying because though I can imagine all the horrors that befall her, I do nothing. I just lie there, my heart beating fast, and I tell myself that all I could really do to help is call the cops; I tell myself that probably wouldn’t even be helpful.
But I listen to be sure:
A woman moving eastbound, screaming as she does, suddenly halts her trajectory, turning back westward to bellow:
“get the FUCK away from me!”
It’s loud, as if she’s beside me, which she is. Our bodies are parallel - or perpendicular, rather, since mine is horizontal - and we are separated only by a few feet, a wall and some insulation. We’re so close in proximity that I can hear even the subtleties: her gasping for air; her rifling through a bag; the sound of a car zipping by; the panting and heavy tread of a male who is catching up to her:
“Baby, wait…”
He doesn’t sound threatening, but I'm not so naive as to ever find solace in a man’s tone.
“...I told you I’m gonna get the money!”
She screams back at him, something about the money. She’s mad. I wonder what the money is for. I have a few guesses. I deliberate, again, calling the cops, but ultimately decide that that would make things worse. So I let my helplessness turn into apathy and try my best to tune out a woman’s genuine screams of terror as I lie safely in my bed, shrouded in cotton, surrounded by squishmallows, spritzed by my humidifier. The woman starts crying and I continue trying to justify my complacency. In the end they continue on their unmerry way and I push it out of mind, like I do everytime this happens.
I tell myself that I’m not a bad person even though I feel like one. I tell myself to be a denizen of this decomposing metropolis is to harden - if I internalize every incident I am privy to I will deteriorate and be helpful to no one at all.
So I willingly desensitize and think, of all things, about my goals. I try to pray, but mid-prayer my mind wanders back to my goals. I fall asleep.
…
I am awoken by the sound of drums and indecipherable mumblings from a microphone. In my semi-conscious stupor I curse this probable protest; I curse the fact that countries drop bombs on other countries - usually for the right reasons, but right now because it’s waking me up early. I fold my pillow over my head and wait for the parade/protest to move eastbound or westbound or any direction away from me. The drums continue. Shit, I realize. They’re stationed.
The repeated, unmelodious pounding of drums sounds like a child trying to get mommy’s attention, and the cumulative effect of each pound compounds my irritation into anger. Each “song” is only interluded by the even worse sound of a man speaking into what could only be the plastic attachment microphone from the 2003 American Idol game on PS2. Even once I am fully awake, the sounds of him speaking are totally indecipherable. It’s all so loud and raucous it sounds like it is a protest, but against me specifically.
I’m beginning to feel like Larry David in an episode of Curb where I’m being egged on to confront whatever the fuck is going on and so I burst out my front door, ready to confront this fest with an indignance that is shattered the second I see a sign that reads “Indigenous Peoples' Day”.
I imagine that if Larry himself were in my shoes, he’d proceed on his quest, traipsing on over, casually asking them to turn the amp down a bit, which would somehow snowball into shouting that they were basically on his property, to which the man with the mic would say, “oh I’m sorry sir… are we on your land?”
However, I’m not an indignant and tactless fictional character, so I simply let the loathing redirect inward as I cowered back inside.
Seconds later, in a twist that would stun M.Night Shyamalan himself, the unmistakable sound of an aux cord being plugged in SHOCKS the airwaves and the “DJ” begins playing Calm Down by Rema and Selena Gomez. My loathing boomerangs back in their direction.
It’s even louder than the drums and honestly, anything I have ever heard in my entire life. I feel like I’m in a mismanaged H&M instead of my bedroom when I hear the man on the American Idol mic summon people to get on the “dance floor”. I eject from my bed and peer out the window to double check that there isn’t a dance floor. I’m right. One white guy wearing a lanyard dances solo on the grass while everyone else sits in lawn chairs that circle the “dance floor” and half-watch, unamused.
Unforgettable by French Montana is mixed in, and by mixed in I mean the DJ starts blasting it even louder than the Rema song, which simultaneously continues to play until its organic end. It’s the new worst thing I've ever heard from my bedroom, worse even than any four AM scream of terror. I look out the window and seethe as a second white guy wearing a lanyard starts dancing. I go to the kitchen to make coffee and stay there the rest of the day.
…
About a week later, my new roommate knocks on my bedroom door.
“Olivia?” she murmurs from the other side.
“One second,” I shout back, suddenly vulnerable and aware of the abject state of my room. I bounce out of bed and quickly check myself in the mirror, wondering if my menstrual shorts pass as non-menstrual shorts.
I open the door and see my young roommate in her 19th century style nightgown. She looks like she could be a ghost and her expression is as though she has seen one.
“Can you come look at this?” she asks, guiding me to her bedroom, where she instructs me to stand on her bed and look out her window.
Less than a foot from the window, a man is arranging furniture in our yard. He has already laid down a rug and buttressed an overhead canopy under which he was now setting up chairs.
I am not against encampments. Sure, the proliferation of a separate, parallel, uncivil society is unnerving to say the least, but with rent prices being what they are, who can make a case against their right to exist? Don’t hate the player, hate the game… etc etc… Unfortunately for this player, building an encampment on private property is against the rules of the game, so we called 9-11 and get this: are put on hold for five minutes.
Like a plot point in a dystopic horror film I now want to write, we had to wait five full minutes on the emergency line !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
When we finally got a hold of an operator he and I spoke in simultaneous frustrated hellos until he declared he couldn’t hear me and hung up. He hung up!!! On (for all he knows) an emergency!!!!!!!!! I redialled and waited another five minutes, solidifying my fear that this is now the standard. All this to say, if you live in Toronto and find yourself doused in gasoline and threatened with a match, or being chased by a man wielding a chainsaw… just make sure you call 9-11 a little bit ahead of time.
The second operator could hear me, thank God, and I told him what was happening. He asked me if the man had any weapons or was physically threatening us, which I made the mistake of not lying about.
“No, but I mean… he is charging his iPhone in the side of our house… and he seems to be stuck on level 6 of Candy Crush so… I mean… he could spin into a violent rage at any moment….”
The operator said he’d send someone over. I relayed this information to my roommate, for whom I’ve been acting as a sort of pseudo-landlord. Then, I showed her the bullet holes in the living room window to reassure her that our windows are literally bulletproof. (Some may argue that bullet holes are the inverse of reassuring, but I think that’s a glass half-empty way of looking at it) I left for a meeting but told her to shoot me a message when the cops showed up or if there were any updates in the meantime.
About an hour later, my roommate texted me saying that the cops never came, and attached some images of the man in the yard who was now smoking crack.
I told her to call 9-11 again and she did and they told her that they “know about the situation,” and that “this isn’t an emergency” and crucially, to “not call back again unless it is”
Basically, until we were being assaulted by the man doing crack on our lawn, they didn’t want to hear about it. Then and only then were we invited to call 9-11 and wait five minutes to tell anyone.
I told our real landlord about it, who zemblantiously* showed up at the same time as the rest of my guests for the Pride party I was hosting (the only Pride party in Toronto to boast zero full gays, though at least two bisexuals, though I guess what party these days can’t boast at least two bisexuals)
* new amazing word I just learned which is sort of the opposite of “serendipitously”... as in “an unpleasant surprise”
Bless his soul, my landlord said nothing about the party and dutifully cleaned up the yard.
And the very next morning, the trespasser was back, reassembling it.
I didn’t want to tell the landlord that all of his hard work from less than 24 hours ago had already been undone, and I literally wasn’t allowed to call 9-11 anymore (is that officially a legal order, if 9-11 themselves tell you to stop calling?)
Anyway, I realized my best option at this point was radical acceptance, so I took a deep breath and named the man who now lived in my yard Jason.
I resigned to the idea that it was basically like having a messy extra roommate who didn’t contribute to wifi. You know? So what?
Jason was around more than my actual roommate - and I am home all the time since I work from home (am unemployed) - so I grew accustomed to his company. He would smoke crack on his side of the window while I practiced handstands on mine. I liked to imagine he was as impressed by my athletic acumen as I was with his robust lung strength. I would talk on the phone outside to Allie, shouting over to fill him in if I mentioned someone he didn’t know, “Jacob is my ex - he lived here before you!”
I started to actually enjoy watching his encampment grow and eclipse the entire yard. I watched Jason furnish the space with another rug; with cushions and books; with an endless sweep of various plastic packaging (what housed people refer to as “garbage”)
Aside from being a slob and a hard-drug user, Jason was totally fine. My concern turned into complacency and I felt more or less like a Cool Mom. I didn’t bat an eye when he brought friends over to smoke and chill, I simply wondered if the female of the group was his girlfriend. In any case, I closed the shutters to allow them some privacy.
I had more or less accepted this new living arrangement as it unraveled my roommate. Yes, she was newer to the neighbourhood, to the hustle-bustle, but also her bedroom’s only window was into his living room, so she couldn’t simultaneously experience daylight and privacy.
I promised her that the next time we were both home while Jason wasn’t, and either my boyfriend and/or her best male friend were also around, we would form a cleanup coalition and remove the furnishings from the yard, destroying it all so it couldn’t be recovered again.
That day came on a Saturday afternoon in early July, a couple hours before Kyle and I had to be at a wedding. I knocked on her door, said “let’s do it,” and watched the endorphins flood her body; her face gleeful with redemption.
We all went off to buy some garbage bags and rubber gloves, and by the time we returned, Jason was back in the yard, smoking.
Our plans were derailed, but our enthusiasm to deal with the problem was intact, so we all split up in separate directions to go cop-hunting instead.
On the average day, 1 in every 10 cars I see is a cop car. But as it always seems to go, when we were actually looking, saw none.
Kyle and I headed back to the house, dreading breaking it to my roommate that it was time for us to throw in the towel and get ready for the wedding.
I was fifteen feet from our house, where she stood, looking disappointed
when a police car approached
Without thinking or checking in the opposite direction, I SPRINTED into the street and threw my body in front of the cop car, my arms flailing frenetically, desperately.
The cops stopped, we told them everything, and they dealt with it. They summoned Jason out from the yard, wrote him a ticket, and told him that if he came back he’d go to jail.
And that’s that
They say it gets a lot quieter when your nest is finally empty, but that hasn’t been the case, no, not in these parts. Jason hasn’t been home to visit - unless of course - that’s ever him, ringing the doorbell in the dead of night.
The 911 info … good to know … & thank you for sharing as always!
Toronto sounds real.