As Long as the Rivers Flow (15 page)

Others who shared the margins of society, the ethnic gangs and the skinheads, were not so benign. The Jamaicans, Tamils, Vietnamese, Latinos and Russians, busy doing their thing extorting money from their own communities, selling drugs, feuding among themselves and occasionally carrying out some nasty piece of work
for the bikers, usually paid no attention to the punks, so low were they in the pecking order.

The skinheads, however, were a different matter.
A Clockwork Orange
was their cult movie of choice. They revelled in its celebration of violence and mindless aggression, and modelled themselves on its psychopathic anti-hero, Alex Delarge. Self-appointed guardians of racial purity, they behaved like jackals seeking defenceless animals to devour; they preyed on the weak, and the punks were their raw meat of choice. With their shaved heads, rolled-up pant legs, red suspenders, Nazi tattoos and steel-toed Doc Marten boots, they swaggered down Yonge Street at night in search of victims to attack with baseball bats, chains and brass knuckles. If punks were unavailable, holed up in their squats or attending concerts, the skinheads attacked the homeless asleep and helpless on their park benches. When from time to time, someone, ravaged by alcohol, weakened by poor nutrition and undermined by mental illness, died in the course of a beating, the skinheads considered they had rendered a service to society.

Spider knew that life as a punk was for him when he first ran away from home one September day two years before. He had been in a special education class with children much younger than himself and felt humiliated. When his adoptive mother kept insisting that he needed an education to succeed in life, he walked out and took the subway to downtown Toronto.

Emerging from the Yonge and College street exit, he saw a punk with long purple hair and a safety pin through his nose begging for spare change. He asked him where he could get something to eat, and the punk took him in hand, accompanying him to a drop-in centre for a meal and to meet other kids in situations like his.

Life, they told him, was good, but you had to be organized.

“When you get up in the morning, you gotta get out to pick a good spot to bum spare change. Subway stops and entrances to shopping centres and restaurants are good places. In front of Maple Leaf Gardens is always good. You sit on the ground with a cap in your hand and beg. Takes some getting used to. Some people shell out without saying anything. But there’s always some jerk saying ‘get a job,’ ‘get a haircut,’ or ‘go home.’ Stupid stuff like that.

“We normally just try to get enough for breakfast at Burger King or McDo. Sometimes the staff won’t serve you, even when you have the money. But that’s no problem. You can always get a free meal at the Evergreen Drop-in Centre on Yonge. The staff there are cool. That’s where you meet up with the others and find out what’s going on, who got jumped by skinheads and who was given a hard time by the cops the night before. You then go out and bum some more change, share your take with the others to buy a case of barley sandwiches and go to a park to drink it.”

The punks took Spider back to their squat in a derelict warehouse in Kensington Market. He was accepted without fuss and he loved it. A dozen or more young people were lounging around, sharing beer and dope on a floor littered with cigarette wrappers, empty food cans, old newspapers, soiled clothing, beer bottles, stained mattresses, used tissues and candy wrappers. No one seemed to mind the smell of feces and urine that wafted in from the hallway, one corner of which served as a makeshift communal toilet. On the walls, barely visible in the candlelight, were graffiti art depictions of their idols: the Sex Pistols, the Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, Black Flag, the Ramones, DOA, Bad Brains and the Misfits.

Spider drank his first beers and smoked his first pipe that night, and resolved never to return to life in suburbia. The next day,
however, as he was leaving with the others from the warehouse, a policeman in a parked scout car got out and came over.

“Kid, you’re awfully young to be hanging out with these degenerates. You should be in school.”

He took him back to his vehicle and punched in the data Spider gave him.

“Just like I thought. You’re a runaway. Only fifteen. It says here your parents are worried. Let’s go.”

Now, two years later, that first foray into the life of the streets and his embrace of his new punk identity seemed an eternity ago. He was already seventeen years old, and a tall, dark brown, heavily muscled teenager. His birthmark was as visible as ever, but he had long forgotten it was there, even though his nickname on the streets was Spider. He was happy because the past twenty-four hours had been good ones.

It had all started the previous evening when Spider and his friends realized they were short of toilet paper, candles, Kraft Dinner and other essentials. They had long since blown on beer and dope the monthly welfare payments handed out by the city to the homeless, and it was out of the question that they would spend the money they had earned bumming change that day on such boring things when they needed it to buy beer and entrance tickets to a punk show that night.

Thus the punks did what they usually did when they needed supplies: they went out to swarm a convenience store. With the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled over their heads to avoid identification by the security cameras, they gathered in the light snow outside the modest business establishment of a recent immigrant from South Asia. He kept his store open around the clock and was trying to make a living selling milk, newspapers, magazines, lottery
tickets, “freshly brewed” coffee, cold cuts, shrivelled-up apples and other items to neighbourhood clients.

After checking to see that there were no customers inside and no police vehicles on the street, the punks rushed through the door a dozen strong and began stuffing cans of pop, loaves of bread, cold cuts, relish, margarine, toilet paper and tissues, porno and music industry magazines, flashlights and batteries under their clothes. They paid no attention to the owner, who yelled out from behind the counter.

“What are you doing? Stop! Stop! I am calling the police. Please! Please! I work hard for my money. You are destroying me!”

Like a flock of crows taking flight, the punks ran for the door, loaded down with their stolen goods. When the owner came around the counter and tried to stop them, they pushed him aside and fled into the night. Everyone, that is, except for a new member of the group, a skinny girl with a bad complexion who was being initiated into the fine art of shoplifting, punk-style. She was the last one out the door and the owner caught her on the sidewalk outside, seized her by the arms and began shaking her.

“Why? Why? Why are you doing this to me? I work so hard. I work day and night. I have a family to support back home, and yet you come to steal! Have you no shame? Have your parents not taught you right from wrong?”

Although he knew the police would be on their way, Spider returned to push the owner to one side, free the girl and run with her laughing to catch up with the others.

Later on, she came to say thank you.

“No one in my real family would’ve done what you did for me tonight.”

After their raid, the punks sat around back at the squat, sleeping bags and blankets over their legs in an unheated room lit with stolen
candles, eating cold Chef Boyardee spaghetti and Campbell’s soup from cans, drinking beer and rehashing the events of the evening.

“Did you see the face of that sucker when we burst in. I thought he’d shit his pants.”

“That capitalist bastard, squealing like a pig over a few cans of pop and spaghetti. He makes plenty overcharging the public and yet complains when we make him share a little of his profits with us. He’s lucky we didn’t trash his dump.”

“Hey, Spider. You’re the man.”

“To the rescue just like last summer.”

“You showed him.”

The previous summer, Spider had earned the group’s gratitude when a gang of skinheads had attacked them. It was after midnight on a hot July night in a poorly lit park. The punks were lying on the grass, enjoying the weather, talking about the events of the day, drinking beer from a case of twenty-four, smoking dope and, when the mood struck them, slipping away for a little quiet sex.

A dozen skinheads emerged from the shadows to spoil their night.

“Whatavwe here. A bunch of creeps! Shoulda known from the smell, you dirty rotten sponging bastards!”

“Why dontcha take baths? Afraid a little water will wash off those fake tattoos!”

“Why don’t you guys just bugger off?” replied one of the punks, who scrambled to his feet to confront the intruders.

“Okay, okay, calm down. We’re not going to attack you,” the skinhead who appeared to be the leader said. “To show our good faith, let’s shake on it,” he added, extending his hand and smiling.

But as the punk put out his hand in friendship, in one movement the skinhead withdrew his and kneed him in the groin, and as his victim bent over in pain, hit him with an uppercut to the head,
knocking him to the ground. The others whipped out chains and moved in, indiscriminately beating and kicking the other punks, male and female, with their steel-toed boots. Spider, who had done nothing up to that point, pulled out a hunting knife with a ten-inch blade that he kept strapped to his calf under a pant leg. With a mad cry he went wild, slashing and stabbing the skinheads in such a frenzy that they turned and ran.

A member of the group that had robbed the convenience store limped into the squat, his face bloody and bruised.

“Cops picked me up and took me on the Cherry Beach Express,” was his explanation, and everyone understood what he meant.

The police of 51 Division were responsible for one of Toronto’s poorest and toughest downtown neighbourhoods. Sometimes, to help keep order, rogue officers administered summary justice in the form of beatings to people not considered worth their while to take to jail—punks, skinheads and criminals caught in the act of committing petty crimes—at a desolate part of the waterfront, called Cherry Beach.

The victims never complained. What judge would take the word of someone living on the margins of the law over that of a policeman? There were never any witnesses, for even in summer, few people frequented the area, filled as it was with abandoned warehouses and factories. In winter, it was even more deserted and sinister.

“Was just heading back here with the goods when this cruiser pulls up and the cops tell me to come over.

“ ‘Whatcha got under your coat, you green-haired little prick?’ one of them says.

“ ‘Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?’ I says to him. ‘Go screw yourself.’

“I didn’t like their attitude and told them they couldn’t stop and search me. I was minding my own business. I knew my rights. Didn’t they have something better to do? That was sure the wrong thing to say.

“The two pigs got out, slapped me around, cuffed my hands behind my back and searched me. They threw the loot away and pushed me into the back.

“They told me it was time for a little attitude adjustment. The sunsabitches took me on the Express. On the way down Yonge to Lakeshore, I told them what I thought of them. But once we turned down Cherry Street, they played their little game—speeding up and slamming on the brakes, pitching me headfirst against the wire cage in the backseat. They thought that was funny.

“At Cherry Beach, they hauled me out, dragged me into the bushes and put the boots to me.

“ ‘Let this teach you not to rob convenience stores and to give us lip in our part of town,’ they said. ‘If we have to take you down here again you won’t get off so easy.’ ”

If the aggrieved punk was expecting sympathy from his friends, he was mistaken. They were at a stage in their drinking when almost anything would send them into peals of hysterical laughter. They were all used to being hassled by the police, and they knew the best thing to do when pulled aside was to say as little as possible. Their buddy had been asking for trouble.

“You stupid jerk. Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?”

“I woulda loved to have seen the face of that cop when you told him to screw off.”

“At least you didn’t get arrested when they found the stuff from the store.”

An hour later, the punks wandered off to attend a show being held at a club on the corner of Yonge and Dundas. It was only nine o’clock but raucous music could be heard a block away. An enormous, unsmiling bouncer looked them over, opened the steel door and motioned for them to enter. Inside, they quickly paid the three-dollar cover charge and joined hundreds of people slam dancing in the mosh pit in front of the stage.

The musicians, bare to the chest and lathered in sweat, bobbed and weaved, downed beer, smoked weed, hammered drums and attacked guitars as they spit into the microphones the incoherent in-your-face slogans of the outsider—self-hatred and loathing, disgust and revolt, reckless abandon and delirium. Spider and his friends hurled themselves at each other and at the others on the floor, chest against chest, shoulder against shoulder, elbow against face and knee against groin, under flashing red, green and blue lights to the sound of pulsing, throbbing, off-key, jarring electric guitar music and frenetic drumming. Dancers, overcome with emotion or stupid drunk, climbed up onto the stage and dove recklessly into the churning mass below, blindly trusting members of the crowd to catch them before they hit the floor. A blue cloud of marijuana and cigarette smoke hung over the room.

Spider could not have been happier. He was caught up in the hysteria and thrived on the physical contact, and each time he slammed someone or was smashed hard he was filled with physical and mental release. He loved the chaos and the crowd of tattooed, pierced, leather-jacketed, metal-studded bodies, and was at one with the anarchistic, broken lyrics of revolt. He sucked in with voluptuous pleasure the smell of raw sex, sweat, adrenaline, body odour, dope, smoke, blood and beer. He felt a profound sense of
existential joy, was alive in the moment and would not have cared if he were to die the second the music stopped.