White donut sugar is falling from the sky, and the moon is a crust of nail, and the cars sound like chain saws, though I’ve never in fact heard the sound a chain saw makes. Jo asks: “How do you escape from a locked room with nothing but a desk and a mirror?”

I don’t know.

“You look in the mirror, see what you saw, take the saw, cut the desk in half, two halves make a hole and you climb out.”

We walk along pavement, beside wide black roads, over bridges. I notice a chain link fence, a tall building, a resilient tuft of weed. There are candy wrappers, chip bags, and fast food serviettes nestled in the icy grass. I remember a time when I could not throw garbage like this away, a time when I would collect it in large plastic bags, hide it just beyond the attic’s oblong entry in my closet’s ceiling. “Nobody loves you,” I’d think. Here, the garbage roams free, ignores relentless traffic, suicidally crosses roads. It is 1975. Woodsy Owl is already four-years-old, and we’ve known for over a decade that “every litter bit hurts.” Still, there is more garbage here in Toronto than one should reasonably expect.

Jo carries my case over her shoulder as if it weighed nothing, our hands are naked, and the sun is sinking into snow. We cross a busy street, when I ask, “Do you live very much further?” Jo says, “not too,” pulling me with a lasso of invisible words, past bleak tarmac, past fine ice dust, past metal posts.

At the bus depot, I anticipated a round-faced mother with a station wagon, one who would call us “you kids” and offer to stop for milkshakes on the way home. Then I thought maybe a friend of a friend, someone with a car, a helpful neighbour. But there’s no one but me and Jo, Jo and me, just the way we used to be.

I don’t know how to hitch-hike, but she tells me “just stick out your thumb.” Our thumbs, like frozen cherries, will extend from the numbness of our hands, while Fords, Chryslers, and Chevrolets become shadowy smudges, bleeding into the night. I know not to take rides from strangers. I know that strangers are not to be trusted, yet when the black Impala stops for us, I do not hesitate to get inside. The song on the radio is Radar Love. The driver, tall and thin, nervously taps his steering wheel. He is at least twice our age. He wears a wedding band. I think, “We could beat the crap out of him, if we had to.”

I do not know about Ted Bundy, who, as we take this ride, could be travelling this stretch of road. It will be months before he is arrested in Utah, and years before he is put to death for raping, torturing and murdering women. Deborah Harry, singer for Blondie, will not yet have announced her close call with Bundy to the media, nor would the media be interested, as her first album, Blondie, has not yet been released.

The Impala driver flirts with Jo; he asks her if she wants to smoke a joint. She turns and faces me from the front seat, and I notice the way her hair reflects the fading light. It is 1975. The LeDain Commission has already recommended an end to charges for marijuana possession and cultivation. In fewer than 30 years, the Canadian Medical Association will estimate that 1.5 million Canadians smoke pot recreationally and Canada will be the first country in the world to legalize marijuana use for the terminally ill.

“Sure, why not,” I say, trying to sound as if I smoke pot all the time.

“Sure,” Jo tells the driver.

 

As the car fills with thick, sweet smoke and my heart pounds, I consider this strange elating terror, and how often I have felt it with Jo. It is a feeling of being completely alive because, somehow, it is always connected with the fear of dying. The driver will become impaired, weave from lane to lane, grasp at Jo’s breast. When he finally finds the brake pedal, after running a red light, Jo will grab my suitcase and we will escape, laughing hysterically. We will run as we’ve run before, without feeling the fatigue of our bodies or the pain in our legs. We will run and it will feel as if we fly, out into the freezing darkness, like harpies cast from hell.

 

The first time I recall running like this was in 1971. Instead of going on a field trip, we hid in the school’s bathroom, stood on the toilets, so our feet would not be visible in the stalls. We waited until everything seemed quiet, tiptoed through the hallways, then fled past the main office, Jo screaming an obscenity as we noisily exited. We could hear heavy running behind us, the sound of clumping, exhausted legs finally giving up. A year later, we would be running again…this time after Jo had exploded a can of whipping cream in the teacher’s lounge of a Catholic school. We’d gotten into the school by sliding a mitten into the frame of an electronically locking door. We’d just wanted to see what the school looked like. They had better facilities than ours—expensive gym equipment, a professional-looking theatre. We played with floodlights and jumped on the trampolines, then Jo said she was hungry and went foraging in the staff room’s fridge. She took two bites out of an apple and offered it to me. I didn’t want it, so she threw it on the floor. Then she found the whipping cream and wanted to see what would happen if she smashed the can. The janitor heard us and called the police. When we got out of the school, it sounded like there were sirens everywhere. We ran past our subdivision, out to the train tracks. The next evening in the paper, there was an article about a break-in at the school. It said there had been some vandalizing and a large sum of money had been stolen. I thought in 1972 that Jo and I had been lucky we did not run into the thief—but in Toronto, I begin to wonder who the thief might actually have been.

 

At some point, this highway becomes a brightly lit suburban street, and Jo, still breathless, says, “Look what I got!” She pulls a wallet out of her jacket pocket, opens it and slides out the bills. Then, she closes it, tosses it in a municipal garbage can and announces: “Pizza tonight!”

I don’t say anything…just look at her.

“He was a jerk,” she says.

I think of the man’s greasy hair, his wedding band, the look on his face when he went after Jo. I think, “somewhere in this city, this man has a wife.”

“You shouldn’t throw his wallet in the garbage,” I tell her. “You ought to put it in a mail box.”

“O.K.,” she says, retrieving the wallet. We spend the next half hour looking for a post box, and afterwards I follow Jo and my suitcase to the doors of a high-rise building. The security intercom doesn’t work anymore but hangs from red and blue wires against a brick wall. The elevator has missing buttons; the one Jo presses is upside down. There is a smell of old food, of spices, of starch—a smell of children who need to be bathed.

“Pakis,” Jo says, when we ascend, as if I should understand what she’s talking about.

The plastic numbers are missing from Jo’s apartment door and someone has attempted to write them with bright blue magic marker. There is a hole in Jo’s apartment wall—a big, round, ragged hole, the kind I will learn much later results from a punch. It contains clothing and shoes and something else I can’t quite make out. When I ask Jo about it, she changes the subject.

The living room is sparsely furnished. A small threadbare couch, a metal floor lamp, a lawn chair. The floors everywhere are covered in the same grey linoleum tile. The kitchen is small and empty. In Jo’s bedroom, there is an old grey sleeping bag bunched on the floor, dirty laundry, a necklace, and although I am aware my mother would call this “squalor” and insist I leave, I feel comfortable here in a way I never felt at home.

It is 1975, and I am with Jo in her mother’s low-income apartment a few blocks East of Jane and Finch. I will not know the notoriety of this neighbourhood, considered troubled since the early 70s, nor that 30 years from now The Toronto Sun will publish a series of articles about gangs, drugs, and guns in this neighbourhood, but with a hopeful slant. They will blame the ongoing problems on bad city planning, over-crowding, and poverty. Some 30 years in the future, statistics will record 75,000 people from more than 70 countries living in this stretch of land.

But in 1975 I am 14-years-old and have no understanding of what a “social problem” is. It will be five years before I return to college as a mature student, take a sociology course, and begin to turn the prism of my history into abstractions. Right now, I am only aware of differences—of sights, smells and sounds that are strange to my privileged senses. I am only aware of the relaxed feeling in this squalor; of Jo seeming so completely independent, of her embarrassment when she tells me, “We have cucarachas,” which, in spite of my embarrassment at my ignorance, I must ask her to define.

 

And the apartment does have “cucarachas”—hundreds and thousands of them that hide in the daytime under the heavy plastic strips that skirt the walls. They hide in the kitchen’s cracks and crevices, underneath the stove, inside the dark workings of light fixtures. If there was any food here—boxes of cereal, bags of sugar or rice,—they would hide there, but even without these amenities, the “cucarachas” seem to find Jo’s apartment—indeed, the whole building—a procreative paradise.

Before now, I had never seen a cockroach and knew nothing of their furtive ways. I was unfamiliar with their gleaming appearance, their stink, the trail of pepper droppings they leave behind. That night, after we eat pizza and prepare to go to bed in her room, Jo tells me that she sleeps with the lamp on. I do not realize the wisdom in this until I venture into the bathroom, flick the light switch on, and see the dark army scatter. “What is it that they do exactly, these cucarachas?” I ask Jo, but she isn’t certain.

It will be at least six years before I hear the hypothesis that cockroaches can survive a nuclear war. I will not know that cockroaches can safely withstand the radiation of a thermonuclear explosion, that most poisons can’t touch them, and that they can live and reproduce up to a month, without heads.

Jo tells me that the cockroaches came from the “Pakis.” She says that the “Pakis” tried to make vegetable gardens in their living rooms, that the cockroaches were in the dirt. Before I came to Toronto, I’d never heard the word “Paki,” and although I have been aware of racism for a number of years, in my mind it exists only in the United States and has to do with white and black Americans.

“What is a Paki?” I want to know, thinking of suitcases and bundles on pack mules, but Jo cannot answer with certainty.

It is 1975, and European economies are strengthening. The majority of immigrants coming to Toronto, to Canada, are no longer from the British Isles, and there are no more American draft dodgers. It is four years since Pierre Trudeau first adopted a policy of multiculturalism and two years since the Canadian Multiculturalism Council is set in place. In two years time, the 1977 citizenship act will “remove any trace of special treatment for British subjects” in Canada, and some 30 years from now, Toronto will have the highest metropolitan percentage of foreign-born residents in North America.

“Pakis don’t know how to live here,” Jo says, and I will discover in the days to come that “Pakis,” according to Jo, encompass a wide range of immigrants including Vietnamese, Chinese, and people from the West Indies, as well as Pakistan and other East Indian groups.

“The Pakis break things and don’t fix them, they don’t know how to use a dustpan and broom, they sleep in their outside clothes, they steal, they treat their kids bad.” These are the things Jo’s mother has told her, and when I meet her, she will tell me the same, after throwing up and before passing out on the living room floor drunk. She does not sleep at the apartment often. She has a number of boy friends and she usually stays with them. She drops by once a month to pick up her government cheque. She leaves in the morning, before we are awake and today, Jo will swear and cry, because her mother has left no money, only an empty bottle on the kitchen table.

“It’s O.K.” I try to comfort her, “I brought my babysitting money…I can pay for food.”

But there is no bread left, there is no milk left, and there is no Kraft dinner. The cupboards and refrigerator are completely bare. The cucarachas are eating the paint off the walls, they are eating the oily residue that formed around the kitchen fan from previous occupants, they are eating each other’s shit.

“You’re supposed to be my guest,” Jo says. “I’m supposed to show you a good time.” Her nose will be red from crying. Her eyes like two circles of fire. “I wanted it to be nice for you.”

I won’t be able to convince her that it is nice for me—just being here, just being away from the hell I know—from an angry intrusive mother and the thick grief of a father’s death that hangs in our house like the smell of tar. I can’t explain how I sleep all day long, as if I had fallen under a curse. And it’s not just the words that are missing to explain—but the time and space it will take for me to digest and understand everything I live that makes me unhappy.

That night, we paint our toenails red and dress in platform sandals and satin shirts. We share make-up in the bathroom, cotton candy lip-gloss, peaches and cream blush. We paint our eyelids blue and comb purple mascara through our lashes; then we hitchhike downtown.

It is 1975, and there are no such things as “age of majority cards.” Three years ago, the legal drinking age dropped from 21 to 18 in Ontario, and the repercussions of serving minors in a bar are not frequently enforced. When Jo lived in Windsor, we’d stand at the liquor store and give men money to buy us tequila. No one ever refused us. And here, in the clubs and bars, no one refuses us either. We both get a bottle of “Blue” and sink into our chairs.

I think we should be conserving money for food, but Jo tells me not to worry about it. The disco music thrums through the soles of our platform shoes and Jo smiles at a man, a plump and dumpy man, at a table beside us. Before I know it, he has joined us, and so has his buddy. His name is Greg, his buddy is Mike...Can they buy us lovely ladies a beer? Jo lets Greg rub his fat thigh against her thigh. She runs her fingers through her hair and licks the cotton candy lip-gloss on her lips. Greg and Mike buy us each a bottle of beer, they buy us chicken strips and French fries, and then Greg says he’s got to level with us. He says that he and Mike are looking for some action. We could make it a foursome, he says, or “if you lovely ladies prefer, you could do us separately, as long as you do us together, because it would really turn us on to watch a couple of girls playing with each other.”

I’m watching Jo’s face, and seeing some kind of metamorphosis. She is not my 14-year-old friend, her eyes have become sharp, her mouth has transformed into a flower, her hand falls on Greg’s knee, her blond hair sways like a curtain and she leans over, pressing her arm against his chest, whispering in his ear.

I feel my face get hot. I want to give the chicken strips and the French fries back. I want to spit the beer onto their shirts to show my disgust and tell them “take a fuckin’ hike.” But Jo has already taken Greg’s money. She’s folding it in her hand just like a handkerchief, and I think of my father, my dead father, and the white handkerchiefs he wore in his suit pocket every day he went to work.

“We’ll be right back,” Jo says, rubbing Greg’s thigh, standing. She extends her hand towards me. “We need to go to the can and check out the mirror.”

She’s smiling at me, and it’s a smile that says “look happy, don’t let them see that you’re not.” It’s a smile I know from grade school—the smile she gave me when she copied the answers off my math test. Mrs. Freed, our grade five teacher, accused us of cheating and Jo told her with complete conviction that we had not. “I saw you,” Mrs. Freed insisted. “You leaned right over her chair and she let you see her test.” Jo smiled that disarming smile. “I didn’t, Mrs. Freed.” Even I believed her.

In the bathroom, I tell Jo that I think she’s completely crazy. I tell her that I’m not a hooker and there’s no way on earth that I’d do anything with these scumball guys, but Jo isn’t listening. She’s looking intently above my head, towards the ceiling. She sees something, and I don’t know what it is, but I’m thinking “cucarachas.” Her eyes narrow and she takes a running jump towards the sinks. The same hand she used to take the money removes one of her sandals, and slams it towards a row of frosted windows. “You look in the mirror, see what you saw, take the saw, cut the desk in half, two halves make a hole, and you climb out…” she says smashing a pane of glass clean through.

I scuttle up behind her, onto the sinks, away from the blinding bathroom light and out, through the window frame, into darkness. I am aware of nothing, only that the cold night air is hitting my face and my legs are running without pain or exhaustion, running, as if they act reflexively, against my wishes, because they know that I’m completely alive.

Judge's Comments

Dinty Moore, final judge

A gritty, vivid coming-of-age memoir shining a bright light on the cockroaches—both literal and metaphorical—that hide in dark corners of a young girl’s life. I was particularly taken by the author’s direct and unadorned style: just the facts, the details, the small scenes that make up a world, and we readers can judge for ourselves. Haunting.