That night Maggie staggers home drunker than usual – maybe just as drunk as usual, but feeling worse for it. Exposing her wings, even privately, always makes her deeply uncomfortable; painfully aware of herself. That’s the last thing she wants to be. So we share a few pitchers at
It’s with considerable shock that Maggie awakes the next morning to find a bunch of guys in her alleyway.
Maggie has lived under the fire escape for four years, a comparatively stable home for a streetie. There she sleeps on her ottoman, an eerily flesh-coloured beast which might once have been red or at minimum rust-coloured, which is usually turned back-out, facing the wall. She keeps a tarp in the springs of the chair which she will place over the landing of the fire escape if it looks like it might snow or rain during the night. She had a cat, sort of, that she called Mog, but it stopped coming by last June and she now suspects it belonged to the college kids in the basement of the six-plex that backs her alley. She owns one change of clothes which she keeps in a plastic LCBO bag that she carries with her everywhere. She wouldn't go so far as to keep anything under the fire escape - nothing she wanted to continue owning, in any case. The remainder of her belongings are always stowed on her person.
The alley which contains Maggie's fire escape is contained on three sides by the blank stares of red-brick apartment buildings, making it an utterly illegal place to put a working fire escape. This is fine for Maggie (though not, I bet, for any burning inhabitants of the apartments on the east side) because it severely limits the chances that anyone would ever try to escape fire via what is, essentially, her rooftop. That nobody in four years had tried to so much as smoke a cigarette up there leads us to believe that the doors on all floors have long since been locked by a lawsuit-conscious but not especially bright landlord. But, if you want a brighter note, nobody in four years has burned to death up there either, at least as far as we can tell.
The neighbourhood which contains Maggie's alleyway is nice, nicer than it was when we arrived. It was the corner of Bellview and McDonald when we got here, now it’s “The Cannery”. Gentrification has a funny place in the hearts of streeties. It's code for "eviction", "fines" and "cops". But it isn't all bad, because on the other hand, it means you're a whole lot less likely to get robbed, assaulted or have your spot taken. Maggie has not, to date, been evicted, fined, arrested, robbed, assaulted or had her ottoman appropriated. The Cannery is in the east end of the city which used to be the old manufacturing district until the place stunk so much that the city shut it down and all the manufacturing jobs went to the suburbs, or Indonesia. Now it’s being slowly cleaned up and converted into cheapish loft-style condos and office buildings. The influx of the youthful, artist and immigrant brought with it first trendy coffee shops, followed by restaurants and art galleries. In recent years there have even been proper boutique-style stores opening, quirky bohemian places with monosyllabic names frequently adorned by punctuation that shouldn’t be there – Tröve, S’ilver, Ælîyñ. The district’s turn-of-the-century roots have been brought out and commodified. Our street lights look like gas lanterns, and certain popular corners have cobblestone crossings. It’s not a likely place to take up residence in an alley, but like I said, it wasn’t quite like this when we got here.
“Beat it.” The head dude says to her, obviously the leader of the lot. There are four of them, two guys in worn blue jeans and dirty white t-shirts, one cheap brown suit with a clipboard and this guy, a round mustachioed jerk with no hair and lots of anger. He doesn’t look at her directly as he makes his demand and the other three stand off at a distance doing their best to look in disparate directions. “Get the fuck off my property, go.”
Maggie, groggy and confused, uncurls and squints in the direction of the intruders. It isn’t like her to sleep in like this. Even after the latest nights, she is up with the sun. She has never been caught unaware before. Ever.
A vague fear lurches in her chest now as she remembers her night – there was a dream. Someone stealing her kidneys. She had a vivid flashback of clutching her middle, desperately trying to hold all the pieces in.
“Wake up, you stupid fuck!” The man who has woken her kicks the back of her chair and Maggie scrambles to her feet. She fixes him with a defiant stare and snatches a dowling rod that she has been carrying around for the last few days. It has been a prop, a toy, and a crutch. Now she wields it like a sword. The mustachioed man takes a step back.
“Go fuck yourself.” She spits at him. “I claim the venerable squatter’s god damn rights. I’m here, and here I will stay. Get fucked!” She pokes her dowling rod at him to emphasize her points. Maggie’s interactions with the public skirt an affected line between barstool prophet and David Mamet gangster. She does her best Fisher King via Danny Devito.
“What the fuck?” The man takes another few steps back and chews angrily on his hairy upper lip. “Listen girlie, you get the hell out of here or I am going to call the cops. Got it? The police. I’m going inside and if you’re not gone when I get back I’m’a gonna have you taken away in fucking handcuffs, comprende?”
“No comprende, senior.” Maggie sings out. “Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!”
“She’s some fucking crackhead! Fucking batshit crazy! Fucking bitch!” The man turns as if explaining the situation to his entourage, but he’s just tossing obscenities at Maggie. Maggie hops a few times on her good foot and swings her stick threateningly.
“Good luck!” She screams after him. As soon as they’ve vanished around the corner she freezes on the spot and stares like a wide-eyed statue.
“I think he’s really going to call the cops, Maggie.” I whisper to her. “Maybe now’s a good time to move.” Maggie has stayed in her unlikely neighbourhood for reasons she would never admit. “My stuff is here” she insists, though she cares so little for her stuff that she regularly forgets it in the dingy washrooms of bars she frequents, or under her seat at the movies. Maggie stays because this is familiar ground to her; not the alley and the fire escape, but the bourgeois artsy scene. Roots don’t mean a thing to Maggie, until she thinks about pulling them up.
“I’m not moving.” She says absently, apparently stunned but I see the wheels behind her eyes cranking out strategies. “This is my place. I live here. They can’t make me. I won’t let them.”
“Come on Mags, we can find another place. This neibourhood has more dead ends than a suburb. There’s nothing here but trouble.” Maggie’s jaw locks like she’s got tetanus.
“I’m not letting them kick me out.” She repeats. This has become a matter of principal. Maggie excels at removing her nose to spite her face. “I am here!”
Maggie considers fortifying her
She paces back and forth. Her leisurely gait is hampered significantly by the pronounced limp on her right side where one twisted leg leaves her lop-sided, taller on one foot than on the other. This is the result of more neglect: an old broken leg never properly set, sustained in adolescence before she’d finished growing. She rolls through the lame half of her step like a cart with an oblong wheel, sometimes exaggerating the motion with a rightwards teeter. In some places, a certain hours, she feels safer appearing drunk than lame. Right now she does it to entertain herself, a drunken dance while waiting for her fate.
At high noon she stops and faces the mouth of alley with a romantic sense of timing that pays off, in this case. A man and a woman round the corner slowly, cautiously, wearing the black uniforms of the city police. Both are tall, fit people who are nevertheless sweating as if the alley were a Turkish bath. Maggie, under her leather jacket, hoodie, t-shirt and tank top, does not sweat. She extends the stick like a samurai waiting to strike.
“Ma’m, please put down the stick.” says the woman in a patronizing tone, placing a hand on her own club. “You are trespassing, do you understand? You will have to come with us.” Behind her, standing next to the male cop, is the fat little man with the moustache and the filthy mouth.
“I have passed on nobody’s tresses.” Maggie growls, staring down the length of her stick. “Not one of these tresses is marked privately as property. Show me the deed! I won’t be moved without a deed!”
“Knock it off, Mags.” I whisper to her. “Think straight: these are the cops. You can’t win by intimidating them.”
“Ma’m, I will not argue with you. Put down the stick now before we add assault of an officer of the law to your charges.” The woman sighs, wondering what she did to have her Monday morning begin on such a shitty note. It was lunch time – she should be at Tim Horton’s by now if there was any real justice in the world.
Maggie twirls the stick around in her right hand and plants it at her side, taking one step to the left. She extends her arms as if to show that no threat remains in them.
“Officer, I repeat: I am completely within my rights. This property is not properly marked as private, and no complaint has been made against my presence. I will not be bullied without cause. I have committed no crime.” Her demeanor has changed. She almost seems rational.
“We received a call from the landlord of
“That’s her alright.”
“So put down the stick,” she continues, “And come with us. You will be told how to proceed after we’ve dealt with some paperwork down at the station.” Maggie smiles, undaunted.
“With pardon to the esteemed Lord of the Land,” Maggie’s expansive hyperbole rears its head, briefly. “But I am not on the lands of 177 Bellview. Is the landlord of 179 Bellview, perhaps, adding his complaint to this gentleman’s?” The policewoman grinds her teeth in annoyance.
“Ma’m, I am not going to argue semantics with you. Put down the stick and come with us. You can put your complaints on the record.” Maggie’s face clouds over.
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