Walking the Hood
by Rosalind Goldsmith
I’m no judo expert, but I still walk the neighbourhood every day. It’s a way of connecting with the world.
Yesterday I took my usual route, through the park. A lady passed by me dragging along a tiny white dog at the end of a long leash. It was wearing a green hat and a yellow bow. I guess I was staring at it.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” the lady said to me. The sun was full out and the sky was blue, so I let it go and walked on, feeling sorry for the dog, who had to wear the burden of this woman’s decorating fetish.
This morning, the sky was a burnt orange colour I’d never seen before. I went into a hairdresser’s to get my hair cut. An alarm went off when I opened the door. “What do you want?” the hairdresser said.
“What do you think?” I said.
She came out from behind her little front counter, pushed me right up against a wall. I ran out of there and straight into a guy with a belly the size of a beachball. He was singing “Nessun Dorma” at high volume.
“Speak for yourself,” I said.
He stopped singing and glared at me, just lit up with venom. “What did you say?”
“I said, ’speak for yourself’ but what I meant to say was ’sing for yourself’, because I, for one, don’t want to hear your whining at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday morning on St. Clair Avenue.”
He right away opened his big trap and started howling “One Singular Sensation” from A Chorus Line.
“I’ll give you a singular sensation!” I yelled at him, waving my fist in the air.
I walked on to the grocery store. My upper right wisdom tooth was hurting. I wanted to go home and take some aspirin, but I had to do the shopping first while my money was still worth something.
The store looked pretty empty. I needed canned peaches, so I went straight to aisle Three. A woman was standing at the end of that aisle. She had on a bright red ball cap tilted back on her head, blue eye shadow and a t-shirt that said: I’M FREE AND I MEAN IT in big black letters. What was she doing? She was picking up cans of peaches and apple sauce and pineapple slices and stacking them in her cart. Then she took them out of her cart one by one and pitched them down the aisle, right at the people who were walking towards her.
One of the cans flew past my left knee. I really wanted the peaches, but the cans she was throwing my way were Hawaiian fruit, so I just stood there and waited until she got over whatever she had to get over. Then she started to bowl them, trying to trip people up.
In aisle Four a whole crowd of people were huddled together, hiding from her, and talking in low voices about what to do. They were standing in a circle and leaning in towards the centre, like a rugby scrum. There was no supervisor or store manager anywhere to be seen; these people were preparing to take things into their own hands. That was scary enough. From the end of aisle Four, I could still hear that woman in aisle Three pitching cans and yelling, “One down! Two down! Three down!” and so on.
I grabbed a few cans of beans which I didn’t want and joined the end of a line at the front of the store for the cashier. Three security guards were directing traffic, making sure people got into the right lines according to their purchases and methods of payment. In my line of thirty or so people, everyone I could see had the same things in their carts: specials of frozen pasta, canned lima beans, Ramen noodles and suitcase-size packages of toilet paper. I waited in that line until I lost track of time.
At one point the lady from aisle Three went up to the number Six cashier. Her cart was loaded up with cans. She started to yell at the cashier, “You just tell me what to do! You just try!” Now she was hurling cans at the walls, on the floor, everywhere. People were ducking and dodging and covering their heads with their arms. Nobody stopped her. She was having a fantastic time throwing those cans.
I abandoned my cart. It was way too dangerous in there. I walked out and straight into a crowd just beside the grocery store. The whole crowd was going in one direction, but the people within it were going every which way: stopping, turning, going backwards, then running to catch up, kind of like a train hurtling along tracks whereas inside the train there are all kinds of chaos and rebellion and murderous behaviour going on unimpeded.
I ducked round the crowd and passed a clothes store. I stopped and went back and looked in for a second, holding my jaw; my tooth was really throbbing now. I saw a few winter coats in there, and some sweaters. All those sweaters had the number 1488 on the front. I wanted to burn the whole damn place down, but I didn’t have any matches.
I walked for another twenty minutes along St. Clair Avenue towards my dentist’s building. I passed two banks. They both had customer lineups and armed police guarding the doors.
Outside the pet shop, a few people were waiting to get in, clutching their cats or dogs in their arms. All of these animals had stupid outfits on, some of them had matching coats and boots. They looked embarrassed.
What is it with people? Why don’t they go to a damn toy store and get a teddy bear or at least have children, and leave the poor animals alone. Why do they have to make them like us? Aren’t those enslaved creatures miserable enough? Jesus. I wanted to yell at them, “Take off those clothes!” But my tooth was distracting me, so I went on.
I climbed up three flights of stairs to my dentist’s office, expecting nothing good, praying I could get in without an appointment. I sat in an empty waiting room. The walls were covered with white plastic sheets and so was the floor. Nobody was at the reception desk, but there was a big sign above that said: “Deductibles are no longer in effect on benefit plans. Benefit plans are no longer accepted.” I looked at a few magazines from 1962. They looked nice. People were wearing turquoise and beige clothes and smiling.
After about ten minutes, I opened the door to the back of the dentist’s office where patients get treated in little rooms with big chairs. I looked into three of the rooms. Each one had a patient lying in the chair. Two men and a woman. Wires were clamped onto their heads, and they each had an intravenous drip going. I assumed they were all being prepped for a root canal.
“Do you know where the dentist is?” I asked each one but they couldn’t speak; they had these wooden blocks in their mouths.
A voice came over the loudspeaker then. “Electrical pulses will begin in three minutes. A countdown will begin in sixty seconds. Keep calm and be prepared.”
I didn’t stay around for that. My tooth was still hurting, but I decided to get pain killers from the pharmacy. I ran down the stairs and across the street to an ATM. Took out my bank card. It had shrunk to the size of a postage stamp. I threw it down a drain.
I went on to the pharmacy to beg for mercy. On the sidewalk outside, I counted eighteen people sitting cross-legged, with cardboard signs on their chests that said: “Anything will help.”
“The hell it will! You’ll wait here forever!” I screamed. I hardly recognized the sound of my own voice.
The pharmacist told me she couldn’t help me. Then she said I was trespassing. I lay down on the floor. Two security guards lifted me right up and dumped me outside the pharmacy. They were singing “Addio del Passato” from La Traviata. I thought simply: What the hell?
I gave up and walked home. Going through the park, I saw that woman again. She and her tiny dog were chasing each other around the edge of the park, playing Hide and Seek or Tag or some game like that. Now that dog had moose antlers tied onto its head and it was shaking its head back and forth with its nose to the ground. “That dog is a dog!” I yelled, “Can’t you see that?” I guess she didn’t hear me.
I’m in my kitchen now. It’s quiet here. I haven’t spoken to anyone. My phone’s been cut off. My rent has gone up twenty percent since yesterday. Which is forty percent since last month. My tooth is still pretty bad, but I have a few aspirin left. I just took one. And now the skin on my right arm is breaking out in this weird rash in the shape of Florida. It could be flesh-eating disease. I would call a doctor but I can’t get one. Fifty percent of them have retired, thirty percent have left the country, and the rest are on strike.
I’m staying in tomorrow. If I feel up to it, I might look out the window for a couple of minutes. Or maybe just one.
Copyright © 2023 by Rosalind Goldsmith
