For one and a half more weeks, I live in drive-by alley.

I nod in a familiar way to the junior cracker cop with the brush cut as he runs through my yard, chasing down a hooded black youth. The kid accelerates away from my dogs as they charge across the snow, baying for war.

In a flash he is climbing out of my yard, and into my neighbour's. I smile to myself, chuckling in anticipation: my neighbour, fed up with kids cutting through his yard, has slathered the top-rail of his fences with grease.

The kid makes a spectacularly uncontrolled faceplant into the snow. The young cop drops on him like a jackal, his older partner huffing across my yard to catch up. I nod to him, too. I tighten my robe and withdraw into the house, the cruel winter cold already chapping my face.

I put the dogs in, and praise them for sounding the alarm when our borders were breached. I give them a stick of bacon I'd been chewing on, and sit back down to breakfast with my wife. Outside: the echoing squawk of police radios.

Just another day in Scarborough.


I was born in a house by the beach in Mississauga, an industrial place with a native name. My parents wouldn't let me wade into the water, because it was of a strange viscosity and the foam it left behind twinkled with little greasy spectra. "This water isn't for swimming," said my mom.

Next I lived in the borough of East York, where loud Greek people made pizza with olives on it for us. The souther you went, the Greeker it got. I lived up in the north part of East York, but I used to ride my bike to the south part until Georgie's mom twisted my ear and some kid who called himself The Ostrich taught me the word "fuck." After that, my mom encouraged me to ride my bike around in the northern neighbourhoods with the other Western European children and Socially Approved Asians. So, I ate less pizza with olives on it.

I've lived in sidesplits and backsplits nestled in the geometric order of Don Mills, too. At the other end of the swill-stream, I had a squat in the poorly dramatised neighbourhood of Riverdale. Also: I once had a shit-slinging ape-man for a neighbour in pubescent North York.

Yes -- and I've even lived in Halifax's colourful North End (that's the end that blew up), where my window looked out across a short alley to another window, where a descendant of American slavery in a stained undershirt routinely smoked crack with a host of ugly prostitutes. Down below, the garbage bins rattled with the rooting of a mumbling homeless recycler whom I called "Sanford."

None of this prepared me for the shit-storm that is Malvern -- a pocket of mung in Toronto's checkered community of Scarborough.

Granted, the rent is cheaper. No complaints there.

The stray bullets, on the other hand, are more troubling. Did I ever tell you about the time when the cops were outside on my front lawn, telling each other jokes while they fished around in the grass for shell casings, lamps mounted on their heads like fishermen up early to scare up bait?

One upshot about the neighbourhood is that there's always police when you need them. A few weeks ago my wife and I saw a mentally ill homeless man try to force his way inside a convenience store, only to be taken down by fourteen men and women in uniform. He didn't struggle. They just all showed up at once: eight squad cars roared into the parking lot ahead of our car, framing the befuddled vagrant with headlights as the duets of cops poured out, shouting commands and levelling their guns. They tackled the poor idiot and wrestled him into manacles. They dusted him off and folded him into the back of one of their cars. Somebody picked up coffees. They swept out like a circus running ahead of a bad debt.

It was quite a show. I think I threw a quarter.

They don't send eight cars to subdue a mumbling white man in other parts of this megalopolis, I can assure you. We were witness to a special racial perk, unavailable to run-of-the-mill Johnny Teutonics like myself.

Other perks include intensive enforcement of minor traffic bylaws, preferentially applied. The police stalk the roadways like those sucky-faced fish you put in your tank to eat scum. If your skin isn't pink, you'd better be sure your sticker is up to date, and that both your headlamps work, because it's the little things that always seem to be leading those embarrassingly exhaustive roadside searches...

As a consequence, the flow of traffic is sedate. Even the teen-filled muscle-cars and glow-fender Hondas crawl along at a conscientious 60 kph. My wife nips and shoots and tucks her way through the tamed traffic, her Baltic features tripping no radar-gun or laser range-finder. (Despite what those anti-quota whiners may say about the modern institutional backlash against whitey, apparently it still pays sometimes to be a member of the Master Race.)

We've been renting the top two storeys of a house here while preparations were made for us to purchase a property of our own (preparations now complete -- our closing date is February 9th). The basement of this house is rented out by the local welfare agency, and lived in by a sequence of immigrant West Indian single-mothers. Some I've liked, some I haven't.

The current iteration is trying to eat my soul.

She is a homely simpleton without a trade who recently found the love of Jesus. Impressed by this show of faith, representatives of the esteemed Christ arranged for free day-care and subsistance assistance, as well as helping to smooth things over with the welfare bureaucrats in order to score a free high-school equivalency education along with her room and board. Her utility bill is covered generously by a member of her Sunday congregation.

She has no job. She watches a lot of mindless American sit-coms through her satellite TV hookup. She screams at her toddler to vent her rage, and plays Calypso-styled Christian Pop at a volume that would rattle Beethoven.

When she feels we have been inconsiderate, she plays this music extra loud in order to "punish" us.

What does she consider inconsiderate? Well, walking around upstairs is considered pretty obnoxious. Failing to shovel her walkway for her is another. When the dogs two yards over bark, I have learned that this can somehow be traced back to our own silent dogs, sleeping in the livingroom. No appliances are to be run in the kitchen too early in the moring, because she sleeps in. God forbid we should be thoughtless enough to employ a radio or a television on the main floor of our house.

I'm not sure what kind of luxury she was accustomed to in her native Jamaica, but it must have been a princely life indeed for her to find it so intolerable to live for free in Canada beneath a quiet family. She is constantly harassing our poor landlord, complaining about everything from the smell of the furnace inserts to the whine of the wind around the eaves.

Last weekend, I really let it get to me.

I was feeding my daughter breakfast at nine o'clock in the morning. The sun was shining through the frosty doors, the dogs were sleeping, and we were watching the locally-produced American-funded kids' series Arthur as we ate oatmeal. My daughter threw her spoon overboard. "Uh-oh," she reported.

That's when the room began to shake and quiver in a sudden and violent Calypso. While enduring this wretched music is not a new experience, I had never heard it at such officious volume.

The dogs woke up in confusion, and began sniffing one another's bums. I knocked on the door to the basement apartment, but I doubted I could be heard over the din. I went downstairs, and waved until I got shit-for-brains' attention. "The music is too loud!" I cried.

"What?" she shouted back.

"Too! Bloody! Loud!" I bellowed, pointing at her stereo. "It's rattling the windows on the second floor. You simply have to turn it down."

"No way," she declared, putting her hands on her hips. "I'm punishin' you for wakin' me up wit' all your bangin' aroun'."

"You're -- punishing us?" I echoed.

"You people have no consideration! I was sleepin', you unnerstan'?"

"Let me get this straight: you overheard me feeding my baby at nine o'clock in the morning, so you're seeking revenge with your music?" I rubbed my temples wearily. "Just what kind of a Christian are you supposed to be, anyhow?"

"I shouldn't have t'put up wit' all dat noise! I can hear, you unnerstan', beepin' you microwave oven and stompin' aroun' up there!"

"Do you think we can't hear you?" I challenged. "We try our best to be very considerate of you, but listen: sound carries. Sleeping in past nine in the morning is hard to do when you share a house. Face the facts: you live in a basement."

"You're sayin' I'm not entitled to peaceful sleepin' when I want?" she screeched, her eyes wide and hostile.

"No, I'm saying you can't afford it." I started back up the stairs. "Turn down the music, or I'm calling the police."

The music was turned down, though I'm not willing to bet on whether it was because of my threat or simply because she wanted to better hear herself screaming as she ranted at the landlord on the phone for half-an-hour. She then moved on to berating her child for defecating in order to vent a little more.

"Buob jerkill noofoo?" asked my daughter as I freed her from the high-chair, wiping her face in a way my wife would find decidedly sub-par.

"I don't know, kid," I admitted. "I think she's just kind of dumb, and angry."

As I listened to idiotsticks raving downstairs, it occured to me that it was considerbly less abrasive than listening to Handel's Messiah rendered in the spirit of Harry Belafonte. I realised that it was no use at all trying to talk sense to such a volatile, infantile harpie -- but she had readily presented me with her Achilles' Heel: her temper.

So, when I woke up at four o'clock this moring to make my daughter an emergency bottle, I was pretty sure I'd have to face the basement bitch come sun-up to explain how I'd had the gall to make my microwave beep while she was sleeping. I handed the bottle to my wife and went back to sleep.

I was awakened a few hours later by music blaring through the ventilation system, crying out in passion and torment for the sweet, deep loving of Jesus Christ. I jumped out bed with a smile on my face, for my experiences from last weekend had taught me much -- I knew this wouldn't take long.

I went downstairs, knocked briefly on the shaking door to the basement, passed through it and into her livingroom. I pointed to the stereo. "Too! Bloody! Loud!" I commented.

"You woke me up at four in the mornin', you people!" she screeched instantly, storming out of her bedroom.

"I had to make my daughter a bottle," I explained, but she was shouting over me with an ill-formed rant about the horrors to which we subject her as a neighbour. This is when my secret weapon was prepared, and deployed. When she paused for air, I shrugged, smiled and said simply: "You're ugly."

Then I turned to go.

"What did you say t'me?" she bellowed, her eyes wide and incredulous. "What did you say?"

Wow, I thought to myself, this costs me nothing, and costs her everything in terms of emotional upheaval -- what a fun game! I paused at the foot of the basement stairs to reiterate. "I said: you're ugly."

"Who you callin' ugly now? Who's ugly?" she demanded with mounting rage as I continued walking up the stairs.

I shrugged again, and said evenly: "You are, smelly." I smiled, nodded, and made my exit.

"Who's ugly? Who?" she continued to bellow at the closed door, storming up and down the steps in a paroxysm of anger.

"Mission accomplished," I told my daughter, who was eating Cheerios by the window, petting a cat and humming to herself. My wife came in with a hot bowl of oatmeal. "What about the music?" she asked.

As if on cue, the music volume dipped down to nearly inaudible as idiotsticks dialed her telephone and ranted profanely at the landlord. It continued until she loudly banged the door on her way out to church.

I have to admit, I haven't had so much cruel fun in a while. I've been being the bigger person for five months now -- suffering whines about garbage pick-up and the temperature, enduring disc after disc of horrifyingly terrible Christian Pop thrumming up through the floor, donating sections of storage space, constantly turning the other cheek with a mantra of soon-we-move, soon-we-move...

I'm not a hard man to please. My policy is very generous: you can come to my country and live off my taxes and charity -- you just can't be an asshole about it.

I'm fed up. If is the bitch is going to take revenge on me for my consideration, my tolerance evaporates. I'm no Christian. I've declared war, CheeseburgerBrown style: for the next ten days, it will be my personal mission to keep that ingrate moron in a permenant state of incoherent rage. It won't take much: I'll stop emptying the lint-trap when I do laundry, and stick my tongue out when I see her. That should do the trick nicely.

I can't wait for next weekend.

In conclusion, here is a short list of Things I Have Learned While Living in Scarborough:

#1. Cultures or sub-cultures that do not put much emphasis on respectful listening are often baffled by their lack of success while dealing with authorities. They can be overheard criticising officials for racism, but I believe the answer may be simply that most officials simply don't appreciate being interrupted and screamed at with circular rants choked full of passionate irrelevence and logical non sequiturs.

#2. The police are really scared of black people. I think they watch too much American TV. Outside of pockets like Malvern, most of the black folk I've met have been as fine a person as you'd care to meet. Never the less, people of diverse backgrounds and social class are treated of a kind when they have black skin, and the response is often overzealous and paranoid on the part of the police.

#3. Black people are really scared of dogs. If you're a paranoid cop, I highly recommend deploying one single K-9 unit to take the place of fourteen uniformed officers. Our mastiff puppy had a drug-dealer cornered in a park for five minutes before we could call her off (from wagging her tail and sniffing his knees), and he looked like he was going to faint, juggling his pagers and bugging out his eyes. He had been utterly immobilised by the gentle puppy. "Sorry about that!" I apologised. "I'm just tryin' to do some bidness!" he grumbled, stalking off toward the teeter-totter and swings.

#4. It is undeniably true that a certain proportion of immigrants to this country are doomed, shiftless epsilons whose sole ambition is to coast through life by taking advantage of folks' sense of generosity and charity, contributing nothing to society but taking hand-over-fist at every opporunity. And all this with a grand feeling of entitlement, to boot. I find it mystifying, and I'm a lazy North American slob. Think about that.

#5. It is undeniably true that a certain proportion of immigrants to this country are bright, hard-working people who make enormous sacrifices for the future of their children, juggling second-language education with multiple jobs while facing institutional discrmination by authorities. They tend to have interesting taste in music, and cook food that smells really good coming up through the vents.

#6. Handel's compositions should never, ever, ever be recast as Calypso music. Fucking ever.

#7. A lot of people who advertise their Christianity with great enthusiasm have no compunction about violating the basic tenements of the religion when it suits them. When I first moved to Malvern, I was impressed with the overt displays of religiosity. I'm not religious myself, but I figured it was kind of like being a member of the Better Business Bureau -- these people were proclaiming themselves faithful to a certain code of ethics. No big surprise to the cynical, it turned out to be more show than substance. People who wear crucifixes and have fish stickers on their bumpers are sinners just like everyone else -- they just have more judgemental language to use when deriding other people's sins.

#8. Racism in this city is one half real, and one half an ongoing delusion some people cling to in order to rationalise their failures.

#9. There are actually some retards in this world who will show up at your doorstep, explain that they were tenants five years previously, and demand their mail. This happened to me. The big black gentleman didn't seem too impressed that I hadn't been collecting his mail and putting it aside for him, which he insisted that every other tenant in the intervening five years had been happy to do for him. Before he could get himself too worked up, however, I invited my dog to the door and the fellow opted to leave.

#10. Some people are poor because of circumstances beyond their control. Other people are poor because they are human beings of low quality. If they didn't live right next door to one another, it would be easier to tell them apart.

This vitriolic expulsion of inner mire had been sponsored in part by the Ontario Mortgage Corporation. Thank you, and good night.