I had a bad busking experience on Sunday with a man who essentially held me hostage by dangling a carrot ($20 bill) in front of me for nearly 2 hours.
I tweeted the full story in this thread (it’s slightly out of order on that link so if you click it…read 1/15 first not 14/15) and I don’t feel like rewriting the details so I’m just gonna post said Twitter thread in paragraph form. (I wrote it out in a Word document before separating it into tweets anyway so it should read like a normal post.)
The canyon between my Sunday encounter and today’s (Tuesday) is the reason why this post is titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” I mean to emphasize the sheer classlessness of the man I met Sunday, v. the generosity of Crystal today. And also the very real separation between the affluent and my own cohort, who are underbanked, lack credit cards and fixed addresses and use coins and cash to buy things.
TORONTO 1: SUNDAY
Busking on Sundays it’s rare to make over $20. And I need to make $20 a day to cover my monthly rent. So I’m out in front of Tim’s @ 10am this past Sunday to be there for the morning rush because by 1pm the entire area is deserted. After just an hour I’ve already made $16. This is good. Maybe I can go home early!
I played for 6 hours the day before to make the needed $20. 6 hours is the very upper limit of my endurance for standing & playing acoustic guitar (acoustic strings hurt more). I was REALLY tired when I got home that night. So I was delighted to have $16 so soon into what I’d assumed would be a 3 hour busk, minimum, and super excited to maybe go home early.
Along comes a well-dressed man.
He stands about 6 feet from me and watches me play a song. He pulls out his wallet which is thick with $20 bills (looked to be at LEAST 600$ in there) and pulls out a $20. Holding the $20, he talks about how he’s trying to learn to play guitar. His story is very long & meandering.
At first I’m genuinely interested bcuz I like (most) ppl but after 10 minutes the man is STILL speaking. I am still doing my best to be polite by not playing/listening but there is a line of ppl outside the Tim’s & he is preventing me from busking for them. BUT he is still holding $20, so I continue to listen and not play.
The man talks for over 90 minutes, during which I don’t make a cent from ANYONE else. I know it sounds insane that I just stood there and took it but the man kept acting like he was JUST about to put the $20 in my case and leave.
The man gets louder and weirder and his convo harder to follow, alienating ppl in line @ Tim’s. For all THEY know me and this man are some weird performance duo. After all, the guy has latched on to me and WILL NOT LEAVE & he is STILL holding the $20 bill. Holding me hostage. I need the money and he knows it.
At 12:30 the man is still talking. He talks about Continental drift. His kids. The ice age. There are no segues between topics. He didn’t seem unstable at first but now I am very uncomfortable. Do I ignore him or ask him to leave and lose the $20? I’ve already put 90 mins into this guy
I try for a middle ground. I start playing guitar again, trying to strike a fine balance between making it clear to passers by that I am indeed busking while still trying to appear attentive to the man who is..,yep…STILL ranting & STILL holding the $20 bill.
Finally, around 12:45 the man very slowly & deliberately pulls his wallet out…puts the $20 bill back in wallet…the wallet in his pocket and walks away. I’m too gobsmacked to call him out. I’m beyond flabbergasted. The anger comes later.
This man took advantage of my politeness & my poverty, he held me hostage with the dangling carrot of $20, alienated EVERYONE in my radius so that they didn’t give me the coins they otherwise would have.
Trying to make up for lost time, I stay out busking until 3pm but as I said…it’s a ghost town. There is nobody around. I end the day with $16.
I know NOW I should have said after a few min “I’m sorry sir. This is how I make a living. I have to play music. If you’d like to donate that $20 I’d appreciate it but I can’t continue this convo.”
But I didn’t say that stuff because I was exhausted from the day before and because I NEEDED the $20. I just don’t understand.
How long did this man expect me to listen to him? Was he EVER going to give the money? Does he do this to other buskers/panhandlers/poor people?
I have to make $20 a day, 7 days a week. Everything above $20 goes to groceries for me and my cat. Furious, I drop my guitar at home and go to the grocery store and shoplift cat food, a pear and a chocolate bar. Okay. That’s dinner.
En route home I walk into a nearby KFC and fill my water bottle with Orange Crush.
“Sir, what are you doing?”
“Stealing pop.”
“I’ll call the cops.”
“You do that.”
I filled the whole bottle. Thanks KFC.
Then I went home and ate my pear and fed my cat and stewed. I usually don’t allow myself to get grifted. I’m fairly streetwise so I was pretty pissed.
I hope I don’t see that man again. I don’t know if I’d be able to restrain myself from…a one-sided frank exchange.
TORONTO 2: TUESDAY
Compare that with today.
I had an encounter a few hours ago with a woman named Crystal I’ve met just once before, back in November. She lives on the streets with a beautiful puppy, and panhandles downtown (she said Yonge) for a living. I forgot to ask for the dog’s name but he was sweet and wonderful and a little shy too.
Now, I’m terrible at identifying dog breeds…but it was 5 months old and had a very wide snout. So I viewed a bunch of picture galleries of different dog breeds. From these galleries, I think her young little dog was either a Boxer, like this little cutie. (I googled “Boxer 5 months old.”)
Or it a Boston Terrier (similar faces, just major ear difference…either up, at attention, or floppy, at ease):
OR it was a mix between the two:
The above dog, a 5-month old Boston Terrier-Boxer mix looks most like Crystal’s dog, but there are other photos of 5 month old mixes that look nothing like it.
The dog also resembled a British breed called, what else, a “Brittany” but these dogs seem way too fancy for Crystal’s tastes, and it doesn’t look right except for the wideness of the snout:
Anyway, you see what I’m driving at, right? All of these dogs have wide snouts. Crystal’s most resembles the third photo, but I don’t think I’m going to resolve this on a computer. This is one of those “real world solutions” where I could simply ask Crystal. Except she doesn’t have a phone.
And I don’t have one either.
So I’ll ever never see her again, or I’ll see her tomorrow, as Crystal promised me when we parted. Or I’ll see her in November again.
Last November she came and sat beside me for a while as I busked. Her aggressive panhandling style made me $10 very fast. I tried to split the money with her but she wouldn’t hear of it. I don’t ask for change, it breaks the busker code. To me, the playing and singing is the asking. People see my open guitar case.
I watch them pass me. Even the ones (always older white men) who avert their eyes as they pass can’t help but peek into my case. I don’t know why they’re so curious to see what’s in there. To see how little I’ve made? To assure themselves they’re better than me?
Anyway Crystal is a nice conversation companion, though the streets have clearly been hard on her. She’s 45 or so but looks 10 years older.
When she came up to my busking spot tonight, aside from her dog she was holding two open bottles of that godawful Clamato vodka mix.
She snorted at my guitar case. There were two measly toonies in there. That’s it. It was my lowest total since a particular stingy day back in November where I landed just $2 and change. I was frustrated but not to the point of being despondent, as yesterday was a very good day: I made $34.
I didn’t put the full $14 extra from yesterday towards today because I bought cat food and dinner for myself (and we ate like kings….KINGS I say!) but I’ve got $6 remaining from yesterday to put toward today’s total.
Meaning I’m still $10 behind.
So when Crystal arrived, I was glad to see her but also a little glum. Typically meeting another busker is not remunerative because you have to stop busking to converse with them (and her dog) and because they’re struggling on the same streets you are, so you don’t ask for money.
Crystal grabbed the bath man I stand on to prevent tendonitis from standing on concrete for hours a day. Trust me…if you’ve ever stood on bare concrete for…even 3 hours a day for a single week…at the end of that week you will be in serious foot and calf pain. Crystal points out my guitar to her dog (I forgot to ask his name…sorry) and he comes over and licks my hand. Adorable.
I used to think that liking animals was like the rockers v. the mods back in the late 60s-early 70s or Beatles v. Stones. I thought you had to declare yourself a cat person or a dog person. It was a relief to find out otherwise.
I am a cat person who loves dogs. I’d get a dog if my life weren’t so unstable and transient.
Crystal spilled Clamato on my bath mat. No big deal.
Then she said: I thought you had to make $20 a day?
“Holy shit, you remember that from the last time we spoke?”
She shook her head like I was an idiot for asking.
I explained that I had the extra $6 from yesterday, so it wasn’t as bad as it looked.
“Well, I got a proposition for you. Come with me to Vic Park, buy me some vodka at the LCBO, and I’ll give ya $10.”
“Wait, really? Why can’t you buy it?”
“I’m banned from there for shoplifting. C’mon Dan, I’ll have you back here in ten minutes.”
I sigh. Sometimes going on adventures with other people like me involve random stops at random people houses for random reasons, sometimes as innocent as picking something up, something for legally dubious reasons like purchasing crack or “Tina” (what people in Toronto call meth) or down…and I don’t want to be around heroin. But Crystal seems to be a garden variety alcoholic. I don’t think she’s going to take me out of my way, and I think she will do what she said she would. The least I can do is get her the drink she wants/needs.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
I had assumed we’d be walking but Crystal hails a cab, nudges her cute lil doggy into the back, throws a mask on, hides her two open bottles of Clamato vodka and tells me to “get in.”
From everything I’ve read about COVID, you need over fifteen minutes in close quarters with an infected person to get it. The LCBO is a 3 minute cab drive away. And my beat has been so restricted since March 2020 that I kinda long for the kind of random adventures living low can suddenly offer up. I get in the cab. We fly down Danforth. Crystal knows the cab driver. He turns off the meter. She tosses him $10 and me $30, the $10 bill is for me, for doing her this favour. The $20 is for the mickey of Smirnoff she wants. No line @ the LCBO. Two patrolling beefy security guards. I buy a mickey and shoplift one. Back in the cab we hurtle back to Main St Station where I jump out. Crystal is so delighted about the extra mickey of vodka she lets me keep the change, which is just over $4.50. It’s 7:45PM and I haven’t eaten yet today. To the grocery store!
I get myself two of those cheese bun things and wet food for Cookie. (He has a bag of kibble @ home). The pear, the cheese and the hummus I don’t buy.
And now I’m home, happy, tired, about to fall asleep. But just one last word:
TWO WORLDS, TWO AMERICAS, TWO CITIES
The entire world is turning increasingly binary. One world for the financial elites, another world for the rest of us. One set of laws for the rich, another, far more punitive set of laws for us. We live in divisive times and they are only getting worse. But there have been some beautiful utterances coming from this lack of cohesion. Some great art has captured our fractious ways. I have two book recommendations.
Steve Erickson’s 1986 novel Rubicon Beach - one of my all-time favourite books - posits America One and America Two. One America for the 1%, one America for everybody else. And China Miéville’s 2009 novel The City and the City takes this idea and puts it…well, in a city, that is split among class lines but not spatial. So one class can only talk to, buy produce from, engage with their own, and the same goes for the other class. Yet both classes share the same streets! If you are caught speaking to, or even looking at someone from the forbidden class, you are arrested by a shadowy police organization called Breach, who drag you to an Orwellian prison complex and keep you there for an undetermined period of time. Why? Because everything about Miévilles novel is indeterminate. The spatial orientation of the city, how it is separated, how people go about “not seeing” the other class, and the punishment for seeing them. The indeterminacy of the sentence makes it scarier for those sentenced (or awaiting sentencing). Paul Bernardo must be feeling this burden right about now, sentenced to life (ostensibly a quarter century in Canada but his “dangerous offender” status meaning his sentence is indeterminate. His sentence ends when he does, most likely. (I’m not complaining. Bernardo is one of the small minority of people who I’m not sure can be rehabilitated. I’m just making a point about indeterminacy. It must drive him CRAZY that there is no set date that officially ends his sentence.)
There are two Torontos. I have a Master’s in English Literature and I work(ed) in high end weddings and events. I’m sure I could go to a rich person’s party and be conversant enough with those people and their ways to not make a fool of myself.
But I’d be bored out of my goddamn mind.
Maybe it’s not about choosing one side of the street over the other.
Maybe it’s about picking the street itself.