Kids will be kids no matter where they live or who their parents are. As a ten-year-old boy living in the slums of Toronto some of my best friends came from families whose occupations were not always on the right side of the law- but in our little world that didn’t seem to matter.
Of my three closest friends, there was Marvin whose father was a receiver of stolen goods and kept a still in his basement, Nick, whose father was a bootlegger with mafia connections, and last but not least, there was Terry whose mother owned a 'special' kind of rooming house across the road from where I lived.
As kids growing up in a notorious area on the verges of Cabbage Town we saw a lot - but at our age, understood very little.
Terry and I, like the other kids in the neighbourhood, spent a lot of time participating in all the normal local after-school pursuits like snaring pigeons in Allan Gardens or dragging big magnets up and down the back lanes seeing what rusty treasures we could snag.
As kids will, we had sleepovers. Terry spent nights at my house but I liked it best when we stayed at his place. It was more fun. His house was a real hive of activity. He had several aunts who lived in the rooms upstairs and there were all kinds of interesting men coming to visit them. It was as if there were a party going on all the time and, best of all, his aunts were always subsidizing our banana splits at the Chinese restaurant on the corner if we promised to stay there for an hour or so.
After Terry, Nick and I joined the boy scouts we got into the habit of going to Terry’s house after our Wednesday night meetings to have some hot chocolate and finish off the evening with a game of monopoly.
We always played at a table located in a kitchen at the rear of the house. It must have been disconcerting for the visiting men to see us huddled around the table in our green shirts and blue shorts with our Stetsons tilted back on our heads. They would come strutting down the stairs from the second floor with cocky satisfied looks on their faces but when they spied our little scout troop they’d quickly hustle off looking confused and guilty.
Terry’s aunts sure had a lot of friends coming and going and strangely many of them were Chinese. I felt that that was a little unusual but I had become accustomed to seeing unusual things around Terry’s house. One day when I was about to start up the stairs to the second floor bathroom I was confronted by a legless man swinging down the stairs towards me using his arms to propel himself in a sort of hopping motion. I say legless but actually his body seemed to end at the base of his rib cage and the way he moved put me in mind of some sort of giant insect. I returned to the kitchen and told Terry about what I had seen but he just shrugged and explained that the man’s name was John and that whenever the circus was in town he came and visited his aunts. Then Terry pulled a fist full of free carnival tickets out of his pocket and waved them in my face saying, “ Look what he gave me.”
Terry and I, and two younger boys who also lived in the house, took the streetcar to the CNE the following day and had a great time on the midway. We ended our day touring the freak show spending most of our time in front of 'Kandar The Human Torso' with whom we exchanged knowing winks.
There was always something exciting happening at Terry’s house. One evening the three of us were sitting quietly in the kitchen after our scout meeting when we heard a loud bang and a crash as the front door caved in. Then a man came running down from the second floor taking the stairs two at a time. He was given chase by several uniformed policemen who were pouring through the gap where the front door had been. They all made their way down the hall past where we were sitting - first the man from upstairs and then the cops in hot pursuit. The fugitive brushed passed and made it out the back door, then leapt over the porch rail and ran through the back yard. We leaned over the table to protect the game board as the police men, looking like a version of the Keystone Cops elbowed their way passed us, crowded through the back door then bunched up on the narrow porch. Two of the officers drew their guns and fired several warning shots then the whole group clambered down the back stairs and continued the chase. Nick and I got up from our chairs and watched the group disappear in the distance but Terry remained at the table calm and unimpressed. I think he used the opportunity to move his marker to a better location on the game board.
In truth it wasn’t always fun and games around the place. One day as we sat on the front porch we saw a cop chasing a man down the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. The policeman was losing ground so he stopped and threw his nightstick at the guy who was getting away. He missed but a garbage man who was perched levelling trash on the top of a dump truck parked by the curb saw what was going on and decided to intervene. As the man passed him he swung his heavy shovel down and struck the fleeing man on the head stopping him literally dead in his tracks. We watched as the policeman and the truck driver leaned over the motionless man while a puddle of blood gradually formed around his head. Shortly a little Italian lady from a nearby house came over, shoved them aside then made a little tent with a newspaper and placed it over the man’s his lifeless face.
The saddest thing that ever occurred at the house and the main reason I stopped spending time there occurred during the summer of 1955.
Terry and the other kids at the house had been away for about two weeks when one afternoon he showed up at my place with tears in his eyes telling me that David, an eight-year-old son of one of his aunts had drowned while swimming. They had been vacationing at Wasaga Beach where his mother kept a summer cottage. Terry often invited me to join them there -I never went and hearing about what happened to poor little David I was glad I hadn’t been there to witness it.
I attended the funeral for a short time but after seeing the little fellow dressed in a tux lying in a small coffin looking more like a puppet than a person I couldn’t take it. I can still see Terry’s aunts dressed in unaccustomed black, clustered around the tiny coffin weeping.
I didn’t know what to say or how to act so I just walked away vowing never to attend another funeral- and with a couple of exceptions I never have. I didn’t blame anybody at the house for the boy’s death- the kids there were watched over more closely than I was. Terry’s mother and aunts, when not engaged in their nocturnal pursuits, were normal caring people but somehow I couldn’t face being in the house anymore. Shortly after the boy's death we moved from the neighbourhood.
As I grew older, I of course realized what had been going on in Terry’s house- you can’t have lived on Pembroke Street and passed the Spot One Grill on Dundas Street every morning on the way to school, and not have known. During the late 1950’s, that corner was the epicentre of Toronto’s flesh trade, surpassing even the infamous Jarvis district.
Terry’s mothers' place was not the only residence on our block that sported a red light in the window, but I can testify from personal experience that it was the nicest little whorehouse on the street.
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