Alan: A decade or so ago, some friends of mine were taking an advanced degree in film and the head of the department told them he had analyzed thousands of movies and concluded there there were three simple rules, three techniques that never worked. I only remember one of them - flashbacks. And I remember thinking he was a fool for having such a list and giving it to MFA students.
There are no rules; sometimes flashbacks work and sometimes they are a lazy and annoying tool. And I only mention this because I’m about to flash back to what I wrote about 24 hours ago.
Color me gobsmacked, I just received a text from the owner of the last place we saw - the first place of three today - and he thanked us for coming to see the place and for my partner’s feedback. When we left, we told him that Baņuta and I sometimes wish we had stickers or diplomas which we could hand out to some landlords, saying “We’re not taking this but we’re giving you five stars for being a mensch and having a decent place”. The ‘Baņuta and Alan Go Hunting Seal of Approval’ that he can put on his front door so other renters can see it and walk in relaxed and hopeful, rather than filled with the anticipated dread I’m assuming my fellow searchers have accumulated in our search.
I didn’t love the street, though it was just within the boundaries of our targed area. It was one of those streets with lots of factories and warehouses and a few houses among them. Not very homey if you know what I mean. To its credit, there was a children’s playground right across the street but it was kind of old and in need of repair. I felt a bit of hope though, when I pulled up and there was a sign announcing that the playground was due for a renovation.
You know that story of course of the three bears and how baby bear’s porridge is just right. When we look at houses, Baņuta and I usually imagine that the smallest bedroom will be Keely’s room. In this house, baby bear’s room was only just right if baby bear was still in a crib but otherwise, it was really really small. Everything was small - the main floor, the backyard. Maybe Mama Bear had a nice room but she would have had to work to fit her writing desk in there. It certainly wasn’t for us but at least it was respectable; someone will be happy there. And I think that when we left we had the sense that even if we didn’t want that place, it was possible we might find a place that we did.
I’ll get back to you after we see the next two places but I feel a different kind of dread over them, not that I’ll hate them but the opposite. We’re going east, baby, where it appears a renter can get a bit more for his money. It doesn’t make sense to me that landlords in the east end are less greedy than landlords in the west where I’ve lived my entire life but they might be. I admit I used to have a bug up my ass about the east end of Toronto. But I think it’s perfectly nice in places. I can imagine someone being very happy there. I know people who are happy there. Maybe I could be one of those people, even though I’ve lived my entire life in the west. But my daughter’s mother lives in the west, she’s not moving and having our houses so far apart could be a huge pain.
End of flashback.
Hard cut to me on the Danforth driving past Pape, past Jones, past Greenwood???!!! Where the hell is this place.
Oh there it is. Baņuta’s waiting for me. She points out a place across the street that looks interesting. It’s not a nail salon or a money cashing joint so I guess that bodes well.
The owners are nice. They start showing us the house and I just happen to be ahead of Baņuta when I see this… let’s call it a “feature” of the place, and I say to the guy “My girlfriend is about to have a heart attack”. And she pretty well did, in the good way.
We went to have a coffee before going to the next house in the east, which I can’t bother writing about, and while drinking coffee the owners texted Banuta, said they liked our vibe and dropped the price a hundred dollars. It was still high at 3500 plus utilities but at the same time, those numbers are in line with the prices we’re seeing.
And we’ve seen places for the same amount that were insulting. So we can’t dismiss it for being expensive. And they liked us. They would be good landlords. And there were lots of things to recommend the place besides the one magical ingredient that would constitute a dream come true for my lovely partner. Nice kitchen, decent space downstairs if a little smaller than what we have. It had a window seat which Keely and the cat would fight over. And the bedrooms were decent and had some of the nicest closets we’ve seen yet.
There weren’t that many drawbacks. It had nowhere for storage. It had one ductless air conditioning outlet on the second floor and I doubted it was accurate when they told me that one vent would cool down the whole house.
And it was in the east end.
As I walked around that part of town that day, it appears the east end of Toronto has gotten better, at least from my point of view. A lot of Torontonians bought houses out there because that’s what they could afford and then the stores that serve those kinds of folks appeared and pushed away some of the places that made me suspicious of the east end my whole life, dating back to when I drove cab and didn’t even like picking up a fare out there. Ironically, as much as Torontonians complain about gentrification, that may well be what is changing the east for the better, at least from the point of view of this potential gentrifier.
But as Baņuta said, “all of Keely’s friends are in the west end”, all her life is there, and all I could think about was all the driving in my future. Just recently the father of one of my daughter’s best friends had said to me - no he had implored me - “Please don’t move too far away.” They wouldn’t drive their kids out there for a playdate. It appeared that if I wanted my daughter to have some friends over, I’d have to volunteer to pick them up.
I started to imagine myself living there and leaving my happy girlfriend each morning, getting in the car to take my daughter to school or to a friend’s or to her mother’s and getting all road ragey 90 minutes later, fighting traffic trying to get back home.
I didn’t say no exactly. But I was thinking “please don’t want this place too much, I don’t know if I can do it”. And maybe that looked like no to Baņuta who reacted in a way that made it clear she really did want it that much.
We parted ways, she had a previous appointment. I went to talk to an east end friend who was a good listener. And I started to think that sometimes we have to sacrifice and I didn’t want to be saying no to my girlfriend’s dreams just because I’d have to drive an extra two hours a week. Or four. What else did I have to do, right? It’s just driving. I like driving. I have podcasts to listen to. So I phoned my daughter and told her the situation, how it would affect her and her friends and everything else and my sweet sweet child said we should go for it. Of course that’s also because when I say “it’s much further” from everything, she has no concept of what that means.
At that moment that I spoke to my daughter, I was thinking “okay let’s do it”. And I actually found myself strangely excited to move to a whole other part of town. Who knows how my life might change and maybe for the better? Maybe I’d wrung everything out of the west end that I could, and the only way new windows and doors were going to open was by moving to a whole other locale. Maybe this west end boy was destined to live out his last years in the east end.
That’s how I felt when I wasn’t wavering and thinking about the driving.
When Baņuta and I got back together, we tossed it back and forth - to her credit she was wavering too. Sometimes she’d say “it’s too far” and as grateful as I was to hear that, I knew she would regret it so I’d say we should take it. t was kind of a thing of whose regret would be more bearable? We eventually decided we’d show it to Keely the next day and if we all felt good about the place, we’d probably take it.
We always had a plan though, that if we thought we were about to take a place we would phone our landlady and offer her a bit of extra money to let us stay. So Baņuta called her.
Baņuta: Let me thicken the plot.
There were three houses that day: one was on Geary, the other two were in the Danforth-Pape-Coxwell side of town, the undiscovered ‘bourn. (a Shakespeare reference for you theatre people out there)
One thing all three houses had in common was that the owner was showing it, always a man who had put a lot of work into the house or was in the process of improving it. All three prospective landlords were anxious for us to like and admire their homes, and one of them even said words I never expected to hear from a landlord: namely that ‘renting your house was a customer service and he liked to have happy customers.’
I urged Alan to at least try out the East side because people were telling us the rents would be cheaper and that we would get better value. Based on the two houses we saw, I would say it was true. Alan would pish posh and say two houses is not enough proof. Okay, but even though both of them were as expensive as what we’ve seen, what they were offering was way, way better. There was one house on Kings Park Blvd which was in the process of being freshly painted and the owner winced when he showed me the scuff marks on the white stairs leading to the basement, apologizing for previous tenants who failed to take their shoes off. That house at $3600 plus utilities did not beckon to us, but in terms of space and comfort it had absolutely everything we needed. It was just too fussy and the giant concrete slab cutting the kitchen in the middle didn’t help.
But the other house. The other house is where the drama begins. It was on Parkmount Road right down the street from the Coal Mine Theatre, a good omen. It was the starter house of a couple with three small children who were moving to the States. When I pointed at the plant hanging down over the roof of the porch and said ‘Holy cow, that’s wisteria!’, the owner exchanged a delighted glance with his wife. He had planted it there seven years ago and if I knew from wisteria I had to be a good person.
Then he took us to the backyard and I nearly fainted. There, steps from the patio, was the thing every woman needs: a room of her own. It was a studio with a lock on the front, sliding glass doors, complete sound insulation, skylights. He’d built it for his wife, who was a painter. I wanted this studio with every fibre of my being. The thought that I could leave the house and go to a separate room to write seemed as amazing as having my own spaceship.
I liked many other things about the house as well, the gas stove, the layout, the warmth and love the house was filled with. It was too expensive, but I wanted it badly.
We got into Alan’s car and when he said he couldn’t face the driving to the East end, I burst into tears. I cried buckets, and, helpfully, in a perfect Hollywood touch, the skies burst open as well. Rain hailed down in sync with my tears, and I tried to pretend it was okay if we didn’t move there because of all the driving and then I got a text that the landlord would drop the rent. It was still too expensive, but they sure wanted us to take the house because they wanted us to rock it in our arms and take care of it and they knew we would do so for whenever — if ever — they came back, or in any case, we would protect their investment
We told them that we had to sleep on it. Then we set up a second viewing the next day so that Keely could see it, too. Alan was trying to accept that the East would be our new adventure. The second viewing was in the afternoon. In the morning I had to do the dreaded deed.
Call our landlady.
For weeks now these three words had been on my ‘to do’ list. Once we gleaned exactly how brutal the brutal market was out there, we’d wondered if there wasn’t some way we could forestall our departure. Maybe if we appealed to her greed? Last year we insisted that she could only increase our rent by the legal amount — 1.7%, I think. Now we were ready to offer a jump of more than 25%. I felt like a scab even considering it. I was breaking ranks with all the other tenants of the world by giving into an unspoken extortion. But going to a new place was going to cause a lot more disruption - and be a lot more expensive - than staying where we are.
Calling Ann the landlady makes me literally sick. An hour before I call her, my stomach starts to ache, and that ache remains for hours afterward. I experience such extreme anxiety when I face talking to her that I’ve gone to doctors and therapists to try to change that. Sometimes I feel like sueing her for damages to my mental health.
To many people, I seem to be a strong and resourceful person. Yet ever since a surgeon said he would have to saw my husband’s face open to remove his cancer some 11 years ago, my resilience is thin. I braced myself against harrowing news for so many years that now I’m two tablespoons short of fortitude. Like caregiver stress just sandpapered it away.
I tell myself Ann can’t do anything to me. She’s already done it. She can’t make things worse. And we might be choosing to live in the east end a few hours from now. With that magic studio. So finally I punch her number.
SCENE: PHONE CALL TO LANDLADY
soundtrack something like Johnny Greenwood
ME: (smiley voice) Hi, Ann. How are your plans for renovation coming along?
ANN: Oh, yes, I was going to ask you, can the contractor come over to take a look next week?
ME: Sure, no problem. Though the cost of lumber these days has gone through the roof hasn’t it? Those renovations are going to cost you ai ai ai.
ANN: (moaning) Tell me about it.
ME: Moving costs, that’s going to be bad too, for you and for me.
ANN: (more moans) Oh… oh… you have no idea…
ME: So we’ve been looking at a couple of places and we’ve started to think that… (extremely fake casual) well, call me crazy but what if we paid A HUMUNGOUSLY HIGHER AMOUNT OF RENT than we are paying now? Would that change your plans?
ANN: (silence) Actually, I was going to ask you the same… okay, let me…
ME: You’d have to guarantee the price for the next five years.
ANN: (enthusiastically) Of course! 100%! Let me talk to my son. Give me two weeks.
Cut to next scene
You are both great writers. I especially love the 'baby bear' caption under the photo of that closet of a room and the line about rocking the house in your arms. And I also commend your blog being part screenplay. Arthur Miller invented a mixed-genre like this way back in the day. Can't recall exactly which piece it was. The Misfits? Have to research.
Shit. Now THAT’S what I call a cliffhanger!