June 13

Fat Einsteins is the oldest open (music) stage in Canada. It’s been going since around the time the Leafs last won the Stanley Cup. That’s a long time.

It used to be held in the basement of a church somewhere up on Bloor, but now it’s in the Stonecutters’ Union building, south of the U of T. There’s a lot of predictably pro-union stuff on the walls which I can half-sympathize with, and the best coffee and cookies this side of Yonge Street, provided by the long-time host, Martha.

I’ve played there on Wednesday nights for the past four or five weeks, doing the standard two songs. I’m always the youngest person there, but age notwithstanding there’s always at least a handful of phenomenally talented artists playing who should be getting paid for their skills. They just never had the luck or the breaks, and also never set themselves up with a “safety net” in case the one-in-a-million chance at being the next Dylan or James Taylor or Cat Stevens didn’t work out. So they wind up working as night-watchmen at museums, even when they could have breezed through university if they had ever tried.

The open stage is normally held in the basement of the building, but we got displaced tonight by some Important Union Meetings or the like, so it’s up on the third floor instead.

I sat and listened to the other acts for the first forty-five minutes, and then felt the coffee coming through. So, just to lighten my load before getting up on stage myself, I went in search of the familiar washroom in the basement.

I got down the stairs alright, but then, as I turned toward the facilities off the hallway, a black man in drab green clothes, who had been blending in with the darkness in the recesses of an unlit side room, rose from his chair and came out to confront me.

“You thought you could just walk right by me?”

I stopped walking. “Huh?”

“Get out of the building.”

If the value of a human being can be measured by the sheer quantity of keys he carries around with him, this man was a king.

Yet with one glance at him, you could guess there’s no way in hell he ever even made it out of high school, not even as a shops-class graduate.

More puzzled than anything, I responded politely:

“May I ask what your name is, and who your employer is.”

“No.”

“What is your name, and who is your employer?”

“Get out of the building.”

Increasingly shaken, I figured explaining myself might help:

“All I want is to use the washroom before I play at Fat Einsteins.” My throat was getting dry.

“You can use the bathroom on the third floor,” he said coldly.

“Fine. I didn’t know there was one up there.”

I turned away, and as I walked back up the stairs, increasingly seething at this decrepit asshole’s refusal to treat me with even basic human decency, I talked back at him:

“You’re a waste of space.”

He started to chuckle. “I don’t know about that.”

“You’re a waste of space! Little bigot!”

So I found the washroom at the end of the hall three floors up, and tried to calm myself down. You can’t finger-pick guitar while your hands are shaking.

Then, back in the room, I got up on stage, played my song—there were enough latecomers that they cut it back to one song each by the end—and left as they were stacking the chairs.

“God’s Gift to Security” was back to lurking in his dark room by the exit. And getting paid for it.

I hissed back at him as I went out the glass front doors:

“Zero!”

Because that, in my estimation, is all the chance which that dismal mass of protoplasm has of doing anything that will ever matter in the world. But then, advertising his name doesn’t seem to be a high priority for that unionized vegetable anyway.

It was his job to protect that property from “probable drug dealers” such as myself? Maybe so. But then it was also his job to identify himself when I twice asked him politely to do so.

Unless, you know, there’s some cowardly, hide-behind union rule that says he doesn’t have to. Like I’ve seen Toronto Transit ticket-takers at Spadina Station cop out on, and read about Air Canada security ninnies doing, too.

Pack of overpaid, gutless pretenders, tripping over all the regal power of their laughable keys and uniforms.

Anyway, I suppose tonight was no worse, objectively, than my bathroom experiences with a couple of uptight Chinese girls in the first place I rented in Toronto, nearly a decade ago—another basement, but one that I ended up being effectively confined to, rather than barred from.

The landlord there had grown up in the house, and his father still lived on the main floor, assisted on a daily basis by several nurses. Being literally senile, the old man truly needed the help.

I went up to the second-floor bathroom one afternoon to shower in around ten pounds of water pressure. Then, coming back down without my glasses, I had to step around a puddle of yellow liquid on the kitchen floor. With the old man grinning stupidly over it, by the sink.

Yellow liquid ... hmm, that wasn’t there when I....

Omigod.

Hence the smell of urine which hung in the air twenty-four hours a day.

Hence also the dried feces I found one evening while moving furniture around in the corner of my room.

There was actually a university-age guy with long hair living on the second floor, along with a pasta-for-brains Italian doofus, and the four petite Chinese breasts. Nevertheless, that proximity to long hair apparently didn’t desensitize the girls to it all that much: After I had used the bathroom one afternoon and said “Hi” to them for the first time, those same two Asian chicks went to the landlord, hysterically complaining about the “long-haired man” (i.e., me) who was using their bathroom.

So, as soon as his plumber-friend could complete it, I ended up showering in an exposed bathtub in the middle of an unfinished (and barely heated) basement. In the middle of winter. Shivering my Occidental ass off.

And then just to be sure there was no confusion, the little chopsticks put up a sign on the second-floor bathroom door: “This is the girls bathroom, boys should use the one downstairs,” etc. Except, of course, that the other guys in the house were still welcome to use “their” bathroom: It was only me that wasn’t allowed to “squat in their paddy field.”

There is a lesson in all that:

Importing the people means importing their prejudices as well. This is a problem that modern liberals find difficult to understand. They say “Let’s overcome our prejudices and let in all these people from China”.... Then the people from China turn out to have prejudices of their own.

If you ever check out an online dating site like match.com that encourages its users to state their preferences, you’ll find that a noticeably disproportionate number of the Asian women posting there list long hair as a “turn-off.” Of course, they’re entitled to be turned on, off, or sideways by whatever their spit-polished vaginas prefer. Even if, you know, they're just blindly reflecting the conformity and intolerance of “outsiders” which is sadly typical of Far-Eastern cultures. (It’s actually all very predictable, since neither totalistic communism nor the feudalism and infallible Divine Emperor [i.e., national cult-leader] which the loyal Japanese lived under until slightly more than half a century ago have any tolerance for individuality or the questioning of authority.)

But, studies have been done showing that persons who are rated as attractive tend to make more money than those who are seen as unattractive. And some of the guys and dolls (Asian and otherwise) who are prejudiced against long hair on men—thus rating us as inherently unattractive, for being all-turned-off by that attribute—find their way into hiring and decision-making positions in the business world. What happens then? Obviously, that’s going to result in lower wages being paid to persons like myself, even aside from any other accepted biases against us hippies.

That is, the “little yellow prejudices” (as Inspector Clouseau would have said) of these people are not only costing me any chance at living out an Asian fetish, and preventing me from using the bathroom in a house where I’m paying my full share of the rent, they’re costing me money and career opportunities, too.

We have laws against that, right? No? Oh.

When I think back on how, a couple of decades ago, the Chinese people in general were being mocked by North American comedians as being “a billion people, all of them with the same haircut,” it fills me with many different emotions.

Sympathy is not one of them.