rty stripped. Subpoenaed
to a competency hearing.

The driver of the truck has been waiting for me to finish the note. He makes eye
contact with me, I make eye contact with him. The other two hop out and start
throwing my piles of ballast into the back of the truck.

I take my bicycle from the shed out back, kick my way through the piles of crap,
and ride off into the sunset.

#

For Christmas I hang some tinsel from my handlebars and put a silver star on the
big hex-nut that holds the headset to the front forks.

Tony the Tiger thinks that's pretty funny. He stopped into my sickroom this
morning as I lay flat on my back on my grimy, sweaty futon, one arm outflung,
hand resting on the twisted wreckage of my front wheel. He stood in the doorway,
grinning from striped shirt to flaming red moustache, and barked "Hah!" at me.

Which is his prerogative, since this is his place I'm staying at, here in a
decaying Rosedale mansion gone to spectacular Addams Family ruin, this is where
he took me in when I returned on my bike from the ghosttown of Niagara Falls,
where I'd built a nest of crap from the wax-museums and snow-globe stores until
the kitsch of it all squeezed my head too hard and I rode home, to a Toronto
utterly unlike the one I'd left behind. I'd been so stunned by it all that I
totally missed the crater at Queen and Brock, barreling along at forty kay, and
I'd gone down like a preacher's daughter, smashing my poor knee and my poor bike
to equally dismal fragments.

"Hah!" I bark back at Tony the Tiger. "Merry happy, dude."

"You, too."

Which it is, more or less, for us ragtags who live on Tony the Tiger's paternal
instincts and jumbo survivalist-sized boxes of Corn Flakes.

And now it's the crack of noon, and my navel is thoroughly contemplated, and my
adoring public awaits, so it's time to struggle down bravely and feed my face.

I've got a robe, it used to be white, and plush, with a hood. The hood's still
there, but the robe itself is the sweat-mat grey of everything in Tony the
Tiger's dominion. I pull it on and grope for my cane. I look down at the bruisey
soccerball where my knee used to be and gingerly snap on the brace that Tony
fabbed up for me out of foam and velcro. Then it's time to stand up.

"Fricken-mother-shit-jesus-fuck!" I shout and drown out my knee's howls of
protest.

"Y'okay?" floats Tony's voice up the stairs.

"Peachy keen!" I holler back and start my twenty-two-year-old old-fo