Who Lives in my Neighborhood

It's hard to say who lives in the EOA, even when you've lived here for a few months. The reason it's hard to say, and I'll be frank here, is that the Bad People live in the EOA, and you're not allowed to say that. I mean drug users and Natives and men with too-sporty sunglasses. Also, young people who wear t-shirts in the winter. But since the Bad People are really the secret Jesuses and the no-bullshitters and the lonely geniuses and the people who make good jokes and the hilarious crazies and pixies and scapegoats and old men and addicts and recyclers and anti-heroes and cookie-makers. They aren't going to win the culture game, but only assholes think they can. So you can't just call them the Bad People. You need a better term.

You may be asking, why do you need a term at all? Because, conventional or not, human categories are real, and it's both interesting and enlightening to get them right. For example, I once knew a funny little man named Hoppy who was always turning up suddenly, coughing violently and peering at you humorously. He'd get drunk, explain complicated scientific and theological concepts, sell a few stolen goods, and disappear when you weren't looking. One day a friend referred to Hoppy, shaking his head, as "that silly fucking leprechaun." Well, it was just the truest thing you could say about Hoppy -- truer than a metaphor, anyway -- he really was a leprechaun. That's the sort of thing I want to know about a person, not who they are but what they are. I myself am an otter. It's a consolation that you can't actually say anything about anything without being wrong anyway.

In order to find out who lives in the EOA, you need to know my friend Tabu. He is the unanimous darling of the EOA, there's no one he doesn't know, including dorks like me. You can find him on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays at the Town and Country Saloon and Laundromat, singing karaoke. Town and Country is the center of the spinning wheel, but don't go in there unless you know Tabu already, or plan to wash your clothes. And since you wash your only set of clothes in the bathroom sink every night, you should find him first somewhere around the corner of Richmond and Dundas, and you should just hang around until he introduces himself. He will. Tabu had polio when he was a kid, which they treated by severing the tendons behind his knees, for which reason he now requires full-length leg braces and crutches to get around. And he does get around. The first time I met Tabu he claimed to have been following me for weeks.

So one night I walk into TnC with a backpack full of dirty clothes and a defensively aloof expression on my face. Tabu appears with a beer for me and invitation to join him and his friends for some karaoke. I want to interject here with the fact that I am someone who knows his karaoke song. It's 'Your Song' by Elton John. I want to also say that up until this point I had not concretely met anyone in my neighborhood, except for my downstairs neighbors. The first person Tabu introduced me to was a man named Harvey, who claimed to be '300% percent homosexual' --Harvey looked like a construction worker in his late forties, but nothing in his physical contortions or aggressive come-ons give me any reason to think he was exaggerating. I should say that TnC is about the exact opposite of a gay bar, so only a pretty god-damn tough person is going survive there as flamboyant queer. Turned out Harvey was a construction worker in his late forties, and among other things, he was one of these strange beings, a constantly bullshitting Ultimate No-Bullshitter. Obviously, it makes sense that he would be the evening's oracle.

This is what he told me: we were huddled against a wall, I think he'd been trying to explain to me something about primordial male instinct. Every now and then he'd jump up to dance grotesquely with the waitresses or say something lewd to some terrifying bad-ass. But at that moment, he was laboring to convey some horrible and hilarious sexual nonsense to me, with his face about two inches from mine, spraying my cheek with beer spit. All of a sudden he stops and changes tone. He says to me, in the way of revealing a secret, "You know who you're dealing with right? You know who these people are? We're the Aunties and Uncles!" And he laughed, a bit wildly but with his eyes wide open staring at me, watching. When Harvey said that, it hit me with the sort of force of truth that you only get once a month or so. It's just the perfect term, for a hundred reasons that you can intuit. And that's all I wanted to share, that the Aunties and Uncles live in the EOA.