Pemberton Music Festival and Sparky: Chapter Twelve

From July 18 to 20, Bruce and I attended the Pemberton Music Festival where I ran into this crowd of young men in Tom Sellick masks.

I would say attending my first music festival ever was like being at a three-day-long birthday party for an eight-year-old, complete with toys, a water slide, a ball pit, face painting, fun costumes, bubble wands and lots and lots of beachwear - except everyone was in their twenties.

Also, it was very loud.


Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Twelve 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Twelve of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

Two other people I know from working at the Gardens have helped me piece together Gerry Ringbold's likely fate. 

Well, one of these people I really only know of as opposed to know personally. Cornwall Dubbins - who everyone calls "Dubs" - is the Chief Arborist for the Thompson Gardens. He used to work for the city in the Parks Department but joined the Thompson Garden staff about a year before the grand opening.

Dubs is in early middle age, tall, skinny and looks like he’ll carry a full head of hair with him to his grave. He is crazy about trees and he loves the Thompson Gardens. So maybe I don't need to tell you that the person Dubs hated most in the world was Gerry Ringbold.

The feeling was mutual. Dubs' six-figure salary was a matter of public record so of course Gerry took aim and fired repeatedly. But there was more to Gerry's animus than just the money. He put motions forward at Council demanding Dubs' resignation. One of these motions alleged, with no facts as usual, that Dubs was running a drug business out of the Thompson Gardens, supporting the habit of all the low life scum Gerry saw everywhere he looked. 

Bob Harrison, the reporter who followed Gerry obsessively, wondered if Dubs would sue Ringbold for libel, but Dubs just kept his head down. The Foundation for its part sent a letter to Council pointing to its solid record of support for local  programs helping neighbourhood people get off drugs.

The day after Gerry's corpse was found, the rumour mill said Dubs was the prime suspect. Jennifer of course said she knew someone who saw Dubs kill Gerry. Later she said she was standing by the gardener's shed when it happened and she heard Dubs kill Gerry.  

In the world outside of rumour and falsehood, the police did ask Dubs and just about every other Garden employee to answer some questions, but Dubs was never a person of interest. 

His alibi was his girlfriend, Carol. They were miles away from the Gardens on June 21 2013.

Carol was also my friend. She worked at the Gardens and always stopped by to chat with me just before she went home for the day. She's the other person has helped me piece together Gerry's fate.

Carol's about ten years older than me. She manages the crew that takes care of the wild variety of plants in the palm house. She has degrees in forestry and plant biology. She first learned about the Gardens when she led for a private sector consultant the project to assess the impacts on indigenous plants of the construction of the public washroom.

"That was a pretty pointless project, but I really liked the Gardens, so I applied for a job" she said. "There aren't too many places around here where you can hang around all day with hundred year old palm trees."

Carol was the one who told me about how grass lawns will transition to more diverse and hardy mixtures if left untended. She also knew lots about all the other things growing in the Gardens. I asked her once about some strange-looking trees. They were forty feet high, had shaggy red bark, a very straight trunk and weird, feathery leaves.

Carol said right away that they were dawn redwoods -Metasequoia glyptostroboides - an ancient species -- older than the giant red sequoias in California -- that originated in Szechuan province in China. The Thompson Gardens redwoods, Carol said, were a gift from the People’s Republic of China arranged about twenty years ago through the local Chinese community to celebrate the city’s one hundred and fiftieth birthday. 

It was none of my business who Carol was dating, but one day, about a week or two before Gerry's death, I saw her and Dubs kiss in parting just before she came into the washroom.

She seemed pretty happy, so I asked her about it. She smiled and asked me how my day was going. I read her what I'd managed to transcribe of Marriba's screed that day: 

In the car culture, normal people live in the suburbs. Rich normals live in the suburbs built fifty to seventy years ago within five kilometres of the downtown core and with big trees on the lot. Normals who are not rich live in the far suburbs, the ones built in the last ten to thirty years (or months) fifty kilometres from downtown with sick little saplings on the lawn and the lines still showing in the turf where they laid the sod. People move to the suburbs so they can procreate and spend the next twenty years driving their kids to dance class and hockey games. People who live in the suburbs are all the same and have the same conversations. They talk about where they have driven recently, what they have bought that day or where they have driven their children to buy something that day. 

Carol laughed. "That's hilarious," she said, "You're quite the writer."

Carol and Dubs accounted for their whereabouts on the night Gerry died to the satisfaction of the local police. From what I know now, they could have had a hand in Gerry's demise without being anywhere near the scene. And if anyone knows where that cute little gardening truck with the balloon tires went, it's them.

You can read Chapter Thirteen here.

This is Post #100 and Sparky: Chapter Eleven

Umbrellas, sails and bicycles at Sugar Beach

This is the 100th post since I started this blog. For this meaningless milestone, I think I'll share my first experience of Sugar Beach. 

Bruce and I were wandering around the waterfront on the July 1 holiday three years ago. At what used to be the ugly end of Sherbourne Street, we found some appealing, but not quite completed public spaces, and a new promenade on the waterfront. The unfinished Sherbourne Common was deserted. Ditto the promenade. But then, drawn by the disorienting prospect of pink umbrellas, we came upon Sugar Beach. It was crammed with people. Every chair occupied. Every square inch of sand had a human on it. Everyone was happy. It was cottage country in plain sight of the CN Tower.

Since that day I have spoken of Sugar Beach as inspired urban renewal, illustrating the genius of welcoming public spaces. So of course Rob Ford hates it.

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Eleven 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Eleven of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

The washroom attendants shifts during the summer of 2013 worked this way: Jennifer had the midnight to eight in the morning shift, Marriba the eight to four shift, and I had the four to midnight shift. We were hired on sixteen week contracts, May to August. We worked the same five days and took the same two days off. Workplace safety protocols required we give each other verbal reports of anything odd or let each other know if we'd ordered any repairs or anything like that.

Instead, we just talked. Well, they talked. I listened.

Here's what I know about Jennifer. She’s an aboriginal, post-surgery trannie. Aside from these details – that she shared with me immediately and which are obviously true – I can't say I know anything about her, not even her real name. She explained that she picked her name because it was the one she heard the most in everyday life. “There’s a lot of Jennifers out there,” she said, “so I thought it would help me blend in.” She’s six two, two hundred and twenty five pounds, with 12” biceps. Blend in is exactly what she does. Around here, anyway.

Jennifer told me that she grew up on the north side of Winnipeg, where she had three sisters and a couple of alcoholics for parents. She was raised by her oldest sister, who, while her parents were passed out somewhere, took care of all of them and made sure they went to school, did their homework and went to bed on time. Because of this, Jennifer completed high school and almost made it to university, but the struggle of the other spirit inside her made her rebel, got her involved in alcohol and drugs and then it was a ten-year downward spiral before she was saved by a street mission in Los Angeles.

Jennifer parceled out bits of this story over several days’ shift-change conversation. I was just starting to get curious about what had taken her to Los Angeles, when she said, “I should tell you about how I grew up."

“You told me that," I said. "You grew up in Winnipeg. Your oldest sister raised you…”

“No, that’s not it. I grew up in Edmonton. I had just one older sister. She got pregnant and had a baby when I was in high school and I took care of that little girl for almost five years. That's how I knew I had a woman inside of me.”

“But what about Winnipeg and Los Angeles?”

“I was just testing you out, to see if you were cool.”

I felt stupidly pleased that I had somehow passed a test. But the week after that, when she told me a third version, I just felt stupid. 

Jennifer explained how she got the attendant's job like Heath Ledger, as the Joker, explained how he got those scars. 

"I saved two kids trapped in a burning school bus."

"It's because of my work counselling first nation LGBT youth."

"I know some things about a Foundation Board member that no one wants me to tell."

I started every shift with a tirade from Marriba and ended every shift with a load of bullshit from Jennifer. This was great material and I wrote it all down.

What I did not expect, as I started my research on Gerry Ringbold, was that I would find connections between Marriba's ravings, Jennifer's bald-faced lies and details that could explain what happened to Gerry.

You can read Chapter 12 here.

Signs of Pride and Sparky: Chapter Ten

Every year engineering students at the University of Toronto give the dome of the tiny, long-unused campus observatory a fresh coat of paint. This year's is especially festive in recognition of the World Pride event that turned my neighbourhood into a week-long street party.

As always, the celebrations observed all local by-laws, but Pride detritus - parade confetti, fallen bits of costumes, tickets, giveaways - distributed themselves far and wide over the area. How far? Monday morning after all the two million extra people had packed their bags and headed for the nearest transportation hub, I stepped out onto my third floor balcony overlooking the courtyard of the condo complex and there on the balcony surface where no parade reveller had stood, was a boa feather, dyed bright blue. 

Another remnant - quickly removed by City of Toronto Parks staff - was an impromptu tree cozy in the Allan Gardens.

Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Ten 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Ten of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

Before I started my Gerry Ringbold project, I had been writing about my fellow washroom attendants. Most of us had some special reason for getting our jobs. I think this is just another facet of the Foundation's detail-obsessed philanthropy. 

For example, there's Marriba. She worked the shift before mine last year. Her family came to this country in 1974. She’s about forty years old and, she says, a deep disappointment to her family. She should have been a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a dentist. Instead, she had a bunch of incomplete degrees: criminology, psychology, biology and a general B.A. that she had tried to stitch together from the credits from all her other incompletes, but which she also could not complete. Marriba said she didn't handle stress well. 

“I have a mild personality disorder,” she explained matter-of-factly the first day we met, “it makes me impatient with people and things and I have trouble controlling my anger. I also have trouble finishing things.”

After her final refusal of her family’s demands that she get a degree, she got a job in retail at a large department store downtown and lost that when the retail empire that owned the store collapsed. She told me that she wouldn’t have lasted there much longer anyway. Next she tried the sandwich and burger franchises and coffee when the first two chains banned her for life. On the last day of her service industry career, she threw a cup of boiling water in the general direction of a customer who had pissed her off. No one was hurt but that was it. Marriba couldn't work anywhere.

Marriba’s family is well-connected. Their ungentle pressure on their daughter having failed completely, they went outside the family for help. Her dad knows someone on the Board of the Foundation. They offered Marriba a washroom shift and she was happy to take it. It’s a good job for a person who really is at her best when she’s all alone.

On the job, Marriba amused herself during the long inactive hours by fooling around with math problems. I would find the pieces of paper stashed in the drawers of the small desk in the washroom attendant’s booth. The scribbling looked insane.

Every day for the summer of 2013, Marriba's shift-change conversation with me consisted of ten minute screeds delivered at high volume and speed. The same as her math hobby, these were both awe-inspiring and troubling. I never got a word in. Aside from “hi” and “have a good day,” I don’t think I said 100 words to her. 

Marriba doesn't work at the Gardens anymore. According to Jennifer, who worked the midnight to 8 a.m. shift in 2013 and who now works Marriba's shift, late last year she flew into a rage and threatened a couple of teenaged girls who had mouthed her off. The girls complained and the workplace harassment policy required Marriba be disciplined. The penalty was two days suspension with pay, but Marriba never came back.

For reasons I'll get into, I know Jennifer cannot possibly be telling me the truth about Marriba, but I can't find any other explanation. All that workplace stuff is confidential and no one else seems to know. 

You can read Chapter Eleven here.