Shaughnessy Bishop-StallFred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Growing up in Vancouver and Montreal, contempt for Toronto was instilled in me at a young age. It was said to be a soulless place, both too dirty and too clean - a city of business suits and smog, bylaws and boredom. Montreal had charm, Vancouver had clean air -- Toronto had the Leafs.
I live in Toronto now, and I love this city. But my view of it is plenty different from most people's - no matter where they might be from.
The first neighbourhood I lived in was Tent City - a lawless shantytown down by the docks. It was a place of vice and virtue, rats and crack, kindness and fire barrels. You got a singular perspective on this city from down there. I wrote a book about it: Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big City Shantytown.
A year later, I moved on up into downtown. It was like entering a city from beneath it - crawling up from the tunnels, through the sewers, to the streets above. I went to galas, openings, awards ceremonies. I spent time at Massey College, City Hall. There was a golden sheen to everything. But often, at night, I'd slip back beneath the streets - into the hideouts, the booze-cans, the tunnels.
The Toronto I'd moved into was, in some ways, too clean and too dirty - but not in the ways I'd been told. It was luminous above, dangerously dark below.
I now live at the corner of College and Spadina. Within 50 metres of my front door you'll find the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction, a public library, Child Services, a Buddhist temple, a homeless shelter, the infamous Waverly Hotel, the even more infamous El Mocambo, and a gothic castle where they make glass eyes. What you might not find is the boozecan, the gambling den, the caves. The anti-hero of my new book, Ghosted, also happens to live on this corner. But, it being a novel, the plot only utilizes about half of the above-mentioned institutions. That's often how it is: the full, real view too surreal (and therefore unbelievable) for the confines of fiction.
If we were to walk through downtown together, I could show you fronts for drug dens and clubhouses, the best soup kitchens, the worst shelters, where to sleep in the summer, stay warm in the winter - which cops to avoid, which hustlers to trust. The hidden aspects of Toronto are similar to those in most big cities; but in some ways it's the more visible things that are most surprising. Toronto has some of the weirdest parades you'll ever see. One day, while writing, the drums and flutes that signal the approach of Falun Gong caused me to look out the window. There, in the middle of Spadina, was a moving tableau vivant: a bloody, writhing "patient" on the back of a truck being theatrically disemboweled by a "doctor" while a man bellowing into a megaphone filled his pockets with fake bills. I held down the delete button and started the scene again.
The Toronto in Ghosted is the same one I know, just seen at times from different perspectives - slightly slanted, deeply complex, or momentarily simplified. It is a city in which the Bloor Viaduct's jump-prevention barrier is never quite finished, in which the CN Tower is no longer the tallest free-standing structure in the world, where you can get anything at any time of day or night but not everybody knows that, where the smell of pig's blood and lilacs mix in the air.
Ghosted is, in some ways, a fantastical novel. It is about a man who finds adventure, despair and, hopefully, redemption by becoming a ghostwriter of suicide letters. The other characters include a refugee from East Timor, a Mexican cop, a Jewish gangster and a Finnish psychopath - and yet, much like the landmarks on College and Spadina, they don't come close to representing the diversity of this city.
Far from being a boring place, the Toronto in which I live is too interesting, too deep and growing, to be fully contained by even the most ambitious of fictions. I don't need to have the whole city inside my novel. It's good enough to know that the novel's in the city - and that any moment someone might pick it up, start reading. That's how books and cities shape each other.
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall's new novel, Ghosted, is in stores now.