Category: It Happened to Me

My friend Jay Goldman drove to New York this weekend. He decided to try the legendary Grimaldi’s pizza under the Brooklyn Bridge, which consistently ranks first in the Zagat survey year after year. While waiting in line, he struck up a conversation with a woman who turned out to have the same camera as he did. As the conversation progressed, he found out that she was also originally from Canada, as were her husband and the two friends from out of town that they were showing about. The woman and her hubby, it turned out, went to Queen’s University; the hubby was a manager at the engineering pub where I was the DJ and wrote for the weekly humour paper whose offices were my second home.

Jay thought that there were too many coincidences not to ask “You wouldn’t happen to know Joey deVilla, would you?”

“Oh, for crying out loud!” she exclaimed. “Does he know everybody?”

The woman in line was my friend Alicia (a.k.a. “Leesh”), the hubby my old buddy George (they’re the people who are neither me nor Iron Chef Japanese in this picture), and the two out-of-towners with them were my pals Chris and Rob, who’d gone down to Manhattan for the H2K2 conference.

The fact that I can exasperate Leesh even from a great distance amuses me to no end.

Dude 1: These two guys walk up to a whorehouse…

Dude 2: I like this joke already.

The office in which I work is on John Street, a busy side street in the heart of Toronto’s club district. On our side of our block, is a row of brownstones which house several bars, cafes and offices; one of the these brownstons houses the office, and two doors down is the bar where I had the date that helped land me this job. The other side of the street is taken up by the big downtown movieplex, a large but poorly-run branch of Chapters/Indigo, the now-abandoned former location of Playdium, a falafel place and Hooters (“Delightfully tacky, yet unrefined”, as the slogan on their Web site says). The Hooters is half a block down the street, but still visible from our office’s front window.

The weather has been very erratic over the past couple weeks. We’ve had days that have begun with torrential rain in sporadic ten-minute bursts and ended with cloudless sunny skies and vice versa. It’s been driving the restaurateurs on the block crazy, as they don’t know whether to set up their outdoor tables or not. The fine folks at Hooters have a rooftop patio, so they’ve got the same problem. They don’t have tables outdoors on the ground level, but they do have these garage-door walls that they can roll up when the weather is nice.

Last Thursday, the garage doors were rolled up when one of the sudden intense downpours began. The thunder was quite loud and the rain was making so much noise that some of us decided to take a look out the front window. The rain was coming down in buckets, and the unfortunates on the street were scrambling for cover. In the middle of the deluge, the Hooters waitresses ran outside to roll down the garage doors.
It was a scene straight out of Porky’s — they were wearing their standard-issue white tank tops, which were soaked in seconds, all the while, jumping up and down trying to reach the handle on the garage door. One of the garage doors was being stubborn and refused to be pulled down, which ensured that they stood out and jumped in the rain even longer. I always that this kind of thing never happened outside of those contrived scenes in bad teen movies and softcore porn. If you’ve never witnessed this kind of spectacle in real life, I would highly recommend that you drop by the office the next time they have a severe storm warning.

It first happened on Thursday, and another downpour happened on Monday. Monday’s scene was rudely interrupted by a beer truck that stopped in front of Hooters, entirely blocking the view from the offiice. Until then, I’d never even considered that a beer delivery could possibly be a bad thing.

I was so enthralled by the soaking and the jumping and the struggung that I didn’t get the idea until it was too late. As they pulled down the sticky door, it occurred to me to run out, be a good neighbour and help pull that door shut. I know that such gallantry is usually rewarded with a hot threesome in the world of porn flicks, but I figure that I’d at least be rewarded with a free beer and the gratitude of a few Hooters’ waitresses. It think it’d be worth getting soaked for that. I am, after all, a gentleman.

From a recent IRC chat:

<comradeM> so, let me get this straight — your life involves a truck full of beer and Hooters waitresses jumping around in the rain?

<AccordionGuy> It’s not always easy being me, but there are benefits…

An actual conversation I had with an older busker friend of mine, near the corner of Queen and Spadina:

Scrawny-looking panhandling kid: Can either of you spare a buck so I can get a hot dog?

My busker friend: Fuck no!

Me: Here. (Hands over a loonie.)

The kid walks off and buys a hot dog from the nearby stand.

My busker friend: I guess I should’ve given him some money. I am, after all, a Tibetan Buddhist.