My boss the counterfeiter

I was working at a small commercial print shop in the early 90’s. I liked the place a lot and learned a lot there.

The boss’ wife was from the Phillipines. I was reading a book with a large section on traditional tribal tattooing there. I showed it to, let’s call her, Mary, and asked her if there was still any evidence of that sort of tattooing in the area she was from.
“Yes.”
“Really? Neat.”
“Yes. They are all bad.”
“What?”
“Yes. In the Puh-hillipines, you have tattoo, you are creemeenal.”
“No, I’m not talking about criminals with tattoos, I’m talking about traditional tribal groups and their distinctive style of tattooing.”
“They are all creemeenal. You have tattoo, you are creemeenal. You have tattoos, you must be creemeenal,” she said, laughing.
“I am not a criminal! You can check with the police. I do not have a criminal record. I’ve never been arrested.”
“Sure, sure, just don’t go to the Puh-hillipines. They will arrest you and put you in prison. They see your tattoos, they say, that guy creemeenal, they arrest you.” She walked away, giggling.

A few months later, we were sitting around at lunch time discussing about a job action being carried out by the Toronto Police. I can’t even remember all the details of what it was about, but they refused to wear their regular hats, and wore ball caps instead as a form of protest.
My boss, let’s call him, Bob, very nice, unassuming, mild mannered guy, mentions how the cops in Toronto are total assholes, along with the cops in a few other cities in Ontario. The police in certain other jurisdictions weren’t too bad. And the police in some places were downright nice and friendly. He rattled off all these different places, and spoke on the subject with some knowledge.
“Uh Bob, how the hell do you know all this?”
Our head pressman, let’s call him, Jim, started laughing.
“Well, uhm, I uhm, *cough*, I’m a, uhm, I’m a convicted uhm, felon.”
I think more than few seconds of disbelieving silence passed. He was one of the last people I knew I would ever assume had ever been in trouble with the law.
“Wow, okay. So...uhm, dare I ask what you did?”
“Well I, uhm, counterfeited American twenty dollar bills.”

Bob proceeded to tell me quite a tale.

It was the mid seventies, and he and a partner John had a print shop. They were discussing American money, and how easy it is to counterfeit. So, and the claim was made that it was a purely academic exercise, they decided to give it a whirl.

After a lot of goofing around with a stat camera, they ended up with workable plates, experimented with paper, ran it though a press with scuzz on the rollers to make it look more aged, tried various inks, and ended up with a pile of US $20s.

After the bright idea of counterfeiting US currency, now that they had a stack of “money”, they got the even brighter idea to pass it. They set out on a tour of Ontario, “buying” a few things and “paying” for them with their “bills.” The two of them went all around the province and managed to accumulate a tidy sum of real money in exchange for their ersatz money.

Their luck ran out in Windsor. John went in to a Woolco and purchased an inflatable beach ball, some washers and a chocolate bar. The cashier that he went to was the wife of a private detective. She had also seen a report come through on the telex that morning about two guys passing fake US $20 bills.
“There has been a lot of fluctuation in the exchange rate today. Let me just go and check what the most current rate is.”
At that point John should have beat feet, but he stood there, and a moment later was surrounded by three security guards.
Bob was back in the car and saw police cars arrive.
Given how long it had taken John to get back to the car, he figured something was amiss. He opened the door of the car and saw that he was right beside a grate. He took all the counterfeit money and shoved it down the grate. As the police were escorting John out of the store in handcuffs, Bob went over.
“Gee officer, why are you arresting my friend.” I guess hoping he could somehow convince them that this was all some misunderstanding.
They immediately took an interest in him. When they searched him and looked through his wallet, what did they find but an American $20 bill, with the exact same serial number as the one John had just tried to pass in the department store. Now, with one counterfeit bill it’s entirely conceivable that you are an unfortunate dupe, that you were unwittingly given a counterfeit bill. It’s happened to me. I’ve unknowingly given a cashier a fake $5 bill. But when two schmucks have two identical phony bills, they’re guilty as sin.

Sitting together in the back of a police cruiser, John realized that he still had a rolled Bank of John & Bob illegal tender in his back pocket that hadn’t been found. Two fake bills was bad, three would have been really bad. Still handcuffed, he managed to fish it out, and I guess they must have been left unattended for a bit, because he somehow managed to twist himself into a position where he could stuff this bill down into where the window emerges from the door.

The reason Bob knew about the attitudes and personalities of police in various jurisdictions is that they were charged in every place they passed one of their bills. When they were released from jail in Windsor, there was a cop from Amherstburg waiting to arrest them. When they were released from that jail, there was a cop from Leamington waiting to put them in a jail there. And so on down the line. All. Around. Ontario.

They opted to plead guilty if all the charges were dealt with in one court. Initially they were each sentenced to eight years in prison. Their lawyer filed an appeal on the basis of something the trial judge had said. On appeal their sentences were reduced to 3 years in prison.

In prison Bob was offered courses that he could take. He already knew how to do everything else, except for machining. He took a two year course and completed it in six months. Released early for good behaviour, he got a job at GM and made more money in a year then he had in the previous five years. Then he took the money and started another print shop.

“Do the cops ever just walk in here to see what you’re up to?”
“Once you’ve done your time, they have to assume you’re back on the up and up, and until they have cause to suspect you, they have to leave you alone.”
“So, uhm, how to put this delicately, have you been clean all this time? I mean, the cops aren’t going to burst in here and grill me about shenanigans I know nothing about?”
“Don’t worry. I’m legit now.”
“Well, there was that one time....” Jim spoke up.
“Oh yeah, we did prints for this artist, and we had, a few, you know, extras. So we decided to take some with us to Grand Bend and see if we could sell them. Make a little extra money.”
“Yeah, and who do you suppose walks past? The artist! Oh shit, he was pissed!” Jim chimes in.
I choked I was laughing so hard.
I gather there was some more legal difficulty for Bob over that, but nothing that caused him any more jail time or to lose the print shop.

“You are not going to believe what I found out today,” I said to my girlfriend when I got home that night.”
“What?! Bob went to prison for counterfeiting money? Bob? You’re joking? That’s as freaky as finding out your uncle is an on the lam Nazi war criminal.”

The next day, I had to have a stern chat with Mary.

“So… A while back you said something about me being a criminal because I have tattoos. Hhhmmmmhhh. You remember that? Well… Your husband doesn’t have any tattoos, right? But it appears that despite not having any tattoos...”

“Oh crap. You know.”

“Yes Mary, I know, and now I don’t want to hear any more nonsense from you about how people with tattoos are criminals. Okay?”
She walked off, giggling.

Finding Buried Treasure

I was in grade 6, and I was walking to school in the morning. The subdivision where we lived had of course been farmland at one time. My walk took me through a large field, that hadn’t yet been paved over. My foot kicked something that caught my eye. It looked like a coin. I picked it up. Dirt encrusted it, so I started rubbing it off. Mmmhh, the Queen looks odd. I rubbed and rubbed. This dirt is really on there. Victoria. Victoria! What the hell?! I cleaned the other side. 10 cents 1858. 1858! I made it to school with barely a minute to spare. No show and tell was scheduled, but my find prompted an impromptu show and tell.

I stuck it in my dad’s ultra-sonic cleaner and that weekend I took it to the coin and stamp store downtown. The owner told me that it was the first year that dimes had been minted in Canada. Due to the fact that this coin had lain in that field for decades, a century maybe, it wasn’t in the greatest shape. Quite a bit of the relief features on the cameo of Queen Victoria were obscured. Due to that he appraised it at $10. For a young lad in the late 70’s this was a decent amount of money. But I knew instinctively that I didn’t want to sell it. This was such an amazing find, the find being more valuable than any amount I could possibly get for it. That my foot kicked up something that had lain dormant in the soil for many years, quite possibly where the original owner had dropped it all those years ago, was such a once in a lifetime oddity.

S.o.t.D. – Infinite Emanation – Adham Shaikh

Infinite Emanation – Adham Shaikh

I was first exposed to this wonderful piece of music on a mixed tape that a DJ friend had mailed to me when I was living up in Lanark. I was so utterly mesmerized by this song that I rewound it and listened to it over and over. I phoned him and held the phone up to the speakers to ask him who it was.

“Oh it’s Adham Shaikh, and the track is...hang on...it’s...Infinite Emanation, and the album is...Journey to the Sun.”

A year later I went to a joint record release party for Legion of Green Men’s Floating in Shallow Water (my name is in the liner notes :-) ) and Ekko’s Centripetal (which was a project of Adham’s). After the show I’m sitting on a couch chatting with Andrew Ross-Collins who runs the wonderful InterChill label, and I tell him something about that song.

“Oh dude, you have to tell Adham that! Hang on.”

He runs off and a minute or two later returns with Adham. He introduces us and he sits down beside me.

“So you’ll either think this is a great compliment or you’ll be really creeped out. First off I just want to tell you that I think Infinite Emanation is just one of the most amazing pieces of music I’ve ever heard. As a matter of fact, the whole album is fantastic. So, if I was ever to die under some sort of controlled circumstances – I’ve been in a car crash and I’m in a coma and they tell my family there is no hope and that they should pull the plug, or I have some horrible disease and I get Dr. Kevorkian to help me put an end to it all, whatever – I would want Infinite Emanation to be playing as my soul leaves my body.’

There was a moment of silence and I thought for sure he would edge away from me, say ‘nice meeting you’ and scurry off with a weirded out look on his face..

“That is absolutely the most incredible thing any one has ever said about my music. Wow! Thanks!”

We ended up sitting there for quite a while talking about a bunch of subjects.

On New Years Eve 2008, my pal Esther had a party at her studio, and Adham was one of the performers. As I left, Lex (from Legion of Green Men) and Adham were leaving as well. We chatted for a bit.
“I know I’ve met you before, but I can’t recall where or when...”
“When you had the record release party at the Hummingbird with Rew and Lex for the Ekko album, I sat and chatted with you after...”
“Infinite Emanation! I remember! Dude, that is the coolest thing anyone has ever said about my music. It told me I was doing something right and that what I was creating touched peoples soul in some way.”

Ohm Yoap

This is a story about my father, my relationship with an old friend, my father’s relationship with an old friend, and how they connect. Sometimes the lessons you learn from your elders, their full resonance doesn’t come into focus until many years later.

My father was a remarkable man on a number of levels and had a positive and profound impact on my life. This tale revealed a lot about the nature of my father, and of the meaning of friendship and of forgiveness. I didn’t realize until much later that it also taught me much about humanity, mine and others.

Back in 2001, I received a call from my pal Anthony Veilleux.
“Hey I ran into an old friend of yours. One you haven’t seen in a very long time.”
This intrigued me.
“I’ll give you some hints. She visited your apartment on Ridout and joined the dark side.”
This intrigued me even more. I started to think back to all the women who ever crossed the threshold of that apartment in the six years I lived there. It quickly added up into the many dozens. Hundreds even. Friends, girlfriends, girlfriends of friends, friends of girlfriends, clients, neighbours, the list went on. And joined the dark side. Heck, if they ever spent any time around me, that could be all of them.
I gave up in short order.
“Carey K-------.”
I almost fell off my chair when he told me.
I hadn’t seen her in thirteen years.

In high school I was friends with Carey. We were the only two freaks in a school filled with mulleted dufuses in Ozzy T shirts and Iron Maiden jackets. We weren’t ever boyfriend and girlfriend per se but she was someone that I cared about a whole lot. When her parents turfed her out of the house for piercing the helix of her ear, I took her in for a few days. When she lived in a grotty little hole finishing high school on student welfare, I would bring her food, and help her out as best as I was able.

Carey was a pretty messed up kid in some ways, but all in all I knew she was a good soul with potential. I couldn’t help but like her. My mom thought she was a sweet heart. She couldn’t fathom why we looked like such weirdos, but she knew we were all right. She went through several phases, wavering between being a punk, then a goth, then a skinhead, then a goth again, and then she ended up getting right into the whole skinhead scene. I mean right into it. She got involved with the whole white supremacist scene in the late eighties, becoming totally immersed in it. Moved to Toronto and got involved in all the shit that was going on there at the time. She even went so far as to be pretty fully sleeved with an assortment of white power and neo-Nazi tattoos, including a portrait of George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess and Adolf Hitler. Extremely well done portraits I might add, but portraits of some profoundly evil people.

Every time I visited Toronto I would look her up and see how she was. She would tell me all about going to Ernst Zundel’s birthday party, going to a White Aryan Resistance rally in the States, show me pictures of herself with some on the lam Aryan Nations guy. I would point out all of the reasons why she was a fool, but I wasn’t about to turn my back on her. As screwed up and repulsive as I thought it was, I knew that at some point she would come to her senses and change. I cared enough about her to not condemn her out of hand. I had a pretty good idea why she was involved. She was very impulsive and easily influenced , and I’m sure like lots of young women, a lack of self esteem probably contributed.

The last I heard from her, she was marrying a skinhead down in Tennessee, to prepare for “the coming race war”, and that was the last I saw of her. And I really honestly never expected to hear from her ever again.

Turns out that this guy was an abusive philanderer (what a surprise) that she had three boys with. After years of maltreatment, she waited for him to be away for a weekend, sold everything in the house, packed up her possessions, and took off with the kids back to Canada.
“Wow, so you re in contact with her?”
“Yeah there was a music festival at the market, and she came up to me and said “Hey you’re Anthony.” She looked familiar, but I couldn’t place her, and she said “I’m Carey, we went to Beal together.” Ahh. “So you’re a tattooist right?” She told me that she wanted to get all of her tattoos covered up ASAP. I had heard that she was covered in neo-Nazi tattoos. So we ended up sitting down and started talking, and we went somewhere private, and she revealed them all. Wow, that is going to be a lot of work, but it will be a fun challenge. That was on a Friday, she came in on Tuesday and Wednesday to have some work done.”
“That was fast.”
“Yeah she is anxious to have any trace of her past removed.”
“And I can see why.”
“She noticed all the pictures around my work station of my sculptures so she was asking me about them. I told her I lived just around the corner, she was welcome to come round for dinner, see all my work, and that way we could figure out how the hell I’m going to cover it all.
As we walked up to the building, she says, ‘hey I had a friend who lived in this building.’ 
‘His name wouldn’t be Thomas by any chance would it?’ 
‘Yeah, as a matter of fact, tall Thomas.’ ”

“She didn’t realize that I knew you and vice versa. She asked if I was in contact with you. When I told her that I was, she asked me if I could ask you whether you would be interested in seeing her again.”
“Oh totally dude! For sure. I’d love to see her again.”
Really cool to reconnect with her and pick up where we left off.

After a few weeks she asked, “So I’m curious why you don’t hate me for what I was involved in? I know you really hate skinheads and Nazis, but you’ve never been judgmental about it with me.”
“Well Carey, did I ever tell you the story about my dad’s friend Joop (yoap) ?”
“No, I don’t think so.”

So I proceeded to tell her a most fascinating tale.

Now, I grew up in a house where the word Duitser (German) was never said. My dad only spoke of vuile rot moffen (filthy rotten krauts) and when he spat out viese schorem (dirty scum) I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about. His hatred of Germans was visceral. I really couldn’t say, “gee dad, you’re such a bigot.” I fully understood where he was coming from. It wasn’t something completely baseless. It wasn’t “I hate those folks on the other side of the hill, who I ain’t never met, cause my pappy told me they were bad, and his pappy hated em, and his…”

I never fully fathomed when I was young, how traumatized he was by his experiences in the war. After he died my mom told me that he had nightmares about his experiences decades after the fact. We lived in a part of Amsterdam that before the war was predominantly Jewish. He grew up with and was friends with all the Jewish kids on the street. On Friday nights if he walked past their houses, they would ask him “Lukey, Lukey, can you switch the light on for us?” (I guess if a gentile did it, it was considered okay.) They would reward him with food. Given that it was in the midst of the depression, this generosity wasn’t taken lightly. I remember on several occasions we ate what I was told was Joodse eten (Jewish food). I don’t recall the dates, but I suspect now that those occasions fell on a significant date. I think I know now why we ate it.

One night the Germans came and rounded up all the Jews in the neighbourhood. My dad and his parents stood and watched from behind the curtains, helpless as their friends and neighbours were taken away. My dad watched the little sister of one of his friends get clubbed in the head with the butt of a rifle, and her unconscious body be tossed in the back of a truck. The next day his class of 28 was down to 11.

Living under the yoke of the Nazis was truly hellish. If an act of resistance was committed against them they would post ten random names, and those people would have to report for execution. They couldn’t care less if you were eighteen and had fallen in love for the first time, if you were a father to six kids, if you looked after your sick mother, you showed up, or they would shoot your brother, your son, whoever. Talk about a reign of terror.

The Nazis confiscated radios so that no one could listen to the BBC and find out what was really going on. By official decree you had to hand over your silverware and gold. State sanctioned theft. People were forced to go to Germany to work in factories (as my maternal grandfather was.) As the war drew to a close, any and all resources were expropriated by the Germans to fuel their war effort. Food, coal, medicines, anything. People froze to death and starved by the thousands. My dad told me of seeing people collapse on the street, and you just kept going because there was nothing you could do for them. And Holland didn’t have it nearly as bad as some places under the control of the Nazis.

Then he told me a story not too long before he died, that absolutely stunned me.

One day in the early sixties, my father and Joop were in Zandvoort, a beach resort on the North Sea. They had known one another about a decade at this point. It was a business trip of some sort, and when they had concluded their business, they went and relaxed at the beach for a while. It was a bright sunny day, and they sat and had something to eat at an outdoor café. They both rolled up their shirtsleeves, and had a drink and some lunch. My dad went off to find the washroom, and returned to the table. Joop was reclining back in his chair, hands folded behind his head, and had dozed off. As my dad walked up, he noticed that his rolled up shirt sleeves had slid back a little further and he saw something on his arm. When he got closer he received one of the biggest shocks of his life. There on his inner left upper arm was a tattoo. A small seemingly insignificant tattoo, but one that turned my dad’s world up side down. It was very simple: a letter and a symbol. It was Joop’s blood type.
The only people that my dad knew of who had their blood type tattooed on their inner left arm, were soldiers in the SS. My dad’s friend had been in the Waffen SS.

My dad was absolutely stunned. For what he hated even more than Germans, were people who had collaborated with the Germans. In Holland to this day, anyone who collaborated with the Germans has a big black mark beside their name. They are literally persona non grata.

When Joop awoke, my dad pretended he hadn’t seen anything, but I can just imagine the turmoil of emotion he must have been feeling.

So there he was facing the biggest dilemma of his life. He tossed and turned for several nights, agonizing over what to do or say. This man was his friend and yet he represented everything he despised. How could he remain on good terms with a man he essentially wanted to spit on. He thought about it, and thought about it some more.
Finally he went to talk to his wife. “So, what’s the deal?” he asked her.
“Yes he was in the SS,” she replied. “He’s wanted to tell you all this time, but he is afraid of what you’ll say. He knows how much you hate the Germans and especially what you think of collaborators.”

My dad went home and spent a few more agonizing nights tossing and turning. Finally he went to see him, and told him that he had seen his tattoo. Joop knew the jig was up at this point, and laid his cards on the table.

“Yes I was in the SS, and I will live with the shame and regret for the rest of my life.” He then proceeded to tell my dad the whole story. It was early 1944, and he was 16. His home life was pretty bad, his father was an alcoholic. The only readily available media during this time of course, was Nazi propaganda. Much of it contained exhortations for people to join the SS to fight the Bolshevik hordes. They did a pretty incredible job of making it look like a glamorous undertaking, that promised a snappy uniform, three square meals a day, adventure, and the adoration of beautiful teutonic maidens. Goebbels and his spin doctors also did an even more incredible job of keeping the truth from people, namely that the war was turning into a total catastrophe for the Axis powers.

Food was in short supply by this point, his father was an abusive drunk, and when a friend talked him into enlisting in the SS with him, it sounded like a pretty good idea at the time. Having been fed a steady diet of Nazi lies for four years, he had no idea what it was he was getting himself into.

He received some fairly rudimentary training, and was sent as a reinforcement to the 12th SS Panzer Division (HitlerJugend) in Normandy. Five days later the Allies hit the beaches, and two days later he was captured by units of American paratroopers, apparently having never fired a shot. He was shipped to a prison camp in Virginia and spent almost three years working on farms or road crews with a ball and chain around his ankle. When he was repatriated back to the Netherlands, to say that he was a pariah is an understatement. (And strangely, he was actually fairly lucky in some ways. The SS had tens of thousands of foreign volunteers. There were entire divisions of just Dutch, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian, Croatian, you name it. Most of these units were completely and utterly annihilated. They knew that they were not going to be welcomed back in their homelands as brave heroes, so they fought to the death against the onslaught of Stalin’s armies.)

My dad had always wondered why he worked as a chemical engineer in Germany. That explained it. No one would give him a job in Holland. He lived in Amsterdam, but he would spend the week in Germany working.

And my father forgave him. My serious, stern, obstinate old man, forgave him. I didn’t know what sent my head spinning more, the fact that a man I regarded as an uncle had been a soldier in the SS, or that my father forgave him. That really altered my perceptions of my dad. He figured that the man he knew for all those years, that was him. Not the stupid, scared, hungry teenager who made the mistake of a lifetime. And I thought that was incredibly big of him. He forgave what he hated more than anything else in the whole world, and continued to be his friend right up until the point he died. He figured that whatever punishment he deserved, he had gotten in a prison camp, and would continue to receive at the hands of Dutch society. But he didn’t think that terminating a friendship with someone that he really genuinely liked would do either one of them any good. He was contrite and remorseful about his past. Joop was filled with the most profound regret about what he had done. And I am truly amazed to this very day that my father, despite all that he had been through, all the pain that he had suffered, could still find enough love in his heart to forgive what he hated the most.

I always knew him as Oom (ohm {uncle}) Joop. He was a frequent visitor at our home, and he and my dad did all sorts of stuff together. They remained friends right up until the day my dad died, and Joop remained a friend to my mom until the day he died.

“So you know Carey, if my dad can forgive a guy who as a teenager was stupid enough to be bamboozled into joining the SS, I think I can forgive you for your teenage indiscretion and being stupid enough to associate with skinheads. I know you well enough to know how impulsive and impressionable you are, and that you were a follower and not a leader. I know you well enough to know that you weren’t initiating anything. And I just figure that turning my back on you isn’t going to do you much good. I most definitely disapprove of what you were involved in, but hating you for it now, won’t make either one of us a better person.”

I still to this day am awe struck at the magnanimous and forgiving nature of my father. Some might think him weak, lacking in resolve, that he should have turned his friend away. I am inclined to think that he was really strong for doing so, and that the value of a friendship meant more to him than harbouring a grudge for the rest of his life.

And it was one of those perfect circle things when I was faced with a similar scenario. Gee dad, thanks for planting a seed of enlightenment in me all those years ago. Sure my friend had screwed up. But I figured I could do more to effect positive change in her life, by being a part of her life than I could by pointing my finger and telling her what a loser she had been.

I don’t know if forgiveness is always the right course of action, but I reckon there are times when it is.

Thanks Dad for a whole lot of things.

6° of PostContemporarity

I went to a Clan of Xymox concert in Toronto in 1989.

After the show, my friend Len introduces me to two guys that he went to college with.

Obviously twins, but trying hard not to look like twins.

We start to talk and it turns out that they were the people behind a record that I had bought recently, Empirical Sleeping Consort.

One of them mentions that he would like to go back stage and say hi to the band.

“Yeah me too. They’re from Holland and so am I and I think it would be neat to say hello.”

“Hey my brother’s girlfriend is from Holland too.”

We start to chat, in Dutch and she asks me where in Holland I’m from.

“Amsterdam.”

“Yes me too. Where abouts in Amsterdam?”

“In the new south district, the river borough (all the streets were named after rivers in Holland)”

“I don’t know the neighbourhood I’m from, but I was born in and lived in the KrommeMijdrecht Straat.”

Music was playing in the club, so I wasn’t certain I had heard her right. But I got a funny tingle down my spine. “What did you say?” I asked incredulously.

“The KrommeMijdrecht Straat.”

I must have had the most stunned look on my face.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“This is really going to freak you out, but I was born in the KrommeMijdrecht Straat!”

“Whaaat!”

(Now this is not a street that ran the length and breadth of the city, but a one block street!)

When we explained to the English speakers around us what had just transpired, they were equally amazed.

“Do you remember the number you lived at? What year were you born in?” I asked.

“I can’t remember the street number, and I was born in 1967.”

Same year I was born in.

“What school did you go to?”

“We moved to a different city when I was three.”

We continued to talk for a while longer and exchanged addresses (which much to my chagrin, I lost shortly there after.)

About five years later I walked into my friend Jarkko’s house, and there are two twins trying hard not to look like twins sitting on his couch.

“I know you two.”

They were looking at me with one of those I remember you, but why looks. “You do?”

“Yeah. Your girlfriend was born on the same street as me!”

“I remember you!!” They both shouted in unison.

And we’ve remained friends ever since.

6° of Typography

In April of 96 there was a typographic symposium in Toronto with lots of big names that I very much wanted to meet and hear. The cost was out of my reach (being a type designer will do that) and much to my regret I couldn’t attend.

The event was on a Friday and Saturday. I consoled myself by going out to a little electronic music shindig on Saturday night, and ended up having a phenomenal time. The next day I went out for lunch on Queen Street with my friend Jean-Michel from France. As we left the restaurant, we hadn’t walked more than two dozen paces, when I passed some men speaking Dutch. I figured they were just tourists and kept on walking. A few paces on however I realized that I recognized one of them. “Wait here” I said to my companion and ran back.

“Excuse me, but are you Gerard Unger?” I asked in Dutch.
“Yes I am,” he said with a rather surprised look on his face.
“Hey, and you’re Just van Rossum and you’re Erik van Blokland.”

I introduced myself, explained who I was and what I did. We proceeded to stand there and chat for several minutes, I showed them what I did, and we exchanged cards.

“Yes Paul Sych was telling me about you. If I had known about you before hand I would have snuck you into the conference,” Gerard Unger said, much to my chagrin of course.

But I still thought it was hilarious to meet the three people at the symposium I most wanted to meet, completely by chance. If I had left the restaurant thirty seconds later, I would have missed them. The other amusing thing is that Just and Erik were both born around the same time as me (Just in 1966 and Erik in 1967) are both as tall as me (2 meters), they’re Dutch and they design type.

They inquired where a good place to eat would be, and after discussing the many possibilities, I pointed out the direction to a good Indian restaurant. This happened to be in the direction where my neglected friend was. He had waited patiently for me this whole time. I introduced everyone and Gerard Unger, being a very personable man (I think avuncular would be a good term to describe him) asked Jean Michel what he did.
“I’m a DJ,” he replied.
“Ah, my son is a DJ in Amsterdam.”
“I know several DJs from there. I actually played a record last night by two guys from Amsterdam, Remy and Sven from Global Cuts.”
“Ah yes, Remy is my son and Sven is my nephew.”

My brain was pretty much reeling at this point! One strange small world incident was followed by another in rapid succession.

A while later I got a call from Joe Clark, a writer who specializes in design.
“Hey I hear you accosted Gerard Unger and Letterror on the street.”
“Yeah. How did you know?”
“David Michaelides from FontShop told me.”
“And how did he know?”
“They told David because they were utterly flabbergasted that someone in Toronto not only recognized them, knew who they were, and could speak to them in their native tongue.”

The next day I was on the phone with Patric from Thirstype.
“So I hear you bumped into the Dutch boys on the street.”
“Yeah how did you know?”
“Just told me. He thought it was hilarious that you knew who they were, and went up to say hello. He said it made him feel like a famous rock star.”

But it gets weirder. FontShop published sheets with bios and small portfolios of notable type designers. Gerard Unger was one of them. It made mention how he got his start at a very famous Dutch ad agency Total, run by esteemed typographer Wim Crouwel. I showed this sheet to my mom for her to get a sense of who I had met.
“Oh I know Wim Crouwel,” my mom says.
“Huh?! Are you sure?”
“Yes your dad used to play baseball with him.” (My father was a really good pitcher and played on the Dutch national team in the 50s and early 60s.) “Yes I’m certain of it, Wim Crouwel. He was a catcher.”

So there I was, thinking my dad used to lob baseballs at the head of a luminary in the world of typography. Wow. As I was to discover later, it was another Wim Crouwel, born the same year, but a physiotherapist who lives in Amstelveen. So, a weird coincidence, but not that weird a coincidence.

My anti-climactic day in court

On Father’s Day last year I was coming home from a hike around 18:00ish. About two blocks away from my house I see a couple embracing. As I get closer I see that’s not the case.

The woman is crying and obviously in distress. He’s got her in a bear hug and she says “Please, Sean stop it. You’re hurting me. Let me go.”

I stop and look right at them. He tells me:

“You’d better keep walking. I can either beat you up now or I can beat you up later.”

He’s about five and a half feet tall and maybe 150, 160 pounds. Given that I’m 6'7" and about 240lbs., I laughed, dropped my pack, pulled out my cell phone and from about ten paces away proceed to dial 911 and very calmly tell them what I’m witnessing. I had the most overwhelming urge to take matters into my own hands, but I figure siccing the police on his scummy ass might be better in the long run. I give the dispatcher a very clear description of the people involved, that his name is Sean, and what is transpiring and that he just threatened me. (I wanted to make sure that was recorded.) He proceeds to tell me that I’m a coward (?!).

“Says the loser assaulting his girlfriend in public,” I responded. She squirms from his grasp and tried to get away, at which point he grabs her by the hair. I yell “HEY!!” and start to cross the road towards them. He shoves the woman to the ground, and runs into a house, whereupon I hear glass smashing. By this point I can hear sirens, so I walk up to York to flag down the cop. (Who was pretty darn foxy, I might add.) I tell her what happened, descriptions, the house he went into, the direction the woman went in, and made sure to mention that he threatened me. She goes off in pursuit of the woman (which makes sense really). I proceed to walk home.

About three hours later my cell phone rings and it’s the cop. She gets a statement from me, and asks if I would be willing to testify. Sure. Make sure to tell her again that he threatened me. Tell her I suspected he was inebriated.
“What gave you that idea?”
“I worked as a bouncer. Only drunks thought threatening me was a good idea. And it never worked out well for them.” She chuckles.

Talk for a few minutes. She thanks me for doing the right thing.
“Oh yeah. I just think how would I feel if that was my niece or daughter or sister in that position and how would I feel about it. I’d sure as hell appreciate it if someone stepped up to the plate and came to their assistance. Well that woman is someone’s niece or sister or daughter. Its up to me to step up to the plate and do something. But to be really honest, I was sorely tempted to beat the ever living bejeesus out of that turd. But I figure as satisfying as that might have been, it’s probably best to let the legal system handle it.” She laughs.
“Yeah, I understand how you feel, but unfortunately you can’t really do that.”
“Pity.”

I’m just not one of those people who can turn a blind eye to shitbaggery. It’s my neighbourhood, one that I really like, and there is no way that I’m going to stand idly by while a woman is being hurt. I could handle it if that guy tried something with me. I could handle it if I got hurt and I had to go to the hospital. I could handle it if the cops came up on the scene and found me pummeling the life out of him, and arrested me. But what I would never be able to handle is if I watched the news and heard that a woman had been stabbed by her drunken loser of a boyfriend and bled to death on the sidewalk, because I didn’t want to get involved and did nothing. The guilt of that would eat me alive for the rest of my days.

I wasn’t so keen on the idea that I now had this guy who wasn’t so fond of me a block and a bit from my house. (But with a recorded 911 call where I stated he had threatened me, and a statement to a police officer where I mentioned he had threatened me, I figured that would help. If he was stupid enough to try anything with me, that would stand me in good stead. Who would a court side with – the good samaritan who got threatened by a guy assaulting his girlfriend, or a guy charged with assaulting his girlfriend who threatened a good samaritan?) But, sometimes you just have to do what’s right, not what’s convenient, come what may. As it stands, I’ve never seen him since. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was languishing in Barton jail the whole time.

So I was subpœnæd, found out the guys name, what he was charged with. (Two counts of first degree assault and mischief under $5000.) I was kind of excited to get to go to court and contribute to the cause of justice. I hadn’t set foot in court since my grade twelve civics class. I figured that the packed courtroom would gasp at my explosive testimony, that the jury would hang on my every word, that I would subjected to a gruelling cross-examination by the defense, that the jury, upon hearing that he had threatened a good samaritan, would render a swift and harsh verdict.

On Monday morning I left all my sharp pointy things at home, went to the court house, found the Crown, who proceeds to tell me that he pled guilty on Friday afternoon, and that no trial would actually happen. They tried to call me, but they called my cell phone, which I had had off all weekend.

Mwah, mwah, mwah.....

Bit of an anticlimax, but it still turned out like it was supposed to. No dropping of the charges by the woman at least, which I feared might happen.

“I can either beat you up now or beat you up later.” Priceless.