The Chairs Are Where the People Go Read online

  It should feel really natural for everyone involved, which takes just a bit of practice. When the scene is over, people are invariably mistaken about who said what. So an actor will think that she introduced something new into a scene, when really it came from something the translator said that wasn’t necessarily present in her sounds or gestures.

  One specific note for the translators is to really try to make the text in translation sound as much like the text in gibberish. A cheap joke to make is if someone speaks a really long sentence, to translate it as simply Yes. Or, if someone uses a loving tone, to translate it as something really angry. Or if someone acts like a child, to speak as if they’re an adult. All those cheap jokes basically constitute refusing to play the game, and the better thing to do is to try and follow the intonations and sounds and rhythms that the actor is speaking, so everyone playing the game is thinking and free-associating at the same time.

  There’s a fantastic division of labor that occurs, which is wonderful. Every single line of dialogue essentially becomes a collaboration between two people. And everyone’s put in a situation where they’re not in control.

  11. The Residents’ Association

  My girlfriend, Margaux, and I moved in together a few years ago—or rather, I moved into the apartment next door to hers and we share the two apartments. Just around the time Margaux and I moved in, our neighborhood was changing from a strip of mostly art galleries and refrigerator stores into a neighborhood of trendy martini bars.

  A place opened right next door to us that had announced that it was going to be a restaurant but quickly turned out to be a place with a pretty light dinner business and a really active bar business. They played loud music until two-thirty in the morning most nights, often with their doors propped open onto the residential street they faced.

  Maybe it’s worth saying a bit about how Toronto is laid out. The way the city is arranged, there are a lot of long main streets that go on forever and have, like, three- or four-story residential buildings with storefronts on the ground floor. And then off those streets it’s usually purely residential for a few blocks until the next main street.

  When I first moved to Toronto I sort of hated this arrangement, because if you want to walk along commercial streets, you can only walk east–west, except very rarely. If you want to get from one commercial street to another, for the most part it’s possible only by walking through long residential stretches.

  So the bar was on the corner of Queen Street, which is one of those long east–west commercial streets, and Beaconsfield, which is purely residential.

  I tried to talk to the owners and manager of the bar to get them to turn the music down, but it wasn’t really effective. They were reasonably nice and sort of sympathetic to my problem, but they weren’t great at taking actual steps to turn the music down. I had just moved into this new place, and it was my first time living with a girlfriend, so the stakes seemed maybe even a little higher than they might have otherwise, and it felt like they were making this place very hard for me to live in.

  So I started trying to find out what I could do, to see if there were any regulations in the city about noise or how late bars could play loud music and these kinds of things. I did research online and I called a bunch of offices at the City. It was kind of amazing how impossible it was to get information. Then I’d call people at the City who wouldn’t return my calls. I’d go through pages and pages on the website which didn’t tell me what I needed to know. I’d get conflicting information from different sources. It was really discouraging, partly because I’d always assumed that the system ran a bit better than it does. And the thing I always thought, through this whole process, was that I’m about as resourceful and well positioned as a person could be to get help and information from the system. What would it be like for someone who is not good at online research, or at reading complicated language, or who didn’t have as much time to devote as I did?

  In the midst of all this, one of the staff at the bar said that the problems were only going to get worse and that I might as well move out. He didn’t say this in a mean way. This was genuine advice, born out of sympathy. He even said that he’d had to move out of a place in another neighborhood because the music was too loud, and that’s the way things go. He said that more bars were going to open in my area, and he told me that the bar next door to me had applied for a license for a 120-person outdoor patio facing onto the residential street that would be open till two in the morning.

  That was shocking news. I talked to my city councillor about it, because the licensing decision is basically up to him. He takes his position to council and they go along with it almost all of the time. It turned out that the patio had already been licensed by the provincial liquor board, despite objections by a few vigilant neighbors.

  The way the application process works is this: when a place applies for a liquor license, there’s a sign posted in the window, which most people don’t notice, in which the public are invited to give their opinions for whether the license should be issued. Of course, if people are very vigilant they might notice the sign and get in touch with the licensing board. One of the conditions of the complaints process is that you have to provide your name and your contact information, and agree that this information will be given to the owners of the establishment. But it’s almost impossible for you to find out who the owners of the establishment are, what the establishment is, or what the owners’ plans for it are. It seems pretty crazy to me that you can’t have your complaints be considered privately. If your concern, for instance, is that the people opening the bar next door to your house are the Hell’s Angels, you can’t complain to the licensing board without the Hell’s Angels knowing it was you who complained.

  The most important thing, though, is that for all the process and rigmarole, licenses are always issued; while they have a process for public input on the issuing of licenses, as far as I know, licenses are never denied based on the public-input process. Which is just awful.

  So at this point I started feeling kind of under siege. I was living in an apartment where every night we heard loud music and yelling and screaming from the bar next door, which doesn’t bother some people—it didn’t bother Margaux as much—but it bothered me a lot. And then there was the knowledge that the problem would only become worse when the patio opened. The bar owners, in their limited attempts at sympathy, encouraged me to phone when the music was too loud. The music was too loud every night, so every night I would phone, and often they wouldn’t answer because the music in the bar was too loud. And I’d call again, and eventually I would get through. And I would politely ask them to turn the music down, and they would very politely say they would. Then they wouldn’t, or they would turn it down but then fifteen minutes later it would become just as loud. This went on night after night and it was infuriating.

  One night, when the music was especially loud, I called and I asked the guy to turn the music down, and he apologized and said he would, and a few minutes later the music was even louder, and I was so angry that I went downstairs to talk to him. I opened the door and went inside, and the music was so loud, it was like a punch in the stomach. It was such a terrible feeling to be so upset and wound up and to walk into this place directly underneath your bedroom, jam-packed with sweaty, drunken, well-dressed people from fancier neighborhoods, with music so loud it hurts. And I went up to the bar to get the bartender’s attention, and I had to scream to be heard, which makes your adrenaline rush even faster, and I was yelling at him, explaining to him that I was the guy who called from upstairs, and could he please, please, please turn the music down. He said, I’m really busy with a lot of customers, you’re going to have to wait about ten minutes. I had been calling every night for about three months, so I went over to the mixing board, and I figured I’d just turn the music down myself. I’ve worked mixing boards before. It had little potentiometer knobs instead of sliders, and I went to turn the knob, and my intention was to turn the
music down a bit and go upstairs, and I turned the knob, and the music instantly fell silent, and everyone in the room stopped and looked at me. So I was standing there, shaking with anger, in this completely quiet room. The bartender was furious, understandably, and he said something along the lines of, Don’t you ever fucking dare touch that mixer ever again.

  I think it’s probably the closest I’ve come in my adult life both to punching someone and to being punched. And I think it’s to the credit of the customers that this didn’t happen. Sort of interestingly, the people in the bar seemed to understand what was going on, and a number of people stepped in to diffuse the situation and prevent a fight. They expressed sympathy for my situation, they did all the things that guys in bars do when they tell people to calm down in order to stop fights from happening. And I apologized, because I hadn’t meant to turn off the music. The bartender was angry. And I went back upstairs. Then things went back to the way they were before, with me calling down every night, and things being really loud.

  It’s crazy. Just recalling this story brings back a physiological response. I feel all that stuff happening to me again. And I feel a certain shame. I mean, Margaux didn’t mind the noise so much. Part of what was so maddening was the fact that I was the only one being driven nuts. There was a part of me that thought, I should just ignore this. It doesn’t feel good to be the guy telling people having a good time to stop the party. The fact that it didn’t bother Margaux in some ways made the situation a lot more complicated, too, for both of us. Here we were, trying to figure out how to live together, and she has to live with me freaking out every night over something that, to her, isn’t really a big deal. And I have to live with her lack of support in dealing with what to me feels like a pressing household problem. So it was hard.

  I lived in fear of the patio.

  * * *

  Then I found out that in order for the patio to open, they needed a bunch of things. They needed a liquor license from the province, which they already had. Also, they needed a number of exemptions from zoning laws, which would allow them to construct that patio there, which they’d already been granted, despite the objection of neighbors through a now-familiar public-input process. Finally, they needed a special patio license from the City that allowed them to operate what in the City’s terminology is a “boulevard café with a residential flankage.” And to do this, it turned out, they needed to get a winning result at a poll of neighbors conducted by the City.

  So I talked to the city councillor’s office about this, and to the Municipal Licensing and Standards—MLS—office, who are in charge of the poll, and started getting ready to see what I could do to make sure that the neighbors understood what was being voted on, because I’d learned by this point how hard it is to understand the process. I wanted to make sure the neighbors didn’t just decide this was another piece of incomprehensible correspondence from the City and something that didn’t affect them.

  I tried to find out exactly what the timing was for the poll, but that was hard to do. I tried to contact our councillor and the MLS every couple of weeks to find out if they knew when the poll was going to happen, but they never knew exactly. Finally I got in touch with them and asked them again when the poll was going to take place, and they told me that it had already happened. The plans for the patio had been approved by a narrow margin. Something like seven people had voted in favor and five people against.

  Now, I am a tremendously concerned and engaged citizen in this story. I am someone who has thought of practically nothing but this poll for weeks, and somehow this poll, designed to solicit public input, happened without my knowing it. I asked why, and they told me that only neighbors who own homes are entitled to vote, which was completely infuriating, and which also proved, after several weeks of research, to be false. Then they told me that I was outside the boundaries of the polling area, which turned out, perhaps even more shockingly, to be true. Again: I’m the next-door neighbor of this bar. But the regulation says that the vote is held by people who live within five hundred meters of the patio, on the street onto which it will face. The patio was on the corner, which means half the people affected by it had no say.

  As I tell this story—when I look back on this time in my life—I find myself a little baffled as to why I was so drawn into this. I put so much time into this. But in retrospect, I have sympathy with my past self, when I think about all the details, and about how difficult the situation was; how crazy all the lies and misinformation and obstacles were.

  When I heard that the patio had been approved, I went nuts. I think that was the moment that the Queen-Beaconsfield Residents’ Association was formed. It seemed so unfair. I was outraged by the sham mechanisms for citizen input. And I was worried that I was going to be driven out of my new apartment and my new domestic arrangement with my girlfriend.

  One of the things that the councillor’s office had impressed upon me, and which seems entirely fair, is that in any public matter, the concerns of a large number of people are given more weight than the concerns of one person, so as a general rule, if you’re having trouble with a noisy bar nearby, one of your first steps should be to find out if other people are having trouble with it, too.

  So I started talking to neighbors and finding people who were concerned about this and asking them if they knew other people who were concerned about it and asking them in turn if they knew other people. At first, we had five people, and then ten people, and then twenty people, and then maybe forty people who were all concerned about this bar and how loud it was. Most of these people were completely surprised to learn that the bar was going to open a patio, despite the fact that there had been a public-input process, twice at the municipal level and once at the provincial level.

  Of course, it’s important to note that once these licenses are granted, they’re practically impossible to revoke. So the City gets people’s input before any problem arises, then once a problem does arise, the City can go back to those people and say, Well, you were the ones who voted in favor of it; we asked you for your input—it passed in a popular vote—you should have said something earlier.

  So we formed the Residents’ Association, and it was interesting. Most of the time, we don’t know much about the neighborhood we live in. The neighborhood that I live in has, within two blocks, about six distinct micro-neighborhoods, and you only see what’s relevant to you. So, for instance, one thing that came up later was that the people who went to bars or restaurants in the neighborhood were actually surprised to hear that there was any residential use in the neighborhood. They’d say, No one lives on Queen Street. But if you look at those buildings, what most of them have is a bar or storefront on the ground floor and what are clearly apartments on the second and third floor. But if you’re not looking for those apartments, you don’t see them.

  In my neighborhood, there are artists and young people living cheaply who rent apartments over the storefronts on Queen, and there are well-off Portuguese families who live in well-kept houses on the north half of the Beaconsfield block, and then there are creative professionals and young, well-off couples in nicer places on the lower half of the Beaconsfield block, and then there’s a big apartment building on the corner of my own street that no one notices, that’s filled with Vietnamese families living in tiny apartments. All these distinct neighborhoods exist on a single city block, and each of them, I think, is pretty unaware of the others.

  So we had meetings and more meetings. People tried to figure out how they could have been understood to have voted in favor of this enormous patio. We finally found someone who had received the ballot in the mail. It was sent with no information. It was a ballot that used purely technical language, with no cover letter or background information of any sort. So we started a petitioning campaign to get signatures from people in the neighborhood, and we had more meetings, and we knocked on doors.

  On that block where the patio had passed in a 7–5 vote according to the City, we got signatures from
I would say something like 90 percent of the addresses, opposing the patio. We got over a hundred people to sign. Of the more than one hundred people we talked to, I would say the number who expressed their active support for the patio was between two and three.

  We’d been talking to the councillor’s office all this time, and we had what seemed to be a pretty compelling case that the polling on this patio issue was inaccurate, that we had forty really angry neighbors, as opposed to just me. We tried to convince him that the license for this patio should be denied, but the councillor didn’t side with us. He talked about the importance of balancing the interests of business and the interests of residents. It seemed to us he was just waffling, refusing to take a side.

  Meanwhile, the issuing date was coming up soon. Then, two days before the council hearing, I discovered a regulation that said you can’t open a patio within twenty-five meters of a residence. And this patio was next door to my house and across a five-meter alley from an apartment.

  It’s weird, because Toronto is full of patios that are close to residences, and to this day I don’t understand what the effect of that regulation is. Anyhow, I called the councillor’s office, and I said, Look, we have a hundred and twenty people opposing this patio, which is only supposed to be issued a license if there’s popular support. The evidence for popular support is that supposedly seven people voted for it. We have signed letters from four of those seven people saying that they believe they voted for it based on misinformation. And furthermore, it’s against the law to open a patio there to begin with.