I’m not usually a big fan of songs that are more about chords than melody, with tunes that are, in the vernacular, “horizontal”, consisting mainly of the repetition of single notes, with only minor vertical excursions – which is why I’ve always favoured McCartney over Lennon, and would usually prefer something by Emm Gryner or Suzanne Vega to today’s selection by Sarah Harmer – but there are always exceptions, even if it’s hard to explain why. Take I Am the Walrus; there’s practically no melody at all, but I love it. Same deal with Lennon’s Dear Prudence, and, to a large extent, Strawberry Fields Forever, the former great and the latter, in my book and not only mine, a masterpiece. What can I tell you? I know exactly Jack/poo about musical theory, and have nothing to fall back on intellectually save the standard idiot’s assertion that “I know what I like” (though I would of course assert, if pushed, that my unschooled taste is nevertheless exquisite). Sometimes, there’s just something indefinably right about a song that might not be at all extraordinary in any objective musicological analysis. Something that grabs you. For me, Basement Apartment pushes all the right buttons.
Maybe it’s the gritty, true-to-life lyrics:
And I can smell the bleach
That they use in the hall
But it can’t clean the dirt off of me
It’s seeping under the door
In across the floor
It’s starting to hurt
Every time I breathe
Every time I try to leave
Or maybe it’s because I, like so many others, used to live the same way, twenty-something, essentially poor, out alone in the world for the first time, inhabiting one of those shitty little urban apartments that over-charging landlords carve out of shitty little houses on shitty little streets within cold, unsympathetic big cities like Toronto. I had the pleasure of living in such places for about my first eight years here in Hogtown, first when I was getting by as a post-grad student, then a house painter, then – god help me – as a law student. One of them was a flat over a greasy spoon joint called, I shit you not, The Steer Burger, thus not in a basement, but, being as there was a diner downstairs, a pest-ridden dive in which I was, along with the mice, a mere sub-tenant of the cockroaches. Then there was a place on a little side street off Kensington market, near Toronto’s Chinatown, where again I was little more than a serf toiling away to the satisfaction of the Lord of Cockroach Manor.
How many roaches were there?
Well, so many that you developed what Kathy (who then lived in a separate unit upstairs) called “Roach-o-Vision”, the persistent impression that something was scurrying around just within the limits of your peripheral vision, which it was. Invariably. The little bastards were everywhere. They flourished within every nook and cranny that wasn’t inside of the fridge. Open a cupboard, the medicine chest, a kitchen drawer, even the stove, and there they were, waving their little antennae at you, as if asking “what’s for dinner?” They were fast, too, and opportunistic. One time I put my nice, icy cold bottle of Sleeman Ale down on the floor between swigs (me sitting on the floor because I had no furniture), and the next time I raised it to my lips, seconds later, a half-drowned, pleasantly pissed roach the size of a crawdad slid into my mouth.
This wasn’t a basement apartment either, but I remember vividly the low-ceilinged squalor of the subterranean unit downstairs, because that’s where the electrical panel was, and sometimes you had to pop down and gain entrance to reset a breaker, after one of them was tripped because somebody’d plugged in a kettle or something. There was a frankly gorgeous Caribbean dude living down there with his girlfriend, and I could never figure out what his name was (his mail was often left in my box, addressed to a bunch of different permutations of possible surnames and first names), but boy, could this guy, ummm, perform. They were going at it night and day down there, and, let’s just say, female screaming of a certain pitch goes right through the floorboards typical of cheap Victorian-era worker house construction, as does a sound akin to somebody repeatedly slapping a raw steak against the side of a fridge. It got to the point that I didn’t know whether to complain or demand a tutorial.
The guy next door raised pigeons by the hundred, which he sold to the restaurants along Spadina. I used to march past the racks of BBQ squab displayed on spits in the eatery windows, and think I bet last week that poor little guy was sitting just on the other side of my fence, happy, well fed, and unsuspecting. The whole surrounding area was like some sort of 15th century food bazaar, there were shops with pig’s heads on display, and shops selling chicken’s feet, and sheep’s brains, with sawdust on the floors to sop up the inevitable fluids. Things recently alive we’re laying around unrefrigerated by the metric ton. In the summer, the smell would just about drop you in your tracks. One of the highlights was finding out that ash from the medical incinerator at nearby Toronto Western Hospital had been sprinkling all over our whole neighbourhood for years, being inhaled by the local rubes, me among them. The guy next door on the opposite side of the pigeon farmer was a drunk who beat his wife, forcing me to call the cops every couple of weeks. He had a borderline rabid pit bull named Sasha that he kept chained up on his porch, about three feet away from ours amid the 19th century row houses, and whenever you came home the firkin-sized bastard would bark itself stupid and strain against its chains, leaping forward repeatedly, half choking itself, trying to get loose and tear you into bite-sized chunks. Somehow, your primate brain stem could never get over the shock of it, no matter how many times you’d been through it.
Oh, happy days of yore.
Anyway, Ms. Harmer’s rockin’ song about slowly wasting away in a crappy little rented box really does strike a chord. Luckily, unlike the character she portrays, my ticket out was well within my grasp, the moment of escape just over the horizon. All I had to do was graduate at the top of my class and walk myself down to the towers of Bay Street, there to pursue my new career in business law. Easy Peasy.
And thereby hangs a tale for another day.
the needlefish 