Today we’ve been hopping around Scarborough. First, at 7:30AM we were at a Pow Wow at Galloway Park, in the Kingston Galloway neighbourhood. It’s another notorious intersection, but like Jane & Finch, it’s non-descript. There’s zero at ground zero, so-to-speak. Around Galloway road are apartment buildings, some social housing, and then street after street of relatively well-kept single-family homes. Two teenage girls (16 and 18 yrs old) came in and chatted for a bit — one of them lives in the Gabriel Dumont housing co-op nearby, home to one of Toronto’s larger native communities (Toronto altogether has 70-80,000 natives, the biggest concentration in Canada).
They said north of Kingston Road is Crips, and south is Bloods — and they don’t get along. They said if they’re wearing the wrong colour, they’ll be chased out of that area — and that when there were older men involved, it was generally calm but once they were arrested the teens in charge are less…restrained. They talked about knives and guns and general chaos, a contrast to the suburban calm that I saw this morning. There must be two overlapping and unconnected worlds existing in the same city space here. The one these girls describe is like the wild west — except for hanging out with the “Emo boyfriends” who play hard core rock and roll “like Slipknot,” two things I didn’t think went together but out here they do, or at least the terminology does out here. They bands play at the Kathedral at Queen and Bathurst sometimes. I was chastised when I assumed they were “all ages” shows (fake Ids, according to these girls, are plentiful in Galloway). I asked if they could avoid the trouble when walking through public spaces, and they said mostly, and that it’s the kids who are involved in drugs who have to worry. I told them when I was in school “kids into drugs” meant just pot, maybe acid. They rolled their eyes then they told me the price of pot, acid, ecstasy, Percadin, 8-balls, rock, lines, Tylenol 3’s, and then some method of doubling up birth control which “messes with your period but gets you really high.” After that I stuck to questions about Emo.