Read Online Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Timothy Taylor
Tags: Contemporary, Mystery
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architects, designers, software developers. After work they had a bike-courier scene. And in the evening, a tantalizingtrickle of those foodies and reviewers adventurous enough to dine out deep on the downtown east side, pushing up against the Hastings Street heroin trade. It was a colourful, kaleidoscopic place. Very Crosstown, very X-town.
And early in the new year, less than twelve months after opening, their efforts earned them the stunned, awe-struck, hyperbole-strewn praise of one Anya Dickie.
“Did you read the paper?” Jules asked him the morning the review hit the newsstands. “ ‘Crosstown Celebrates Local Beverages and Bounty.’ She likes us.”
“She likes a lot of places,” Jeremy said. Bloods could also be suspicious on occasion.
“Oh, very nice,” Jules answered, pinning the review to the cork board outside the front door.
“She liked that tower of tuna and spinach and yam wafers topped with mango chutney at that cream-coloured Crip palace over in Yaletown. What’s that place? The Tea Grill.”
“Hey,” Jules said, holding the door for him as they went back inside. “I happened to like that tower of tuna and spinach and … not yam wafer …”
“You can’t even remember. Was it a fruit? A vegetable?”
“I didn’t make it personally,” she said, faux-haughty. “But I recall it was popular.”
Jules Capelli was not a Crip, but she was different than Jeremy despite her sympathies to his cause. She believed, primarily, that restaurants were themselves organic. Crip, Blood, whatever it was you were consciously trying to do only had so much impact—you grew a reputation in the divinely haphazard way that trees grew roots and leaves. Being as small as they were, being as flexible, being as fresh sheet as they could be, every day, with a natural, loping and very personal spontaneity that suited her so well—these facts, Jules serenely held, told the story of how they had become Who They Were.
Of course, Jules didn’t pay the bills.
People rarely set out to kite in a controlled way. More often financial kites soar out of sight with terrifying speed, the virtual string burning through your fingers. Jeremy could remember precisely how his own went aloft. It started with his line of credit at the Toronto Dominion Bank, $230,000 guaranteed by Dante Beale. He’d used the largest part of it to buy used kitchen equipment, Ikea furniture, glass and flatware, and decorate the front room. The remainder he had used monthly to buy fish, meat and vegetables. They were slow months, those first few, slower than he fully realized, and ninety days later—twelve weeks of black cod, salmon caviar, roebuck saddle, fresh rabbit and Saltspring Island chevre—the TD Bank rang to point out that his account was overdrawn by several thousand dollars.
He misunderstood at first, and asked cheerily: “Isn’t that what a line of credit is for?”
His account manager, one Custer Quan, broke it to him more gently than he would have if Jeremy didn’t have a heavy-hitting friend like Dante Beale and Inferno International Coffee. There was no more available credit, Quan explained. The Monkey’s Paw was maxed out.
Jeremy remembered processing the news slowly, considering all the cheques he had written in the last twenty-four hours. Forty pounds of fresh sockeye salmon. Fraser Valley foie gras. A crate of arugula. Beck’s from the Liquor Board. There were undoubtedly more that he didn’t remember.
He promised Quan a deposit and hung up the phone, sweating, glad Jules wasn’t in yet. And then it came to him, fully formed. He wouldn’t have known he could be creative in this way. He took his TD Visa card—which, along with an Amex card, were the two other items Dante had facilitated—and drew a sufficiently large cash advance from an automated teller machine. Deposited this amount in his personal chequing account, which had been empty ever since he opened The Paw. And knowing there had to be something
And early in the new year, less than twelve months after opening, their efforts earned them the stunned, awe-struck, hyperbole-strewn praise of one Anya Dickie.
“Did you read the paper?” Jules asked him the morning the review hit the newsstands. “ ‘Crosstown Celebrates Local Beverages and Bounty.’ She likes us.”
“She likes a lot of places,” Jeremy said. Bloods could also be suspicious on occasion.
“Oh, very nice,” Jules answered, pinning the review to the cork board outside the front door.
“She liked that tower of tuna and spinach and yam wafers topped with mango chutney at that cream-coloured Crip palace over in Yaletown. What’s that place? The Tea Grill.”
“Hey,” Jules said, holding the door for him as they went back inside. “I happened to like that tower of tuna and spinach and … not yam wafer …”
“You can’t even remember. Was it a fruit? A vegetable?”
“I didn’t make it personally,” she said, faux-haughty. “But I recall it was popular.”
Jules Capelli was not a Crip, but she was different than Jeremy despite her sympathies to his cause. She believed, primarily, that restaurants were themselves organic. Crip, Blood, whatever it was you were consciously trying to do only had so much impact—you grew a reputation in the divinely haphazard way that trees grew roots and leaves. Being as small as they were, being as flexible, being as fresh sheet as they could be, every day, with a natural, loping and very personal spontaneity that suited her so well—these facts, Jules serenely held, told the story of how they had become Who They Were.
Of course, Jules didn’t pay the bills.
People rarely set out to kite in a controlled way. More often financial kites soar out of sight with terrifying speed, the virtual string burning through your fingers. Jeremy could remember precisely how his own went aloft. It started with his line of credit at the Toronto Dominion Bank, $230,000 guaranteed by Dante Beale. He’d used the largest part of it to buy used kitchen equipment, Ikea furniture, glass and flatware, and decorate the front room. The remainder he had used monthly to buy fish, meat and vegetables. They were slow months, those first few, slower than he fully realized, and ninety days later—twelve weeks of black cod, salmon caviar, roebuck saddle, fresh rabbit and Saltspring Island chevre—the TD Bank rang to point out that his account was overdrawn by several thousand dollars.
He misunderstood at first, and asked cheerily: “Isn’t that what a line of credit is for?”
His account manager, one Custer Quan, broke it to him more gently than he would have if Jeremy didn’t have a heavy-hitting friend like Dante Beale and Inferno International Coffee. There was no more available credit, Quan explained. The Monkey’s Paw was maxed out.
Jeremy remembered processing the news slowly, considering all the cheques he had written in the last twenty-four hours. Forty pounds of fresh sockeye salmon. Fraser Valley foie gras. A crate of arugula. Beck’s from the Liquor Board. There were undoubtedly more that he didn’t remember.
He promised Quan a deposit and hung up the phone, sweating, glad Jules wasn’t in yet. And then it came to him, fully formed. He wouldn’t have known he could be creative in this way. He took his TD Visa card—which, along with an Amex card, were the two other items Dante had facilitated—and drew a sufficiently large cash advance from an automated teller machine. Deposited this amount in his personal chequing account, which had been empty ever since he opened The Paw. And knowing there had to be something
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