Tony the Tiger thinks that's pretty funny. He stopped into my sickroom this morning as I lay flat on my back on my grimy, sweaty futon, one arm outflung, hand resting on the twisted wreckage of my front wheel. He stood in the doorway, grinning from striped shirt to flaming red moustache, and barked "Hah!" at me. Which is his prerogative, since this is his place I'm staying at, here in a decaying Rosedale mansion gone to spectacular Addams Family ruin, this is where he took me in when I returned on my bike from the ghosttown of Niagara Falls, where I'd built a nest of crap from the wax-museums and snow-globe stores until the kitsch of it all squeezed my head too hard and I rode home, to a Toronto utterly unlike the one I'd left behind. I'd been so stunned by it all that I totally missed the crater at Queen and Brock, barreling along at forty kay, and I'd gone down like a preacher's daughter, smashing my poor knee and my poor bike to equally dismal fragments. "Hah!" I bark back at Tony the Tiger. "Merry happy, dude." "You, too." Which it is, more or less, for us ragtags who live on Tony the Tiger's paternal instincts and jumbo survivalist-sized boxes of Corn Flakes. And now it's the crack of noon, and my navel is thoroughly contemplated, and my adoring public awaits, so it's time to struggle down bravely and feed my face. I've got a robe, it used to be white, and plush, with a hood. The hood's still there, but the robe itself is the sweat-mat grey of everything in Tony the Tiger's dominion. I pull it on and grope for my cane. I look down at the bruisey soccerball where my knee used to be and gingerly snap on the brace that Tony fabbed up for me out of foam and velcro. Then it's time to stand up. "Fricken-mother-shit-jesus-fuck!" I shout and drown out my knee's howls of protest. "Y'okay?" floats Tony's voice up the stairs. "Peachy keen!" I holler back and start my twenty-two-year-old old-fogey shuffle down the stairs: step, drag. On the ground-floor landing, someone's used aerosol glitter to silver the sandbags that we use to soak up bullets randomly fired into our door. It's a wonderful life. I check myself out in the mirror. I'm skinny and haunted and stubbly and gamey. Num. There's a pair of size-nine Kodiaks in a puddle of melting slush and someone's dainty wet sock-prints headed for the kitchen. Daisy Duke's home for the holidays. Off to the kitchen for me. And there she is, a vision of brave perseverance in the face of uncooperative climate. She's five-six average; not-thin, not-fat average; eyes an average hazel; tits, two; arms, two; legs, two; and skin the colour of Toronto's winter, sun-deprived-white with a polluted grey tinge. My angel of mercy. She leaps out of her chair and is under my arm supporting me before I know it. "Maxes, hi," she says, drawing out the "hi" like an innuendo.