The Ossington Bus: Fiction — Russell Smith

Author photo by Jowita Bydlowska

Here is a brief jeu d’esprit from the Toronto writer and fashionista Russell Smith whom I met at the now legendary Wild Writers We Have Known conference put on by The New Quarterly in Stratford, Ontario, in September, 2000. I remember it as a gilded occasion: Mark Anthony Jarman was there, as well as Steven Heighton, Elise Levine, Caroline Adderson, Mike Barnes, Leon Rooke and Diane Schoemperlen, all of whom have appeared in Numéro Cinq. John Haney took photographs.{{1}}[[1]]The proceedings — fiction, criticism, photographs and panel transcripts — were published in The New Quarterly, Volume XXI, Numbers 2 & 3. On page 350 there is a great John Haney photo of Russell Smith and dg.[[1]] And Russell Smith is wild: Among his several works of fiction is the pornographic novel Diana, A Diary in the Second Person which was first published under the pseudonym Diane Savage by Gutter Press and subsequently reprinted by Biblioasis under the author’s own name. He’s also written a book on men’s fashion, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress (2005).

“The Ossington Bus” is an all too brief introduction to Russell Smith’s precise, elegant prose style. Please do stop over the sentences and appraise their condensed, fluid motions. E.g. “We have looked at our watches, looked at our watches and prayed, wept and prayed and looked at our watches.” The story itself is a small gem of an ever so slightly parodic magic realism planted in Toronto’s Little Portugal wherein the oft missing Toronto Transit Commission’s Ossington Avenue bus takes on legendary qualities. I also thought of E. M. Forster and his story “The Celestial Omnibus” when I first read this — Forster’s nostalgia for the magical, especially in his stories, is often overlooked. Russell Smith is careful and charming: his irony never becomes arch and the language, alternating between irony and belief, builds a momentum that magically gives that bus wings at the story’s close.

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Why do we wait for the Ossington bus? It never comes. We jam our hands in our pockets, turn up our collars, lean out over the tracks of slush and peer down the hill, and all the way down to the mental hospital is nothing but a wide expanse of empty street. We think that we will see a bus lumbering around the corner from Queen. The wind whips along Dundas and the cars stop and start, grunting. Brass music from the fish shop, twisted by wind.

Inside the cafe on the corner, men sit on metal chairs with their ski-jackets on, drinking beer and looking at the soccer game hanging overhead, the only square of brightness in this window. We imagine that they look out at us stamping our feet and stepping into the traffic to gaze down the empty hill, and they say to one another, “I remember the last time the Ossington bus was seen. My father, just after he arrived from the Azores in 1974, saw it twice. At least he claims he did. It used to come more often then. There was an old man on Shaw, Armando Gomez’s father, who says he saw it three times, as a child, but no-one believes him.”

“I saw it myself,” says an old-timer with a fedora from 1955, a hat he has worn like a sign of conscience every day of his life, a sign of resistance. He is sitting alone. No-one has noticed him. But now everyone turns to look at him. Some of the younger men, at the bar, roll their eyes at each other. He speaks very slowly, in the quiet. He says, “Nineteen eighty-five. I saw it with my own eyes. Clear as day. It came chugging up Ossington, stopped at Dundas. Then it went through the lights. And it stopped at that stop, right outside. People got on. And it took them away.”

There is a silence as the eyes inside the cafe turn to the grimy window, to our dark coats outside, waiting.

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