People Watching: Training for Vengeance
More of a narrative than what I've posted before, Training for Vengeance is the first "People Watching" story that I will be posting here.
Toronto has a lot of artists, geniuses, and freaks out and about.
“People Watching” is a series covering the individuals that intrigued me, or might have more to their story than meets the eye.
The University of Toronto can be cold and miserable, but perhaps it’s something about an environment like that; the harsh conditions and gothic buildings, that make some people believe that they can turn into Batman.
Winter, 2022
I was walking to a late class, but I was not travelling alone. Three friends, one of them my roommate, all took anthropology with me, so once a week, we all made the trek from the east end of campus into the construction riddled western part of the university. The east was dominated by Victoria College, a collection of squat concrete buildings and picturesque stone dormitories centred around a castle. It was a nice place to live, but considering the cold and the dark and the changing paths brought on by the construction, walking to class always felt like a longer trip than it should have.
The four of us were in fairly good spirits after dinner, and were chatting idly when we came close to the corner of Victoria where it met the public roads, a gardened area marking the boundary of campus and city. And from behind the bushes was a strange repeated grunting sound. Strange noises are part of living in the city, so I’m accustomed to just ignoring them, while sneaking a glance to see what type of weird person or animal is causing them. And as I passed and looked over my shoulder, I was not disappointed.
There, in the nearly freezing temperature, was a man wearing nothing but a t-shirt and jogging pants and doing pushups on the concrete pavement, grunting with exertion as people walked around him. I couldn’t help but stare at him as I passed by. He was working like a machine and making noise like a computer overheating, muscles bringing his chest to the ground over and over again. As I waited to cross the street, the man finished his workout, rising to his feet and arching his back in a stretch before walking off.
It makes you think; what brings a person to do this sort of thing?
I have a few guesses, personally.
First of all, this was only a few months after Robert Pattinson’s “The Batman” came out, and every time we get a movie like that, some dudes get it into their heads that if they just put in the work in the gym, they too could become a crime fighting, ass kicking vigilante. I can only assume that this guy had just come off a Dark Knight marathon and was just getting his frustrations out in the city due to a lack of space in his studio apartment. You know, classic guy shit. The closest I’ve come to that is doing chin ups in the subway after seeing Spider-Man a couple years back, but even then, I wasn’t out on my hands and knees on the winter streets.
But maybe I’m just not on his level.
My second assumption is that he had the “self improvement starts now” moment not at 2:00AM like the majority of us, but rather at 5:30PM, coming home from the workday. It’s only natural that instead of cleaning the house or meal prepping for the next week, that the guy just drops to the ground and starts doing push ups in the middle of the street.
Starting tomorrow is for suckers, and “Big Gym” is clearly not going to get a nickel from him. Fight the power, man!
My third assumption is Toronto specific. For those who haven’t heard of Scott Pilgrim, it’s a wonderful biographical film about a bass guitarist from midtown Toronto and his relationship with an Amazon delivery girl. Really touching period piece for the early 2000s; explores a lot of deep themes about relationships, the local music scene, and the emergence of e-commerce in 21st century Canada. But you might be wondering, what does this have to do with push up guy?
Well, that pairing, Toronto musician and emotionally unavailable woman is surprisingly common in the city. On top of that, Scott Pilgrim has a martial arts subplot in which the bassist decides to demonstrate his fighting ability in a misguided attempt to woo the delivery girl. So, I can only assume that the push up guy was trying to flirt with a woman, and in traditional Toronto fashion, decided to pick up Muay Thai to better express his affections. That would be truly something sweet, and in following in the footsteps of many other Toronto men, would be keeping the city’s culture alive.
But I didn’t think all of that then. I shrugged, and mentally shelved him in the “Toronto crazies” section of my mind, and kept walking to my lecture, chatting with my friends all the while. But here’s the thing.
I don’t remember a damn thing about the class I went to that night. But I still think about that guy sometimes. So wherever he is, whatever he was doing all that for, I hope he feels ready. Because if someone is willing to brave the cold and ignore public decency to make themselves stronger, we might just have another Genghis Khan on our hands.
And I don’t think Toronto is ready for all that.
A bit of a departure from the previous style of post I’ve made so far, but variety is the spice of life. Next time you see a stranger in the city, look beyond the facade of business clothes or weed smoke, and imagine why they’re really doing what they’re doing.