Child-eating Couches and Street Cred

It was old, broken, did little more than lay around the apartment and smelled kinda funny. And I’m not talking about me.

I put up with it for a while, but after it showed an appetite for swallowing small children – it almost got my granddaughter more than once – I figured it was time to get rid of it.

I bought a futon instead.

The old couch, a hand-me-down to begin with, had deteriorated badly in the past few months. It still looked good, but the frame was snapped on one side and the springs gave up the ghost eventually as well.

It meant that people sitting on it tended to sink in a little farther than the manufacturers recommendation. In case of six year-old Lauren, that downward trip got deeper and deeper as time went on.

Until one day, she disappeared.

She thought it was funny at first – nothing scares her, anyway – but when there was nothing left of her but the top of her head and one flailing hand she started calling for help.

We were able to pull her to freedom, but in the days that followed the couch started displaying an appetite for bigger prey, namely Lauren’s almost 10 year-old sister Allison, and the J Man, who is 11 and at least 70 pounds.

It was time for the couch to go.

Remembering the hell my friend Reg and I went through getting this mammoth sofa into my apartment, I decided the subtle approach was out. So I borrowed a sledge hammer from work and smashed the damn thing to pieces.

(I’m pretty sure my landlord wouldn’t have been thrilled to know I was wielding a sledge in his basement, but the hell with him. He won’t let me use his pool and he doesn’t read my blogs.)

The couch is gone now and my family is safe. The futon that I bought as a replacement is much smaller, but on the bright side, it has shown no desire to consume small children.

Not yet, anyway.

***

So I’m at a Tim Horton’s in Pickering the other day when an OPP officer approaches and proclaims “I know you.”

Never a good sign.

I think for a moment and venture that maybe I’d seen him scarfing down some poutine at Mr. Burger in Oshawa. “Maybe,” he offers, “but that’s not it. Where are you from?”

Toronto, I tell him. Downsview, to be exact. “But I don’t think I was famous with cops in my youth.”

Not to be deterred, he figures I might have run with the “wrong crowd” back then and playfully slaps me on the back.

And then it hit me. “I remember now,” I tell him, recalling a disagreement with a sign I had on Consumers Drive in Whitby recently, an incident that resulted in two flat tires and drew three cops, a fire crew, an EMS team and a pair of tow truck drivers, all clamouring for my attention.

“You were the first to arrive,” I tell him, not mentioning that it was his over zealous call that brought all those emergency people to the scene.

He left, satisfied, and after I thought about it a moment, so did I. “Yo,” I tell my co-worker, “the cops know me, bro!”

You can’t buy that kind of street cred.