Ford Sensation

After a week where the public demise of Rob Ford was inescapable, Toronto author and poet Lynn Crosbie offers a completely different view of the man at the centre of it all:

He doesn’t so much walk into my house as appear there—flanked by various officials, he stands imperiously, laying down a track of virile cologne.

He is tall, so tall.

And maddeningly, he scarcely glances at me.

After barking out a series of complex orders, he is gone as quickly as he arrived, and so began my very private crush on our embattled mayor, the surprisingly hot Rob Ford.

This was two years ago, when Ford was returning calls from his constituents into the late hours, talking “cats out of trees” as Councilman Doug Ford reminded us on their most recent, agonic, radio show.

I had heard, repeatedly, that he was accessible, and, driven to desperation by an ongoing case of animal abuse and parlous bylaw infraction in my cruddy neighborhood, I gave it a shot.

I left a message with his staff, and thought, well that’s that.

But he responded with alacrity.

He addressed each matter with care and diligence.

And his calls, during this period, usually on the sexy late side (10PM or so) were so comforting: every time we spoke, he was patient, helpful and kind: is this when I fell a little in love?

I know that most people reading this are vomiting, but you had better know this: If you met this pheremone-blasting monolith, you too would be dazed and confused.

I wore sky-high silver heels and some little slinky thing, and he just stared over me, at some vanishing point, where the victims of his baroque Byronic charms lie.

During his current tenure as King Lear, I dreamed he and I went to an amusement park, and he was irrepressibly fun—writer Bonnie Bowman also just had a confusingly sweet dream: surely there are many others.

He is in our dreams because he is everywhere, but he lives there too, to take refuge; to be listened to and cared for; to have his own desperate cries answered with the brusque compassion he rode into this town on.

As I watch him now, so frenzied, so stooped with shame and disgrace, I wish him back into the curiously seductive—the man has tiny fangs—gallant who came to my aid, and mellowed my evenings with his tough tendresse

But he is a married man, and I am sorry.

All I can do is apologize and try to move forward, occasionally dreaming of RoFo (a nickname I give him as a gift): the raving, rubicund man of my dreams.