What's the Point of Truth if it Destroys All Hope?
The death anniversary of Toronto's most doomed mayor.
It’s Friday at The Small Bow. Today, we’re remixing another old favorite, an essay about the death and sobriety of Toronto’s most captivating (and notorious) politician, former mayor Rob Ford. Ford passed away on March 22, 2016—one day after a judge awarded punitive damages in the Gawker v. Hogan Trial. 1
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Rob Ford
Was Two Years Sober
When He Died
“I have a gang of old sins unconfessed I shovel out of sight.”
— John Berryman
*****
On March 22, 2016, the most infamous mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, passed away at age 46 from pleomorphic liposarcoma, an extremely rare subtype of liposarcoma that killed him less than 18 months after his initial diagnosis.
The obituaries devoted to him from all over the world detailed his tumultuous political career, most of it stemming from his disreputable behavior that terrorized his city for four long, wild years. To recap: Rob Ford had become world-famous for being recorded on a cellphone video smoking crack while in office.
The video, an unsettling minute and 17 seconds of the conservative city mayor sitting in a shady residence talking local politics with his drug dealer and his friends, was shocking in its authenticity. There was no doubt it was Rob Ford: rumpled, sweaty, and jabbering away, high as a racehorse. "I don't know if that camera's on but…." he gurgled to the stranger filming on his cellphone.
Initially broken by Gawker in 2013, the story cannon-shot him from a local political scourge to an international buffoon. That buffoonery also made him a superstar. Some of the adjectives used to describe him in the various obits were "boorish," "troubled," "erratic," and each trotted out their favorite ignominious lowlights, including his numerous racist and homophobic comments.
There was also mention of the multiple incidents police were called to his house, including domestic disturbance complaints by his wife and one by his mother-in-law, who reported to police in 2011 that she feared he would kidnap her two grandchildren and take them down to Florida. Ford admitted to making that threat but said he did so only while extremely intoxicated.
And he was extremely intoxicated constantly—the stories of his drunkenness and recreational drug use were tied to his political career like strings of old dog food cans. But in the last paragraph of some of those obits, there was this: "Rob Ford was two years sober when he died."
Bullshit, I thought.
*****
I thought it was bullshit because, on March 21, 2016, a Pinellas County jury added another $25 million in punitive damages against Gawker to pay Hulk Hogan, including $100,000, to me personally. I was deeply in debt at the time and unable to pay it. Gawker's attorneys attempted to rescue me from the penalty by showing the jury that I had no assets, no income, and more than $26,000 in student loan debt and almost $4,000 in credit card debt. Instead, the jury–I shit you not—asked if they could give me manual labor, like picking up trash on the side of the road.
One of Gawker's attorneys, a well-meaning young dude who resembled Matt Saracen from Friday Night Lights, stopped by my room for a pep talk and a mental health check-in. He asked me if I needed to call someone from AA or my rehab therapist. He wanted my assurance that I wouldn't hurt myself or relapse or both. He told me he found my strength throughout the trial “inspiring.” I don’t remember if I responded or if I just stared blankly at the wall behind him. But I was not inspiring to anyone; I had no strength. Most people considered me a dejected, broke loser who had to go back to Brooklyn soon to find a media job, which would be impossible because my performance during the trial rendered me completely unemployable.
And then Rob Ford died a day later. I tried to tell the lawyers about the eeriness of him dying the day the trial ended, but they didn't get the weird connection.
I believed the Rob Ford story was the site's finest moment, the perfect combination of newsworthiness and tawdriness that proved irresistible to readers and unavoidable to mainstream media. To commemorate the achievement, I purchased an autographed photo on eBay of Rob Ford arm wrestling Hulk Hogan as a congratulatory present for John Cook, the Gawker editor who broke the story.
By the way, isn't it mindblowing that moment happened? The bit required Hogan to lose to Rob Ford. After Ford pinned Hogan, the sweaty mayor threw up his hands joyously, his triple-XL shirt falling off like old hospital bedding. It was all a big show.
*****
On November 14, 2013, I flew to Toronto with two other reporters to do a smart-assed man-on-the-street piece asking local Torontonians where we could buy crack “just like their mayor.”
When I was about to take off for my flight, my friend Lindsay texted how excited and jealous she was that I would see him in person. Like millions of others on the planet, she had become obsessed with the non-stop saga of Rob Ford. Right before the flight attendant announced that it was time to switch our phones to airplane mode, she sent one more text: "Please don't let anything happen to the Entertainer of the Year!"
And the day we landed, the chaos was still whipping in full swing. The mayor had just told a group of reporters that HE DID NOT sexually harass one of his former female staffers and that HE DID NOT say he wanted to engage in oral sex with her because, as everyone should know, he was a married man and he had "more than enough to eat at home." Incredible stuff.
Given the mind-bending wall-to-wall coverage Rob Ford was getting, I assumed we'd have no shot at seeing him up close. But Toronto maintained a poised, business-as-usual approach during what would be considered extremely heady times for any major city. More than 100 press people from several different countries were there to attend a council meeting where there would be a vote to (finally) strip Rob Ford of power to do anything close to the public service he'd been elected to do.
But most of the press, like me, were there to rubberneck, hoping the mayor would pop off and do something even crazier, which was an extremely high bar for him to clear by that point. Anything short of him stripping naked and firing a bazooka through the ceiling of City Hall would have been mundane.
I assumed there would be more security to accommodate the increased media presence, but it was very relaxed. You could drop right into the meeting room without a fancy press lanyard or a pat-down. I got a spot in what would be considered the cheap seats, but I had enough of a sightline to witness Rob Ford in all his bulbous glory, and, friends, he was absolutely mesmerizing.
He fidgeted and played with his phone, only lifting his head up to pay the slightest attention when he heard someone from the dissenting council reference "Mayor Ford," otherwise, he'd rock back and forth and spin in his chair. When the meeting droned on about non-insane-mayoral-related business, he daydreamed and sometimes waddled off the floor to a hallway to the left of the dais. Had he been in third grade, his teacher would insist his parents put him on Ritalin.
On that day, the council pushed forward with the first set of motions to severely limit Rob Ford’s ability to oversee anything, even a holiday parade route. Each councilor had an electronic voting machine about the size of a desktop monitor in front of them that displayed all the motions, and when called upon, they pressed a button to cast their votes. Mayor Ford mashed his voting button overoveroveroveroverover again. Despite his efforts, the council voted 41-2 against allowing the mayor to oversee emergency services in his own city. He spun in his chair even faster.
After the meeting, I watched the press scrum outside the mayor's office on the second floor. The dozens of bright lights, boom mics, shouty TV reporters, and pushy newspaper people settled into their usual outpost in front of the elevator and waited.
When the door opened, there he was, the legend in full view: Toronto’s 64th mayor, Robert Bruce Ford. My stomach dropped. I was starstruck.
He was smaller in person. He was rotund, for sure, but he was under six feet tall. He moved quickly and animatedly, and his big white head was slick with perspiration. He resembled a wet egg.
He was immediately swallowed up by the scrum: "Do you have a drug problem?" "Are you still drinking?” Rob Ford bulldozed through them, shouting back at the media in his comically squeaky voice: "Not today, guys. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU."
Please don't let anything happen to the Entertainer of the Year.
*****
We picked the wrong day to attend the council meeting. The day after we were there, Mayor Rob Ford tried to instigate a fight on the meeting floor but instead accidentally knocked over a councilwoman named Pam McConnell. Afterward he publicly declared he'd run for mayor again in 2014. He also claimed he stopped drinking. He said he was listening to "healthcare professionals” and was even using a personal trainer to work on some of his "issues."
But that night, we got lucky—our reporting team finally scored crack (for the story), but we had no idea how to smoke it. I crumbled it into a tin foil pipe like a clueless suburban teenager with oregano weed. I lit the rocks inside the foil, but they quickly disintegrated. And it smelled haunting and terrible. Imagine if a lightning bolt had just struck a horse in the head and split its skull wide open. That's what crack smelled like to me. It smelled like sulfur and burning horse hair and evilness.
The next night, we got some more, but instead of smoking it, we convinced two homeless people from George Street to come to talk about the mayor on camera in exchange for the crack we bought. They stayed for a long time that night, sunken-eyed and gleefully giving their opinions about how Mayor Rob Ford ran their city. It was tough to watch and the smell was overwhelming. I also felt dizzy and ashamed of how we treated these people, so I stepped out. When I returned to the room an hour later, they had finally left. But they had smoked so much crack in the bathroom that the towels had turned black.
*****
Even though it was close to two years after the trial, and I was also almost two years sober, I was more hateful than humble. I had a list of people whose lives I wanted to fuck up, but I wasn’t ready to admit that, not with an AA sponsor or anyone who could help me. It was miserable to be so awake in sobriety, forced to swallow the broken pieces of myself back down each day to maintain an aura of spirituality. Wasn’t there such a thing as earned or justifiable resentments? There should be. How about, "Make a list of people who had harmed us and then exact spiteful revenge whenever possible," maybe? And the best way for me to complete this step was to show the world that Rob Ford wasn't sober when he died.
I decided that would be my first big story for The Small Bow: “Was Shlubby Racist Liar Wife-Beater Rob Ford Really Sober When He Died?” I would track down some of the witnesses, bother some of his family members, fact-check the dates. I wanted to do a no-brakes tabloid hit on the man's corpse because what if, once again, he'd lied? Maybe he was never sober, and his cancer was only ravenous because he skipped chemo to smoke crack. We had the right to know! I was going to put some of my scuzzy reporting skills to use in order to let everyone who doubted me and discarded me and ruined me know that I was BACK.
I poked around a bit and finally tracked down one of Rob Ford's sober companions, a man we'll call "Tom" because he was hesitant to go on the record. I told him the story I was going to do, so I didn’t stay polite for long and just went for it and asked him straight up: Was Rob Ford sober when he died?
Tom said yes and swore that he was sober and was doing all the work in sobriety that people like himself and me and Rob Ford need to do in order to keep that sobriety. Then he relayed a story about how sober Rob Ford actually was when he died. Now, I'm paraphrasing, possibly mythologizing, so take this for what it is:
"After his last round of chemo didn't take, I got in touch with him to check in and see how his spirits were. I watched this man go through so much public scrutiny while working hard to change his life and stay clean. I thought he earned a furlough–one for the road, really. I told him I would buy him a beer. I told him that he'd earned it. But he refused. He told me, 'Tommy, I'm gonna do this the right way. I want my kids to know I died sober."
I don't care if it's bullshit—that was exactly what I needed to hear at that moment. I’m sure there are easy ways to find out if it’s true or not and I won’t stop you from doing that. But what’s the point of truth if it destroys all hope?
*****
The original version of this story ran on The Small Bow on March 19, 2019. Since then, I’ve reworked, revised, and reimagined it several times. I’m sure I’ll do it again next year.
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DEPARTMENT OF CELEBRATIONS AND TRIBULATIONS: A RECOVERY WRITING WORKSHOP PARTY WITH ANA MARIE COX
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Register at https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/89310768348
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*****
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Hide-and-Seek 1933
by Galway Kinnell
***********************
Once when we were playing
hide-and-seek and it was time
to go home, the rest gave up
on the game before it was done
and forgot I was still hiding.
I remained hidden as a matter
of honor until the moon rose.
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
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The New York Times did a decent rundown of everything in case you are new here and don’t know what I’m referencing: Hulk Hogan v. Gawker: A Guide to the Trial for the Perplexed
That was fantastic in the “I laughed, I felt, I got a little choked up” kinda way. Thanks for revisiting this piece. It means people like me read it for the first time.