Loddy-Dah

by Dolly Dennis

  “Yeah,” Loddy said. “Like, they’ll do a fast cover up on a couple of buildings, patch up the streets and camouflage the sidewalks with planters and who would know the difference?”

  They arrived at the Swiss Hut like yapping puppies still wet after a bath, shaking their heads, flinging their arms and hands, stomping their feet. Big Gilles, the owner, was at the cash and barked at them. “Fermez la porte. You let the wet in.”

  “Hey, Big Gilles, anyone at our table?” Fury gestured towards the back of the room.

  “Non. It’s empty maintenant. Va vite. I expect a crowd tonight.”

  They all settled into a cozy booth directly inside the entrance of the backroom and ordered beers. Ulu proceeded to the ladies’ room to scrub the mud from her coat before it damaged the fabric. Because of her executive position at the YWCA, she now wore impeccable clothing and shopped at Holt Renfrew or the Parisian boutiques on the main floor of Place Ville Marie. She had transformed herself from a hip go-go girl into a woman with political ambitions and so dressed the part. She wore a bra now and burned all Dewey’s nude photos and negatives of her.

  Dark and suffocating, with the strident racket of a packed bar, the Swiss Hut sheltered a mélange of patrons from the city’s periphery: drifters, draft dodgers, poets, separatists, artists, failed politicians, accomplished intellectuals, hippies, and dirty, old geezers with fried brains from a lifetime of too much of everything. The Last Call bar as some called it. It was also the hub and nub, the nucleus of Montreal’s night life, where original ideas were thrashed about, argued and defined.

  The barmaids wore tight-fitting, skimpy faux leather black shorts and transparent off-the-shoulder peasant blouses, serving beer with one hand and warding off advances with the other. The front end, on the other hand, operated as a restaurant and the waitresses there balanced trays of chicken and poutine with one hand and used the other to carry the ketchup. The tourists from the nearby Holiday Inn ate breakfast here before boarding their tour buses. However, the clientele who called night their day — entertainers, prostitutes and drag queens — gave the restaurant its unique temperament.

  “Could work,” Fury said. “It would be different.”

  “Like, how so?” Loddy said. “Montreal has lots of coffee houses already like The Yellow Door, The New Penelope, Madeleine’s, so like how are they going to compete?”

  “They won’t,” Dewey said. “This coffee house business will probably die a painful death like all of Samuel’s other schemes.”

  Ulu returned, draping her coat with caution over her chair then distracted herself with the music menu on the table jukebox.

  “Merde to the new Garage Coffee House,” Fury said, raising his beer bottle. “May it have a long run!”

  Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head coursed around them. Everyone gave Ulu a look of “you’re not serious”.

  “I like the song,” she said, and resumed fiddling with the music menu.

  Dewey lit a joint, took a drag, and let the smoke subside inside his lungs, then offered it to Ulu.

  “Here, hon, this’ll help you forget about the coat.”

  Ulu shook her head, but Fury grabbed a toke. It was that kind of place. Everyone turned a blind eye and no one cared who you were or what you did as long as everyone minded their manners. Loddy inhaled the density of the room, which reeked with tobacco, grass and barbecue sauce. Suddenly, she had a craving for poutine and ordered a large bowl of fries and curd cheese choking in gravy.

  The damp chill now collected an eccentric line-up at the door from the nearby L’École des Beaux Arts. Classes completed for the day, they hung around with the impatience of youth for an empty booth or table, chatting and roughing up each other under Big Gilles’ steely surveillance. A muffled drowning of languages — English, French, Greek, Italian and Portuguese — filled the congested room.

  “Putain de merde! Calisse!”

  Someone in a crammed booth near the kitchen repeatedly stabbed the table with a switchblade carving an abstract pattern of diagonal cuts into the wood as the knife thumped, thumped, thumped on each hit. One of the waitresses had squealed and Big Gilles, his apron flapping at his thighs, charged over to diffuse a threatening situation.

  “Casse-toi!”

  The guy with the switchblade, obviously intoxicated, ignored him. Big Gilles snapped and lunged for the knife. In the scuffle, the blade slashed Big Gilles’ palm on the downward stroke and lacerated the skin between his thumb and forefinger. He ignored the blood oozing quick and thick and wrapped his apron around his hand to halt the bleeding.

  Loddy knocked over a couple of beers with her elbow as she twisted around for a better view of the fight.

  “Oh my God! It’s Marcel!”

  Ulu caught the bottles just in time before they rolled over the table and onto her lap. Indifferent to the entire skirmish, she tagged a waitress to clean up the mess and ordered more beer.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Loddy parroted the words as though she were in a Gospel choir backing up Aretha Franklin.

  “That’s enough,” Dewey called out. “Stop it.”

  Fury now by his side, they were ready to rescue Big Gilles, who looked bewildered and on the edge of losing consciousness.

  “Maudit anglais,” Marcel shouted. “Fiche moi le paix, okay!” He wiped the knife clean on the side of his leg, and slid it inside the back pocket of his jeans.

  The cook flew from the kitchen with several clean dish towels and fashioned a sling for the wounded hand.

  “We go to emergency, boss.” Big Gilles shooed him away, but the cook insisted. “This cut needs more than a bandage. You need stitches, boss.”

  “Okay, okay. Une minute.” Big Gilles locked eyes with Marcel and snarled: “Et vous. I don’t want to see you here when I get back, morceau d’ merde. J’en ai assez!” Everyone shifted backwards and yielded a path for Big Gilles and the cook.

  Dewey and Marcel faced each other like two cowboys ready for a duel, Charles Bronson confronting Henry Fonda in Once Upon A Time In The West, but without the guns.

  “Can I talk to you, Marcel?”

  “You want me here?” Fury by Dewey’s side, ready to defend him, if necessary.

  “It’ll be okay. Go back to the girls.”

  Fury complied, but kept his eyes on Marcel and his buddies.

  “Who is that guy anyway?” Fury nudged Loddy, thrusting his chin towards Marcel.

  “He used to be part of The Garage Theatre Company until he decided he was too good for us.” Loddy described the visit to Marcel’s home. “Like he just couldn’t make up his mind who or what he was. One day he was a separatist and spoke only French. He’d pretend he didn’t understand what we said, and the next day, he’d say how lucky he was that his father sent him to an English high school even though it was difficult at first with the Anglo kids making fun of him. He used to tell us having two languages gave him more opportunities. Don’t know what happened to change his mind again.”

  “He was brainwashed that’s what happened,” Ulu said.

  The situation seemed cordial enough until one of Marcel’s friends lashed out: “Parle français!”

  Without warning, Marcel bounced Dewey’s head against the back of the booth, a switchblade at his throat. Loddy screamed, and Fury scrambled to intervene.

  “Tell your friend to stay away,” Marcel said, keeping the knife near Dewey’s face.

  “Fury, get back. He’s just joking,” Dewey said. “Right, Marcel?”

  “You have such a big nose. I can make it smaller if you wish at no cost. Eh, what you say?”

  A burly waiter, limp blond hair skimming his shoulders, burst into the scene from the front end of the restaurant and threatened to call the police. “Tu as entendu ce que Big Gilles t’avait dit. Go, before I beat you.”

  Marcel, a smile creeping over his
face, said to Dewey: “It is only because we were friends once that I don’t hurt you.”

  “Tough guy, eh,” Dewey said, taunting him. “What drug did you take, huh? Or is it the booze?”

  Before he could react, blond hair snatched Marcel away from the situation and escorted him out the door. “I see you tonight and you will be punished.”

  “Oui, mon amour.” Marcel spoke with complaisant affection, and left with his band of thugs.

  The Swiss Hut heaved a sigh of relief and assumed its usual hum of night-time revelry.

  Bridge over Troubled Waters now wafted from the tabletop jukebox.

  “Christ, Ulu, can’t we have something snappy here?” Dewey slid into the faux leather seat beside her.

  “He and the waiter are lovers? Who would have thought?” Loddy turned to Dewey. “So, like, what did you talk about?”

  “Hate has no words.” He guzzled down the last bit of his beer, then smacked the empty bottle on the table and stood up. “Let’s get out of here.”

  xxx

  They piled into a taxi, talking all at once, and no one listened. The driver delivered them to Ulu and Dewey’s flat then pulled out of the curb in a squeal of tires again splashing Ulu’s coat.

  “Damn you!”

  The instant they set foot in the flat, Ulu vaulted towards the bathroom to again salvage her coat while everyone else headed towards the kitchen. After the excitement at the Swiss Hut, they now settled into a state of tranquillity. In a couple of hours, night would be day.

  “Coffee, tea, beer, grass, anyone?” Dewey removed a Windsor salt box from the cupboard and set it on the table.

  “Marcel,” Loddy said, pointing to the box. “Reminds me of the giant one in his room, remember?”

  “Marcel is a multi-talented guy and could have gone in many directions if he wanted,” Dewey said. “Just don’t understand why he chose to waste his energy on a bunch of morons.”

  He poured a steady stream from the box into an empty fruit bowl until what appeared to be a brown sugar cube plopped on top of the hill of salt.

  “Looks like frozen shit,” Loddy said. “What is it?”

  “Never seen hash before?” Dewey blew away the white particles dotting the cube wrapped in saran wrap.

  “Nope. Only in baked brownies and that was just dumb.”

  Fury and Dewey slouched over the kitchen table busy exchanging a hash pipe while Ulu and Loddy had already drifted into the living room with their glasses of Dubonnet. Nobody could sleep.

  xxx

  The sky announced morning, a sliver of pink and yellow ablaze between the spaces of nearby buildings.

  “Here’s the sun,” Loddy said as she squinted through the lace curtains. “What will this day bring?”

  Ulu awoke from a bubble of snores, the aroma of coffee luring her into the kitchen. The others followed.

  “Anyone get any sleep?” Loddy asked, searching for a coffee mug.

  “Nah, we were pretty revved up after what happened last night,” Fury said.

  “I thought, like, it was a dream or something. Never saw a knife like that close up except in movies.”

  The phone rang.

  “Who’d be calling at this hour?” Dewey said, picking up the receiver.

  “If it’s Bettina, I’m not here. Or better yet tell her it’s Sunday and I’m at church.”

  “Dad?”

  “Something must have happened to his mother,” Loddy whispered to Fury.

  Dewey just kept nodding. He rubbed his eyes as though he wore contact lenses and a dust particle had irritated them, made them tear. He wheeled away so they wouldn’t see.

  “Goodbye, Dad.”

  He hung up and stayed that way for a couple of breaths. When he faced his friends, they saw his eyes red from the rubbing.

  “Allergies,” he said. “Ulu remind me to pick up an air purifier next time we’re at the hardware store.”

  No one spoke. Everyone followed his movements as though they were viewing a silent film in slow motion. Dewey carried his empty coffee mug to the table and filled it with the last bit of wine from the night before. He nursed his drink with stooped shoulders, his chin resting on his chest. He swallowed the drink, like cod liver oil, and said: “They found Aaron’s body.” He was hiccupping now. “He’s dead.”

  What to say? What to do? In a crush of friendship, they swooped around him with hugs as though they could erase Dewey’s pain.

  “Should have been me, not him. My mother is on medication now and won’t talk to me, and my dad hates me more than ever. Should have been me. I was the big brother. Should have been me.”

  If life tended to improvisation, Loddy now wanted a prepared script to cushion the surprises. Happiness was a brief celebration and then forgotten. Pain stayed, constant, hidden in memory, and surfacing without notice. She sometimes wondered if anyone tracked all the natural and man-made disasters in the universe. What were the statistics on joy versus sorrow? Perhaps David had it right the first time. A monastery. A regimented life in silence and solemn prayer. But even he hadn’t lasted that course.

  SCENE 28:

  The Garage Coffee House

  Summer 1970

  It wasn’t unusual for Loddy to pay a visit to The Garage Theatre and monitor its gutting. She felt as though someone was destroying a part of her life, rendering it non-existent. Many of the artifacts and costumes were auctioned off, donated to school drama programs, or other theatrical companies. She and Fury purchased the entire front row — ten seats for a dollar a piece including the rips and cigarette holes in the red vinyl. They installed the row in the middle of their urban backyard and called it the new theatre of the absurd, or the latest in contemporary garden furniture.

  Fury’s studio scorched with a nauseating mixture of turpentine and oil so he arranged for Loddy to model in the row of seats. She squinted against the August sun, which sat high and bright, burning her sensitive skin. She never tanned, just turned beet red, and peeled like an orange. Loddy wore her Rubens’ Model red silk robe, breasts glistening, sloped under the slippery fabric, one leg draped over the seat’s arm rest, and an oriental fan creased in her right hand. Fury sketched a quick series to be interpreted later into paintings for a new Gallery Den exhibition. She had an audience of neighbours: giggling children stopped their play and stared through the chain link fence; Monsieur Boucher, elbows on a pillow, leaned from an upstairs window with an outstanding view; Mrs. Harris next door forgot to hang up her laundry on the clothesline; someone whistled from another building across the way.

  “Stop fidgeting,” Fury said.

  “Everyone is looking,” she said, fanning her face and chest with quick cuts of air. “And I’m hot.”

  “Okay, let’s take a break.”

  “Va’t’en chez vous,” she said, stamping her foot at the kids who scampered down the lane.

  Jacob emerged from the kitchen with a tray of Sangria and patio glasses.

  “Ah, our man! About time.”

  Fury met Jacob halfway to lend him a hand while Loddy straightened up and secured her robe. A pattern of perspiration, resembling the map of Italy, spread over the middle of her back.

  “Can’t take Montreal in July anymore,” she said to no one in particular, “and Fury won’t take us to St. Emile as promised.”

  “Sorry, love, but you know how Dormer is leaning on me to get the new show up and running and I’m way behind schedule.”

  “Yeah, I know. I know.”

  “Promise, after the opening, we’ll go somewhere special.” He handed her a glass of Sangria.

  “Roma?”

  “If you want, love,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

  “Just kidding,” she said, pouting. “I’m just so hot and bored.”

  Jacob had picked up Fury’s sketch pad and was flipping through the p
ages.

  “This is good, man.”

  “Hey, give that back. Those are just studies.” Fury wrenched back the pad. “I don’t let anyone see my work before it’s finished.”

  “Don’t take it personally, Jacob. Even I don’t get to see his stuff before its time.” Loddy tossed back her hair, and noticed Monsieur Boucher still leering at her.

  “Madame Boucher,” she yelled, voice carrying across the neighbourhood. “Your husband is a horny bastard.”

  Jacob and Fury convulsed at the sight of Monsieur Boucher diving for cover, and his wife, screeching in the background, berating him with every curse word she could garner in both languages.

  The trio then settled into a lazy patter as the heat drained them of words or further activity. It was enough just to swallow summer.

  “Well, I have a proposition for you, Loddy-Dah,” Jacob said suddenly. If you’re bored. Samuel hired me as house musician for the new coffeehouse, which means I get to play some tunes. And he wants me to find a couple of acts to add to the program. So I was just thinking, how would you like to finally and seriously display that amazing voice of yours?”

  “Jacob, who you kidding? You know I can’t sing in public. I always, like, freeze and make a fool of myself.”

  “What was that tune you just threw at Madame Boucher? The entire street heard you. That qualifies as the public, doesn’t it?”

  “Come on,” Fury chimed in. “Why not give it a shot?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, swirling her sangria.

  By the end of the day, she had allowed Fury and Jacob to convince her to do it.

  xxx

  Stricken with a bad case of nerves, Loddy dawdled towards Jacob’s flat for their first rehearsal.

  “You’re late,” he said, flinging open the door before she even had a chance to ring the bell.

  Loddy could see Jacob had minimalist tastes: A tropical plant sat in a puddle of sun on hardwood. A number of large canvases of musicians playing various instruments were propped on the floor as though they were waiting to be hung. A low-lying sectional in the middle of the floor invited guests to lounge around the oversized square glass coffee table. Except for the accessories, everything was stark white. Jacob led her to an alcove adjacent to the living room where an old upright piano stood in a windowless bay.