“Romain?” she’d said, worried, “What did he do?” From my room, where I hadn’t slept a wink, desperately replaying the film of the previous night’s events — Gail, the butchered dog — I heard Frank mention my name in that sombre voice he used only in the direst circumstances, “I want to ask him a few questions.” Frank Brodie, asking me questions? Why? The damned dog, it was Louis!
“What do you want with him?” My mother was getting impatient, annoyed.
“Is he here?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?” My mother was lying to him, but Brodie insisted. Insisting wasn’t Brodie’s style. After Clifford Wiggs’ swans had been found dead, he had asked me about Louis’ whereabouts once, and then left, satisfied.
Frank Brodie wasn’t a particularly bright guy. We made fun of him in the French Village, but were forced to respect him. Fifty or so, he had a bald head like a turtle, and a very fat ass. He patrolled in his black Buick looking bored, turning a blind eye to the alcohol smuggling in Pointe-Leggatt, boats coming all the way from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, dropping off their cargo in the middle of the day. It was hard to believe he was the representative of law and order in Métis Breach. He had no uniform, and no real power besides staying in contact with the provincial police to report whatever crimes he saw.
“What do you want with him?” My mother seemed caught off guard now.
And those words I heard, like a punch straight to the solar plexus, “They say your son raped a young woman in Métis Beach.” What did he say, exactly? My mother’s muffled cry followed by the sound of broken glass in the ceramic sink. Who had sent Brodie? Robert Egan? And why rape? Who had said anything about rape? Brodie went on, ignoring my mother, “I want to talk to him. I know he’s here.” My heart began pounding. Frank Brodie, not a particularly smart guy, but you needed to take him seriously, especially if he was making such a serious accusation. Panic-stricken, I searched for my clothes in the half-light, bumping against the furniture. Going through my drawers, looking for money, my papers.
“What … What are you saying?” And the soles slapping closer and closer to my room. Without thinking, I jumped through the window into the cold morning, my jacket in a ball and my shoes in my hand.
In the beginning I didn’t sleep at all, spending my nights walking up and down the still-busy avenues, despite the late hour, sometimes mixing in with the joyous crowds that poured out of theatres, giving myself the illusion of security. I walked until I was exhausted, staggering like a drunk, my clothes dirty, my ankles full of flea bites, pestered by suspicious cops, their truncheons quickly out and ready to cut through the air, getting shouted at, “Get out of here!” each time I slowed down or stopped to contemplate a shopfront, a place of interest.
I tried resting in the lobbies of apartment buildings, where I was insulted and spat on. Parks were far too dangerous. Subway entrances always had cops too ready to stick their damn nightsticks in your sides. Then, one night, as I followed a guy who seemed as disoriented as I was, I discovered the night theatres of 42nd Street and their sinister fauna. For fifty cents, I could afford a few hours of poor sleep, while insipid double features, cowboy and adventure movies, played in a loop, until a guard pulled you out of your dreams with a smack of his stick and, on the second warning, threw you out without a refund.
For basic hygiene, I bought soap, a toothbrush, and toothpaste at Duane Reade, and I carried my goodies around with me in a brown paper bag. By day, trying to keep my mind intact, I’d grab a newspaper out of a garbage can and find a restaurant where I’d order a cup of coffee and sit there, drinking it as slowly as possible. A waitress would sometimes take pity on me and slip me a piece of cake or a sandwich wrapped in paper that I’d devour outside. Their slightly flirty smiles, their maternal benevolence warmed me.
I still remember that waitress who worked at a Broadway deli, a young woman, not particularly pretty, with full cheeks and dark brown hair, doe-eyed, whose face reddened whenever a customer tried to have a conversation with her. There was something attractive about her, perhaps her fragility, which reflected my own. The morning sun hadn’t yet chased away the shadows of the Times Square buildings; the smell of bacon, fried eggs, and French toast made me drool, a real torture, but breakfast was too much of a luxury for me. She approached my table discreetly with a small box filled with butter rolls, which she placed in front of me, her index finger over her lips, “Don’t say anything, or the boss will notice,” and with that she continued her rounds. Heavy hips, slightly drooping breasts under her polyester uniform, and yet I began daydreaming about her, desire suddenly awakened in me by the attention she gave me. I burned with envy to follow her after work to an apartment I imagined was small, modest, but well cared for. Lace tablecloth, maybe flowers on the table. I’d take a shower, sleep with her, companionship. A momentary pang in my gut as I thought of the one thousand five hundred dollars I’d left with Joe Rousseau, money I saved working hard at the McArdle sawmill. With it, I could have paid for a hotel room for both of us, a luxurious room. I would have brought her out to eat in the finest restaurants, where we would have ordered the best, the most expensive items on the menu. I could tell she didn’t look other customers in the eye when she poured them coffee. With me, it was different — she smiled, we exchanged a few words. She volunteered something about a picture in the newspaper I had in front of me, a baby with arms like fish fins, caused by medication doctors had prescribed to pregnant women. “It’s horrible,” she said, her eyes suddenly clouded. I would have taken her hand to reassure her, but what could I say? Then, not long after, she came back with a plateful of French toast that I ate rapaciously, another secret between us. I told myself that was it, I had won, I’d sleep with her tonight. And then, suddenly, a man’s loud voice came from next to the cash register. She stiffened. Jennifer, she was called. An animated discussion between them and she disappeared into the kitchen. I understood. I got up, disappointed at not seeing her again, once more alone in this city I had dreamt of but which had turned out to be nothing at all like my dreams. Once again events forced my hand. Your courage will come from the choices you can’t make. I could hear Captain Hogan’s words from The Buccanneers of the Red Sea in my head like a cruel joke. My heart tight, I wandered the humid asphalt of Times Square, thinking of the two guys who’d picked me up as I was hitchhiking out of Mont-Joli, two guys madly in love with two Gaspé girls they’d met in Maria. They’d been far too busy talking with each other to take any interest in me. They didn’t know my name, I didn’t know theirs, but when they’d dropped me off at the Greyhound station in Montreal, I felt a lump in my throat as if I was saying goodbye to good friends.
The next morning, a thin, persistent rain was falling on Manhattan, and everywhere the bitter smell of tar. I was walking in Greenwich Village, looking for a place to hide without being bothered, when on 13th Street, I discovered a used bookstore with a friendly sign in the window:
FREE COFFEE FOR ALL CUSTOMERS
A labyrinth of dusty shelves and unsteady piles of books of all kinds — bestsellers with well-thumbed pages, reference books, poetry, essays by some of the eternally suspect — Mao, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg — as well as erotic books and, in the back, a small section, “Books in French,” where I discovered Le Deuxième Sexe, The Second Sex.
“She’s right, Simone. Tous des salauds, les hommes. All men are bastards.”
I stiffened. A man’s nasal voice, almost cartoonish. The same guy I’d seen behind the counter at the front of the store when I walked in, with a funny bird’s head, piercing blue eyes, and a kind smile. He asked me in French whether I spoke the language. I hurriedly responded that I did, relieved to finally have a conversation with another human being. And he laughed, an open laughter that suited him. Here was this man, not at all put off by my dirty clothes, trying to impress me with the few words of French he knew and delivered at machine-gun speed, “Bonjour, c’est la vie, la vie
en rose.…” A terrible accent, enough to scare off a herd of cows. “L’amour, l’amour, filles de joie, voulez-vous coucher avec moi?” We both laughed at that, like boys in the playground at the end of a day. God, it felt so good!
Charlie Moses, with a mug like Bob Dylan’s. Thin and nervous, he spoke with his hands. He was two years older than me, and dreamed of becoming a famous writer. In his desk drawer, he had a few half-written novels, but the books weren’t quite there yet. He warmed to his subject — he was on the right path, he assured me, he was working on a “promising story.” To pay the rent he worked part-time in this Greenwich Village bookstore, The New York City Lights Bookshop, a reference to the bookstore founded by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in San Francisco, cradle of the beat movement, which had produced, according to Charlie, the best American writers, including his favourite, Jack Kerouac. He stopped suddenly and asked, excited, “You’re French Canadian?”
He barely waited for my answer, and disappeared into the back, then returned with a large blue atlas under his arm. He opened it, his hands shaking, on the page that showed Canada. “Come on, man!” he said, “Show me! Show me where you’re from!”
Amused, I pointed at a minuscule dot on the map that he then contemplated with amazement.
“Oh!”’
“Oh, what?”
His eyes moved slightly west, a strange expression on his face. He said, with one finger on the map, “Rivière-du-Loup is right there.”
He’d pronounced it Revere due loop.
“And?”
He slapped his hand on the table. “Oh man! Oh man! Oh man!”
“Oh man … what?”
He danced around me, slapping his hands on his thighs. “Oh man! You’re like Ti-Jean!”
“Who?”
He put on a serious, grandiose air. “Jack Kerouac.” His parents and grandparents came from Rivière-du-Loup and had settled in Lowell, Massachusetts, hoping for a better life in America.
“Just like you, man! We had to meet! It was written in the stars! Man, oh man, yes!”
Charlie invited me to share his small apartment in East Harlem, the Hispanic part of Harlem where, he told me with pride, Dean Moriarty had lived for a bit in On the Road. He lived in a dark, one-bedroom apartment, its wallpaper stained with moisture, no shower, only an old bathtub. Strangely enough, the bareness of the place didn’t seem to affect him at all. In fact, it was the opposite, he seemed to savour it like a privilege. He was living like Kerouac’s characters, and so he was convinced he was living a fabulous life, directing his own story, knowing in his heart that he would eventually move from spectator to protagonist.
Charlie Moses. I began calling him Moïse, in French. I can’t remember why, but he absolutely loved it.
In the following days he showed me his city with obvious pride, as if he owned it all. Bringing me everywhere, to tourist attractions — the Empire State Building, Battery Park, the Statue of Liberty — and to more sordid ones — the creepy peep-show cabins on 42nd Street and the foul-smelling discharges of the Meatpacking District, where rangy dogs roamed, famished, drawn by the awful smell.
Indefatigable, he frenetically took notes in a dog-eared notebook for his new novel, a sort of On the Road, though limited to New York. “New York is a country in itself, a microcosm of future America.” Full of nervous tics, Moïse told me that the action would take place in the city’s neighbourhoods, with landscapes as beautiful as the snow-peaked mountains of Colorado, and as depressing as dead-end towns like Shelton, Nebraska. No cowboys or feather-capped Indians like in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Or pachuco Mexicans like in Fresno. No, none of that, but instead blacks, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, Poles, Irishmen — the poor and the dumb and the full of cash. “New York!”
I watched him in ecstasy before the city he loved so much, feeling such gratitude at having crossed paths with such an amazing man.
On a sunny afternoon, he brought me over the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, cars and the blue waters of the East River flowing beneath us. Moïse wanted to show me the place he was born, “So you can understand what I mean, a bit more.” A sad, derelict building, four stories high, in the shadow of the rusting Williamsburg Bridge. Before the bohemian lifestyle he treated himself to in East Harlem, Moïse had been truly poor, the sort of poverty you can’t choose. Broke parents who couldn’t pay the bills. A sinister apartment, a single room without a bathroom or a bathtub — those were shared, at the end of the hallway — just an old sink with rusty enamel to wash in, robbing you of all privacy. Moïse said, his face drawn, “I was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty — the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.”
He laughed at my bemused air. “Hey, man! Don’t look at me like that! I didn’t come up with the phrase. That’s Eugene O’Neill, the great American playwright. You know him?” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter.” He gave me a friendly slap on the back and urged me to the side of the building where he extended his arms, ready to give me a leg up.
“You really want to go up there?”
“I’ve done it a thousand times.”
We pulled ourselves up the fire escape and climbed to the roof. There, Manhattan and its horizon thorny with skyscrapers took my breath away. Lost in thought, Moïse said, “I used to come up here often. I could spend hours here. When you’re small and you live in a shitty place and your parents work as hard as possible but still can’t make it, and from your own home, from your rotten neighbourhood, you see this, well, you tell yourself, one day, I’ll be there.” He took in the view. “Look how beautiful it is. Beautiful and terrible. Terrible because it always reminds you how shitty your life is. I came to understand I should never be melancholy about the city. No, I needed the view to inspire me to better things. And that’s what it did.”
After that, we stayed silent for a while. We could see, in the distance, the top of the Chrysler Building shining in the sun, reminding me of the lighthouse near Métis Beach, where Gail had kissed me for the first time with a desperate energy and something fearful in her eyes.
And this unbelievable story of rape that Frank Brodie seemed to believe entirely. I’d been duped, betrayed.
I felt so far from all of it now that I wasn’t sure whether my memories were real or not, whether my past actually existed. Unless my present was the lie — this overwhelming view of Manhattan, the shimmering waters of the East River, sparkling white boats sailing on it, and my new friend Moïse fidgeting next to me. Past and present seemed impossible to reconcile, as if they were two troubling, distinct dreams, dreamt by two different people.
“Hey, man, you okay?”
I staggered, and felt myself growing weak. Lack of sleep and food was getting to me, despite the fact that Moïse had been seeing to my diet like a loving mother — beans, canned spaghetti and stew, its slightly nauseating odour mixed in with the acrid smell of his old gas stove in his seedy East Harlem apartment. I felt like puking. He caught me by the arm, sat me down on the warm tar roof. “Hey, take it easy, man. Take your time.” My eyes filled with water. I began speaking, my throat tight with emotion, of Métis Beach, the village, the cordial relationship, tainted with suspicion, between the English and the French, those summers spent watching the English, envying them. I talked. Talked and talked and the words came to me easily, a constant flow, punctuated with childish sobs: “You see, back home, it’s not like here, there’s no river separating us, but the border is much more difficult to cross than the East River. I could have never dreamed of saying what you did — one day I’ll be there. Just impossible. You’re born to a station, and you stay there. That’s the way it is in the world I come from. What you’re saying, the beautiful and terrible image, it doesn’t exist. Or maybe it does, I don’t know, but if it does I couldn’t bring my eyes to look at it out of fear of being burned.…”
Moïse listened
to me carefully, his brow furrowed, welcoming my words with small nods. God, it felt good to speak! Without feeling judged. When emotion stopped me, he put his arm around my shoulder, without asking any questions. Moïse still didn’t know my whole story; he’d deduced I’d left home like a thousand other boys my age after some violent argument with my parents, and he believed I was waiting for a friend to get back to New York to stay with her until the dust settled. It was what he thought, and I hadn’t said anything to make him believe otherwise.
“Come on! There’s more to see! You’ll be okay?”
We took the subway on Marcy Avenue. The whole way back Moïse didn’t stop talking, his hands cutting through the air — his novel would make him rich, finally, and with the money he could stop writing by hand and buy a typewriter, and all of the girls in New York city would fall for him. It would all happen when he became famous. He chatted away, grimacing like a monkey, trying to keep me distracted. “Hey, man, we’re in New York! Forget the rest, okay?” And I laughed. He was a ball of energy, Moïse.
My friend Moïse.
Back in Manhattan, we got out at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, in the middle of Harlem. A total shock to me.
“You think your borders can’t be crossed, but wait and see, you might think they’re not so bad after all.”
He dragged me into a dense crowd, only blacks, most dressed in their Sunday best, walking under a heavy sun, skirting itinerant salesmen selling their goods from blankets on the sidewalk. Books, clothes, kitchenware, radios. Fat women, bunches of kids around their skirts, bartering loudly. A teeming crowd, supervised by heavily armed white policemen as well as images of Martin Luther King and Malcom X stuck to every wall and lamppost.
Métis Beach Page 11