A couple of minutes later a teenager got on the bus, a big slouch of a kid, stoned out of his mind. Darvon or Empracet was my guess. The son of the guy with the beard. He stumbled down the aisle, pie-eyed, looking like he’d just discovered America.
– Tabarnak, pa, the place is gone!
His father didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even look up. He just sat there, staring at his feet. And then the bus started moving, off to deliver its cargo of disaster victims to hotels around the city.
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When you get right down to it, it was Gros Morin’s fault. Act of God, he told me in the mobile command post. I know, it’s just one of those things you say, but it’s the wrong thing to say to an alcoholic anonymous who’s having a hard time coming to terms with the Power greater than himself. OK, Gros Morin couldn’t have known. But the damage was done anyway.
I have a lot of respect for the Red Cross. Sure, there was that little problem with HIV, but that doesn’t stop me remembering all the good things they do in the world, for refugees, disaster victims, and other stray dogs without a collar. I’ve only got one gripe with the Red Cross: do they have to put scented shaving cream in the toilet kits they hand out to victims? My first day homeless and I was going to walk around smelling like a hooker.
Act of God. I admit, it’s got a nice ring to it. And it does lend itself to reflection, even if it is an English expression. But what did God-as-we-understand-Him-to-be really have in mind when he killed at least three innocent people and saved a loser like me? That’s what I wanted to know at 6:30 in the morning, smelling like cinnamon, putting on the same clothes I took off the night before, in a hotel room so bland Plato could have used it as an archetype. They were all innocent, as far as I knew. For the seven months I lived there I can’t exactly say I had a wild social life. But I said hello a few times to the old lady on her balcony on the first floor. She was almost blind, I think. What terrible thing had she done in her darkened world to warrant dying like that? And what about the wife and daughter of the guy with the beard? I hardly ever saw them, but it wasn’t hard to imagine what they’d had to endure living with that hulk of an alpha male. So, what? The Good Lord has started taking it out on the little guys? He gets his rocks off kicking people when they’re down?
There is no Good Lord.
My thirst was back. I needed a drink. There’s nothing quite like a double Scotch on an empty stomach to lighten the load of existence. It’s almost instant. Even when you puke it up there’s usually enough time for a little alcohol to get to the brain. God, I could taste it. The mini-bar was still locked. I swear, if there’d been a tool box in the room I would have demolished that lock and my sobriety with three bangs on a cold chisel. But there wasn’t. So I went looking for coffee instead. I was desperate.
If cirrhosis of the liver is the disease of alcoholics, stomach ulcers are the occupational hazard of alcoholics on the wagon, thanks to the industrial quantities of bad coffee we imbibe at AA meetings and every time the craving for booze hits us. And it hits often. The hotel restaurant was closed. I thought about strangling the manager who’d decided to tweak his profit margin by opening the restaurant at 7:00 rather than 6:30. Then I left. The night before, I hadn’t given any thought to the neighbourhood I’d been dropped off in. I could have driven my car to the hotel instead of riding the bus. But there are times we all need to be mothered, even if it is by a surly fireman in his fifties who’s winding down his career driving victims around town in a little red school bus.
I had a vile cup of coffee in a greasy spoon on Sainte-Catherine, then started walking east. The class war is for real, and anyone who tells you it’s not is a liar: may their nose grow, their Quebec Liberal Party card spontaneously burst into flames, and their cell phone give them cancer. It’s a war waged by the rich on everyone else. On one side of town you’ve got the two million dollar sugar shacks in Westmount; on the other side, the hovels of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. And for some people, it’s just the street. Walk down Sainte-Catherine from west to east if you want a crash course in political economy. It should be a required assignment for all the arrogant little shits polishing the seat of their pants at the Hautes études commerciales. Walking down Sainte-Catherine might not change their thinking, but at least they’d see how the rest of humanity has to live so they can eat canard à la lime and drink Pouilly-Fuissé.
At seven o’clock in the morning, in the shadows of the bank and trust company towers, the homeless crawl out of their holes to start the day while the prostitutes are finishing theirs. Meanwhile, in the leafy residential neighbourhoods, aggressive young junior executives wake up under their Linen Chest duvets while secretaries put on their faces in front of their bathroom mirrors. The anglo riff-raff on the West Island read The Gazette while the sheep in Laval and the other north-shore ‘burbs flip through La Presse, make their shopping lists, and head to the mall in their Voyager minivans with the remote starters. But on rue Sainte-Catherine, the down-and-out are already out, in full view of the world. Misery drags it heels. Misery looks for a hit. Misery sells its ass.
If you take rue Ontario east and go through the tunnel on Moreau, you get to Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. It’s home. Chez nous. The third poorest neighbourhood in the best country in the world. Here, misery isn’t just on the street, it’s in the home. Not all of them, mind you, but most. When I was young everyone had a job. We were poor but we had our dignity, as they say, and the kids were well looked after. My father and my uncles worked up the hill at the Angus rail shops. They had good steady jobs with decent pay. The guys who worked there were like the aristocrats of the neighbourhood. But there were lots of other places to work, too – the foundries, the garment factories, Viau Biscuits, the sugar refinery, the port. My uncle Jos used to keep a rowboat moored at the foot of rue Dézéry. He’d row out into the river, tie up to the Jacques Cartier Bridge, and go fishing out there, can you imagine? Today, the Angus shops are closed, people with any kind of job are in the minority, dignity has left town, and the teenagers carry knives. Not all of them, but a lot of them.
That’s my chez nous. I grew up on rue Lafontaine between Aylwin and Cuvillier, in a big ground-floor apartment in a building made of yellow-glazed bricks. The vacant lot next door became our yard. My father planted a plum tree in that yard. It’s still there. It died recently but the guy who owns the lot hasn’t cut it down yet. So it just stands there, dried up, at the bottom of the hill that we used to slide down in winter on pieces of cardboard.
I lived all over the city before moving back to my old neighbourhood, to rue Darling, two hundred feet from our old plum tree. I lived in Outremont, NDG, Mile End, and the Plateau. I lived in Old Montreal and Villeray. I’ve had apartments that cost fifteen hundred a month and I’ve had roach hotels. I’ve lived in chrome-plated condos and in one of those yuppy rabbit hutches in a high-rise downtown. I even had a bungalow out in Brossard (big mistake, like everything else about my third marriage). But I can tell you now, there’s nothing like a four-and-a-half unheated in the old neighbourhood. It’s not my fault I’m from down here. I don’t know what I was looking for in those other places, but I know I didn’t find it. Cutty Sark tastes the same everywhere, but it wasn’t until I got back to Hochelaga that I started tasting water again. I hit rock bottom. I lost everything I had, but I found sobriety again in my old neighbourhood. Amen and Praise the Lord, as they say in Little Burgundy.
There wasn’t much left of my unheated four-and-a-half on the third floor on Darling, just the calendar with the Chinese pin-up girl that the previous tenant had left hanging on the back wall of the kitchen. I left it there, maybe as a reminder that the world is vast and women are beautiful. The rest of my worldly belongings were now compacted under a mountain of rubble. I patted myself on the back for my wisdom in buying the Pléiades edition on Bible paper, made to last 300 years. Lieutenant Geoffrion was just climbing out of the rubble when I arrived. Gaston Geoffrion, but they call him Boom Boom after his idol, number 5 on the Canad
iens back in the fifties. The lieutenant is a short man with an eagle eye that he’s developed from years of investigating fires. He once spent weeks in a burnt-out church, going through the rubble with a tooth brush. He found the cause. He always finds the cause. You just have to be methodical and persistent, and Boom Boom is both. He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t see me approaching.
– Christ, you scared me! Where the hell’d you come from? Écoute, Gerry, I can’t tell you a thing. Not yet.
– Was it arson?
– No, je pense pas. If it was, the guys from the cop shop would be down here, messing things up.
What the Boomer meant was that when you’re investigating a fire you have to be very careful not to accidentally destroy the evidence you’re looking for. He doesn’t trust anyone, least of all the police.
– You’ve got no idea? Gas? The furnace? Somebody storing dangerous products?
– No. The explosion was really ... strange.
– Strange?
– Écoute, Gerry. The more time I spend talking, the less time I spend thinking. And I’ve got to think. You want details, call Lieutenant Giguère at Public Affairs. Salut.
– Wait! Wait! Attends! At least tell me how many victims there were.
– Six. I think that’s all they found.
– Six? You sure?
He was already gone, nose buried in his sketches, lost in his train of thought.
Six. As far as I knew, there were eight of us living there. The bearded guy and his son were on the bus. So, either there’d been visitors in the building the night it blew up, or I was dead and I didn’t know it yet. Time for another coffee.
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Good bartenders are the guardian angels of alcoholics. If I’m alive, it’s because someone treated me like a man when I was almost an animal. I miss bartenders. It’s things like that that make me thirsty sometimes. The lost fraternity of the bar. But we make do with what we’ve got, and what I’ve got now is the Bien Bon. The Bien Bon is a snack-bar at the corner of Ontario and Darling. It’s twelve stools along a counter, it’s open six days a week from five am to five pm, and it serves the best shepherd’s pie in the city. I have lunch there every day except Sunday, and I often eat breakfast there, too, especially those mornings when I wake up thinking too much about the little ship. The walls used to be pink, but now they’re covered with newspaper clippings, pictures of baby animals, naughty cartoons, cheerful maxims, and magazine photos of TV stars and cars (all of them Fords, I always wondered why). Rose, the owner and cook, has a thing for Willie Lamothe and the back wall of the place is like a shrine, covered with photos of the country singer from Saint-Hyacinthe at every stage of his career. Angéla, the waitress, is tall, with jet-black hair. She’s in her forties and perfect: she says bonjour with a trace of an Acadian accent, she serves me without any small talk, and she leaves me alone.
That morning, everyone at the Bien Bon was talking about the explosion on Darling. I resisted the temptation to brag about my close encounter with death. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people bring their lawn chairs out front so they can sit comfortably while watching their neighbour’s house burn down. Behind the phony compassion of people who chirp “Poor you!” there’s the curiosity of the scavenger. But who am I judge? For 30 years I earned my living furnishing carrion to the vultures. At the Bien Bon, I just wanted to be left alone. Besides, I had to make a list. There are two kinds of people in the world: those who make lists and those who don’t. Obviously, I belong to the first group. And starting over from scratch is no small potatoes, as my mother used to say. So I took out my notebook (some people carry a Swiss Army knife, I carry a notebook, tool of my trade). And I started my list:
1. Bank machine.
2. Buy – a real razor, a real toothbrush, unscented shaving cream.
3. Buy – socks and underwear.
4. Buy – second-hand clothes and a suitcase at the Glaneuses or Value Village.
I was just getting to number five (go back to the hotel and change my clothes) when a young woman ran into the Bien Bon and threw herself at the pay phone. It took her three tries to get the number right. Her back was turned, but I could hear her hyperventilating. She was in a panic. She wasn’t from around here, I could have sworn to that. She was wearing what all the women her age were wearing – tight jeans, a belly button, and something on top – but everything about her said she came from money. There was no answer at the other end of the line. She slammed the receiver down, then quickly picked it up and dialled again. I couldn’t help listening. At the Bien Bon, the phone is on the wall right behind the stools. If you want privacy, go somewhere else.
– Monsieur Demers, s’il vous plaît. It’s his daughter ... it’s urgent ... Oui, I’ll hold.
She turned around and leaned against the wall. It was my neighbour from the second floor, a student, a beautiful girl. I always wondered what she was doing down here. I had my theory. The English have a word for it: slumming. It’s what the young bourgeois kids do: live with the peasants in the poor neighbourhoods for a while, to piss off their parents.
– Papa? Écoute Papa, I’m trying to reach Mama ... She’s not home? ... You sure? ... I don’t know ... Non, non, it’s nothing ... nothing serious. Everything’s fine ... Écoute Papa, I’ve gotta go. Talk to you later.
She hung up – and collapsed in a dead faint.
I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but the end result was I got drawn into a story that was none of my business. She came to, thanks to Angéla’s good care. I introduced myself as her neighbour and companion in misfortune. She recognized me. She asked if there had been any fatalities and if I knew any names. All I could get out of her was that she’d just come back from a trip, she’d lent her apartment to a friend, and she was worried. Very worried. I made a few calls on her behalf, to the fire department and the police station, and the next thing I knew we were in my car heading for the morgue. Angéla insisted on coming along, bless her. Nobody said much on the way. Angéla murmured a few reassuring words from the back seat while the girl sat up front, trembling like a leaf. Her name was Hélène.
There’s nothing like a visit to the morgue to trigger a good existential crisis. At the end of the day, let’s face it, it’s the fridge for everyone. There’s no escaping it. Some people get off on knowing there’s at least one thing the rich can’t buy their way out of, and that we’re all equal in the drawers of the morgue. I think that way, too, sometimes. The trouble is, by the time you get there, you’re in no state to enjoy your new-found equality.
It’s funny how our screw-ups follow us around. The guy in charge of identifying bodies at the morgue recognized me. He didn’t like me very much. You might say he was conscientious about guarding the privacy of his dead. We didn’t even get to the hellos.
– Hey, asshole, I thought I told you I never wanted to see your face in here again. If you’ve got any questions, call the coroner’s office. I don’t talk to reporters.
The girl looked at me like I had the plague. I can’t say I blame her. The guy in charge backed off a little when I told him we lived in the building that blew up on Darling. But the damage was done. Hélène turned cool towards me and insisted on going in alone for the ID. The guy in charge told Angéla and I to wait. We sat down on a vinyl-covered bench.
Angéla had been serving me every day for months but we’d never said more than a hundred words to each other. It was Angéla who spoke first:
– So. You’re a journalist.
– Nope. Not any more.
Silence. I talk about my life at AA meetings, nowhere else. But, well, OK, she’d never done anything to hurt me, so, just to be polite, I added:
– I’m retired.
She looked at me, carefully. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. To put it mildly, I didn’t fit the image of a retired journalist. I looked barely a rung up from the rubbies on Place d’Armes. I wasn’t exactly the guy they were going to come looking f
or in my chic little Outremont pad when they needed someone to host election night coverage on TV. Angéla continued observing me. I braced myself for another nosy question, but after a moment she said:
– If there was someone in her apartment, it wasn’t a friend. It was her mother.
– I know. I heard what she said on the phone, too.
– Why’d she lie?
– I don’t know.
More silence. The guy in charge returned, alone. I asked him if the young woman had recognized anyone.
– I’m not allowed to say.
– Where is she?
– Gone.
Angéla and I looked at each other.
– Alone? I asked.
He made a face as if to say: “Of course, idiot!” As if I thought a corpse was going to walk out with her. Then he led me to a cubicle. It was my turn to look through photos of the victims.
What can you say about a corpse? Not much, as far as I’m concerned. In my line of work, I counted them, nothing more. In a pinch, when it wasn’t too far-fetched, I might write “horribly mutilated” or “burnt to a crisp.” My talent was describing how the corpse got to be a corpse, how the crime or accident or disaster happened. But the corpse itself? A person is born, grows up, falls in love, has children, reads books or spends his life sitting in front of the TV, fulfils his quota of nastiness or good deeds, and is either happy, miserable, or a bit of both. There’s nothing much more to say when you see his corpse. What’s lying there could be the body of a saint or a murderer, a Nobel Prize winner or a real estate developer, and it wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever was beautiful or ugly in the person, sublime or ridiculous, is gone without a trace. There’s only meat left. But that didn’t help when I picked up the photos. They weren’t the first stiffs I’d seen, but they shook me up. I was moved. Maybe because they were my neighbours and I’d known them (a little) when they were alive. Maybe because it could have been me. Or maybe because they were just innocent people, dead for no apparent reason. Mind you, whether you die for a reason or die for no reason, it doesn’t make any difference when you’re the one who’s dead.
8:17 pm rue Darling Page 2