– Ah, OK. I’ll look into it. Merci, Madame Kovacs!
I couldn’t take any more. I went back to my new home and sat on the floor in the middle of the living room-dining room-kitchen. There’s something deeply comforting about an empty room. It’s like being on the prairies, or on a beach: you can see trouble coming a long way off. I should’ve seen trouble coming in my empty room; I was alone and there was nothing to distract me. I should’ve started making a searching and fearless moral inventory of myself (Step Four). Instead, I was fixated on Denise and her little Josée. It sounded like the classic story of a young woman trapped by her milieu. Denise had obviously been a good student. She’d gone to CEGEP and then on to university, probably against her mother’s advice (or, more likely, in the face of her mother’s complete indifference). She’d broken with her family to get on with her life. And then, who knows, maybe she’d run into problems at university, gone back to the kind of bar she’d frequented as a teenager, and fallen for the first bum who reminded her of her father or the old neighbourhood. Preferably a bum with a drug or alcohol problem so she could imagine saving him. And then she died, for no reason, in an accident with no apparent cause. An absurd tale, if ever there was one. Worse, it might have been true. But one thing I still couldn’t figure out: where was her lover man, François, missing for two days then coming back for his car? Flying high, probably, cranked up on coke. Too stoned to know what was happening. Or staying stoned, so he wouldn’t have to think about it.
The truck from the Glaneuses arrived with my new living environment (as they say in Décormag). I arranged my furniture, which didn’t take long considering the elegant simplicity of my tastes. Then I had a shower and changed my clothes. I cut a fine figure of a man in my new, slightly-used shirt and my new, previously-owned pants (both striped, though unfortunately the stripes were going different ways). I was set for life. I tried out my La-Z-Boy to kill time before dinner. And I promptly fell asleep.
u
Someone was knocking at the door. For most mortals, that’s nothing unusual. For me, it was earth-shattering. No one ever visits me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I know where to find people when I want them. I climbed out of my La-Z-Boy ready to send packing the Jehovah’s Witnesses, or the Boy Scout selling chocolate bars, or the ex-con rehabilitating himself by peddling ballpoint pens, or anyone else who thought they had the right to disturb my peace of mind and home. I flung open the door. Angéla barely managed to pull the dish she was holding out of the way.
– Am I disturbing you?
– I was sleeping.
– Excusez-moi. I brought you a potato pie. I figured you wouldn’t be set up for cooking yet.
She came in, a fine-looking woman in her forties, a little chubby perhaps, a little worn out. She had thick cascades of black hair, a slight rasp to her voice, and an accent with traces of the sea. And she was still addressing me as vous, since I was old enough to be her father.
Angéla cast an eye over my living environment.
– You haven’t got much.
– I like it that way. We’re always dragging too much stuff around with us.
She knew what I meant: she looked like she’d been dragging around enough stuff of her own. I asked her if she wanted to join me for dinner. She had to go back to her place to get the salt and napkins and other things I didn’t have. Then we attacked the potato pie.
– Is this a recipe from back home?
– Oui. A poor man’s dinner.
– When I was a kid, we used to put salmon in it.
– I guess you weren’t as poor as we were.
We shovelled in potatoes for a moment.
– So, how’d you end up in Quebec, Angéla?
Silence. I wasn’t going to get her story that night.
– The important stuff, you already know. The details, I’ll tell you another time. What about you? You told me yesterday you were born just across the street?
So that was the deal: a potato pie for the story of my life. Normally, I would have told her to drop it, but I wasn’t in a normal state of mind. I have to admit, she was having an effect on me. So I poured it all out: my three marriages, my brilliant career covering the local police beat, my half a swimming pool full of Scotch, the whole enchilada. Two or three times she said: “I know what you mean ...” and she sounded like she did. When I got to the end of my story and we’d drained the second pot of coffee, I asked her why she was asking me so many questions.
– Because you’re an interesting person. And I like stories, too. But I prefer stories about people who are still alive. It’s good to take an interest in the living. More than the dead.
Oh, oh. I could sense something coming.
– Why do you say that?
– Because you worry me, snooping around, asking all your questions.
– C’est mon affaire.
– No argument there. But if you ask me, I think you’re just playing reporter again and sticking your nose in where it’s none of your business.
– I could have died that night. I have a right to know what happened!
– What difference will it make if you find out? Do you think we’ll ever know why some people die and other people live? Haven’t you got enough to do right now, just looking after yourself and the people around you?
She got up.
– I’ve got to get some sleep. I get up at five. Easy does it, mon ami.
End of conversation. Exit the beautiful Acadian woman, leaving behind a guy in his sixties, confused and insomniac, in an empty kitchen with dirty dishes and no dish soap.
u
I loathe rue Laurier. It’s bad enough on the Plateau, where two thirds of the residents dress in black and three quarters of them are novelists, scriptwriters, painters, dancers, multimedia artists (whatever the hell that means) or tightrope show-offs from the Cirque du Soleil. On Laurier between Christophe-Colomb and Papineau you get the impression that half the population of Quebec is rehearsing a show for the other half. Thank God for grants. OK, sure, the guy at the artisan bakery makes bread, and I might actually get to like him if he’d stop trying to sell me his philosophy along with his baguettes. But at least he’s making something. Which is more than you can say for the ladies of Outremont, wiggling their anorexic little asses on Laurier west of Saint-Laurent. It’s even worse in that quarter-mile stretch of Laurier in Outremont. Everything I hate most in the world is right there, in full view. Ah, the delectable pleasures of class hatred! I start hating them when they double-park their cars (four possibilities: BMW, Mercedes, Volvo, or a 4-by-4 as big as a cruise ship). I hate them more when they turn on their car alarms that honk as they walk away. I hate them when they stop and yack on their cell phones in the middle of the sidewalk, like they own the place. I hate their accent (floating around in mid-Atlantic, somewhere between Paris and Montreal). I hate them when they give to panhandlers and I hate them when they don’t. I hate their Benetton kids, with enough money in their mouths in orthodontics to feed a village in Burkina Faso for a decade. I hate the men in their three-piece suits and the women in their chic little business outfits. I hate their Saturday pullovers and loafers even more. I hate the way they talk like they own the world. I hate the way they size you up in a glance (what’s he doing here?). I hate the brown-nosers and cocksuckers who work in their chrome boutiques and try to sound like they’re from Paris; I hate even more the ones who don’t have to try. I hate their vulgar power and their boorish confidence. I wish them nothing but the worst and I long for the good old days of that great Chinese invention: re-education through manual labour.
One Christmas Eve, back in the days when bombs were going off in mail boxes around town, Chantal and I went to midnight mass at Saint-Viateur d’Outremont church, at the end of rue Laurier. It’s a real in-your-face church, glittering with gold from dome to altar, the perfect catwalk to model your new mink coat. The principal object of devotion there is social rank and I’ll bet you no one has ever conf
essed to exploiting his workers, screwing the maid, selling his soul, or double-crossing a business partner. That night half the political elite of Canada and Quebec was strutting around the nave in their raccoon skin coats. It seems I was more than a little intoxicated and talking in more than a whisper when I proclaimed that the FLQ should have planted one of their bombs there. To avoid a scandal, Chantal steered me towards the door. Bad move. Imagine my delight when I came nose-to-nose with Pierre Elliott Trudeau who was just then making his grand entrance. It was over in a second. I’m sorry to say I didn’t get the satisfaction of planting my fist in his face, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. One of his gorillas stepped between us and took my sucker-punch on his starched white shirt. Then he escorted me to a snow-bank outside so I could freshen up while he whispered something into his walkie-talkie. In English.
I was musing on that fond memory while I parked my heap on Laurier. I couldn’t get it into reverse (it happens sometimes), so I got out and pushed it into a parking spot. Then I strolled over to the funeral service for the late Madame Diane Demers, trophy wife of the head honcho of the National Bank. The church hadn’t changed. The service was simple, dignified, and in good taste. Everybody who was anybody was there, and not a peasant in sight – except for me, of course, looking like a pimple on a powdered ass in my nylon Canadiens windbreaker and my striped pants with the stripes going the wrong way. When the ceremony was over, the cortège followed the casket down the aisle. My former neighbour Hélène Demers walked beside her father, with all the dignity befitting such an occasion. She didn’t look like a slumming student anymore. She carried herself with the tailored elegance of her class. She had this regal way of holding her head; this was not a woman born for ordinary things. What ensued was a minor masterpiece of non-verbal communication. Our eyes met, she looked at her father, and indicated my presence with an almost imperceptible tilt of her head. Monsieur Demers, in turn, discretely indicated my presence to a Tarzan in a three-piece suit. I wasn’t kept waiting. Money is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? Some loser can shout himself hoarse at the welfare office for hours without getting anywhere, but all it takes is a nod from some VIP to set in motion a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound flunkey in an Italian suit.
This time, there was no scene. The goon was waiting for me outside the door and led me aside. He spoke courteously with a trace of a Slavic accent (where do they find these guys?) and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
– Monsieur Demers has asked me to convey to you his polite request not to disturb the family and not to publish anything about the death of Madame Demers.
He was almost charming, like a maître d’ quietly advising a regular against the Dover sole.
– And, there is this ... to compensate you for your inconvenience.
The envelope contained ten, crisp one-hundred dollar bills. They’d done their homework: losers like me come cheap. In detective novels, this is the point at which the fallen hero atones for his sins, recovers his lost dignity, throws the money on the ground, and gets pounded to a pulp. Not me. I said OK, put the money in my pocket, and walked away.
The fact is, my Pinto needed a transmission job. And I didn’t really give a shit about their story anyway. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened: a high-rolling bourgeois woman cheats on her husband using her daughter’s apartment because she thinks hotels are too risky and motels too sordid. Then she dies when the building blows up, just as she’s taking off her panties. What more did I need to know? The colour of her lingerie? Whether lover boy cried “mommy” when he came? Those kind of people bore me. I drove back to Hochelaga and headed for the Caisse Populaire to deposit the cash.
You’ve got to allow lots of time when you go to the bank on the first of the month. It’s Cheque Day. In the morning, the line snakes all the way out the door and spirits are high on the sidewalk outside. They’re all there: Frail seniors who look like they’ve spent a month hiding in their rooms. Sixteen-year-old girls proudly pushing baby carriages. Young punks in debt to their dealers. Unemployed guys desperate to get the cable switched back on. Mothers in a hurry to fill their fridges and cook a decent meal before the kids get home from school. Immigrants right off the boat from Mars: for them, Cheque Day is like Christmas. And of course the regulars from the tavern, planning the mother of all binges. My brothers and sisters. Mes semblables, mes frères. My fellow citizens from the wastelands of the empire, the margins of neo-liberalism, and the ruins of the welfare state.
I decided to avoid the Bien Bon: I didn’t need another lecture from Angéla. I headed for the Chez Clo instead. On the way there I ran into a group of teenagers wearing baseball caps. They were talking loud. Ah ouan! seemed to be their mantra.
– Ah ouan! Ah ouan!
– Fuck that shit was good, man!
– Ah ouan!
– I was out of my tree, man! Out of my fucking tree!
Expressions come and go, and that one was new to me, but it wasn’t hard to guess the meaning. I recognized the kid doing the bragging: it was the son of the guy with the beard. I’d seen him on the bus the night of the disaster. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old, but he already knew what he wanted to do in life: spend as much time as possible in a catatonic stupor.
– Hey! I called.
– Wha?
He was wasted. You could see it in his eyes.
– You lived on Darling, right?
– Ouan.
– You don’t recognize me? I lived above you.
– Ah ouan ... ouan ...
– What’s your name again?
– Patrick.
– I’m looking for your father, Patrick.
He tensed up.
– What for?
– I wanna talk to him.
– I don’t know where he is.
– Where are you staying?
– At my grand-mother’s.
– Madame Laperrière?
– That crazy old bag? She’s not my grand-mother; she’s Denise’s mother.
– Do you know where your father is?
– He fucked off. I dunno know where.
– Écoute, Patrick. I’m just trying to find out what happened that night, the night of the explosion. Where were you when the place blew up?
– I wasn’t home.
I resisted the temptation to say “Ah ouan!” And, eventually, I got another piece of the puzzle from him. Little Josée had run out of the house that night while her parents were fighting. They were shouting so loud they didn’t hear her go. When they finally realized what had happened, everyone took off looking for her.
– I went looking, too, said Patrick. But I got lost ...
His friends thought that was hilarious.
– I came back too late. Lucky me, eh?
– Yeah, lucky you. Écoute. If you see your father, tell him his upstairs neighbour wants to talk to him. My name is Gérard. He can leave a message for me at the Bien Bon. Know where that is?
– Ouan.
– By the way, what’s happening with Denise and the kid? Is someone going to bury them?
– How the fuck would I know?
He’d had enough. He and his friends walked away, the living dead, in search of new adventures in the big wide world of psychotropic drugs.
u
Usually the pork hock stew at the Chez Clo puts things right with the world, but that day my nose was in the gravy. I was thinking about little Josée. Only three years old, but she’d had more common sense than everyone else in that dysfunctional family put together. I imagined her doing the only thing possible under the circumstances: running, leaving, getting the hell out, putting the greatest possible distance between herself and the nightmare at home.
She must have headed down Darling in her pyjamas. It was a crisp October night. Maybe she was dragging a teddy bear with her, or a blanket. She walked towards the river for a while, under the light of the street lamps; there was no one about. She was careful at the intersections, she
looked left, then right, then left again, just like she’d been taught. Then she heard someone calling her name. Maybe she hid, but not well enough. Her mother found her and took her home, while her father went to the dépanneur for cigarettes or beer. I only hoped Denise hadn’t scolded her daughter too much, that she’d hugged her tight before tucking her into bed, that there’d been enough time for a little moment of tenderness. I hoped Denise had had time to say: “Don’t worry, sweetie, we won’t fight any more ... there won’t be any more shouting ... sleep well, mon petit bébé ... mommy loves you” – before death took them both. But maybe that was asking too much.
And now their bodies were lying in the morgue, unburied, unclaimed, like slaughtered animals. I thought about the people in India who believe that, when a body is unburied, its soul wanders the earth, troubling the living. And then there was Patrick, a lost puppy without a collar, alive only because he was too stoned to find his way home, but already dead, already dead ... And his father, that jackal with a beard, gone God knows where in his fancy drug dealer’s car, a man who didn’t even have the humanity to bury his woman and his little girl.
God, give me the strength to get through the day, I thought. God, take away my thirst. I had to walk, to keep moving. I left the Chez Clo and headed for the mountain. I just put one foot in front of the other. Maybe Angéla was right, and I should have let the dead lie. The stories I had so far were mostly my imagining. I’d probably never be able to prove that Madame Demers had met a lover at her daughter’s place, or that Patrick’s father was a drug dealer. And even if I could, so what? What difference would it make? Knowing the truth wouldn’t bring me peace of mind. I told myself I’d be better off forgetting my pointless search and working on my Twelve Steps instead, trying to find some measure of serenity. You don’t get there by inspiration, it takes perspiration. It’s hard work, day after day, 24/7, 365. It was the first day of the rest of my life, I told myself. One day at a time.
Sometimes, the clichés they spout at AA really piss me off, even if I know they’re the only thing keeping me sober and alive. Sometimes I step back and look at AA with a double shot of irony. I start feeling superior to all that kitchen-table philosophy with its Hallmark sayings. And then I remember that that’s why I almost ended up dead. I can spin circles in my head faster than a moth flapping around a 100-watt bulb. I mistake cynicism for intelligence. I have to remind myself that it’s better to be naive and sober than brilliant and dead. I was replaying all this in my head for the thousandth time while walking up the mountain. And then all of a sudden, it hit me: it was Indian summer, the weather was gorgeous, the maples were in full colour. I had a rush of well-being. Tears flooded my eyes. It was a beautiful day, I was alive, and the light was so golden it would have made even the concrete bunkers they call high schools these days look inviting. I gave thanks. I sat down on a park bench and watched the young people go by. And then I fell asleep. At my age, and with my mileage, you can’t have two late nights in a row without paying for it.
8:17 pm rue Darling Page 5