That was three months ago. Since then, Malik had also forced me to confront my actions. But I still owed Marie-Lou over four-hundred dollars. From time to time I’d slip her a twenty or two, which she accepted wordlessly.
I missed her. And I figured she’d be happy to see me. We hadn’t spent much time together since I’d crashed at her place a couple days before moving in with Vincent.
You entered Chez Maurice through a big metal door with peanut machines next to it. The room smelled vaguely of detergent and flat beer. It had a terrazzo floor and limp ceiling fans churning the clouds of cigarette smoke. At that time of day the room was still lit by the sunlight filtering in through long tempered glass windows, on which you could read “air conditioned” and “SPORTS FANS WELCOME.” When I walked in Marie-Lou jumped into my arms. I didn’t even have time to take off my headphones. She kissed me on the cheeks. It was heartwarming to see her so happy. I took a seat at the bar with my back to the row of machines that lined the street-side wall.
Afternoons at Chez Maurice weren’t exactly action-packed. There was no one to serve except a few old guys who needed a fresh beer once an hour while they gambled away their cheque on 7s Wild. The place was dead.
Marie-Lou brought me a beer.
“So, how’s the new job?”
“My new job? Like working at the dump, under the trucks as they unload the garbage.”
She looked at me with a mocking compassion.
“Poor baby. . .”
“Are you sure there aren’t any jobs here?”
She shot me a look that made it clear my question irked her.
“Forget that,” she said categorically. “Gee, do you really think this would be a good place for you to work?” She looked meaningfully at the VLTs that lined the wall behind me. “Sweet plan, dude.”
She gave me a lingering look, and I felt myself turning scarlet.
“Yeah, thought so,” she finally said.
Then she went to punch something in at the register. The system looked pretty rudimentary. Next to what we had at La Trattoria, it felt more like the till at a McDonald’s.
“You going to see Iced Earth?” I asked.
“Nah, their last album is shit,” she said. “It’s weird that you’re asking though. Jess really wanted to go with me.”
She answered from the other end of the bar, scribbling on a pad next to a glass full of change. She hadn’t dyed her hair since getting back from B.C. last year. Through her copper-coloured locks I could see the high cheekbones and snub nose that gave her the profile of a manga heroine. Her boss let her work with her piercing in. She played with it when she was deep in thought. At the mention of Jess, I tensed up all over my body.
“She got out of hospital last week, by the way.”
“You mean detox. . .”
I averted my eyes from the reproachful look I knew she would have waiting. I couldn’t refrain from adding:
“And I should care because. . .”
She acted as if I hadn’t spoken, and went off to check on her tables. Three old-timers in work shirts had taken a seat. You could tell from their faces as they sat down that Marie-Lou was the best part of their day. The sleeves of her red and black-striped shirt hid the horned demon tattoos she had on each arm. Each time I saw her she looked even more beautiful. Seeing her here you couldn’t tell she was a metal chick: she’d learned to transform her look at work so people who didn’t know her would have no idea she was into Dimmu Borgir, Darkthrone, and Immortal. I guess we all did, to a point.
She was back behind the bar, clinking empty Molson Dry bottles together as she lined them up in the case.
“She talks about you a lot. She’d really like to see you again. Or at least hear from you.”
I finished my beer.
“Not gonna happen,” I said.
Jess was my girlfriend from fifteen through seventeen. She and Marie-Lou were childhood friends, two firecrackers who somehow ended up at our staid private high school. It wasn’t long before Jess had got her hooks in me. And I was obsessed with her.
“She’s changed, you know.”
“Great. Speaking of change, let’s change the subject,” I said.
“Okay, okay, don’t get mad,” she said, before leaning over and looking me square in the eye with a worried expression, like a doctor examining a hematoma.
I laughed. Her face lit up, as if she’d just remembered a piece of good news.
“Hey, how’s the album cover going?”
“Almost done,” I said, trying to keep my smile. “I’m meeting the band next week, to show them the mock-ups.”
“Are you gonna show me?”
“Hell yeah. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
She took my hand, swept up with a sort of momentum, and then something made her stop, with a funny look. I didn’t react. She looked uncomfortable for a minute, then gave me a sort of fake slow-motion right hook to the jaw. I didn’t make a fool of myself. I didn’t tell her I wanted us to try again, didn’t offer to show her the drawing tonight. I just ordered another beer, happy to be there with her. Life wasn’t coming to an end just yet. Her face took on a more serious look, the way it did every time she poured a beer. Her lips grew a touch thinner and she scrunched up her eyebrows. Then she put a beer down in front of me.
“Finish late tonight?”
“No, not late. A little after dinner. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“I’m thinking of going to South America in the spring.”
“Oh yeah?”
I shifted on my stool. She was making a rum and Coke, and talking into the glass.
“I thought you were going back to Cegep,” I said.
“Nah, not yet.”
“How long you going for?”
“A few months. At least.”
That threw me for a loop. I took a sip of beer while I mulled it over. She stopped for a few seconds in front of me, before taking out the order.
“What’s up with you?”
“Nothing, I’m just tired. It’s the new job.”
She gave me a sweet little smile and set off with her tray to the table where a guy with tribal tats sat reading the paper.
Once Jess and I finally broke up for good, after the suicide threats and the Tylenol overdoses and her drunk mum begging me to take her daughter back and Jess sobbing on the phone until two in the morning, after all that, I’d tried my luck with Marie-Lou. She still had a boyfriend at that point, though. Gilles. That guy freaked the shit out of me. He was twenty-four years old, and under investigation for selling weapons. Gilles hung out with a pack of lowlifes at the Longeuil Metro, people like Maureen the four-foot-tall Latina lesbian who had the whole King George family eating out of her hand. The first time Jess introduced me to her, she was packing a gun under her Lakers shirt.
The day was darkening. Some more washed-up old guys turned up at the bar. A few younger people too, barely older than me. I glanced at the machines out of the corner of my eye. Marie-Lou caught it.
“You’re not starting up that shit again, are you?”
“No way. Don’t worry,” I said.
Her face hardened instantly. My cheeks were burning but I kept up my mask. I remembered the fiercest moments of our fighting, and tried to chase it from my mind.
“I’m gonna figure out a way to pay you back. Soon.”
“I don’t care about the money. I just don’t want you going near those things anymore.”
Her look cut right through me. I took a sip of beer.
“Did you finish the Sandmans I leant you?”
She was about to answer when Benjamin, Marie-Lou’s boss, walked in. Benjamin was around twice my age. He moved with a laid-back confidence, as if he’d planned out each and every move well in advance, and it was working out just fine for
him, and nothing could surprise him anymore. He said hi to a few tables of regulars as he walked by with a box of liquor, making predictions about the hockey game. In his long trench coat, with a smoke dangling from the corner of his mouth, he looked a touch like John Constantine.
Benjamin said hi to Marie-Lou and started rummaging around behind the bar. He asked her not to mix the empty imports with the Molsons. Benjamin always used a neutral tone, never raised his voice. He was a lanky, taciturn guy with red hair and a wide, bony forehead. The bags under his eyes gave him a somehow sleepy, detached look. At a first glance, he wasn’t the friendliest guy around. If I didn’t know Marie-Lou, he probably wouldn’t have given me the time of day.
One night I was sitting at the bar waiting for Marie-Lou to finish her shift, and I’d brought a Stephen King to keep me company. Without even a hint of a segue, or so much as a hello, he told me I should really try Jack Ketchum next. I said I’d never heard of him. Suddenly this guy who never strung together more than two or three words was chatting my ear off, like a prophet in the throes of an epiphany. He talked to me about books for an hour. He recommended Dashiell Hammett, Elmore Leonard, and James Ellroy, who I pretended I’d heard of. Don’t ever read them in translation, he stressed. I said I’d started It in English. He said reading translations was worse than watching the Sunday afternoon action movies dubbed with French actors on TV.
“What kind of sense does that make, having a hillbilly who talks like Vincent Cassel?”
“Not much, I guess.”
I would have been hard pressed to tell you what a hillbilly was.
Two or three years later, when I started reading the French version of Naked Lunch, I remembered our discussion. The translation was so awful it was barely readable.
Back when Marie-Lou introduced me to Benjamin he had three pastimes: amateur boxing, tending bar, and reading a preposterous number of books. It was his fourth year in AA. Benjamin’s years as a practising alcoholic had been unusually rocky. In those days he worked at Peel Pub, pouring pitchers for the Anglophone hordes who’d head downtown to drink until they forgot their mothers’ names. Benjamin was the kind of guy who could finish his shift at midnight, go out and drink away four hundred dollars in tips before last call, then borrow a twenty from a friend for the cab home. He went on that way for years. His life was one long bender. At the end he was up to a twenty-sixer a day, with a twenty-four beer chaser. His drink of choice was vodka, room temperature, usually on an empty stomach. Then he quit cold turkey, the day after he fell off his balcony one night trying to unlock his front door.
Benjamin walked up to me and shook my hand. His grip was tough, his hand rough as sandpaper. He had a look at my copy of Cthulhu, sitting beside my beer.
“Still keeping busy with your fairy tales.”
He smiled, a rare occurrence.
“Marie told me you’re working at La Trattoria.”
“Yeah, it’s been a week.”
“Greg still work there?”
Benjamin was still smiling, as he read the back cover.
“You know Greg?”
“Yeah. Surprised he’s still alive.”
“I guess he parties pretty hard.”
“I guess you could put it that way.”
“Where do you know him from? Did you work with him?”
“I knew Greg in my former life.”
He put down my book without a word, and started emptying out the box of bottles he’d brought. He removed the pourer spouts from the empty bottles and screwed them onto the full ones. When he opened the forty of Jack a waft of floor polish tickled my nostrils. I’d always wondered how Benjamin could work in an environment so full of alcohol and never succumb to temptation. When I’d asked him, he said:
“It’s not easy, but it’s simple. You just tell yourself that you can make it through one more day without opening a beer. Don’t think about tomorrow. You cross that bridge when you come to it.”
I stole a glance at the machines. The fruits and the bells paraded by on their screens. That was when a tall man came into the bar. He seemed just a little older than Benjamin, maybe in his mid-forties, with a salt-and-pepper beard and wrinkles that lent his eyes a melancholy aspect. Benjamin stood up behind the bar.
“Ah, Mohammed.”
I’d rarely seen Benjamin this happy. You could tell because he spoke just a touch louder, with a hint of surprise in his voice. When Mohammed smiled wide wrinkles formed around his baggy eyes and he took Benjamin’s hand in his own giant fist and shook. Before he had a chance to order Benjamin had already placed a Perrier on the bar in front of him. He introduced me and Mohammed shook my hand as well, as if I were a man of his age.
“My friend, you aren’t sleeping enough,” he said to me. “Night is for sleeping as well.”
Mohammed’s voice was deep and velvety. I wasn’t sure how to answer, couldn’t tell if he was taking the piss or not. It seemed as if this man somehow knew my whole story. I cleared my throat before finally speaking:
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Mohammed winked at me and clinked his Perrier against my beer.
“This here is the most dependable cab driver in town,” Benjamin told me.
“Stop, please.”
Mohammed said hi to Marie-Lou, and shook her hand as well. There was something comforting and ceremonial in his manner. They talked a little. He addressed her like a niece, or the cherished daughter of a close friend. Mohammed crushed the lemon slice in the bottom of his glass. Years later I’d learn that he was the one who had peeled Benjamin off the ground the night he fell from his second-storey balcony, and driven him to the hospital. That was the day they became friends. Now Mohammed stopped by the bar regularly to say hi.
Marie-Lou went off to check on her tables. Benjamin and Mohammed were talking sports, boxing mostly. Benjamin told him about a couple of bets he’d placed. Mohammed gently chided him. It felt a little like a script, and each man knew his part. Though Mohammed had a North African accent he peppered his speech with Quebec expressions, as if he’d been born in Joliette.
I’d never seen Benjamin interact with anyone like that. I knew he liked to gamble, place the odd bet. He was a regular at poker games that finished around dawn. He’d told me a few stories, about these games full of coked-up bartenders trying to double their tips by going all-in at nine in the morning. Benjamin claimed he’d never lost money, not even once. At the beginning of summer I’d asked him if I could go check out a game with him, and he said no. He didn’t give a reason, didn’t raise his voice, didn’t lecture me. Just no.
I paid Benjamin for my beers, careful to conceal my wad of cash from Marie-Lou. When I got up to leave she gave me a kiss on each cheek and then a hug, holding me even tighter than when I’d got there. I held her close as well, would have held her against me all night, but our embrace came unlaced after a few seconds. We weren’t in that place anymore. Maybe it was better that way. She made me promise to do better at staying in touch. I put on my headphones and left with a wave for Benjamin.
Outside night had fallen. Tiny snowflakes floated through the air, like ground-up specks of glass sprinkled over the city. I turned my Walkman up to eight to block out the rumble of the traffic. “The other side of the platinum door/ Another day in quicksand/ Still feel close to nowhere/ I hope this is the right way.” In Flames. I never got tired of Clayman. I headed down Ontario a while, to the stop on Saint-Denis for northbound buses. I walked by the Voyageur intercity bus terminal. Buses stood waiting in the parking lot. I felt like getting on one for Trois-Rivières. When the No. 30 finally arrived, I could still smell Marie-Lou’s scent on myself.
I spent the whole trip dozing off, moving only to flip the tape in my Walkman. I looked around. A guy my age with shaved eyebrows in head-to-toe Karl Kani was talking to his girlfriend on his cell, offering fifteen different versions of the same excus
e. An Asian woman buried under a pile of packages was letting her head bump into the window. Two private school girls in plaid skirts and aluminum-coloured puffy coats were sharing a pair of Discman headphones. A guy with a long but patchy beard was absorbed in a Star Wars novel. Just beside him, a black woman no older than me, her face a closed book, stared unblinkingly out the window. I turned up the volume.
When I got home Vincent was sitting in the living room La-Z-Boy, finishing off a frozen dinner with a two-litre of Sprite at his feet. The apartment was dark. He was watching the hockey game in an old pair of soccer shorts and the gym shirt from our old high school. Those t-shirts were so big they were practically robes, yet the fabric stretched tight over Vincent’s pecs. I collapsed onto the couch that was also my bed. My clothes still smelled like last night’s special blend of fried food and cigarette smoke. I didn’t have the strength to change my clothes. I took a sip of Sprite.
“I still don’t have any cash for. . . It’s coming though.”
“No worries, man. Just as long as you don’t forget.”
He dropped the box of his meal on the coffee table.
“Think I could steal a Michelina’s?”
“Sure, just not the cheese. Take one of the tomato sauces.”
His eyes never left the game. In the TV’s glow his black skin looked almost blue. I went off to heat up a frozen meal.
“Have you finished your exams?”
I was talking over the hum of the microwave.
“Not yet. You?”
“I handed in my last assignment today.”
“Nice.”
I went over to sit down with my steaming-hot dinner. I asked Vincent to wake me when he got up the next morning.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’ve gotta be at work around eight or so.”
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