I looked at him, surprised. He went on.
“You seem to have a good head on your shoulders. You know what you’re doing.”
I could hear the guys shouting out in joy. When I turned they were high-fiving. I imagined them hitting the jackpot, or swelling their credit count in a series of lucky plays. My mouth was getting dry. I tried to focus on the discussion with Bob.
“I don’t know. Renaud told me it would take a while to find another dishwasher to replace Carl.”
“Fuck Renaud, man. Dude can barely get his mayonnaise to thicken. It’s no shocker that he can’t find a dishwasher. Anyway, let me know if you’re interested. I could always get you a job at my friend’s restaurant.”
Jonathan and Desrosiers came up to claim their winnings. One hundred twenty-seven dollars. I was dizzy. My heart started pounding, banging on my eardrums. It was all I could hear. A fog was rolling in, submerging everything.
Jonathan laughed as he counted out the bills. We’d have to do some shooters to celebrate their win. He was already slack-jawed and slurring his words. Martin poured us two rounds of Jack. I had to lean against the bar to keep the second one down. Desrosiers drank it down like apple juice. He lit a smoke. His little eyes sparkled over his freckled cheeks. Bob turned to him as he put his cap back on.
“I’m hungry. You?”
“Nah, man. Anyway, the smoked meat place is closed.”
“Speaking of . . . Last call, boys,” said Martin.
Jonathan handed him a twenty.
“No more pitchers for you. You can have one last beer, that’s it.”
Jonathan said something garbled. One eye was drooping. Martin poured a Blue Dry in a tiny glass, said it was on the house.
I asked Jonathan if he wanted to split a cab. It was a long ride to Ahuntsic.
“I’m not going . . . home!” he drawled.
“C’mon, dude. They’re closing. We gotta go.”
Bob gave Jonathan a pat on the back, to encourage him.
“No, man! I’m not . . . going.”
Jonathan guzzled down half his beer in one swig. He was getting loud and testy. Bob spoke slowly and attempted to reason with him.
“I’m not going home,” Jonathan said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Cut it out, man. You’re going to bed.”
“I don’t wanna! Fucking sleep. At fucking home. . .”
His gaze wandered and then he yelled it out, accenting each syllable by banging his glass on the bar.
“I’m. Not. Gonna. Sleep. At. Home. Till. She. Comes. Back!”
Beer was splashing over his hand and spilling onto the bar. Bob and Desrosiers exchanged a look, like bystanders watching someone about to spectacularly crash their bike. Jonathan knocked over the glass with the back of his hand. With catlike reflexes, Martin snatched it out of the air just in time. He eased it into the glasswasher. His face darkened. You could feel his patience wearing thin.
“And she can go. . . Wherever she fuck . . . fucking wants!” he railed on. “I don’t give a . . . fuck.”
Desrosiers took Jonathan by the shoulders, to calm him down.
“Let go, man!”
Jonathan was fighting all the way, windmilling his arms. He bumped into a table on his way to the door. Bob told Martin, quietly, “We’ve got this, man.” They shook hands.
We all left. Desrosiers caught Jonathan just before he could get hit by a car. Jonathan gave passing drivers the finger, then started kicking a trash can. Eventually he lost his balance and fell onto the icy sidewalk. He lay there on his back, crying tears of rage. His sobs rang out, shaking like spasms. Bob and Desrosiers helped him up. He was sniffling loudly and shaking as if he was seriously hurt. His face was all puffed up and covered with slobber and snot.
Bob and Desrosiers lived a few hundred metres away, on De Champlain, across from the Notre-Dame Hospital morgue. It was a slow, arduous journey, trying to keep Jonathan on his feet. The light snow had stopped falling, and the cold had returned with a vengeance. We stopped a minute so Jonathan could throw up a little more.
“It’s gonna be okay, buddy,” Desrosiers told him, giving him a gentle pat on the back.
It took around twenty minutes just to make it to the corner. We finally got to their apartment, and then Jonathan threw up again, in the snow. Once he was done the four of us went inside. It was a railway-style apartment. Twenty pairs of sneakers, mostly skate shoes, were lined up in the entranceway. I asked if they were Desrosiers’s.
“Ha ha, no, those are Bob’s. He’s got a bit of a fetish.”
I took off my boots and laid them out with the shoe collection. The hallway opened onto one of the rooms, and at the end was the living room. That’s where Bob and Desrosiers took Jonathan. They unlaced his big Sorrels and then took off his coat. He didn’t interfere, just sobbed from time to time. They set him up on one of the living room sofas. Bob brought him a blanket and a bowl, just in case. I watched them do it, still wearing my thick flannel.
The living room looked like a teenager’s bedroom, which was pretty funny given how old these guys were. One of the sofas was piled high with t-shirts still on hangers. I recognized the brands all the skaters in my school used to drool over. On his way over to hang up Jonathan’s stuff in the hallway, Bob saw that I looked impressed.
“Don’t worry, it’s not stolen. Desrosiers gets free merch all the time. It can get a little ridiculous.”
In the middle of the coffee table was a big popcorn bowl full of buds. Desrosiers sat down and picked up the remote in a single movement. He turned on the TV. The sports channel was on. He rummaged in the drawer for his grinder and rollies.
“Want some? That was this year’s harvest.”
“Uh, no thanks. Nice of you, but I don’t smoke.”
A single toke made me catatonic; two turned me into a raving conspiracy theorist.
“This shit’s one hundred per cent natural. No chemicals. I grow it in my dad’s fields up north.”
The long narrow kitchen was separated from the living room by a linoleum counter. When he saw I was still sitting in the middle of the living room Bob called me over to sit on one of the stools at the counter while he cooked up a late-night snack.
“You’ll see, we eat in style around here.”
He searched through the fridge, and pulled out two legs of lamb in sous-vide, and half a litre of stock.
“You scoff that from work?” I asked.
He was still leaning over the fridge.
“Scoff? Hell no. It’s my recipe Séverine uses. And I’m the one who cooks it. So I take my cut, that’s just normal. Desrosiers, you drank all the beer? Bastard.”
“Maybe. Don’t know.”
Desrosiers was crashed out on the sofa, playing Grand Theft Auto III and puffing on a joint. Jonathan was laid out on the other couch, his face finally at peace. He was snoring.
“If you’re really desperate, I’ve got some of the vodka I brought back from China,” Desrosiers said without taking his eyes off the game.
“Sweet. It’s not like I need my eyesight or anything.”
As he rummaged through the overflowing recycling bin, Bob told me how Desrosiers had spent six months in China with a bunch of other pro skaters the year before, as part of a promotion. There was a little factory across from the hotel where they stayed. Every morning a guy showed up with a box full of little flasks, and sold one to each worker. One day, out of curiosity, Desrosiers bought one. Bob showed me the green glass vial with ideograms written on it in black marker. It was almost full. It was the kind of liquor that would evaporate on your tongue, before you even had a chance to swallow. A single sip had been taken from the bottle, by Desrosiers. I was pretty sure the level wouldn’t be going down any time soon.
Bob picked six or seven empty bottles of Johnny Walker out of the recycling. The
re were little mickies and bigger twenty-sixers.
“We might be able to scrounge a couple drinks out of these, hey?”
While we waited for water to boil for the noodles and the stock to thicken, Bob managed to extract almost two ounces of whisky. He poured it into two Montreal Expos glasses.
“Sorry, it’s all I’ve got clean.”
He was Marquis Grissom, I got Larry Walker. He put an ice cube in each one, noting that it was a no-no.
“But this time of night, it’ll go down a little smoother.”
It was true, the whisky went down way easier than I thought it would. Bob plated the food, almost as if we were at the restaurant. It was my first ever lamb shank, and it was incredible. Intensely flavourful meat melted away from the bone without coercion and the sauce clung to the fettucine, Bob had tossed it in a serving bowl with garlic, olive oil, lemon zest, and fresh parsley. He watched me digging in and said:
“Another trick for never getting in trouble in the rush: keep your dishwasher well fed.”
He lifted his glass for a toast.
“Yo Desrosiers. Sure you’re not hungry? There’s lots.”
Desrosiers said he was fine. He was reaching regularly into a big bag of Cheetos, absorbed in his game. Jonathan was sawing logs.
Bob asked if I was in school, and what I studied. I said I went to Cegep at Vieux-Montréal, doing graphic design.
“Cool. One of my exes did that. She makes a good living.”
I talked about Deathgaze and the album cover. Bob told me about a guy he used to work with who had a band that was doing well. He said that in restaurants you met a lot of people with artistic sidelines. Bob knew a lot of people, and had a good story to tell about each one. As if every year of his life was really two, in kitchen years. He told me about the time all the cooks left in the middle of a rush, not an empty seat in the restaurant, because the owner hadn’t paid anyone in a month. He told me about a place on Saint-Laurent that hired models instead of servers. They never said a word to the cooks, and were constantly screwing up and taking the wrong food to the wrong tables. Then there was the time the immigration agents showed up in the middle of a rush with rifles and bulletproof vests, to arrest anyone who didn’t have work papers. Then he started listing off all the craziest chefs, starting with the one who burned his own neck with red hot tongs before the first service of the night, just to get fired up. Next it was time for the floor managers. He’d known some preposterous slave-drivers.
“The worst of the worst was at Galatée. Dude, you have no idea. He could load a room, pack it to the rafters, have people eating dinner standing up at the bar, whatever it took to squeeze three services into a night. He’d ride the servers until they had convulsions. The guy was a fucking machine. He was everywhere at once. But at the end of the night he’d turn into a monster. One time I saw him do two big rails, like this, right off the bar by the beer taps; just hoovered them up, then puked in the bar sink, right in front of the customers sipping their drinks. He rinsed his mouth out with Jack instead of Listerine, and went off with a cheque to a table, like it was nothing.
I asked Bob if he’d quit doing coke at some point.
“You never really quit doing coke, man. You may think you’re done but you’re never done, you’re just taking a break. You go through phases.”
At his lowest point Bob could spend whole nights going back and forth between his dealer’s spot and his apartment, buying quarter-gram flaps because he was convinced every one was his last. He’d keep going till he got down to his last twenty dollars. I thought of the chorus of “Master of Puppets”: “Come crawling faster. Obey your master. Your life burns faster.”
Your life burns faster: it made me think of everything I was burning, one twenty-dollar bill at a time. It wasn’t my life that was being burnt; it wasn’t just my body that was subjected to the ravages of my own stupidity. I was burning everything I touched: money, friendships, girls, plans. Deep down I knew I wouldn’t stop until everything was gone. But I kept right on gambling anyway. For a second I had an impulse to call Malik, but at this time of night it would just worry him. He was the kind of guy who just might set off from Trois-Rivières in the middle of the night to come get me.
We finished our food. Bob put the dishes in the sink and we went over to the couches. There was nothing left to drink. Bob rolled a joint and smoked it with Desrosiers, who was starting to nod off. I listened to the guys talking: Bob gesticulating, Desrosiers with his hands crossed on his stomach and his head laid back on the sofa. They were trading stories from Peace Park, some legendary place where skaters, junkies, and homeless people lived together in a strange harmony.
Bob and Desrosiers had known each other for ages, since they were kids. And it showed. I thought about my own friendships. The way things were going they weren’t going to last. I told myself I absolutely had to pay Vincent rent, tomorrow.
It was almost five-thirty a.m. My drunkenness had lifted, giving way to irresistible fatigue. The day that had passed suddenly felt like a year. I glanced over at Jonathan, and figured it was time for me to go home and sleep too. I thanked Bob and Desrosiers for their hospitality, and left the apartment into the winter dawn. I went out looking for a Metro station. Outside the city was coming to life, as I walked down the streets, my own rhythms at odds with the new day dawning. I walked by warehousemen and cashiers and paperboys and labourers and the earliest of the office workers.
My eyes were scratchy from fatigue. After two blocks, I realized I’d put my headphones in but forgotten to press “play.” I stopped at a bus stop and discreetly counted my remaining money. Made some calculations, estimated what I’d have once you added my paycheque. It was far from the two-thousand dollars Deathgaze had fronted me. I pressed play; there was Hetfield screaming. “Your life burns faster. Obey your master. Master! Master!”
I sighed and kept walking up Ontario in the glacial blue dawn.
Chapter 22
The smoke of cigarettes and joints rose in thick spirals above the mezzanine. The crowd grew denser as we moved forward, but Marie-Lou and I managed to squeeze up quite close to the stage. We were as excited as kids on Christmas morning. To the right I could see Alex’s blond locks. He was by the merch table, with his friends. Good thing, too: Jess never would have let me come to the show alone with Marie-Lou. Since the middle of summer she’d been throwing little hissy fits because I was talking to Marie-Lou too often for her liking.
I surveyed the scene in the warm light emanating from the room’s high ceilings. There were excited fourteen year-olds with peach fuzz moustaches and oversized tees, their hair not yet long enough to headbang properly, and people in their early twenties wearing wifebeaters under leather jackets, and girls with tattooed arms and black lipstick and bullet belts and lank dark hair, and couples around thirty, or some other age equally remote from my vantage point, in concert tees from tours that rolled through town when I was still in kindergarten. I had no idea what rock all these strange creatures had crawled out from. It seemed every metalhead in the province of Quebec was assembled here tonight.
A roar was cresting in waves. The Métropolis began to shake, I could feel it in every bone of my body and in my solar plexus. The crowd began chanting—“Megadeth! Megadeth! Megadeth!”—a refrain that grew more powerful with each iteration. I joined in. An electrical current was flowing through a thousand upraised arms. The lights dimmed and we started yelling louder than ever. I shivered from head to toe. Marie-Lou lit a joint and then lifted her fist in the devil’s horns. Telluric rumblings whipped the crowd into a state of excitement and then, in a beam of blue light, Static-X took the stage: four imprisoned demiurges, radiating pure energy. The two guitarists and the bassist were jumping on the spot. In a trance of sorts they spat out angular, dissonant riffs swept along by apocalyptic keyboards. At the back, the drummer was headbanging behind cymbals glimmering in the purple and cyan lig
hting. The musicians bounced around all four corners of the stage like rubber balls. The singer/guitarist, hair glued to stand straight up in the air, was standing on the monitors the better to light a fire under the audience. Though he generated a sizzling field of energy, it wasn’t enough to win this crowd over. No one gave a fuck about the opening band. We were here to see Megadeth, and between each and every song we reminded them, yelling louder every time, so loud that by the time Dave Mustaine took the stage we all would have lost our voices from screaming it over and over again. Static-X was forced to cut their set short to make way for the headliners. The tour manager even came out to beg us to get behind them for their final two songs. But there was nothing to be done. When the intermission came, and the overhead lights came back on, I could no longer stand still. The crowd calmed down for a few minutes, then started changing again—“Megadeth! Megadeth! Megadeth! Megadeth!”—with the force of a revolutionary mob. It was deafening. When the room was plunged into darkness again Marie-Lou yelped and squeezed my arm in a show of enthusiasm. She turned to me. I could see her teeth gleaming in the half-light.
“Me-ga-deth, man!” I had to read it on her lips.
Onstage the roadies were finishing the equipment change. Above all the shaggy heads I could easily pick out Alex’s. I yelled out his name. He saw me and gave me a thumbs up and a devil’s horns.
One after another, the roadies left the stage. The overhead lights dimmed, leaving us in darkness. The crowd screamed as one, at a higher pitch than before. After an eternity the opening chords of “Holy Wars” poured forth from the amps, a thousand times louder than Static-X; it was an earthquake, a volcano erupting and spewing forth thousands of roaring lawnmowers. The drums kicked in. I could feel it in my chest, as if someone was pummelling me with their fist. Pyrotechnic explosions burned our eyes, and then the bass and second guitar came in. A shock wave rang through the already fully amped crowd and the mosh pit erupted like a sea of orks in Helm’s Deep. Rabid fans were climbing all over us, body-surfing and jockeying for position and headbanging furiously. Dave Mustaine appeared in a white shirt, long armbands on his forearms; he was folded over his guitar, face lost in his red mane, which he gently rocked in time to the rhythm. When he came up to the mic all we could see was his grimacing mouth surrounded by copper-coloured hair. Ellefson and Friedman had taken up positions at the front of the stage, and were strafing the crowd with a hailstorm of notes sharp as saw blades. They followed up “Holy War” with “In my Darkest Hour”—a brief respite—only to come back swinging with “Reckoning Day,” which was met with shrieking as the crowd cried out as one like a possessed tribe enthusiastically greeting the end of the world. I looked at Marie-Lou. She looked back at me. Her pupils shone in the darkness now zebra-striped with green and blue light. I smiled at her, possessed by a violent, irresistible joy. The crowd pressed her against me every time it surged forward. Sometimes her eyes were glued to the stage, sometimes she headbanged and yelled out lyrics. She knew every song by heart. We had to back up to keep from being sucked into the mosh pit. When “Hangar 18” came on, she really went crazy. She jumped into the melee, climbed over the swirl of bodies smashing into each other, then let herself be swept along by the crowd, tumbling over the human sea all the way to the foot of the stage. I followed behind her, flabbergasted. As the mosh pit grew bigger it sucked me up in its undertow and the craziness and I tapped into the mania swirling all around me. I was in a trance. There was no up, no down. I couldn’t tell where my body ended; I’d become part of this rocky, roaring wave of sound and sweating bodies. The entire Métropolis was shaking. As if by miracle, I found Marie-Lou again, right in the middle of “She-Wolf.” She was wiping her bleeding nose on her sleeve, like a kid with a cold, and grinning so wide I could see her huge eye-teeth. Her forehead and cheeks were soaked with sweat, her army tank-top plastered to her body. When she saw me she screamed and pumped her fist. The veins on her neck popped out. She was dragging me deeper into the pit, into the eye of the hurricane where we would be immolated together by the same fire. The crowd was a shapeless mass of arms and legs, dangerously pressing us from every direction as we pushed back and together sang along with “Symphony of Destruction.” The air was getting sucked out of the hall, the hammering riffs were getting under our skin and filling us up until bolts of cosmic energy shot from our fingers, mouths, and eyeballs. If this kept up we would soon be vaporized.
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