The cigarette smoke and dust clouds formed a thick fog through which we caught glimpses of Dave Mustaine’s intense silhouette as he headbanged along with us, transporting us with solo after razor-sharp solo, raining down like a swarm of arrows. With a thundering roll, the bass and drums crashed over us in a wave. I was under sensory overload, ready to explode.
After the encore, calm gradually returned and the crowd broke into distinct groups of sated, sweaty fans. But the air was still thick with tension. A tiny spark would be enough to send this fire flaming up again, twice as strong. I couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in my ears. Marie-Lou looked spent, her face and neck a purplish blue as if she’d just run ten kilometres. Her black eyes shone bright over her bright red cheeks. She held onto my arm while we went to get in line at the coat check. Outside, even in our coats, the November cold froze our sweat-drenched bodies. Twenty feet from the door Marie-Lou took me aside. She seemed to be looking for her smokes.
“Here, this is for you.”
She handed me a tape.
“It’ll get you into some heavier stuff.”
She smiled. I took the tape and scrutinized it, as if staring intently enough would reveal its contents. I thanked her and she kept smiling. We looked each other in the eyes for a moment. She looked amused, or proud, I couldn’t really tell which, as if she’d just discovered something secret about me.
“Hey lovebirds.”
I heard Alex’s loud voice over the fuzz of whistling and crackling in my ears. He came up and checked us out, looking somehow unsure, as if he’d caught us with our pants down.
“You coming out with us?”
He pointed at his crew.
“Nah. I have to go home.”
“Come on, man. It’s Friday.”
“I promised Jess I’d go to her place after the show.”
“Fuck, man, it’s almost midnight. She’s sleeping. She’s got you wrapped around her little finger. We never get to hang out!”
He turned to Marie-Lou.
“What about you, feel like going out?”
I was sure she was going to say yes.
“No, I have to go home too. I’m working early tomorrow.”
From his six-foot-two, Alex looked down at us with steel-grey eyes as if we were his clueless younger cousins. He shook my hand in silence, and leaned over to give Marie-Lou two shy kisses on the cheek before heading off to Foufounes Électriques with his long-haired friends. In his patched leather jacket, he looked like a biker. No doormen would ever card him.
We bought slices of 99-cent pizza and went up Sainte-Catherine to Berri Metro station. Marie-Lou was looking stronger, back to her old self. She said that no one but her brothers had ever wanted to go to shows like that with her. My eardrums were still scraped raw, but I could hear her every word loud and clear. Her voice cut through the ringing in my ears. We talked music the whole ride, from Berri to Longueuil. She kept saying that she couldn’t wait to hear what I thought of her mixtape. Longueuil Metro felt like an abandoned half-built cathedral, as the renovations just dragged on and on. Our voices rang out through hallways littered with drywall and sheet metal. We would have talked all night if we could.
When she got on the No. 16 bus, she said we’d have to go see another show one day.
“For sure.”
As I waited for the No. 71 that would take me to Jess’s the entire night replayed in my head. I flipped the tape case around in my hand like a talisman. Despite my ringing ears, and my exhaustion, I would have killed to listen to it right away. It felt like my whole life was just beginning, like time had been multiplied tenfold, like I was suddenly seeing in Technicolor.
When I think back to it now, almost fifteen years later, it takes my breath away. All that innocent happiness compressed into a single moment. But that was nothing compared to gambling. I’d make that discovery a little over a year later, killing time between classes at the Fun Spot. My very first video poker machine. That was all it took. That was my first taste of true euphoria. It was so intense, so intoxicating, that I wouldn’t know what had hit me until I’d lost everything, even stuff that wasn’t mine to begin with.
Chapter 23
Islept in, well into the next afternoon. Vincent had been careful not to make too much noise going back and forth between the kitchen and living room. I got out of bed with a burning desire to get my life back on track. Vincent was shut up in his room doing schoolwork. I went to the supermarket to stock up on frozen food and pop. I also bought eggs, bacon, and skim milk, since that’s what Vincent drank, and on my way back I ordered us pizza.
I think it was Bob’s coke stories that got to me. I’d never gone there myself but I’d seen firsthand what a crippling addiction it was watching Jess, who’d strayed down that road just like her father. If Bob had managed to quit, or at least take a break, as he put it, then surely I could stop gambling. If Bob and Benjamin could get a handle on their addictions, what was stopping me? I thought about Malik’s advice. He kept saying I had to get back to doing what I loved, had to find my focus again. After putting back two slices of pizza I took out my sketchbooks. I made room on the coffee table, and spread them out in front of me, and began drawing faces, hands, and bodies. I started with pencil, 2B and then 6B, then shaded it in with charcoal. I wasn’t as rusty as I thought I’d be. It was encouraging. I thought about Deathgaze. My Cegep semester might be a write-off, but there was still a chance I could finish the album cover in time. I thought about Alex and how he’d had kept his faith in me all these years. I didn’t want to let him down. We’d be friends for life, like Bob and Desrosiers. I went into a drawing trance. I took out my felt pens. Countless sketchbook pages littered the floor, scribbled with unfinished illustrations. My hands were covered in charcoal and graphite. There were silhouettes of marine creatures in high contrast, underground temples infested with crustacean monsters, a nightmarish mythological world at least partly inspired by Lovecraft.
As the evening slipped away I made real progress on a few different drawings. I’d again found my way into that floating state where I could create without my mind drifting off perilously into dead ends of angst. It felt like being reunited with a long-lost earlier version of myself. The occasional burst of DMX told me that Vincent had emerged from his room to grab a slice of pizza. On each of his sorties he’d check out what I was doing, and ask me a question about grammar or verb conjugations. I kept going until the end of the night. Around ten he came into the living room after his shower, in basketball shorts and a spotless undershirt. He was clearly happy with his own day. We played a few games of Twisted Metal and then watched Seinfeld until we both fell asleep, he in his La-Z-Boy, me on my couch.
I slept well that night, despite an unsettling dream in which I was the only staff member in a packed restaurant, all on my own to cook the food, serve the customers, and of course wash the dishes after.
The next day when I opened my eyes Vincent was already hard at work. I also got up full of vim and vigour. I made us breakfast first, then washed the dishes. The window offered glimpses of blue sky. The trees that had shed their leaves and the fresh snow made everything more luminous. I felt joy welling up in me like just before Christmas holidays when I was a kid. After making coffee I got right back to drawing. I sorted my sketches from the day before, keeping only the ones that might work for my cover. Of the twelve or so I kept, my “octopus god” seemed most promising. The Deathgaze album would be called Soul Claimer. It struck me that I might be onto something really powerful, and perfectly attuned to Alex’s ideas and tastes.
I spent the morning drawing up sketch after sketch for the band logo. I took out my scratch boards. I had just enough gouache left to cover them. Next I began scratching away with my burnisher, taking inspiration from the Black Metal groups Marie-Lou listened to make them a cryptic black-and-white-style logo. Their name was almost illegible. Each letter was rem
iniscent of a hairy spider leg, gnarled tree branch, or sinister knot. I tried a few other things as well. On backgrounds blackened with pastels or oil pencil I wrote “Deathgaze” in Liquid Paper, working in drips and splotches, like the Bloodbath or Darkthrone logos. I could go back to retouch and tweak it all in Photoshop later, once it was scanned.
I kept on like that into the afternoon, with barely five minutes’ break to finish off yesterday’s cold pizza. Then I worked some more, swept along by the same momentum, until I felt my pager vibrating. A voice message. I thought twice before checking it. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be good news.
It was Renaud. They needed me to come in tomorrow. The new dishwasher wasn’t working out. He asked me to come in early since I’d be on my own for the night. When I hung up I looked around the living room, which had morphed into a studio. Paper, felt pens, crayons, and Rembrandt pastels lay scattered all over the place. On the shelf was a sort of mood board made up of undersea photos cut from National Geographic and photocopies of old engravings I’d been saving since I got the job.
I didn’t feel like drawing anymore, so I just started picking everything up and sorting it, throwing out whatever was of no interest, gathering the images worth scanning. I jumped into the shower and then went to sit down in the living room, in boxers and wool socks, with my Isaac Asimov book. I wouldn’t move for the rest of the night. As the cars drove up Henri-Bourassa, their sound muffled by the falling snow, I felt at peace. I read with a clear mind. If I could, I would have stopped time then and there.
Chapter 24
Two days off had seemed like an eternity. But the second I found myself back at the restaurant it felt like I’d already been there a week. The dishpit door was open a crack, I didn’t even have to ring. Jonathan was sitting on an upturned plastic bucket having a smoke. When he saw me come in he leaped to his feet. He looked much better than last time I saw him, a few days ago.
“Man, sorry for the other night,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“You’re having a tough time. Happens to the best of us.”
“I know, but that’s no reason to lose it like that.”
I was going to ask if he’d patched things up with his girlfriend but he beat me to the punch.
“Hey, did you hear?”
With his high-pitched voice, he reminded me of a kid about to brag about his latest prank.
“No, what?”
“Christian got fired. They had this long talk in the office, and ended up yelling at each other.”
“Who’s they?”
“Uh, him and Séverine,” Jonathan said, as if I’d asked the stupidest question in the world.
“Renaud wasn’t there?”
“Renaud. Pfft, nah man. That guy’s never around when you need him. I didn’t think Christian had it in him, to get that mad. You could hear them going at it through the door, all the way in the prep kitchen. Bébert was right, man. Christian was drunk at work. All the time.”
Jonathan starting filling me in on all the details. I wondered if he wasn’t embellishing a little. The way he told the story it was as if he’d been right there in the room watching Christian get fired. As he talked he was rubbing his chin, where a downy beard had sprung up in the two days since I’d seen him. It turned out the bisque was just a drop in a bucket, a final touch to make it look as if Renaud had pulled off his putsch. But the problems ran way deeper than that. What Bob had told me about Christian was on my mind as Jonathan told me his slightly disjointed story, hurrying along like he wanted to get everything out before someone caught him in the act. In the last six months Christian had been helping himself to the restaurant’s liquor. He’d been showing up to work already drunk. He’d made mistakes on the payroll. At the end of their talk, Séverine offered to put him on leave for six months, so he could get help. If he got clean she’d hire him back. Christian said no.
“He came out of the office without a word. He looked way older. And just walked out, didn’t say bye to anyone.”
Jonathan paused. He looked at the pile of clean dishes, with his eyebrows scrunched up. Then he nodded suddenly.
“I’ve never seen Christian mad before,” he finally said. “Not even a little. This time he was mad though. He’d stopped yelling, but he had a look on his face, like ‘do not fucking get in my way.’ He looked like he was going to shoot someone. Or maybe himself.”
A cook I’d never seen before, a muscular bald guy in his mid-twenties, came back looking for clean pans. Jonathan butted out in the ashtray and went back to the prep kitchen, tying his apron around his waist.
You would have thought Christian finally getting sacked would have put Bébert in a good mood. But when I saw him he was all alone in the basement, swearing away.
“Oh, you’re here,” Bébert said. “Welcome to Renaud’s shit-show.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Seen Renaud anywhere?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s what’s going on. Since Séverine fired the chef we’ve barely seen Renaud out here once. I’m pulling thirty-two hours in two days, and a hundred bucks says he won’t even show his face. And while I’m already stuck doing everything, shithead leaves me all alone to train his buddy.”
“His buddy? Steven?”
“Nah man, new guy. You didn’t see him? Looks like a neo-Nazi all puffed up on creatine.”
As he talked he was pulling out a tray of crème brûlée.
“Check it: guy puts shit in the oven, doesn’t set a timer, and takes off without telling anyone. Fucking retard.”
Bébert threw the entire tray—water, ramekins and all—in the garbage. It was the second batch they’d screwed up. He slammed the oven door shut, then popped his head into the stairwell and yelled something at Jonathan, who you could hear working in the service kitchen.
“Fuck, I can’t keep track of everything,” he said, as if addressing an anonymous spectator.
The shards of porcelain glimmering on a mound of burnt brown custard and vegetable scraps at the bottom of the garbage bag gave me a pretty clear picture of the night ahead.
I changed as fast as I could. The staff room was a mess. Christian hadn’t even cleared out his locker. His old cook’s pants and work shoes were still there; it’d be days before they were cleared out and put away with the rest of the lost and found.
I went upstairs. It hadn’t struck me when I arrived, but the dishpit was in a lamentable state. It looked as if no one had washed a dish since the night before. Everything had just been heaved in frustration and left to rest where it fell. As if it would magically clean itself. It exhausted me before I’d even started.
I went to punch in and stood in front of the computer a minute, checking out the dining room. I envied the floor staff. They didn’t have to work up to the eyelids in food scraps, arms immersed in ice-cold water or warm greasy dishpit soup. By the front door, two couples were waiting to be seated. The men wore silk scarves draped in the openings of their black coats, and their immaculate white shirts were almost lustrous. The women looked like older, more insouciant versions of Séverine. They wore fur coats. I envied the customers like I envied the floor staff, imagined they were equally fortunate. I told myself that once I got my life in order, I should take Marie-Lou out for a nice dinner.
Jade was squatting behind the bar, stocking the last of the white wine in the fridge. Her face appeared over the fridge door. Her look of concentration melted into a big smile. She came toward me, running almost, as if she had big news. Her hair was up in a chignon, kind of Japanese-style.
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