AT COLLEGE, I wasn’t the first in anything anymore. I got thrown off the hockey team and lost my tennis games on a regular basis. Since I started wearing the beginnings of a beard and letting my hair grow, the girls chased after me. I felt only indifference. I didn’t have a lot of friends left, since I spent most of the time criticizing them for not wanting to change the world. I speechified and issued proclamations. I didn’t listen to anyone. I talked like Maria whose mother was at the bottom of a hole, except that my mother was accompanying Robert Charlebois to a TV show tonight. After a discussion about burning down the slums, I gave my phone number to Maria who balled up the sheet of paper where I’d also written some thoughts about methodology. Why not renovate the slums, and engage in construction instead of destruction? Maria never called. I learned to tame my animal nature through masturbation, but the feverish exercise left me with the bitter taste of guilt, as if I had been unfaithful to Maria. During our group meetings, she took up most of the space. Mr. Lafontaine generally kept quiet. New members were monopolising the debates. There were twenty of them or so, in jeans and sleeveless t-shirts, chains around their belts. They were into street-fighting. Society is shit. That was true, but you have to explain what the shit was, analyse it, and choose your objectives. That’s what I thought, but kept my thoughts to myself. One day, I was sure, I’d reconcile my logic and my needs, the facts and desire.
Maria stopped talking about the slums and started issuing speeches about American imperialism, the cause of all injustice around the world, and the symbols we needed to destroy. I could say, “Let’s begin with the slums.” But she launched into a diatribe about McDonald’s exploiting Latin American peasants and poisoning poor people here. I didn’t say anything, and tried to catch her eye instead. Maria wanted to destroy a McDonald’s. She was too busy to look at me, but the more her project took shape, the greater her passion grew, and her gestures and attitudes seduced me all the more. It was stupid to destroy a restaurant, and I understood that even veteran members of the group weren’t hot on the idea, and Mr. Lafontaine had reservations about the use of violent action not based on large-scale popular discontent. A Latino spat, “Petty-bourgeois shit! People’s consciousness is born from violent action!” My mentor went quiet, and I saw Maria agreeing.
The plan was simple: choose a relatively isolated McDonald’s, smash the windows with a heavy hammer, throw a dozen Molotov cocktails in selected spots so the fire would spread, then run. Not a word about the alarm system that would go off after the first hammer blow, or how much time we had to do the job, or how to make our getaway. We set the place on fire and melt away into the night. Maria handed out instructions about how to put together a Molotov cocktail and advised us to make a few to practice. Mr. Lafontaine declared he was opposed to this slide into anarchy, and that as far as he was concerned, the group no longer existed. The meetings went on at Maria’s place.
I remember my first attempt. I took an empty bottle of Côte de Beaune Village and filled it with barbecue lighter fluid. I didn’t seal the bottle correctly. I threw it against a rock in the park, and was rewarded with a poof! sound and a weak trail of flame. I tried again the next day with a Johnny Walker Black Label bottle. The rock exploded and flames lit up the park. I ran like the devil and by the time I got to my house, a hundred metres away, the night was filled with sirens. My father asked me if I’d heard the explosion. I couldn’t get to sleep that night; I vacillated between the exaltation that came from entering the world of action, and the strange and troubling feeling that I was a prisoner on a rollercoaster that forced the thrill of pleasure on me.
I was still an attentive student in Mr. Lafontaine’s class. Without saying anything out loud, we agreed not to mention Maria. But there I was, involved, burning with hope, gnawed by doubt and fear, and he was responsible for that. As a way of acknowledging the role he played in my life, the day before the attack on the McDonald’s on Bellechasse Street, I told him about the plan. “You’re making a very big mistake, Tremblay, but sometimes you have to go the wrong way to learn what you need to learn.”