I SUPPOSE I SHOULD TELL YOU RIGHT NOW WHO our father is. Everybody else knows. Étienne Tremblay had been a pretty famous Québécois folk singer in the early seventies. A chansonnier. He recorded two albums that were everywhere. Back in the day, he could come home from a show with a paper bag filled with women’s underwear. Outside of Québec nobody had even heard of him, naturally. Québec needed stars badly. The more they had, the better argument they had for having their own culture and separating from Canada.
There was a signed black-and-white photograph of him over the counter at the hot dog place. Mostly he wore a black suit and a top hat. The top hat was his trademark. He bought it at a costume shop in Vieux-Montréal and fell in love with it. He had blue eyes, a giant nose and was ridiculously tall. He had been really handsome, as handsome as an American. A lot of people had said that he could have been a huge star if he had learned to sing in English. But he hated the English. Hating them was the true passion of his life.
Étienne Tremblay had a terrible singing voice. I had heard him trying to sing a Pepsi tune while washing out a coffee cup and it sounded awful. He couldn’t even carry “Frère Jacques.” Once a newspaper article had called him the Tone Deaf Troubadour. People would ask Nicolas and me if we had inherited his musical abilities. It was safe to say that we had, seeing as we didn’t have any at all.
His real talent, what people went crazy for, was his knack for writing song lyrics. There was a song about a mechanic who builds a snowmobile that can go faster than the speed of light. There was one about a grandpapa who has gas. There was a song about a tiger that escapes from le Zoo de Granby to go eat poutine. He had a song about a man who finds a magical cigarette that doesn’t end, and he never has to come back from his cigarette break. He made the ridiculous squalor that was everyday life sublime. There was no subject that was beneath Étienne Tremblay.
And he was a bon vivant. Everyone loved him for it. He inhaled helium and sang a Gilles Vigneault song on a variety show. There was an interview with him where he claimed to have slept with three hundred women by the time he was twenty-one. He was arrested at a raid at a dirty movie theatre, but this only made people like him more because he had a song about Édouard who finishes work and goes to the dirty movie theatre and always has to make up crazy excuses to his wife about where he has been.
He got caught with prescription pills that weren’t his and was arrested again. He did well in jail. All the other prisoners liked him. He talked to the other prisoners about what some old washed-up vedettes from the seventies were like in bed. He claimed to have gone down on Petula Clark. He came out of prison each time like a war hero. Until he finally ended up being sentenced for eight whole months.
To say that Étienne’s fame had gone to his head would be an understatement. He really believed that he had a higher calling. I think he ranked himself up there with Jesus, and I’m not even exaggerating.
Oh and, how could I forget, in the middle of all this he had two kids who became famous too because Étienne always brought them on stage and on talk shows with him. He would make us come out and wave wildly at the audience and blow kisses and say adorable things that he’d written for us to the hosts. We were known by everyone as Petite Nouschka and Petit Nicolas.