THREE
UN CANADIEN ERRANT
Adieu
Thirty-seven hours later, Milton stepped off the worst smelling bus in North America, into the most romantic city in North America.
He slung his 80-pound duct-taped sack over his shoulder, found a tourist map screwed to the wall in the bus station, made note of the general direction he was going, and headed towards the door.
He was home. His destiny of greatness, fame, fortune, immortality flashed before him. His chest puffed up, the 80 pounds of his entire life slung over his left shoulder was as light as a feather, he was finally here, to sit on his throne, the Fresh Prince of…
WHAM!
The cold hit him square in the face.
On the Prairies it gets cold. Like 50-below-Celsius-with-the-wind-chill-whipping-off-the-Lake-in-the-dregs-of-February cold. It gets so cold your nostrils freeze shut, and it burns to breathe. But it’s a dry cold. If you wear enough layers and plug in your truck’s block heater, you might survive.
Montreal cold, though, is an entirely different thing. It might only get to 30 below, but it’s a damp, biting cold. The wind whipping off the fleuve is like being hit full force in the face with a boat paddle. The humid frozen cold leaks through even the thickest, most air-tight clothes, through your skin, and into your bones. Every cell in your organism screams.
It was this boat paddle that greeted Milton when he took that first breath.
WHAM!
The door greeted him second.
“Mon tabarnak j’vais te décâlisser la yeule, câlice!”
A local commuter welcomed Milton with a local greeting and a shove of the door. The door swung back and hit Milton square in the face, leaving a bright pink mark that would grow into a bruise throughout the day, perfectly bisecting his increasingly frozen face, causing his eyes to water and the tears to freeze as he staggered out onto Berri Street.
The 80 pounds hanging off his shoulder started to feel like it weighed closer to 280. Milton buried his head into the wind and started trudging uphill. He’d figured, from his glance at the map, to walk a block uphill headed north, then a block westward, then another block north, as he worked his way diagonally towards the room he was renting unseen from Craigslist, on avenue de l’Épée.
He forgot to pack a toque, so he dragged his sweater up over his head and zipped his jacket up as far as it would go. He looked ridiculous, but by block two he didn’t care, he’d meet the elegance of this city tomorrow. Today he was dying.
. . .
Clueless
Milton didn’t know a lot of things he probably should have.
Obvious things, like taking a cab from the bus station would have been $12 well-spent. Like Montreal was a French city and a basic grasp of the language would have been an asset. Like a hundred other things. But, most of all, in this exact moment, he didn’t know that the Mont part of Montreal meant mountain, and the real part meant Royal and that Parc du Mont-Royal, traversed by avenue du Parc, the street he was trudging up, was Mount Royal Park
Montreal the mega-city is spread across the Hochelaga Archipelago—a bunch of islands at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. The two biggest islands, Île Montréal and Île Jésus, make the shape of a pair of lips, with the heart of the city—the crooked cobblestone streets of Old Montreal, the student ghetto around McGill, the palatial mansions of Westmount, the Jewish delis and bagelries and smoked meateries of The Main, the sex clubs and dive bars and fancy shops of rue Sainte-Catherine, the tourists flocking to the former site of the Montreal Forum (the hallowed former home of the formerly hallowed Montreal Canadiens) only to find it’s been turned into a shopping mall on avenue Atwater—is on the bottom lip, Île Montréal.
The topography of the bottom lip was created by a long dead volcano that rises above the city just northeast of downtown, like a bee sting on a fat lip. It’s all uphill from downtown and downhill from uptown towards les banlieues, with the most mountain-like part in Parc du Mont-Royal.
In terms of things that make Montreal magical, Parc du Mont-Royal is near the top of the list. In terms of things that make carrying an 80-pound bag several-teen blocks in the freezing cold something that could be mistaken for actual hardship, Parc du Mont-Royal is also at the top of that list.
But Milton was a man now, a poet-man, and this was man-making hardship. He was his great-great-great-great-grand Janne/Johnny crossing the Atlantic. He was that Norwegian fella Sir Edmund Hilroy, crossing the North Pole with his coil-bound scribblers. He was Sir Benjamin Franklin, reaching for the Don Beaupre Sea. He was Bernie Federko on a breakaway. He was John George Diefenbaker, the George Washington of Saskatchewan, crossing his eponymous fake lake on a third-hand three-car cable ferry.
Milton’s trek through the park nearly killed him.
It was only a kilometre, but he could have sworn it was equivalent to the entire length of Ellesmere Island. He staggered the last few feet across avenue du Mont-Royal and onto the sidewalk in front of a McDonald’s.
Out of the wind he collapsed onto his deflated duct-taped sack. He lay there for a long while, catching his breath, collecting his thoughts, contemplating his manhood, slowly freezing to death. A woman walked by and put three quarters in his hand.
“Quel dommage, c’est terrible!”
Milton had lost his will to go on. He was sure he was going to die there, in a pile, on the sidewalk in front of a McDonald’s. Another stranger handed him a couple nickels.
The custom of giving new arrivals loose change struck him as odd, but also a bit delightful. What a kind and generous place, he thought, as someone handed him an entire loonie.
He was trying to get to avenue Bernard, which intersected avenue du Parc some unknown distance on, and then follow it to avenue de L’Épée. But he had no idea how far it was, no idea what time it was, no idea how long it would be before the numbness creeping up his shins would overtake him entirely, so he schlepped his giant duct-taped sack across the street to a bus stop.
Besides the 37-hour busathon from Regina, Milton had ridden the bus plenty in Moose Jaw. Mind you, there were only two buses—the uptown and the crosstown—but he was confident he could figure out one measly Montreal bus ride. After all, he was Dr. Zhivago. He was Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
. . .
The 80
The bus shelter had a sign with a schedule and a simplified map for Route 80, the only bus that stopped there. Of course, the sign was entirely in French and the times were written the French way, 17h15, which made no sense to him, but he didn’t know the time, so it didn’t matter anyway.
He sat in the bus shelter and waited and waited while the numbing cold crawled up his legs and began biting his ass.
A bus approached, it was the number 80, and it whizzed right by, slopping slush onto the glass front of the shelter.
A while later, closer yet to frostbite and assured death, another bus whizzed by, slopping another glop of slush onto the glass front of the shelter. A few minutes later another. Then another.
Seven busses in all passed the bus shelter where Milton sat freezing to death, before someone else, an early-twenty something with plaid flannel jacket, skinny jeans, and vintage glasses, walked into the shelter to wait.
“Juh’excuse mawh?” Milton asked.
Vintage Glasses dug the headphone out of one ear.
“Yo, what’s up.”
“Oh, thank god, you speak English. How do you get the busses to stop?”
“Huh?”
“Stop. The busses. They keep going by?”
“I dunno, man, just, like, stand here and they stop.”
“But, I’ve been here for like an hour and they just keep going by, though.”
“I guess maybe they don’t stop if it looks like you are spending the night in here?”
“Oh… I’m not… I’m just… I just moved here… From Saskatchewan.”
“Right on, man.”
Vintage Glasses put his headphone back in.
The next bus was along in a couple of minutes and it stopped and opened the door. Vintage Glasses hopped on and scanned a card over a reader. The door was about to close.
“WAIT! I’M… WAIT!”
Milton hauled his giant bag up the three steps and stood beside the driver, who looked him up and down and shook his head.
“Tabernak.”
“Does this bus go to Bernard Street?”
The driver just stared at him.
“How much is it?”
Milton shook a handful of change at him.
“Deux-dollars-et-vingt-cinq.”
Milton had no idea which question that answered, if either.
He started dumping small coins into the farebox until the driver slammed on the gas, knocking Milton backwards. Milton swayed and staggered his way to an open pair of seats and sat down next to the window and dragged his bag up on the seat next to him. It sat there like his only friend in the world.
. . .
Culottes
His concentration on street signs was broken when the old woman sitting behind him tapped him on the shoulder.
“Monsieur, je m’excuse, monsieur?”
Milton turned to get a face full of dirty underwear.
“Monsieur, vos culottes sont tombées de votre sac.”
Disgusted, Milton pushed the underwear away.
“No thank you!”
“Non, monsieur, it is yer panties. Dey fall from yer sac, juste la.”
The old woman pointed to Milton’s bag.
Milton looked at the underwear again and they were vaguely familiar. Same brand as he wore, same… Oh god! Could it… Same frayed waistband, same hole in the hip where he put his thumb through pulling them on. He grabbed them out of the woman’s hand.
“Merci.”
Oh god.
He lifted up his bag and saw the gaping hole. Catcher in the Rye plopped out on the seat next to him.
His head went hot with embarrassment and the entire movie of the day rewound in his head, he saw now the Hansel and Gretel trail of books and undies he’d left behind him, as he dragged his giant bag through the frozen hellscape he’d just survived. He realized now that the sense of getting stronger, as he walked through the park, was a fiction. The bag wasn’t feeling lighter because of some inner super-human strength he’d mustered through sheer will and brooding masculinity; it was feeling lighter because it was getting lighter. Because all his things had fallen out along the way. He wasn’t Holden Caulfield. He wasn’t even John Hinckley Junior. He was just Milton Ontario.
He cursed mildly at himself, turning the bag over to see what had escaped. Most of it had. There was still his 44-pounds of 98-year-old Underwood No. 3 typewriter, his 1954 Regentone portable record player, one plaid shirt, three well-worn band t-shirts, one change of underwear, three socks, one pair of relaxed-fit Costco-brand blue jeans, two Leonard Cohen records, and maybe five books, including the hardcover Critic’s Picks Annotated Edition of Ulysses, which weighed nearly as much as the typewriter.
The remnants were still there because they were wedged in one end by the Ulysses and held there with three wraps of duct tape. It was less than half his stuff remaining, but they were the heaviest things, so the bag still weighed over 60 pounds.
In the course of rolling his eyes towards the heavens to curse god, he caught a glimpse of the sign zipping by out the window: avenue Bernard.
“Frig!”
Everyone on the bus looked at him, then to their neighbour and shared a quiet laugh at the raggedy Anglophone losing his mind on the bus.
Milton pulled the Next Stop cord.
