FOUR
SEPT- CENT- SEPT
Toc-toc-toc
At 00h37 there was a loud banging on the door of the third-floor apartment at 707 avenue de l’Épée. Every light in the place was on but no one was awake.
Two people, one of whom actually lived there, were asleep on couches in the living room, while the TV blasted a Super Putty infomercial. Another uninvited guest was sleeping on a small love seat in what was once a nice dining room but was now a sparsely furnished sort of lounge down the hall next to the kitchen. The only person in an actual bed was Georgette Poule, a 29-year-old chain-smoking puppeteer from Lille, back in Old France.
Georgette was on the lease. It was her Craigslist ad, “Furnished room for rent Mile End,” Milton had responded to. It was her “bring cash” message that Milton took as confirmation that the room was his. Now, three hours after getting off the number 80 two stops too late and having, in the freezing cold, to scale an eight-foot fence topped with razor wire, traverse a handful of train tracks, walk a mile one way, walk two miles the other way looking for an opening, and then scaling another eight-foot fence topped with razor wire—tearing the clothes he was wearing and what was left of his hockey bag to ribbons—it was Georgette who was roused out of bed by his banging on the door that was right next to her room.
“Putain! Merde! Qu’est-ce qui se passe? Connard!”
After a great struggle to unwedge the old crooked door that dragged across the worn-out wood floor, and a great deal more cursing en français, Georgette swung the door open to find Milton.
He looked like he’d just survived Napoleon’s invasion of Russia: grubby, bloodied, bruised, frozen, in tatters, still wearing his sweater, or what was left of it, for a hood.
“Mon dieu! Ta gueule! Putain!”
Milton stared at his shoes; blood dripped from various razor wire cuts onto the floor.
“Uh… um… hello. I’m… Uh… Milton… Ontario… Your new roommate.”
He stuck out his hand.
“T’es quoi—? Get ’way!”
“From Saskatchewan.”
“Go the fuck ’way, or I call police! Dégage! Connard!”
“No. I live here now. I emailed on Craigslist.”
He attempted to step into the warmth of the apartment. She slammed the door and leaned all her weight against it, trapping him partway. This was the closest Milton had ever been to a grown woman.
“NOHDEEE! NOHDEEE! WAKE THE FUCK UP! PUTAIN! IL Y A UN SANS-ABRI FOU QU’eSSAYE DE CASSER LA BARAQUE! NOHDEEEE!”
“Uh… My name is Milton.”
“Dégage! Connard! NOHDEEE! WAKE THE FUCK UP! CALL POLICE!”
“I’m from Saskatchewan.”
A man emerged from the living room across the hall, rubbing his eyes and trying to sort out his hair and his twisted plaid shirt all at once.
“What the hell, Georgie?”
“RUDDY! CALL POLICE! A ’OMELESS MAN IS BREAKING IN TO OUR FLAT!”
Ruddy was useless in an emergency.
“AAAAAAAAAGH! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH! WHATDOWEDO?! WHATDOWEDO?! AAAAAAAAAGH! AAAAA AAAAAAAAAAGH! DON’TLETHIMIN!! AAAAAAAAAAAGH! OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAGH!”
He ran down the hall, locked himself in the bathroom, and kept screaming.
“Ah, putain!”
Another man emerged from the living room. He was in a stretched and stained Molson Ex t-shirt—the kind you get free with a case of Molson Ex, but customized with a sloppy “S” drawn with Sharpie between the Molson and the Ex—faded boxer shorts, and filthy work boots. He was the hairiest human Milton had ever seen.
“Another satisfied customer, eh, Georgie?”
He bawled with laughter.
“Nohdee, connard! ’e is trying to break in! Stahp ’im! Call police!”
“Nobody’s calling the cops, I’ve got weed growin’ on the balcony.”
Another woman appeared.
“Oh my god, you guys! What’s with all the yelling?”
“Nudding. Just a lovers’ spat between Georgie here, and some hobo fella she was diddling.”
“Oh my god! You slept with that!? He’s disgusting! Georgette, how could you! Ew-ew-ew-ewwwww!”
“Ta gueule! Jamais! Putain!”
“Christ, b’ys! Will everyone just shut up!”
“I’m Milton Ontario. From Saskatchewan.”
“Nohdee! ’elp me! ’it ’im! Nohdee! Putain!”
“That’s enough, now.”
The hairy guy clomped to the door where Georgette had Milton trapped.
“Look, b’y, if she’s done givin’ ya the business, then the business is done, go on home out of it now.”
“I’m Milton…”
Milton tried to wriggle a hand free.
“From Saskatch…”
Before Milton could get the final syllables out Noddy clocked him with a right cross square on the jaw.
Time stopped.
The world went black.
Milton fell backwards and nearly down the one, long, three-storey flight of stairs, but he was saved by what was left of his giant bag that was wedged on the landing. Georgette pushed Milton’s leg out the door with her foot, closed the door and bolted it.
. . .
Bienvenue
Milton was awoken by a scream early before sunrise. He’d spent the night, jaw burning, bleeding, sleeping on top of his giant bag in the cold stairwell outside the door of what he’d thought was supposed to be his apartment.
“HESSTILLHERE!!!HESDEAD!!!YOUKILLEDHIM!!! AAAAAAAAAAGH!!!”
Ruddy had spent the night in the bathtub to avoid the hobo murderer lurking in the stairs. He got up when he thought the coast was clear to go back to his own apartment and his own bed before he had to be up at 6:00 to serve coffee at Java Jean on Bernard and Esplanade.
Milton tried to blink the sleep out of his eyes and the stiffness and misery out of the rest of him as the same four faces he met last night leered through a small crack in the door.
Ruddy took off back down the hall to the bathtub.
“Oh my god! He’s too disgusting! Oh my god! Georgette! Why! Ewwww!”
“Ta gueule! I’m calling police!”
“Holy Christ on the Cross, will you all just cool it. Buddy, whaddayat sleeping in the stairs? That’s a sure way to get another smack.”
“No. No. No. Please, no. You don’t understand.”
“Nah, b’y. I understand just fine. But she’s done with ya, and good thing too, I’spose. Looks like she scratched the shit right outta ya. But it’s over now. Done, that’s it. Put your pecker away and go on home, b’y”
“NOHDEE! Shut up you asshole, I did not sleep with this boy. I would never! ’e’s not my type. Connard!”
“Well ya got yourself a level 17 clinger, Georgie, and he keeps waking me up in the middle of the goddamned night. I oughta give yas both a smack.”
“No, no, no. That’s not it. It’s not… I’m not… I never… We never… I’m your new roommate.”
“Whowhatnow?”
“Your new roommate. I answered the Craigslist ad a few days ago.”
“For Chrissakes, Georgie! He’s our roommate.”
“My name is Milton Ontario, from Saskatchewan.”
“Buddy, you look like you just crawled out of a bum’s asshole.”
“Ah, Connard! I thought you were coming ’ere yesterday. J’ai besoin d’une cigarette.”
“Yeah, sorry, I got a bit lost.”
Noddy, the hairiest man alive, helped Milton up and into the apartment. Georgette sat down on an easy chair in the living room and lit a cigarette. Ava, who’d been sleeping on a tiny love seat in the lounge, threw her hands up and declared to no one, “This is crazy, he looks like a bum!” and went back down the hall to her loveseat. Ruddy was still having a moment in the bathtub.
Noddy grabbed Milton’s bag and hauled it down the hall towards Milton’s new room.
“Jesus, b’y, you bring your brick collection with ya from Ontario? This is yours, it’s got some shit in it, a bed, and a lamp, and shit—the bed sucks balls, but it’s probably better than sleeping in the stairs. She’s all yours. I’ll chase Ruddy out of the shitter so you can hose yourself off. Jesus, you look like my Granddad’s withered ballsack, and he’s been dead for 30 years.”
Milton thanked him, Noddy disappeared to “chase Ruddy out of the shitter.” Milton collapsed on the bed, and it did suck. A broken spring dug at his kidney, another stabbed into his shoulder. He immediately fell into a very deep sleep.
. . .
Marde
Milton woke up sometime the next afternoon when he rolled his bruised jaw onto a sharp, broken mattress spring. The pain shot across his face, through his head, and smacked into the back of his skull. He rolled onto his back and let his jaw throb.
He lay there for a long time, accounting for his past 60 hours. They had been the hardest of his entire life. He thought of his great-great-great-great Grand Janne/Johnny crossing the Atlantic. He thought of Sir Edward Hilroy, of Benjamin Franklin, of Bernie Federko. He thought of John George Diefenbaker.
He figured the hardship of the past 60 hours was probably enough to net him poems for years. And maybe, maybe, if he played his cards right, he could turn them into a novel someday. A bestseller about overcoming hardship and triumphing in the face of tremendous adversity. He’d have to change the names of the characters, and maybe accentuate some of the details for dramatic effect—call himself Morgan, say he grew up in the middle-of-nowhere in Texas, have him move to Paris or Rome to give it a more cosmopolitan feel, make it less provincial, less Canadian, increase his chances of sales in the States and overseas, have it end with Morgan saving the day, getting the girl, getting the sudden-onset penile hypertrophy, growing a beard, selling the movie rights, living happily ever after.
Milton’s Oscar acceptance speech for best adapted screenplay was interrupted by his bowels performing a double backflip in the pike position.
Ever the bashful shitter, Milton had been too shy to go on the bus, or at the 18 Tim Horton’s they’d stopped at between Regina and Montreal, or the bus station, or the drug-den McDonald’s he collapsed in front of after surviving his trek through the park, or in the abandoned late-night railyard he got trapped in. He’d clenched for several days straight. A rectuming was nigh.
His new apartment was the top floor of a ubiquitous Montreal three-storey row house—one of thousands of massive, narrow, long, brick buildings squashed together with three front doors to three separate apartments.
All these thousands of apartments were arranged more- or-less the same. Kitchen in the back, living room in the front, bedrooms of some sort, usually three or four, in between, and a bathroom somewhere in the middle.
Not that Milton knew any of this. He’d never been to Montreal, let alone a Montreal row house. He didn’t know the bathrooms were always somewhere in the middle, amongst the bedrooms. He waddled back to the kitchen holding his throbbing jaw and his fast-approaching shit, then back down the hall past four closed doors to the living room and the door to the stairs he’d spent the night on, then back, before he started checking doors. Behind door number three was the bathroom, and he made it just in time.
Sept-cent-sept was an 8-1/2. In Moose Jaw, they measure apartments in bedrooms. In Montreal they measure them in total rooms, or portions thereof: living room, kitchen, dining room/lounge, some weird tiny storage room with a washing machine that almost worked, and four bedrooms added up to eight, plus a “1/2” to tell you it has a toilet. It’s not clear whether the “1/2” refers to a bathroom only counting as half a room somehow, or if it’s just a way of indicating there is a room suitable for both number one and number two.
While Milton two’d in the 1/2 he looked around his new place for the first time.
The bathroom might have been nice once upon a time. The floor was covered in tiny white hexagonal tiles, the walls were covered with white glossy rectangular tiles, the tub was an ancient cast-iron clawfoot tub that looked heavy just sitting there, the shower apparatus was sleek, curving chrome pipes and spigots and porcelain handles, and a shower curtain hung from chrome hooks on a chrome ring like in cartoons.
It might have been nice once upon a time.
But the grout lines in the tile had long gone black with dirt. The once-clear shower curtain was now the opaque grey of unbrushed teeth, and three of the eyelets that hooked on the hooks that hooked on the chrome ring were torn out, so the curtain slouched. All the sexy chrome had brown-grey flecks of rust starting to eat through the solid coating of scummy grime. The mirror above the likewise-disgusting porcelain pedestal sink was criss-crossed with cracks. There was a dust ball the size of a softball under the rusting radiator.
It might have been nice once upon a time.
. . .
Deux solitudes
Avenue de l’Épée runs along the imaginary border of the Mile End neighbourhood of the Plateau region of Montreal—the crosshatching of small residential streets and commercial avenues stretching from downtown in the southeast, along the eastern slopes of Mont-Royal, to the train tracks that run alongside avenue Van Horne in the northwest.
It had long been home to Francophones, Hasidic Jews, and émigrés from Greece with their wide array of bakeries and fruiteries and diners and smoked-meat sandwich shops. Its favourite sons were brilliant men like Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen.
But the Plateau was now being overrun by trendy fair-trade cafés, gourmet grilled-cheese sandwich restaurants, and yoga studios catering to an endless supply of young Anglophones and their endless supply of asymmetric haircuts, plaid shirts, and fixed-gear bicycles that were locked by eights to every pole and post in the neighbourhood.
A lot of these Anglophones are students at one of the two big English universities downtown: McGill, Canada’s best attempt at a Harvard, and Concordia, Canada’s best attempt at a Kazakh National Research Technical University.
But many more of the Anglophone expats are refugees escaping the beige infinite flatness of Upper Canada. Of Oakville and Scarborough, of Uxbridge and Etobicoke, of Milton, Ontario.
Scores upon scores of them flock here, like Milton Ontario, to be part-time writers/part-time waiters, part-time painters/part-time bartenders, part-time musicians/part-time baristas.
They flock here to live four and five to a rundown Mile End 8-1/2 third-floor walk-up. Flock here to learn the banjo and start noise bands and write poetry. Flock here when Berkeley didn’t pan out and McGill was their safety.
They flock here seeking asylum in the perpetual twenty something adolescence allowed by a cultural-linguistic Anglophone bubble in the middle of North America’s most cosmopolitan French city and the largesse of the depressed rents that go along with a permanent state of political rot.
This differentness, from Brampton and Burlington and the cheap rent, is the appeal of Montreal to the skinnyjeaned, horn-rimmed, pour-over hordes of Upper Canadian Anglophone suburbanite refugees. It is very much another country. It’s as far away as you can get from the fifty shades of beige of Mississauga and Pickering and still get home for the odd weekend so mom can do your laundry.
But it’s summer camp.
It’s not real.
Not even for the lot of them too old or so done with their first comp. lit. degrees. The ones who at any other point in history would be well into their middle-age. The 19-year-olds, the 29-year-olds, the 39-year-olds going on 21, have all come to get-on and hangout and hookup and get a deal doing it.
That it’s on some of the most politically and historically fraught lip-shaped islands in creation doesn’t matter one bit.
That they’ve created an island of English sameness in a sea of French differentness—which itself is an island of French sameness trying desperately to survive in a sea of English differentness—doesn’t matter one bit.
That they are occupying the heart of the largest city in Quebec, which itself is occupying the heart of the unceded territory that has been home to the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), Abenaki, Wyandot (Huron), Anishinaabeg (Algonquin), and St. Lawrence Iroquoian peoples for milennia, doesn’t matter one bit.
Centuries of complex historical, social, and political forces at work don’t matter.
All of the land stolen, blood spilled, tricks played, and clever bureaucratic manoeuvres used to settle the unsettleable argument over who gets the riches of the land don’t matter.16
The riches of the land don’t matter.
The social tyranny of the Church, the petty tyranny of Le Chef, the petty racism of pure laine, the provocations of “Vive le Quebec Libre,” the Richard Riots, Refus Global, the Quiet Revolution don’t matter.17
The uprisings and mailbox bombs and martial law, the kidnappings and manifestos read on prime-time TV and bodies found in the trunks of cars at airports don’t matter.18
Separatist governments, referenda, 0.6 per cent, “money and the ethnic vote” don’t matter.19
The compromises and betrayals, the triumphs and heartbreaks, the history of sorrow and disgrace blotted out by rah-rah hockey games that have replaced rah-rah wars and the urgency of survival in a place that has winter two-thirds of the year, which have netted us this complicated country don’t matter.
Nothing really matters because the struggle is not survival. The struggle is lugging a heavy bag through a park in winter without a toque to a room you’re renting sight-unseen from Craigslist for $250 per month with three others while you flit through your twenties pretending to be a poet.
And maybe real life will happen later. Maybe war or revolution or plague or famine or poverty will show up and demand more than barely rhyming free verse and home-recorded noise albums of all the wandering twenty-thirty-something teenagers in the Plateau. But until it does, asymmetric haircuts and fixed-gear bikes and scavenged freegan gluten-free lentils and endless online petitions are acts of rebellion. Are acts of courage. Are acts of resistance against the infinite flatness. Until it does, the only thing that matters is that nothing really matters but feeling good and taking the long way to the realization that barely rhyming free verse and home-recorded noise albums matter least of all.
And Milton sits at the very heart of this, taking a shit, taking in the soap scum and toothpaste crust built up on and spilling down over what was once, a lifetime ago, fine craftsmanship, and all it looked like was filth, decay, neglect, and the halfhearted dreams of tens of thousands of adultescent dilettante part-time rock flautists/part-time florists. And all he could think of was where he might find a roll of toilet paper.
He finished, used the last three squares of toilet paper on a roll that had rolled under the rusty radiator, flushed, and felt a thousand times better.
A thousand times better until he saw himself in the cracked and dirty mirror. He saw someone he didn’t recognize. He scrubbed at the mirror with a dirty old t-shirt he found tossed in the corner and got it slightly cleaner, but it did nothing for his face.
A thin dark bruise split his face in half; his jaw was deep purple; both eyes were bloodshot and ringed by black (either bruises or exhaustion or both); he was covered in dirt, scratches, and dried blood; his lips were split and swollen from the cold.
He leaned in closer and poked at his various wounds to see if they were real. They were. He winced. The smell of his three days without a shower overpowered the three days of shit he’d just flushed.
He turned on the shower.
. . .
Sa chambre
Milton towelled off with the old dirty t-shirt and went back to his room. He put on his last pair of underwear, his one remaining pair of pants, one of his last few shirts, and the last pair of socks he owned and sat on his disgusting, busted old mattress on the floor in the corner.
His room was small, really small, and windowless, really windowless.
Milton could stand in the middle with his arms out and touch opposing walls with the tips of his fingers.
Next to the mattress was a shaky and swollen pressboard table. There was an ancient lamp—not an antique, just old—on the table that hummed when he turned it on.
The ceiling light, a single bulb, was covered by a sheer red scarf with some kind of flowers on it, the kind of thing your aunt buys at the Farmer’s Market, which bathed the room in a pervy red light. The corpses of hundreds of dead flies could be made out through the fabric. Milton would have ripped it down, but the entire apartment had luxurious 12-foot ceilings and there was no way he could reach it without a ladder.
The walls were painted a faded orange, almost peach colour. Except for the wall above the bed where the paint had peeled off in a circle roughly the diameter of a garbage can, exposing bare plaster. Milton rubbed more paint off on the edge of the circle and tapped at the rock-hard plaster. He tried not to imagine what it was that might have caused it, but he figured there was a body concealed in the wall that had decomposed and leached body slime into the plaster, ruining it for paint forever.
Directly across from the mystery circle was another door. This door once led to the bathroom but had been nailed shut and painted over hundreds of times. Its only vestigial function, as Milton would learn, was to improve the conveyance of bathroom sounds into Milton’s room.
His room was clearly a converted closet that Milton was now paying $250 per month for, plus internet.
He tore the surviving duct tape off his bag and unpacked his things. He piled what clothes were left in one corner. He piled his last few books next to the mattress.
The biggest ones had survived the trip, ones like The Collected Letters of Thomas Mann—who Milton had never heard of, but it was the only non-welding textbook on a folding table of “Free Books” in the PUS Student Centre one day, and he’d yet to open it to notice that it was 1,572 pages of German letters from the renowned German author to various German lovers, friends, and acquaintances—and the Ulysses Critic’s Picks Annotated Edition, which, for all its indecipherable Irish ravings and incomprehensible critical essays by literature professors, might as well have been in German. He set these two behemoths on the floor next to his bed and piled tattered copies of Beautiful Losers, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Gone with the Wind, and Down and Out in Paris and London, and a notebook full of drafts of poems on top of the pile.
Two Leonard Cohen records survived the trip: I’m Your Man and Death of a Ladies’ Man.
The last things he dug out of the bag were his typewriter and record player. Despite the hellish trip, the two antiques were indestructible. He hoisted them both out of the bag and set them delicately on the table. He stood back to admire his new home, which looked more like a cell, a metaphor he played with in his head for a moment and how it added to the rich experience of harrowing hardship he’d just been through and all the poems he could write about it, until he was interrupted by the pressboard table crumpling to the floor under the weight of the testaments to early 20th-Century American manufacturing.
He reassembled the rubble and his pile of books to make a makeshift short table that was just the right height to work at if he sat on the floor, which saved him having to worry about finding a chair.
. . .
8-1/2
After he had his cell arranged, he decided, since no one was home, to snoop around.
He tapped gently on each door before opening them a crack to look inside.
Directly across from him was Noddy’s room. It was a long narrow room that ran the length of the hall from the front door to the dining room/lounge. In the back corner was a bare double mattress sitting on the floor with a knot of tie-dye blankets on it, empty beer cans and filthy dishes, and dirty free-in-a-case-of-beer t-shirts were strewn everywhere. In the middle of the room was a carpet with a rusted barbell and two gold, dented plastic, 25-pound weights on either end. There was a big window looking into a sort of courtyard between this building and the one next to it.
The walls were mint green and decorated with a number of posters depicting—clockwise from the door—Scarface, a woman’s ass in a thong, Dazed and Confused, and a woman in a bikini washing a mid-80s Chevy Camaro with her butt. There were several wilted potted pot plants on the floor beneath the window.
The door at the end of the hall, next to the front door, was Georgette’s room. The room was probably a den before this place was turned into a halfway house for Lost Boys and Girls. There were massive French doors leading to the balcony, overlooking avenue de l’Épée, but the maple trees along the street threw the entire room, which was painted a deep purple, into shade.
It was decorated with all kinds of scarves and beads and smelled of perfume, incense, cigarettes, and dirty laundry. There were dozens of wine bottles with candles stuck in their mouths, and wax dripped down their sides. An accordion peered out from beneath a pile of clothes on a chair in the corner. Several grotesque-looking puppets were hanging by their strings from a nail on the wall next to a large dresser with a mirror. The top of the dresser was buried in bottles and tubes and canisters of creams and oils and waxes and nail polishes, and several sex toys of various sizes, colours and configurations, which Milton, having never seen such things in the wild, mistook for more scented candles.
Next to Georgette’s room was the living room. It was big, and built around a large, elaborate mantel. The fireplace itself was boarded up, but there were half a dozen wine-bottle candles on the hearth. Highball glasses overflowing with cigarette butts and empty wine and beer bottles decorated the mantel, the coffee table, and the patch of floor where an end table should have been. Another sheer red, vaguely tribal scarf hung above the mantel. In the corner directly opposite the door sat a massive yet small tube TV on top of a milk crate. Three couches, all older than Milton, were aimed towards the TV from across the room.
Milton would learn that the entire apartment, except for the scarves, which were all from Georgette’s personal collection, was furnished with things found on the street.
Back towards Milton’s room, between the living room and the bathroom, was another bedroom. He assumed it belonged to Ruddy or Ava, but it looked unlived in. There was a mattress leaning against the wall, an empty clothes hamper, a desk with nothing on it, a dresser with nothing in it, nothing on the yellow walls, and a closet door behind piles of large moving boxes was locked with a padlock.
Down the hall past the bathroom and Milton’s cell was the dining room/lounge. It had an incredible built-in china cabinet, crown moldings, and stained-glass windows on the back wall, but the cabinet was empty and several of the doors hung crooked and half-open. There was a wobbly chrome and Formica kitchen table with an old record player, a pile of records and another highball glass overflowing with cigarette butts on it. The table was flanked by mismatched chairs on either side. Opposite the table was a really small love seat. Everything in the room was dwarfed by the grandeur of the once-luxuriant space, a fact that double-underlined and highlighted the cheapness of the garbage furniture and garbage people who had let this place fall apart.
Through a swinging door that didn’t so much swing as stutter, was the kitchen. Like the entire apartment, the floors were narrow maple hardwood, with the varnish long worn away. Everything in the kitchen was coated in a fine grey sheen of greasy dust.
The kitchen was laid out almost as though they forgot to add a kitchen at first. The stove was next to the small cabinet holding a large, stained, stainless-steel sink. The sink was right in the way of the door, and the stove stuck out in the middle of the room, so you had to manoeuvre around it. Beside the stove was a doorway to the storage closet/laundry room/second bathroom—i.e. a small room, about the size of Milton’s, with a washing machine, a toilet, and a pile of junk shoved in one corner. Beyond that was a fridge that stuck out like the stove and blocked access to the cabinets which ran along the back wall of the kitchen. That was it for the cabinets, a whole 6-feet-or-so of counter space, partially blocked by a fridge. The wall opposite the sink, stove, and fridge had a small wooden table that wobbled mightily, and a window leading to a fire escape.
Milton hadn’t eaten since the day before, so he poked his head in the fridge and helped himself to some kind of foul-smelling cheese that was marked with a big, bold “G”.
Having shat, showered, and gorged himself on someone else’s expensive French cheese, Milton felt brand new. He still looked like he “crawled out of a bum’s asshole” but he was ready. Ready for Montreal. Ready to embrace his destiny. Pursue immortality. Ready to leave the apartment.
. . .
Le Mile End
Rue Bernard is shops, restaurants, cafés, and theatres clear across avenue du Parc to boulevard Saint-Laurent—the Main. Parc was the same from Bernard down towards the park, but the flavour of the businesses in either direction was a little different.
Running east-west along Bernard were vintage clothing stores, artisan cheese shops, high-end ethnic restaurants—everything from Brazilian to sushi—pretentious single-brew coffee shops filled with pretentious single-brew drinkers huddled behind MacBooks, the city’s foremost puppet theatre, yoga studios with ample stroller parking, a grocery store with valet parking, the other smoked-meat place—Lester’s, the antithesis of the ubiquitous tourist trap Schwartz’s a few blocks southeast on St. Laurent—and the world’s top independent publisher of English graphic novels.
Every inch of the several blocks of Bernard from the Outremont Metro station to the west and St. Laurent to the east, which are crisscrossed by tree lined residential streets, is drenched in yuppie pretense.
The artisan cheese shop, for instance, had 132 varieties of hard cheeses (in addition to their 137 varieties of soft cheeses), including 14 different gruyères, but not a single cheddar. Not one.
The luxury grocer didn’t sell frozen TV dinners, but sold individually wrapped grapes from France. Not wrapped bunches of grapes, but single, seedless red and green grapes wrapped individually in cellophane, each with a tiny list of ingredients, and a barcode to scan each grape at the cash. Individually. They were ten cents each.
Parc, on the other hand, is another world entirely.
Instead of trendy grilled-cheese cafés and the latest Yelp darling boutique poutineries, it is full of dumpy diners cut right out of, and still serving food from, a 1950s dumpy diner catalogue, and butcher shops without names or signage, only carcasses hanging in their windows.
There is a hardware store, a dollar store, an almost-a-dollar store—also without any signage—a stationery store that sells only the cheapest pens and paper, a clothing store called, simply, Vêtements, which according to its window display deals primarily in women’s lingerie, baby clothes, and Jewish religious outfits.
Side-by-side-by-side were two competing fruiteries and a discount grocer, all selling versions of the exact same things in unnecessary quantities for unreasonably low prices in attempts to undercut the others—five half-bad pineapples for $7, four pounds of three-quarters-turned grapes for $2, 12 pounds of bruised plums for $5.
These fruiteries, plus the hardware store, were almost entirely responsible for supplying the ingredients that set off the 2006 artisan micro-homebrew toilet brandy blindness outbreak in Mile End.
The Mile End stretch of Parc is anchored by a YMCA on the corner of rue St. Viateur (of bagel fame), and, a few doors down, a former Anglican church-turned-library. Every building along this stretch is guarded by a thousand fixed-gear bicycles chained to every pole, sign, post, railing, and picket.
. . .
Livres
Between the massive red brick YMCA and the massive red brick church-turned-library, sitting tucked almost invisibly between the dépanneurs (a French word for “mob front” that sells cigarettes, chips, and lotto tickets) and Greek drycleaners, is a misplaced row house that was home to Mile End’s oldest bookstore.
The store takes up the living and dining rooms of the first floor of an old row house. It’s a cash-only kind of place—all books were $2—operated by two ancient French men: Guillaume Vautour and Gweltaz Mouette.
Guillaume owns the building. He inherited it in the 1950s when his mother died. It would be worth more than two million dollars if he were to sell it, or it could bring in several thousand dollars per month in rent, but instead every inch of all three storeys are jam-packed with books and old newspapers and boxes and piles of all of Mother’s old clothes and kitchen appliances, and rats. Lots of rats.
In a rotting, unmarked cardboard box on the third floor, amongst a bunch of old, mouldy shoes, is Maurice “The Rocket” Richard’s20 1946 Stanley Cup ring that Guillaume’s father, Georges, took off The Rocket’s finger himself in a bar fight on rue Ste-Catherine.
That ring is worth more than the entire building and all of its contents. But Guillaume doesn’t know it’s there. He hadn’t been upstairs for years because of his bad knees, and back, and hip, and the gout, and the uncorrected hernia, and his feet had only gotten flatter since the war.
Neither would the city garbage collectors find it when they took The Rocket’s ring, and 27 garbage truck loads of other assorted treasures, to the city landfill after the house was repossessed due to unpaid taxes after Guillaume died in 2011.
Guillaume sleeps in a room off the kitchen in an old recliner smooth with decades of grime.
On random afternoons he props open his front door with an old wooden chair and balances a handwritten “livres” sign on the seat and sits in his living room, surrounded by piles of French and English books, chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes, yelling very racist epithets about immigrants and Anglophones at Gweltaz while the two of them remove “Propriété de la Bibliothèque Mile End” stamps from the edges of paperbacks with 100-grit sandpaper.
Guillaume doesn’t particularly like Gweltaz. Gweltaz has the annoying habit of humming while sanding the books, he dresses like one of the Tweedles, and he suffers some kind of speech affliction that Guillaume attributes to a weakness of character. After 25 years of Gweltaz just showing up, Guillaume still doesn’t know his name. But he shows up every day, sands books for hours for no pay, gives Guillaume half his lunch, and never says a word, just hums, while Guillaume educates him on the existential threat minorities pose to the “pure laine Québécois comme nous.”
The other reason Guillaume keeps Gweltaz around is that his arms are long enough, slender enough, and supple enough to fit through the after-hours book-deposit box slot at the library.
Stealing library books is technically theft, but it makes for the perfect, low-overhead business.
Each morning before the library opens, Gweltaz, who lives in an apartment up the street, fishes whatever books he can out of the after-hours book-deposit box. Then the pair spend the day sanding the stamps off the new inventory while Guillaume rattles on about the travesty that are turbans in the police force and Gweltaz hums Wagner.
And because Guillaume owns the building outright and doesn’t bother paying any kind of taxes—he learned long ago that city hall was so corrupt that they wouldn’t pursue tax delinquents unless someone complained about the stink of a rotting corpse—what meagre sales they do have are pure profit, and keep him well-stocked in unfiltered cigarettes and sherry.
They shouldn’t have been able to get away with it once, let alone several times per week for 25 years and counting, but the circulation department of Réseau des bibliothèques publiques de Montréal were never able to figure out why their Mile End branch had such low return rates, such high loss rates, and so many appealed fines.
It got so bad in the 1980s that a branch manager was fired because of it. But the losses weren’t because of a lack of managerial oversight, a failure of lending policy, overdue fine structures, or not enough Propriété de la Bibliothèque Mile End stamps. They were solely because the after-hours book deposit box slot placement on the converted church was the ideal height and angle for Gweltaz’s spindly arms, and in a surveillance-camera blind spot.
On a good week, if he felt like being open more than a few days, Guillaume might sell 50 books for a couple bucks apiece. But sales had been picking up with the influx of the “maudit Anglais et leurs vélos” in the neighbourhood. So, he started pricing the English books at $4 each.
And every so often, about once a week lately, a hayseed from some Saskatchewan backwater with their face arranged in the wrong order would move to town to pursue some harebrained poetry dreams, and having lost most of their book collection in transit would stumble upon livres while in search of vêtements and would buy 20 English paperbacks and pay with a $100 bill, which Guillaume would snatch from his hand and then shake his cigarette angrily and yell “Pas de change! Pas de change!”
It was still quite cold, but the sun was shining, and the streets and shops and cafés were all crowded with people—who all apparently had nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon—and Milton had never felt so alive.
His new neighbourhood was positively brimming with life, and so was he. He practically skipped all the way home, humming to himself the tune that the elderly book salesman was humming—the overture from Rienzi—while he happily and lovingly refurbished old books with his colleague as they discussed, he was certain, Continental Philosophy.
Milton returned with 20 books crammed into a couple of sacks of half-rotten fruit and day-old bagels, a ream of so-cheap-it’s-almost-transparent typewriter paper, three pens that cost a whopping 50 cents, three coil-bound notebooks that cost a dollar, a six-pack of white briefs—Vêtements didn’t carry boxers—a two-pack of synagogue pants and shirts, and 24 pairs of white tube socks. All told, he spent $15 on food and clothing, and $100 on books.
. . .
La viande de cheval
When Milton returned to Sept-cent-sept the stairwell smelled of burning rubber, and thick, greasy black smoke hung near the ceiling.
Something that sounded like French Enya was blaring from behind Georgette’s closed door.
Milton nodded unnoticed “heys” at Ava and Ruddy on his way past the living room. They were arguing about Marx and smoking weed out a slightly open window.
“No, you don’t understand! It doesn’t matter how great his ideas might be, if they are impossible to implement because of the frailty of men’s egos, then it doesn’t matter.”
“But the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans—none of those were ever true Marxists. Don’t blame Marx for their bullshit.”
“Like, imagine a toaster, right? If that toaster doesn’t make toast, is it still a toaster? No! It’s a pile of junk you throw away.”
“What are you talking about? Toaster?”
Milton dumped his new books and clothes on his mattress and took his half-bad fruit and bagels to the kitchen.
Smoke was pouring out of the partially open stuttering door. Noddy was inside singing and frying something on the stove.
“Oh, Sonny don’t go away… Hey, b’y. Whaddayat?”
Milton couldn’t make out a word of whatever he just said.
“Your daddy’s a sailor who never comes home… Want some horsemeat?”
“Sorry, some what?”
“I’m feeling so tired, I’m not all that STTTTTROOONG GGGG! Horse, b’y.”
“Uh… Did you say h-h-horse?”
“Yes, b’y. They pretty much give this shit away at the butcher, cheaper than rabbit even.”
“Rabbit?”
“And it’s good. Better than beef, not as good as moose, b’y, but better than seal.”
“Seal?”
“I’m not all that STTTTTTROOONGGGGG! Yeah, b’y. I’m a lousy townie, so I don’t like the texture none. Tastes like my arse. Want some?”
Noddy held out a frying pan of ground horse that was still spitting grease and smoke.
“Uh… no, thanks.”
“Bullshit, you’re having some, I insist. My treat. I doubts they got anything this good in—where ya from in Ontario?”
“Saskatchewan, actually.”
Noddy took two bowls out of a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, shook them off, and divided the meat half in each. He dug his hand in the six inches of brown water in the sink and found a fork and a spoon, wiped them on his off-white Bud Light t-shirt, stuck one in each bowl and held out the bowl with the spoon to Milton.
“It’s lean, not like pork, good for you.”
He took cans of Coors Light from a box on the windowsill and slid them into either pocket of his plaid cargo shorts, handed one to Milton, and clomped down the hall in his work boots.
“I’m notallthatstrrrrrrrrrrOOOOOOOONNNNNGGGGG.”
This was a regular thing, Noddy having a bowl of fried ground horse for supper. At least five nights a week he’d fry it until the smoke alarm would have gone off, if the smoke alarm had batteries in it, and then eat it with a spoon and chase it with two or three or maybe six, sometimes eight or twelve, warm Coors Lights. That’s it. Never a vegetable, never a starch, only ever fried horse and warm beer.
Milton held the dirty bowl of ground horse meat in his hands and stared at it like he was waiting for it to tell him something.
In the living room Ruddy and Ava were still arguing over the ontology of toast.
“No! It doesn’t matter if you are putting jam or butter or the tears of angels on it, it’s not toast. The toaster didn’t toast it. It’s just bread. The toaster isn’t a toaster.”
“Then who’s supposed to be the toaster? Lenin?”
“No, Marx.”
“I thought he was the peanut butter.”
“No. There is no peanut butter. There is no toast. It’s still just bread.”
“So, who is the bread then? Trotsky?”
“Us, the people, the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the workers of the world. We’re all bread.”
Noddy had sat down between them, turned the TV on to a Quebec Hockey League game. It was 1-0 for Thetford Mines Home Hardware Pelles Volantes over Rapide Lube Monstres de Huile de Jonquière in the first period.
“Don’t lump me in with those fascists!”
Noddy kept turning the volume up to drown out the toast talk as he washed down mouthfuls of fried horse with mouthfuls of warm Coors Light. Ava and Ruddy just yelled louder at one another.
“God! Nooo! If Marx’s chauvinist utopia my-dick-is-bigger theory doesn’t transform society, us, the workers, the bread, into toast, then it’s not a toaster. It’s just scrap metal.”
“Jesus! You’re both toasted. Shut yer yapping and make room for… uh… buddy here. The game’s on.”
Milton came in and sat down at the end of the couch farthest from the three of them.
“Oh my god! It’s you! How’s your face, that looks really bad.”
Ava punched Noddy in the arm.
“You’re such a jerk, Noddy, gawd!”
“Sorry fer smackin’ ya, buddy, don’t mean nothing by it, George was just having a moment, and I figured you could take ’er better than she could.”
“I’m fine, it was just a misunderstanding, all good.”
Milton pawed at his horse with his dirty spoon.
“Or Ruddy, here, screaming like a little bitch in the bathtub all night.”
“Shut-up, Noddy, I was on shrooms.”
“What’s your name?”
“Me? It’s Milton Ontario.”
“Oh cool, I’m from Timmins, Ava is from Etobicoke.”
“Oh, no, sorry. I’m from Saskatchewan.”
“I don’t know where that is, I’m not familiar with Milton.”
“No, I’m not from Ontario, I’m from Saskatchewan.”
“Wait, like Saskatchewan the place?”
“Yeah.”
They all shared a laugh. Milton wasn’t quite sure why.
“I can’t believe there is a Milton there too. What are the chances?”
“No, no. That’s my name. Milton.”
“Jesus, b’y, get your story straight.”
“I’m Milton Ontario, that’s my name, like the town, yeah, but not, it’s just my name. I’m from a little town in the middle of nowhere in Saskatchewan.”
“You’re named after a suburb?”
“No, I’m not named after the town. I’m named after the kicker.”
All three of them looked at Milton like he had a second head.
“You don’t know Doug Milton?”
“Doug who?”
“Doug Milton! He kicked the winning field goal for the Riders in ’82.”
“82? Never heard of him.”
“So, this Doug guy then, he’s from Ontario?”
“No. That’s just my last name.”
“Like the province?”
“Yeah. I guess. My family is originally from Finland, they were called Alatalo, or something, but it got changed at the border.”
“So, you’re not from Ontario.”
“Jesus, Ruddy, b’y, try and keep up.”
“No, I’m from a tiny town in Saskatchewan.”
“What’s it called?”
“You’ve probably never heard of it, it’s like 100 people. Called Bellybutton.”
“That’s the name of the town? Oh my god!”
“I can’t say much, my nan is from Dildo, but that’s a pretty stupid name, b’y.”
“What, my name?”
“Well, that too, but your town, Jesus.”
The four of them continued to make get-to-know-ya small talk while Milton poked at his congealing bowl of horse and Noddy chewed loudly with his mouth open, guzzled warm beer, and turned the hockey game up louder and louder until the Anglophones were shouting over the French announcers and the French Enya blasting from the next room.
. . .
Les colocs
Ruddy and Ava brought Milton up to speed on the roommate situation.
Noddy dated Ava on-and-off, mostly off, for most of last summer. At some point, in some kind of VennDiagram/Threes Company sort of situation, Ava started dating Ruddy from her band Spigot—a two-piece noise ensemble, Ava on recorder, Ruddy on laptop drum machine. But even when her and Noddy were all the way off, even after the summer had ended and she was back in school, double-majoring in Eastern Religions and Centrally Planned Economics, even when Ruddy dumped Ava for a guy named Crane in his other band, Narc Wolf—a three-piece grind-core noise band—Ava kept coming around the apartment with Ruddy just to hang out. Not to hang out with Noddy, just to hang out.
Ava and Ruddy would sit in the front room, smoke pot, burn incense, pet the downstairs neighbour’s cat who was always upstairs, drink tea, eat the communal long-grain brown rice, and get into arguments about third-wave Marxofeminism with anyone in earshot.
Neither Ava nor Ruddy actually lived there. The unused bedroom belonged to a fourth roommate named Andy, or Andi, or Andie, or André—Milton wasn’t sure. They were never around. They’d all but moved in with their boyfriend or girlfriend in some other 8-1/2, but commitment issues kept them paying rent to store their stuff at Sept-cent-sept.
Georgette was from Lille, in France, but had moved to Montreal to work at Place des Poupées: “the best puppetry theatre in the North America.” She had studied puppetry at Les Beaux-Arts, part of the Sorbonne in Paris, for seven years, and now was an apprentice prop mistress, making the tiny props for the puppet shows. It barely paid anything, but it kept her in menthol cigarettes, red wine, and vaguely tribal scarves she hung all around the apartment.
Ava explained Georgette’s music code. If it was French Enya turned up to 11 she was in having sex with Larry, a 52-year-old married Anglophone insurance salesman from Repentigny. If it was the Rolling Stones, it was Chris, a med student from Brampton.
It sounded salacious and complicated to Milton, but the way Ava and Ruddy explained it, while Noddy held two fingers up to his mouth and flicked his tongue in Ruddy’s ear, it was a normal thing for normal adults to do, and that sometimes Larry and Chris would come hang out too. They were both kind of square, but Larry would bring foreign beer, and Chris would bring good weed.
When his bowl of horse was empty, Noddy started to tell Milton the highlights of his story. But he only made it as far as he was 41 and had left St. John’s and his decade-long gig DJing at the Sea Horse, a strip club, “the classy one,” a year and a bit before Milton showed up at Sept-cent-sept.
He talked a lot about the “girls” at the “Horse” and how he “looked after them” with a sort of big-brotherly pride. He was all of five-foot-four and 150 lbs, but he still talked as if he were their protector. There was a subtext to his story of out-of-control alcoholism and coke-binges he referred to as his “glory days.”
There was some debate around the apartment, behind his back, as to why Noddy left St. John’s. Everyone was convinced he was on the run from something or someone. His name probably wasn’t even Noddy.
Noddy rarely went out. He’d come home from work and just lounge around the apartment in work boots and cargo shorts with a juice glass full of vodka, or a warm Coors Light in each hand, with the hockey game on in French—which he swore he spoke fluently but no one had seen a lick of evidence of such—and blow his roll-your-own smoke out the half-open window, most of it blowing right back in, and go on loudly, and at length, about the “girls” and unrelated “tits” and “pussy” and “pieces of ass” from St. John’s he’d been into in his “glory days.”
After the unwatched game would end, he’d go into his room and blast Poison or Ratt until he’d either fall asleep or Georgette would bang on the wall and yell “Nohdeeee! Putain! Shuddafuckinmusicup!”
The French Enya wound down around the same time as the hockey game. Noddy, several warm Coors deep, didn’t bother turning down the recording of a French hockey radio call-in show that came on after the game, and insisted instead on telling stories about a particularly “sick piece,” who was one of “his” dancers “back in Town.”
Georgette emerged from her room wrapped in a scarf, “Nohdee! Connard! Turn it DOWN! Putain!”
“Sorry, Georgie, couldn’t hear it over Larry railing ya.”
Ava, Ruddy, and Noddy all yelled in unison: “Hey, Lar!” Noddy added, “how was your nut?”
Larry flatly responded “Hi guys” back.
“Ta gueule! You are a disgusting!”
This delighted Noddy greatly.
Then Georgette turned her attention to Milton.
“New boy, you are not dead, that is good. Do you have my money?”
Georgette did not take kindly to being given $250 in fives. She was still cursing when she slammed her door.
“They’re probably gonna fuck on all that money like Donald Duck’s uncle there, what’s his name? Darkwing?”
They all fell silent as they watched the radio-on-TV in a language none of them really understood for a while before Ava yawned and said: “I’m bored, let’s go out.”
“Robin is having that potluck thing tonight. Owly and Hawk are playing after the soup is gone.”
“I could have soup. Noddy, you want to come?”
“Yes, b’y!”
Noddy belched. He could barely keep his eyes open from drunkenness and waking up every day at 5:00 a.m.
“What about you, new guy?”
“Sorry, what is this?”
“Oh my god! He says sorry like such a hoser! Adorable!”
“A potluck. A house show. A party. You’ll meet people. Might even get laid or whatever you’re into.”
“Yeah, sure, I guess.”