SIX
SPECTACLE DES OEUFS
Cherchez la femme
The next weeks blurred together into a rash of long nights that bled into early mornings that ended with Milton curled up under a ratty towel and his winter coat, with a ball of dirty laundry for a pillow, on the bare, filthy, fifth-or-sixth-hand mattress in his windowless room.
He tagged along with Noddy or Georgette or Ruddy or Ava to every house party and potluck, every secret music show of bands no one had ever heard of, every pay-what-you-can fringe festival vaudeville burlesque extravaganza, every art student term project exhibition, every Free-First-Tuesday-of-the-Month at Musée des Beaux-Arts, every Free-Second-Wednesday-of-the-Month at Musée d’Art Contemporain, every half-off showing of Elephant Man at Cinema du Parc, every poetry reading at every out-of-the-way St. Henri freegan co-op coffee shop, every two-drink minimum open mic bilingual comedy night in dive bars in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, every work acquaintance’s bowling birthday party in the far-flung banlieues, or entire nights spent wandering from 8-1/2 to 8-1/2 pre-drinking for parties that never happened.
To the outsider, it looked like he was being social and having the time of his life. Becoming fully immersed in the underemployed Anglophone Bohemian art student expat caste. Mixing in with the thousands of Normcore asymmetric haircut GTA refugees, and the usual bit of alcoholism that goes along with it. But really, it was all just an ongoing search for Robin.
Not that he ever needed help nor excuse to imagine impossible happily-ever-afters for himself and the unsuspecting subject of his infatuation, but the intense regime of sleeping all day, and going out all night, the endless unoccupied and unencumbered hours, the lack of any responsibility whatsoever—the vacuum of obligation, connection, and preoccupation that his life had become—was filled almost entirely, as it had been by Ashleys for most of his childhood, with daydreaming of, with fantasizing about, with obsessing over Robin.
While out at the hundred different variations of bemused late-onset teenagers moping about in coffee shops and bars and art galleries and Leninist bike repair co-op noise band concert venues and under-furnished living rooms and kitchens, he was always watching the door, or checking over his shoulder, or approaching chestnut-haired girls with their backs turned.
While at home, when he wasn’t sleeping off the night before, he filled pages and pages of cheap paper from the Greek papeterie with brooding, lovesick poems that swung between enraptured and enraged, depending upon how cold the trail for his unrequited new true love had been the night before.
He had only ever met her the one time, at the anarchist freegan potluck in the vermin abattoir. They talked, she was engaged, but slightly aloof. Cold even. She travelled in and out of conversations with Milton.
There were moments he was sure they were plumbing their deepest depths in the way that welds two souls together. And other moments where she didn’t seem to give a shit. And others yet when she was drunker and higher and called him a poet. And meant it. And touched his shoulder. And maybe meant it. And others still when she laughed at him for being a poet, for being in the same room as her, for being on that curb beside her in front of that Dep in that rundown neighbourhood at that late hour of the early morning, dumpster borscht, bathtub brandy, and cheap cigarillo on her breath, her eyes glassy and distant, on the run from imaginary police after imaginary fart-firecracker-fire fights.
He replayed every moment of that entire night over and over. He rehearsed better things to say in conversations that happened weeks ago. He mulled over the meaning of every look, of every inadvertent touch, of every joke made at his expense that no one laughed at. Was it contempt or curiosity, or maybe even connection, behind the teasing? Did she feel it too? Was she lying on a bed of broken springs and mysterious stains fully clothed for warmth staring into the darkness where the odd-shaped hole in the paint was, wondering what he was doing just then? Wondering if he was wondering too?
Of course not.
She didn’t care. She went to Oxford. She dropped out of Oxford because she’s above that shit. She spent three years in a Calcutta dump, filming seagulls for a seven-minute mostly-silent black-and-white film about seagulls in a Calcutta dump. Not a film of Calcutta dump seagulls that was a metaphor for anything, not a suggestion of anything, just dump birds for their own sake, she swore. An honest-to-god, earnest-to-Jesus, meditation on dump birds. She hung around real artists who made real art. She argued loudly about the merits of her friends’ paper-mâché dicks.
She didn’t hide. She was perfect and real and immediate and present. If you bored her, her eyes told you, her body told you, her mouth told you, her getting up mid-sentence and walking outside to smoke a joint with Where’s Waldo told you. There were no airs or pretense or bullshit. She didn’t hide behind a veil of irony and sarcasm and disconnected smart-assery like everyone else trying to be someone else. Trying to be poets. Trying to be artists. She was an artist. A maker. A creator. Not a critic, a pretender, a hanger-on, a faker, a hater. She was so sure of everything she did and everything she said. She was a goddess. She was beautiful. Her eyes. Her cheeks. Her hips. Her lips. The faint curves of so much more hiding under the old military surplus winter jacket she wore that night.
She was perfect.
the wind blew you
next to me
i could feel your soul
when you blew
your smoke
in my face as a joke
that night
we met
that night we fell
fell into the well
of your eyes
your heart
of forever
She was cruel. She asked Milton to open up, to share his insecurity and deepest secrets, to share his poems, his art, his soul. And what did she offer him in return? A tease. A touch on the shoulder. A face full of cigarillo smoke. How dare she!
that name
is not my name
my name is not
milhouse
that is much more lame
name than milton
It was her fault that he was alone, even when he was out with people. She became the key to his happiness, the one thing in the world that made sense to him. But he didn’t know where she was, didn’t know what she thought of him, didn’t know how to find out, didn’t know how to find her.
He nonchalantly asked Ava and Ruddy if they knew her. And they did. He asked them if they knew where to find her. And they didn’t.
“She’s around.”
He caught a glimpse of her a couple of weeks after the potluck. He was riding the 80 bus downtown to take a metro to a poetry slam in Hochelaga, she was riding her bike uptown through the Park. He got off at the next stop and ran uphill three blocks as fast as he could before his lungs gave out and he collapsed in a heap on the sidewalk, in front of the same crack den McDonald’s he’d collapsed in front of when he first arrived. Someone threw a quarter at him while he lay there, chest heaving.
She was long gone.
. . .
Cultivez votre pécule
It was more than a month before he saw her again at the crack of dawn in the lobby of a giant downtown bank.
The bank was a title sponsor of the annual Festival Toute la Nuit—an all-night mish-mash of art things scattered around the city. It all wrapped up with a free breakfast at the bank—a 10,000-egg omelette cooked in a cartoonishly giant pan balanced on top of a dozen propane burners. All to cleverly launch the bank’s new advertising campaign: Cultivez Votre Pécule/Grow Your Nest Egg.
20 “chefs”—signified by their hats, not their credentials, including the bank manager, his wife, their 15-year-old daughter, seven bank employees, three of their spouses/ partners, two accounting interns (who were quite drunk after sharing a bottle of vodka in a paper bag on the curb outside of Place-des-Arts after leaving the modern dance show that was happening for 12 hours straight inside), the chairwoman of the festival planning committee and her husband (who was still dressed as a clown having just completed a marathon juggling performance with his juggling troupe in a 24-hour doughnut shop on St. Laurent), Gilles “Pépé” Papineau, the morning show shock jock and flaming racist from 108.4 FM La Bouche, who was doing a live spot from the scene, and two line cooks from Saint-Hubert, a popular chicken restaurant—stirred the pool of egg slop with canoe paddles.
Dozens of volunteers in green vests attempted to corral the throng of thousands of half-drunk and over-tired all-night art festival-goers that packed themselves unsafely close to the giant vat of bubbling eggs.
“S’il vous plaît, faites la queue! Derrière la ligne! S’il vous plaît! S’il vous plaît! S’il vous plaît!”
They cried, begged, pleaded with the unmoving, ever-growing mob.
“S’il vous plaît! S’il vous plaît!”
There was also an official adjudicator from The Guinness Book of World Records counting the empty egg containers in a mountain of empty egg containers near the giant pan and examining evidence of broken eggs on the floor around the pan.
The reigning world record for largest omelette was held by the Tuscaloosa Breakfast Festival, which, in 1998, attempted to make a 10,000-egg omelette, but due to premature breakage, spillage, and wayward eggery (the technical terms coined by the very same Guinness adjudicator) managed to only make a 9,876-egg omelette.
The Toute la Nuit organizing committee were sure the record was theirs as they ordered 1,000 dozen eggs to ensure they wouldn’t fall short of the 10,000-egg mark.
A record-breaking 10,000-egg omelette to be shared with festival-goers free of charge as the exciting conclusion to an all-night art festival and exciting launch to a retirement savings plan marketing campaign sounded like a good idea to the organizers, the bank higher-ups, and the slowly sobering festival-goers.
Who doesn’t like garish publicity stunts and free breakfast after a long night secretly drinking in performance art shows that make no sense in all-night fast-food joints and half-closed art galleries?
However, none of the 20 culinary dilettantes pawing at the puddle of eggs had ever attempted to make a 10,000-egg omelette before. Only a few people on earth had ever tried it. And no one from the Montreal team called any of them to learn about how long it takes to actually cook an omelette that size nor how unappetizing a swimming pool-sized pan of eggs looks, and sounds, and smells—especially smells—nor the effect that thousands of drunk and tired people crowding into the lobby of a downtown bank will have on the temperature and smell, the smell, and general ambiance of the room—a B.O., egg fart, and whiskey morning breath stinking mosh pit.
The plan had been to make a great show of dumping the 10,000 eggs they’d spent the previous three hours cracking into five-gallon buckets into the giant skillet right at 6:00 a.m., to great fanfare and snapping of photographs by all the major papers—maybe even one of the nationals.
They’d then vigorously stir the eggs with the canoe paddles for the 10-15 minutes it would take for them to cook—just slightly longer than a normal omelette, they figured—and then jubilant festival-goers would, in an orderly queue, file by with their bank-branded paper bowls for a scoop of eggs and a small foil container of milk supplied by Les Producteurs de lait du Québec. The festival-goers would make their way to the food court of the conjoined shopping mall, quickly eat their eggs and clear out for the next wave of omelette eaters.
Records would be broken. Priceless media exposure would be won. Scores of high-rate, low-interest retirement savings plans would be sold. Everyone would be home, satiated, and gleefully asleep by no later than 9:00 a.m.
By 5:00 a.m., long after most of the festival performances had wrapped up, the first few thousand festival-goers assembled outside the doors of the bank. Every new group of two or three rattled on the doors of the bank trying to get in out of the cold.
Inside, dozens of volunteers cracked the last few hundred eggs into buckets and beat them with paint-mixing paddles attached to large drills.
Though banks invented and perfected the queue management post-and-stanchion system over centuries of making people wait in lines, this particular bank on this particular day was woefully underprepared for the mob of hangry zombies that poured through its doors nonstop after they opened shortly after 5:30 a.m.
The crowd quickly filled the bank lobby beyond its capacity, yet more continued to push in out of the cold. The S’il vous plaît’s of the volunteers in their green vests was drowned out by the yelling, in several languages, of people being jostled and squeezed.
The crowd closed in around the frying pan and flaming propane burners. Entire five-gallon buckets of beaten eggs, as was noted by the Guinness Adjudicator, were dumped over, making the floor slick and sending people falling and sliding into one another.
A few shoving matches and at least two fist fights broke out. There were rumours that someone close to the ATMs had been stabbed.
An elderly woman who had earlier spent most of the night watching her granddaughter, a 21-year-old textile student from Université de Montréal, knit a 22-foot long single wool tube sock in a metro-station tunnel, fainted from the heat and overcrowding and had to be crowd-surfed from the front of the mass to the paramedics waiting in the rear.
The throng spilled out of the bank in through a narrow doorway that had been opened into the neighbouring mall food court. And they just kept coming.
The volunteer security force called for police backup around 5:45 a.m., and the Montreal police, not unfamiliar with its share of hockey riots, and ever vigilant against potential race riots, especially with the huge number of Anglophone free food lovers that were in the crowd, sent 300 officers in full riot gear.
The chief of Service de sécurité incendie de Montréal, a cherub-like lifetime firefighter named André, showed up with a small army of first responders and fought his way to the front of the crowd to issue the bank manager and festival chairwoman each tickets for fire-code violations, and threatened to “fermer le tout!”
Had the bank manager not been a close personal friend of the mayor and the chief of police, the entire event would have been shut down. Instead, the riot police merely broke up the scattered fights, shepherded as much of the mob as possible into the mall and adjacent metro station, and began turning away latecomers.
The chaos receded into monotony as 12,000 people waited for 10,000 eggs to solidify.
They began lying on the floor, huddled together in packs of threes and fours. Sleeping on friends and backpacks as the dawn broke.
The marbled lobby of the head office of Montreal’s biggest bank on the launch day of the biggest publicity campaign in its history was transformed into something that looked like a Red Cross emergency shelter.
Victims of a night of revelry and ill-conceived contemporary art exhibitions—the well-heeled, the unencumbered, the childless, the bohemians, the students, the swarms of twenty-something teens—gathered for warmth and shelter and their daily ration of lukewarm egg goo.
. . .
Toute la nuit
The night had begun with Noddy, Ruddy, Ava, and Milton walking down to see Georgette’s puppet theatre company, Place des Poupées, an all-night Victor Hugo puppet-show marathon.
It began with Cromwell. The epic lyrical play about the English politician/warlord/only-commoner-to-be-Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell.
The play was so long and complicated—6,920 verses, 79 characters, countless extras—that it was 129 years from when it was written before it was finally produced. This was the first time it had been staged with puppets.
Georgette had explained that they needed 13 puppeteers to pull off the four-hour play with 39 puppets—nearly every single one in their inventory.
High-end puppets cost thousands of dollars each, so the company would reuse puppets from show to show. It’s rarely an issue, just repaint the grey moustache of King Lear brown and call it Cromwell.
However, the number of puppets needed for this show required them to get creative with their puppet recycling.
The Lion from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe became Member of Parliament “Death-to-Sinners” Palmer. The skeleton from their Halloween production of The Nightmare Before Christmas became Barebones the Leather Dealer. They had no other choice but to make the parrot from their production of Aladdin, Lady Falconbridge.
Cromwell’s four jesters—Trick, Giraff, Gramadoch, and Elespuru—were played by puppets who were previously Montreal Canadiens legends Rocket Richard, Boom Boom Geoffrion, Toe Blake, and Jean Beliveau respectively. They had been created especially for a 2005 show, On a tué mon frère Richard, about the 1955 Richard Riot.21
To add local flavour, the four Canadiens puppets were left in their uniforms for Cromwell.
That it was part of an all-night city-wide arts festival, and likely because it was free, four hours long, started at 10:00 p.m., and was a 181-year-old lyrical play by a French poet about a British shit-disturber, there were seven people in the audience when Cromwell started.
Half an hour into the first act it dropped to six when Noddy, who’d brought a case of Coors Light, drank his last beer, belched, said “fuck this shit,” and loudly, clanking beer cans and tripping over the legs of everyone else in attendance, left the theatre.
Milton didn’t understand a word of it, and he was pretty sure Ruddy and Ava didn’t either. But they were there in support of Georgette, so they sat through the first act, passing a bottle of cooking sherry between them that Ruddy had brought, grimacing with every sip.
By the second act all three of them were asleep, with Milton snoring the loudest. They were awoken by the house lights when they came up for the intermission after Act Three. It had already been nearly three hours, so they thought it was over and left. Headed for the bus to take them downtown to wander amongst the galleries and all-night diners/performance venues and bus shelters/concert-halls for the night.
Georgette was royally pissed that they didn’t stay through the entire play, let alone the entire Hugo marathon. She let them know with a barrage of “Putain!”s and “Connard!”s when they were all back in the apartment the next day.
The rest of the night blurred together into a lot of wandering around lost and cold, standing on street corners, in hotel lobbies, and metro station entrances trying to decipher a very artistic but otherwise incredibly useless map of venues and events. Ava and Ruddy were bent on seeing as much as they could, with a focus on being seen.
The range of things they saw ran the gamut from an art studio complex by the old port (i.e. an abandoned warehouse) where 100 artists gathered to make art for 24 hours straight, to a small independent theatre hosting a karaoke slow-dance-sock-hop-a-thon.
In a heavily graffitied alley in a particularly seedy part of town, a dance school hosted a multimedia performance that featured 12 naked dancers—six men, six women—dancing in the 22-below cold while video of a re-enactment of Napoleon’s march to Moscow was projected on their bodies. The twenty-minute piece was set to run every hour on the hour, but had been cancelled by the time Ava, Ruddy, and Milton arrived at 1:00 a.m. after two of the dancers were hospitalized with frostbite and the projector had been stolen.
In the lobby of the Musée d’Art Contemporain a performance artist from Newfoundland was splitting frozen codfish with an axe like they were firewood while reciting, or more like screaming, the 1949 Terms of Union with Canada.
It only took him a few hours to go through all of the 500 pounds of frozen fish he’d brought, so by 2:30 a.m. he was just pulverizing thawing fish parts with his axe while completing his fourth lap through article 46: “Oleomargarine or margarine shall not be sent, shipped, brought, or carried from the Province of Newfoundland into any other province of Canada.”
The smell of fish entrails hung thick in the air. No one watched for very long.
Ava, Ruddy, and Milton spent the longest time sitting in a dark corner of a ballroom in Casino de Montréal, located in the former French pavilion for Expo 67 on Île Notre Dame, watching a silent rave.
To avoid having the noise impact the Casino’s clientele of elderly addict gamblers and tourists, the rave was silent. The dancers wore wireless headphones connected to the DJ booth.
The Casino, in good capitalist form, found a loophole in the Toute la Nuit free-for-all policy by allowing anyone into the rave for free, but charging $20 each for headsets.
Instead of dancing, Milton, Ruddy, and Ava sat in a dark corner, coming down from their cooking sherry drunks transfixed by the sight of hundreds of ravers whacked out on ecstasy and $12 vodka-Red Bulls, throbbing in unison in complete silence.
Eventually it put them all to sleep until they were woken, again, by the house lights coming up when the party ended at 6:00 a.m. with an announcement about a free breakfast at a downtown bank.
“Breakfast?”
“I could eat.”
“Let’s go.”
. . .
Je m’excuse
Several hours later, Milton was laying on the hard marble floor of the bank, staring up at the cheap pot lights, crossing and uncrossing his eyes, making the lights double and dance back and forth, waiting for the 10,000-egg omelette to cook.
The aid-worker/volunteer/security force in their green vests circulated through the crowd waking people up, telling them they’d have to leave if they were going to sleep, and telling others the eggs would be ready any minute now.
It was 9:30 a.m., with the bank due to open to real customers in half an hour, when word spread through the mass that the omelette was finally ready.
What had been a peaceable crowd for the previous few hours—after the initial throng had calmed and the drunkest of the scrappers had been hauled off to jail—stirred slowly back to life, rose to their feet, and again began squeezing in towards the free eggs.
The riot police, who had all been sitting slumped in a pack, or pacing eagerly in the back corner of the bank, juste au cas où, also came back to life.
The vest brigade broke into their chorus of “S’il vous plaît,” but the long wait had sapped most of the life, and most of the drunken unruliness, out of the crowd and it was more of a lumbering, half-asleep, undead mass pushing towards the source of the egg stench.
Through the dopey madness, across a throng of thousands, on the opposite side of the bank, Milton saw Robin.
She was with Where’s Waldo from before, and Owly of paper-mâché dick-missile fame, and some others Milton didn’t recognize.
She laughed easily and despite her probably having been up all night watching puppets perform Les Mis and some angry Newfoundland separatist eviscerating putrid fish with an axe, she sparkled.
All of Milton’s guts, his hopes, his dreams, his visions of Nobel prizes and Oscars and perfect children running through meadows of daisies leapt into his throat.
He’d been replaying the night they met over and over on an endless loop for weeks, but now he clammed up. He’d been up all night. He smelled like fish and eggs and silent casino rave. He wanted very much to find the right way to get over to her, make it look all nonchalant, say just the right thing to make her laugh, make her eyes light up, make her fall madly in love with him.
But the lines he had been rehearsing were re-writes of that first night. All his dreams were of a vague future. He was utterly unprepared for this moment.
Of all the dozens of hip parties and hot music shows and trendy art happenings that he’d been to in search of Robin for the past several weeks, it was at a botched pre-dawn free breakfast in a bank lobby that he inevitably ran into her.
But you don’t get to choose your destiny; it chooses you. So, if it was to be today, it was to be today. Here. Now. He had no choice. It was his destiny. He had to act. He had to remind himself of the steely-eyed courage he’d forged on that long walk through the park. He had to remind himself that he was Edmund Hilroy, Benjamin Franklin, John George Diefenbaker!
He psyched himself up. He felt himself grow taller. More handsome. Stronger. He was ready to grab his life by the horns. Show it who’s boss. Sweep it off its feet.
He still didn’t know what to say, or how to act cool, and he especially didn’t know how to get over to her through the throng of hangry zombies.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands of people, and a swimming-pool-sized frying pan of goopy eggs between him and her. He was going to try to work his way over to where she was. He was going to try to get her attention in the meantime. Make eye contact. Maybe wave in an aloof but earnest way. Not too earnest. Not too aloof. Like you would wave at a neighbour across the produce section in the grocery store. If that neighbour was the love of your life and she didn’t know it yet. Maybe just a nod. Or a nod and wave. But one of them up-only nods, where your eyebrows carry your entire head upwards in warm, friendly recognition. Can’t be too eager though. Can’t let the brows go too wild. Can’t look too surprised or excited. Can’t snap the head back too hard. Can’t get whiplash in the lustful excitement of seeing your future walking around right in front of you.
He told Ava and Ruddy he was going to the bathroom and began elbowing his way through the crowd. He kept his eyes locked on Robin as he pushed his way through the mass of bodies.
“Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse.”
The thought occurred to him about halfway there that maybe he could show her a poem. Maybe read it to her. Or just give it to her.
“Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse.”
He felt for a wad of paper, sweaty and creased, in his back pocket. There were at least a dozen poems, all about her in one way or another. Maybe there was one in there that would be just right. Maybe she’d respect him more if she knew he was a serious artist too. Maybe there was one poem that was vague enough to not totally creep her out.
children swoop like a flock
of dump seagulls
without their sea
with their landlocked
landfill pantomime dreams
and they dont even want
children
seagulls
parasites
circling the garbage trucks
looking for a free meal
“Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse. Je m’excuse.”
As Milton got closer to the bubbling egg pan, the crowd grew thicker and his “Je m’excuse” began to lose its effect.
“Je m’excuse.”
He began having to shove his elbows into the smalls of people’s backs and throw his shoulder with all his weight into narrow openings between people to get them to move. He slowed to barely moving at all.
Eyes still locked on Robin. Mind racing through the inventory of poems he had in his pocket, trying to write a scene that began with some cool chit-chat, segued effortlessly into him unfolding a poem from his pocket and whispering it into Robin’s ear as they became an island of two people falling in love while a stream of undead flowed past them towards some free tepid omelette soup.
Having fought his way to the last row of people between him and the omelette, he threw his weight into a barely perceptible gap between a guy and a girl who were jockeying to be among the first to get their paper bowl of egg slop.
Just as he did, though, his concentration was broken by Robin’s eyes. She saw him. He saw her. They saw each other. He could have sworn her eyes lit up. He could have sworn she flashed a barely perceptible smile that confirmed she had feelings too, that confirmed soon she’d be Mrs. Milton Ontario.
In the midst of imagining what song they’d have their first dance to at their wedding reception in the Bellybutton Legion, someone tried to push past him going the other way. The two pushes acted as a force multiplier and knocked the girl Milton was trying to get by off balance. Standing, as she was, in a puddle of eggs that were spilled in the first act of the breakfast gong show, her feet slid out from under her and she barrelled into the ankles of one of the riot police.
This set off a chain reaction causing several riot police to fall like dominos, the last one crashing into the frying pan handle—which served no functional purpose—sending the 10,468-egg omelette, as the Guinness Adjudicator had certified, sloshing through the air, blanketing Robin and a few hundred bystanders in goo, which settled into a 6-inch layer on the floor of the bank.
The commotion also knocked over a number of the propane burners, setting fire to the mountain of emptied egg cartons and paper bowls waiting to be filled.
. . .
Niveau trois
Riot police are trained to perform a number of escalating crowd-control measures. These range from Level One: NonActive Deterrence—i.e. standing in a position that is visible to a potentially volatile crowd to dissuade them from notions of violence and chaos—to Level Five: Active Suppression with Lethal Force—i.e. shooting people.
Within each level there are a number of sub-levels depending upon the circumstances. Level Two, for instance, is Active Deterrence, meaning the officers place themselves between the crowd and their target. If the presence of the officers isn’t enough to calm or disperse the crowd, the commander can escalate to Level Two-B: Non-Engaged Active Deterrence, to include a highly choreographed and exhaustively practiced series of manoeuvres that include marching, stomping, slapping their clubs on their shields, and chanting “Cesser et se disperser!”—very much similar to the haka dance that has made the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team one of the most feared in the world.
If the dance routine fails, they might then begin moving towards the crowd with the intent of taking away their space and scaring them off.
Level Three, initiated in the bank lobby when Inspecteur Lebarbare began shouting “Niveau trois engage!” after Milton precipitated the synchronized riot police tumbling routine, is Active Non-Lethal Suppression and Detention. That is riot police-speak for “commence beating the shit out of rioters with clubs and arresting as many of them as possible.”
Riot police, however, are trained and equipped generally for outdoor riots. Wielding large shields and swinging clubs is most easily done in open spaces and on solid ground. The bank lobby was enormous, but it was crowded, and the solid ground was buried in sloppy eggs. So as they began to push out from the centre of the bank in attempts to push the crowd outside, and as they began to swing their clubs, and as they attempted to grab those nearest the centre of the rapidly escalating riot and bind their hands with plastic handcuffs, they slipped around on the omelette mess, and the entire scene devolved into a very sloppy wrestling match.
It was a scene that would later be recreated for a completely different effect at several rue Sainte-Catherine strip clubs with the always popular “spectacle des œufs,” daily wrestling matches featuring scantily clad women rolling around in kiddie pools full of scrambled eggs.
Milton ended up on the floor in the original dominoing, so he avoided being clubbed immediately. He managed to fight his way to his feet and join the throng of people fleeing the swinging batons. He did get hit on the side of the head and the back of the shoulder with a club, which left some serious bruises, but he managed to escape.
Montrealers never shy away from a chance to have a proper riot. As the egg zombie horde spilled into the streets, they started smashing windows, flipping over and setting fire to cars, looting jewelry stores and Baby Gaps, and climbing light poles draped in Quebec flags singing Montreal Canadien fight songs.
The crowds and trail of destruction spread quickly in all directions and the 300 heavily armed riot police could do little to stop them, still trapped inside the bank, slopping around in the egg goo trying to disperse the crowd and make room for the fire department to put the burning pile of cartons and paper bowls out.
The chief of police had to call in reinforcements from multiple other police departments to assist. But even then, smoke could be seen rising from downtown for the rest of the day.
Milton got out of the bank and wandered around the chaos looking for Ava and Ruddy, or, and mostly, Robin. He couldn’t find any of them, and decided, as the number of police began to grow, to go home out of it.
The buses and metro had been shut down while the rioting was going on, so Milton had to hike all the way back over the mountain in the freezing cold to get home.
He got back to the apartment late in the afternoon, and found Ava sitting on the step smoking a cigarette.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. What happened to the side of your head?”
“Club, I think.”
“Ouch.”
“Why are you here?”
“Looking for Ruddy, I thought he might show up here. Have you seen him?”
“No. I just walked back up here from downtown. I was looking for you guys.”
“Argh. Mind if I wait here with you?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Upstairs, Georgette was sleeping off her Hugo marathon, and Noddy had gone to work. Ava and Milton turned on the TV and watched news coverage of the riots. Shots from the Channel 11 Traffic-copter of packs of people being chased from burning car to burning car by packs of police. Live shots of people climbing out of broken store windows with their arms full of electronics and diapers. Live reports from reporters reporting live from the scene.
“I’m at this intersection where rioters have just done that thing and police have responded in this way. Back to you in the studio.”
The sound of the sirens on TV woke Georgette.
“Putain! Ta gueule! A riot! Mon dieu! C’est fou! Merde!”
Noddy came home from work not long after.
“Fuckin’ metro’s closed because of this bullshit! Cost me 40 bucks to take a cab. There’s cops everywhere, b’ys.”
The riot on TV was by far the most interesting and exciting performance any of them had seen that night or day. But it was difficult to compute that the burning cars and water cannons and tear-gas grenades were happening live, just down the street, where they had been a few hours ago.
It looked more like something that only happens on TV. That only happens somewhere else. But, having been there, having been trampled, having been skulled by a baton, having escaped the clutches of police, having run through the streets that were now on fire, it made the entire situation somehow something else. It was almost more real. Almost.
It was more than just a spectacle on the News. It was a spectacle they had witnessed, they had lived through, they had survived.
But they survived it in much the same way a bumpkin survives a long walk through a cold park. They’ll burn the sound of sirens and the smell of smoke in their memories, they’ll tell the story, they’ll turn it into their shitty art. They’ll think of themselves as somehow courageous, as somehow something.
When, in the end, it’s barely even that. A free-breakfast clusterfuck of a riot is as close as any of them will get to a cause. And what a cause.
It was all fun and games until the riot police started bashing skulls in, then it was still just more fun and games.
“Look at them fuckers go, b’y! Gonna be some sick deals on Craigslist this week.”
Provocateur en chef
The four of them watched the news play and replay highlights from the riot well into the night. Around 10:00 p.m. a serious-looking anchor sitting at a serious-looking news desk came on.
“Channel 11 has just gotten security video footage of the incident that incited the outbreak of violence at what was supposed to be a celebratory breakfast for art festival-goers at the downtown headquarters of Banque de la Nouvelle-France. This footage has just been released by police, who are asking for the public’s help in identifying those involved with starting the ugly incident, which has since spread throughout the downtown.”
Grainy black-and-white security video from inside the bank came on the screen. A short clip played showing a massive crowd milling about a massive frying pan full of eggs that was being stirred by 20 people in chefs’ hats with canoe paddles, surrounded by riot police.
“The chief of police has told reporters that the riot squad was dispatched around 6:00 a.m. this morning to the scene of the free breakfast that was the culmination of the Festival Toute la Nuit to assist event organizers with crowd control.”
On the video the crowd was dense and restless but contained, when suddenly several police officers toppled over, knocking the pan over, spilling the eggs, starting a fire.
“This footage is from after 9 o’clock this morning. Police have told reporters that the crowd was subdued until this point, when an unprovoked attack on police took place and the scene, as you see, was quickly plunged into chaos.”
They replayed the video in slow motion and zoomed into the part of the crowd where the “unprovoked attack” came from. They put a halo of light around the area of most interest.
“Now pay close attention to the highlighted portion of the video. It clearly shows… RIGHT THERE! An unidentified man throwing this young woman into the line of police officers. Watch it again…”
The highlighted portion showed a grainy black-and-white man bumping into a grainy black-and-white woman, and the woman bumping into the line of grainy black-and-white riot police.
They played it again, from another angle.
“As you can see, from this alternate angle, the woman is standing there, minding her own business, when this man… RIGHT THERE! Throws her towards the police barricade.”
The alternate angle showed the same grainy blur, just from the side instead of the back. The shapes of distinct people were barely discernable.
“At this hour, the man who incited this terrible scene remains at large. The police are asking for the public’s help in bringing him to justice.”
They put a blown up still image from the grainy video on the screen along with the number for police, all under the headline “Riot Provocateur Remains At-Large.”
It wasn’t easy to tell the man in the picture was Milton—the graininess and blurriness and black-and-whiteness of it all—but every head in the room watching with him snapped around.
“Hoooollllyyyy fuuuuuuu-ck!”
Milton went beet-red with embarrassment.
“O.M.G! Milton!?”
“What?”
“C’est toi?”
“I… dunno… Maybe? I was there. I got bumped.”
“Bahahaha! Milton Most Wanted! Fuckin’-eh buddy! Nice! NICE! Yis, b’y!”
“I cannot believe it! Oh. My. God!”
“Putain!”
“Am I gonna get in trouble?”
“Nah, b’y. Look at that ugly fucker. Can’t tell if that’s a super-criminal or a bag of dicks. No one’s gonna know it’s you.”
“Should I turn myself in? It was an accident, I got bumped.”
“Fuck that, b’y. They’ll eat you alive. An Anglo!? They’ll string you up from the tower at the Big O. You’re fine. No one knows you, that picture is junk, b’y.”
“The police are offering a cash reward for information leading to the arrest of the Riot Provocateur.”
“Or maybe I’ll turn you in. Make a buck. Heheheheh.”
“Somebody is going to! Somebody knows! Somebody saw! I’m going to go to jail!”
Milton began pacing across the room.
“Milty, b’y.”
“I’m going to rot in jail for the rest of my life because of this. I was just trying…”
“Why were you even over there? You said you were going to the bathroom, they were, like, behind us.”
“I can’t go to jail! I’m not built for it!”
“Milt!”
“Oh my god, Milton, did you do that on purpose?”
“I can’t. I can’t. I can’t!”
“Putain!”
“Milton!”
Noddy grabbed Milton by the shoulders.
“I can’t! I’m too young to go to jail. I’m not tough. I can’t!”
“MILTON!”
Noddy slapped him in the face.
“No one is going to jail. No one is going to snitch on you. Are they?!”
“But…”
“Are they?!”
“No, mon dieu, those pigs deserve that!”
“I won’t say anything. It was just an accident. Right?”
“We’ve all got your back. You aren’t going anywhere. No one in this town knows you. No one knows it’s you in the video besides us. So just chill the fuck out, b’y, it’s fine.”
“Ok.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s fine. Ok.”
“Your ass would be destroyed so fast in prison anyway, b’y, nobody wants that. Bahahaha.”
“Ta gueule! Nohdeeeeee! Connard!”
Milton gradually calmed down, and they all stayed glued to the news. The video of his grainy blob shape bumping into the girl’s grainy blob shape bumping into the policeman’s grainy blob shape played every half hour. They called it the Omelette Riot and had dubbed the grainy grey blob of Milton the Provocateur en chef.
Sometime in the middle of the night, Milton fell asleep on the couch in the glow of the riot coverage. Georgette and Noddy had already gone to bed, Ava was sleeping on her usual tiny love seat down the hall. No one had heard from Ruddy. Or Robin.
. . .
Le voyou
Ruddy woke Milton up at around 7:00 a.m. the next morning with a slap on the leg.
“Milty!”
“What! What?”
“I got arrested!”
“What?”
“They got me. Fuckers. I didn’t do anything. I was just trying to leave the bank when some asshole cop grabbed me, cuffed me, and put me in a van.”
“What?”
“Yeah man. They had nothing. I didn’t do anything. But they kept me in ‘the shoe’ overnight! But I’m out now, ’cause I didn’t do anything. Just got a bullshit ticket for $500! Like I’m fucking paying that! Bullshit! My dad said he’d sic his lawyer on them.”
“What?”
As each of the others woke up to Ruddy’s tales of doing hard time, his story grew and grew.
Noddy was impressed with Ruddy for surviving a night in “the can.”
“I thought for sure you’d be somebody’s bitch before they even closed the door behind ya.”
Georgette didn’t really care.
“Ta gueule! Pourquoi es-tu toujours là? Rentre chez toi! Va-t-en! Putain!”
Ava was the last to wake up, and the happiest to see Ruddy.
“Oh my god! I thought you might be dead! I couldn’t live without you.”
They were supposedly broken up at the time, but that didn’t stop Ava from burying her tongue down Ruddy’s throat.
“Never leave me!”
Ava got the full story out of Ruddy.
When the riot broke out, he curled up into the fetal position and started screaming near the exit of the bank. To get him out of the way, keep him from getting trampled, and to pad their arrest stats, the police threw him in the paddy wagon and put him in jail.
In jail he curled up into a fetal position in the corner of the holding cell and began screaming, which annoyed both prisoners and guards and led to his being thrown in solitary confinement, or “the shoe,” as he called it, overnight.
They let him out in the morning with a ticket for contravening the city’s noise by-law, which they gave to everyone they arrested. But while most of the arrested rioters, looters, car burners got the minimum fine of $75, Ruddy’s ticket was the maximum possible, $487, because he made such an annoying racket in the jail.
“The food, the people, the conditions in there, the shoe! It’s all so medieval and vile.”
“Oh my god.”
“Yeah, you’re a real hard ticket, b’y.”
“It was rough, man.”
“Not nearly as hard as Milty ’ere. Buddy’s on the run. Montreal’s most wanted. Right here, b’y. That’s hard as fuck.”