Inner Dialogues

Haunted

Walked around parts of downtown Montreal the other day, in the area between Stanley and Atwater, with my son. First I spotted Cleopatra’s, and I described the many shows I’d seen there with friends: Tina Turner, Cher, Donna Summer, all performed by male impersonators. Going east, many new facades to be seen on Ste-Catherine, mere hints of the old buildings up top, on the third floor, windows painted black, blank with boards or buried in coats of graffiti. Here, the still-standing smoked-meat joint where we used to eat after partying on Crescent or Mountain, the one where a cockroach crawled up the wall near my knees as we sat at the counter; there, a nightclub with a rooftop terrace for the pretty crowd, now a vegetarian palace. Here, in this tiny boarded-up space, the best porchetta sandwiches we’d ever eaten. There (St-Marc or St-Mathieu?) a comic book store still doing business. Got my morning coffee and almond croissants here, took this route to work that-a-way.

Three buildings where I lived in as many years when I was about the age Alex is now: the first, looking much the same, a plain concrete highrise. The second, a tiny brick box darkened by decades of grime; same ancient windows and balconies; a for-rent sign. I remember my little apartment faced the back, looking on an office building and a brick wall. I’d painted the living room hot pink and my decorations included a pink plastic flamingo and a black bakelite mannequin’s hand. That was my quasi-Art Deco phase. I recall not spending much time in that place; we were right downtown, in the heart of the action.

The last building, my favourite of the three, has slipped into neglect. A first-floor window was cracked; a second-floor window was propped open with an empty beer bottle. There was rubbish and bare soil to either side of the gracious front door. I remember more about this one; it had a double Murphy bed in the living room and a breakfast nook in the kitchen. I cooked cheap food on the small gas stove near the back door, either because I was too broke or too lazy to eat anything else. Rice with butter and salt, or Kraft Dinner. I had a large, scarred wooden table in the living room, upon which I made leather belts with all kinds of studs and shiny things: the sorts of belts you can still buy in any store today. That was my semi-punk era. I had a really good party there once – amazing that we managed to fit so many people into such a small space. The next morning, I saw that someone had thrown up in the bathtub.

Just a couple of blocks over were two concrete highrises with stories.  The further was where the boyfriend of the time lived. Eighteenth floor: his balcony gave me the willies. He was the one who, unbeknownst to me while we were dating, slept with every girl in my entourage and probably a few more. We drank Johnny Walker and Guinness, and listened to a lot of Keith Jarrett and Laurie Anderson, and read Yukio Mishima. The second building blew up at four in the morning. That is to say, a street-facing apartment was destroyed by a bomb planted in a television set, which had been delivered to the tenant. It was a drug thing. I was watching TV with a friend at my place when we heard it, and the booming magnitude of the sound made us gape at each other in horror.

Throughout this tour of litter-strewn side streets and still-stately brown or greystones, I felt as though my younger self was standing right behind my shoulder, drawing my eyes to this doorway (“it used to be something… a rock club, I think…”), to buildings where close friends had lived, to the favourite thrift store whose elaborate façade was preserved as part of Concordia’s holdings. Every identification brought a crowd of fragmented memories and images. What I ate, what I wore, even what I was feeling at any given time.

It’s no wonder I felt haunted. Not really nostalgic, because in retrospect it feels like a hectic time, with too much craziness, too many people, too many situations, so many highs and lows. We were young and fashionable, free to do as we pleased, more or less. My evenings and weekends (because I always held down an office job somewhere on weekdays) were a blur of activity, afternoon terraces and sleek hair salons (La Coupe was new, and all the rage), musty vintage clothing shops and late-night café-cognacs in basement restaurants, disco lights and dim punk bars, that very seedy yet oh-so-authentic reggae bar somewhere near Tupper. Teetering through freezing slush down Mackay in high heels and short skirts in the middle of winter to the club on Ste-Catherine where you could feel the dance floor bounce dangerously with the pounding of synchronized feet. Backgammon games at Darwin’s, playing suckers for a dollar a game. Burgers at Carole’s, the one greasy spoon on Crescent, when Ronny Iadeluca was flipping patties and talking a blue streak. Just a few years before he died on his motorcycle, a mere hundred or so feet from his driveway. Sammy, tie-wearing airline agent by day and grimy biker by night, later killed in a plane crash. “Golda” and others who would die of AIDS. Rose Mary, party girl extraordinaire, of cancer.

Memories revived and now best left to lie dusty and still in the back corners of the mind.