John
Woolfrey 4004 words
1729
Rue de la Visitation
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
H2L
3C3
(514)
597-2189
Le Quartier des
Condoms Mignons
Copyright 2005 by Raymond John Woolfrey
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
Now I live in the
second-floor flat of a three-storey
greystone, complete, I’m happy to say, with outdoor wrought-iron staircase. It turns
gracefully between two young trees whose boughs form a canopy over it. The step
treads are pink, of all colours. Not a bright pink, though. The last landlady
painted them a dusty rose after she and her lesbian friend Hélène tore up the
old porch floor and laid a new one. The pink won’t last, though. Already after
one winter it’s worn off the middle of each step. At the bottom stencilled on
the sidewalk are the words Gay Love.
They appeared after my birthday party this spring—a guest did it during the night,
I found out later. It was his job to stencil that all over the city—on
sidewalks, buildings—anywhere he thought it might be artistic. It was the name
of a new bar. I didn’t care. I felt honoured to have those words as my welcome
mat.
My new landlady never mentioned it. She
doesn’t care much about what I do as long as I pay the rent on time, which is
what I did just now. As usual, she answered the door blinking at the daylight,
as though I’d just summoned her from a darkened bed chamber. Also as usual, her
two small children spilled ahead of her into the front porch as I was let in,
shouting greetings at me. With her small, frail body draped in black, her long
dyed-black hair hanging like fine straw about her thin shoulders, she turned
her pallid face up to regard me with black eyes obscured by contact lenses
stained brown from all the cigarettes she and her chum[1]
smoke. A crooked smile shattered her normally lugubrious countenance as she
greeted me. “Allô, Marie-Québec,” I said, smiling back. Her parents, fervent indépendantistes,
gave her that New World version of the name Marie-France. I don’t get the
feeling she doesn’t like me for being “English,” though. She and her chum are
both very cool, like beatniks. I stayed just long enough to give her the cheque—Antoine
and Laurence were too clamorous for either of us to bear.
Marie-Quebec’s chum, Yves, sings French chansons. She’s his manager. Yves’s studio is right
beneath my bedroom but the previous landlady insulated their ceiling, so I can
only hear his basso voice and the lower notes of his electronic keyboard just a
little bit—and never at the wrong time. The earliest he starts is at ten in the
morning, so when I sleep in his music makes a tolerable alarm clock. He’s
practising now. I can also hear the kids running up and down the hall, but the
insulation blocks their treble voices completely. Now Yves is shouting at them:
C’est assez, là ! (“That’s enough!”)
I don’t mind neighbours’ music when they
make it themselves—then it’s real music. Above me live a pair of opera
queens. They rented a piano to hammer out their favourite pieces as they try to
sing them (also in the front, above my bedroom). One of them lives quite
frenetically, rushing around from room
to room. Every now and then he plunks himself in front of his piano where he
pounds out the opera tune he’s working on, but only for about fifteen minutes at a time, and then he resumes his
rushing around. When the two of them play their opera records, all I can hear
is the occasional wailing and the drum rolls at the finales.
I, too, have a piano. The previous tenant
just left it behind when she moved, and her brothers, who moved the rest of her
stuff, asked me if I’d mind keeping it for a while. Would I mind? I could play
my favourite classical pieces and use it to learn my notes for choir. I keep it
in my double bedroom at the front along with my desk, computer and bed. The
double bedroom for my roommates faces the back; so does the living room and
kitchen. The flat is L-shaped, like most Montreal places this size. But because
the building next door burned down many years ago, and the lot remains vacant,
there is nothing to block my view from the kitchen or to darken my living room.
My kitchen is very big and bright with two
high windows on the side that overlook the vacant lot next door, and a door to
the balcony at the back. Although it’s very cold in winter, and very hot in
summer as the late-afternoon sun floods through the bamboo blinds, it’s also
very private. The back is enclosed by two windowless brick walls, and the three
old ladies with whom I share the fire-escape balcony have never even opened
their back door. On sunny summer days I eat out there and sometimes I sunbathe
to the sound of the wind blowing through the trees at the back of the vacant
lot. It’s easy to pretend I’m in the country.
The only neighbours who can see in are the
fiftyish man and woman who live in the ground-floor flat across the vacant lot.
She lounges in her sunroom all year round in a thick, white terry robe. On warm
summer mornings, she sits on her deck outside and chats—always in her white
robe—with the men who come by to work in the sawdust mill behind her duplex.
They have to drive along her gravel driveway to get to it. I’m not sure who is
whose landlord, and I don’t understand how they manufacture sawdust—I always
thought it was a by-product; but the sign says plainly enough Bran de Scie, and trucks laden with it
lumber out every now and then. I call one of the men who works in that mill
Butch because of the stiff, little-man way he walks: shoulders back, his hands
in his pockets, and his confederate-soldier-style cap perched on his head.
Despite the cap, I’m pretty sure he’s not gay.
One evening, as a roommate and I were
lingering at our kitchen table, the lounge lady and her husband returned from
an evening out. The husband did a little strip-tease, bumping and grinding
while he took off his shirt. Eventually he saw us laughing, and they shut us
out with their vertical blinds.
People walk their dogs in the vacant lot
between us. Late on summer nights, men used to cruise in the bushes until a
neighbour behind installed one of those movement-sensing spotlights. The city
let the lot grow wild the first two summers I lived here. Cats hunted and
stalked birds in its thickets.
Past the lounge lady’s sunroom and the
sawdust mill, and beyond a crab-apple tree, I can see the basketball court
where shirtless boys shoot hoops in summer. Mostly I just hear the thump-thump
on the pavement and their lusty shouts and grunts. The court is in the end of a
park where more buildings had been razed by fire, and beyond it nests a plastic
pink flamingo up in a tree all year long.
My three old-lady neighbours next door—two
sisters and their aunt—are all about the same age. The aunt is a retired
textile worker who sometimes sits despondent looking, chin on hand, on the
front balcony. The two sisters own a hairdressing salon in the west end. They
sometimes talk to me in English, but they love that I address them with vous,
rather than the tu almost everybody uses.
Mes voisines and I get along quite well, partly
because we all live quietly; Marie-Québec says they listen to their tvs with earplugs. The only time I ever
hear anything is when a man—a brother, maybe—comes over Sunday evenings, about
once a month. He talks loudly, causing them all to laugh and carry on. I, on
the other hand, have had roommates who have driven them crazy by playing the
stereo loud when I was out.
Les Thivièrge have lived here for
twenty-five years. When I asked them what the name of the quartier used to be,
they shrugged their shoulders and guessed, Paroisse[2]
Sacre-Cœur, after the church they go to every Saturday afternoon at five.
That’s about the only time they take their ’75 Buick Skylark out from behind a
duplex across the street where they pay to park it. The church is just two
blocks up on Ontario Street, but I guess the pageantry of going to church by
car appeals to them. Perhaps when they were girls, papa used to drive the
family, maybe even with horses.
When I moved in here three years ago, the
duplex across the street, with its three flats and a trendy restaurant in its
corner commercial space, was quite dilapidated. The flats are small, but
nevertheless an old couple, who have also lived there for about twenty-five
years, share it with their son, his wife and their baby. They come from New
Brunswick and have an Acadian name: Arsenault, I think. Their flat has no
balcony, so they lay cushions on the window sills to lean their elbows on when
they want to watch the street below. Their pitou[3] sits on the sill with them, its ears
twitching at every sound, its bulging eyes darting around with worry. In
mid-November they decorate their windows with Christmas lights that flash on
and off all at the same time.
A biker lived in the flat next door to
them. Every morning he’d start up his very loud, old, and poorly tuned Harley.
Summer evenings he’d party to loud country and western music with the windows
wide open. One evening he was drinking beer on the sidewalk in front while
talking to a friend. Rather than go inside to use his bathroom, he simply
pissed right there into the gutter.
Below him, on the ground floor, lived a
man who dressed like a carpenter. I watched him replace some bricks that had
fallen from the façade to expose the inner wood wall. When he left a hose
running in the street—he’d been using it to mix the mortar—and went inside, the
kid that stayed with him from time to time picked it up and wet everything in
sight, ending by sticking the hose in between the bricks and the inner wall and
holding it there—to see if it would fill up, I guess. The father, when he came
out, cursed and chased the kid away, but he didn’t seem more upset than that.
A group of young anglophone guys bought
the building and turned out the biker who they said hadn’t paid any rent for
some time. The carpenter was induced to leave too (they left the Acadian family
alone), and they renovated the flats themselves, putting in recessed lighting
everywhere and a new bathroom behind a large window on the second floor. A cute
pair of twenty-year-olds rented it later; they weren’t shy about showering with
the blinds up, and I didn’t mind.
Over the next year, the two sets of flats
to the left of that building were converted into two-storey row houses. Two gay
anglophone brothers bought one of them, and soon afterward, a single gay man
bought the other. Before this, I was the only other English-speaking person on
this street, and the two opera queens above me and I were the only gays. Soon
after, more gays moved in, as well as more gay anglophones—mostly anglos from
other cities looking for cheap rent.
On warm summer evenings I sit out on my
front balcony. Furtive-looking dark-haired boys pass by, their eyebrows knitted
as though trying to solve one of life’s important mysteries. Invisibly, their
gay antennae scan the street for sex. Sometimes they catch sight of me up above
and cast a steamy glance that feels like we’re doing it right then and there. I
can tell if they have the time or are on their way somewhere. Even when there’s
no time, we all cruise, look, gotta get a good look at whomever we find even
mildly interesting—and, naturally, make sure we’re getting checked out as well.
Everybody in this city cruises. After all,
Montreal men and women do themselves up pretty well (anglos here must be one of
the very few groups of English-speaking people who dress smartly, having
learned from their francophone counterparts), and sex seems to be the
ever-present undercurrent. “Oh my God, why can’t New York men look this good!”
I once heard an exasperated woman cry to her friend at a street corner, as
though she’d seen just one too many hot guys.
We love to cruise, we love to look. A
friend from Saskatoon said that back there everybody looked straight ahead,
never at anybody else; that was what he liked about Montreal—everybody looks
right into everybody else’s face. Everywhere.
Once, in the seventies, when a leather bar
on Stanley Street was getting raided (downtown where the gay bars used to be),
a crowd of straights oozed down the half block from St. Catherine Street just
to watch—no heckling or insults, no egg-throwing—this was entertainment for
them. They murmured and laughed among themselves, the chic young women and gay
men eying the dark-haired cops with their Latin moustaches. I like to think
that that large crowd of club-goers intimidated the police, as though there
were too many witnesses to their bullying, because soon the paddy wagon drove
away empty and the cops themselves dispersed. The rest of us went back into our
respective bars, the show over.
My is officially called Centre-Sud by the
city, and Le Village Gai, semi-officially, by gays and gay-friendlies. It is
one of the poorest areas in Canada. There are small apartment buildings housing
people who have lived on welfare from generation to generation. Dozens of
little flats like the ones across the street from me were built to house
workers for the factories that sprung up around the turn of the century. Back
then the city was divided into Catholics in the east (French and Irish
together) and the English-speaking Protestants in the west.
Since the CBC built its Maison
Radio-Canada in the seventies (demolishing rows and rows of homes to do it), yuppies
moved in and converted some of the duplexes into condos. The gays who live here
fall into almost every economic class. I think most have moved here from the
country, like the workers before them, which is perhaps why it feels like a
village.
I have an idea of what a village feels
like from the Laurentian town near which I spent my summers growing up. As in
Sainte-Suzanne, side streets in the gay village run uphill and downhill from
its main street, St. Catherine. Farther down from Rue Principale in
Sainte-Suzanne lies the lake; below my village, though a bit farther away and
cut off by shipping docks, flows the St. Lawrence River. When I walk down to go
shopping on St. Catherine Street, the view at the end of my street is the old
French pavilion from Expo 67 on its artificial island; now it’s a casino, all
lit up gold and glittery at night. It’s run by the same government corporation
that sells lottery tickets to the poor people of my neighbourhood.
The shops along St. Catherine Street
alternate between new designer bistros and the original cheap-clothing stores
from before the gay conquest. One big café window may show off the village
showoffs with their buzzed haircuts, pierced heads, and surly looks, their eyes
never missing a hot object passing by, while behind the next window, with its
yellow sun filter, may lurk chipped, mournful mannequins in dowdy housecoats.
Everything is always on sale or being “liquidated,” marked by bright orange
tags in the shapes of tiny explosions.
That’s the name of my favourite store:
Explosion. It’s a clean, spacious dollar store where knowledgeable
yellow-aproned women will show you where to find those burner liners, and
without false hospitality. I can’t describe its smell, only that it’s clean—and
sort of Christmassy; every dollar store
has it. Yvette, a neighbour of mine, works there on Saturdays. She always
greets me with a cheery “Salut, Williaum !” One day they had a
bin of Wrigley’s gum by the cash with a handwritten sign above it that read Spermints. I figured they must have
been selling well, considering the clientele.
I love to trot home holding one of their
bags: bright yellow with a cartoon bomb and sizzling fuse. And, perhaps on
purpose, but I’ve never been sure, the bar above the store was called Big Bang
in one of its many incarnations.
Most of the city’s gay bars are here, from
the trendiest dance bars for the fashionable, to tacky piano bars for moumounes[4]. One bar was called Au Deux R, after its two
owners, whose first names both started with the letter R. I never
thought to translate it into English, so I was amused when I heard an anglo
with a slight hiss in his speech call it “Two Rs.”
Getting to the village by Métro is easy,
if not unsettling. From the platform you board a conveyor belt that draws you
through a long, sloping tube. Before you are injected into St. Catherine
Street, you must pass through the entrance with its orange and white tiles that
are somehow arranged to look as though they’re lined up in curvy rows (when
you’re drunk it’s hell; at all times, it looks like something from a Fellini
film—I can hear his music in my head as I pass). But for most jobs I’ve had
while living there, I could walk to work. To get to my newspaper job in Plateau
Mont-Royal, each time I cross the very spot where the man in the blue Chevrolet
and the one who looked like a turkey vulture tried to pick me up. The hustlers
have long since moved to the village.
There are almost no high-rises here. Most
of the buildings are duplexes and triplexes in rows, without breaks, except for
the portes-cochère, passages built for residents to lead their horses into
their backyards.
There are dépanneurs at every corner (even anglos call
convenience stores that). Boys on heavy, black bicycles deliver all year round,
beer bottles rattling in the big metal cages on the front. I have a favourite
dépanneur. Most of the people who work there and use it are tattooed biker
types and their chain-smoking girlfriends. But when gays come in, the toughs
don’t even seem to notice anything different—they might joke with us, but not
about us. Last Halloween, when Michael and I stopped by my dépanneur in our
matching bright pink dresses with the chiffon, polka-dot hats, the guys there
laughed playfully and said we were très belles filles.
I have never seen nor heard of any
friction between gays and working-class straights in the village. The little
fag-bashing, relative to other cities, that occurs seems to be perpetrated by
neo-Nazi punks from farther east or west. In fact, it’s often hard to tell the
gays and straights apart, and there are a lot of working-class gays here.
Sometimes I’m surprised that certain men in the bars are gay—they look and act
just like any Québécois working guy: tough but jovial.
I think people here just don’t care about
straight or gay, just like in most of Quebec. Sexuality is considered normal. I
saw a guy in a park once late at night pulling on his cock—it was sticking down
the leg of his shorts and was getting pretty hard. What he didn’t know was that
on a balcony above him two obese, middle-aged women and a man were watching
him. They started to laugh and make comments like: Ô, le petit cochon—tsk,
tsk, méchant, lui ! (Oh, what a little pig! So naughty!) Almost anywhere
else in North America they might have called the police.
In another instance, Michael was involved
in a hot little pile of three men at a nude swimming hole, when a man with two
children surprised them. All the father said to them was: Héh, les
gars—contrôle tes hormones ! (Hey, guys—control your hormones!)
The village is also one of the few place
in Montreal where they don’t know (or don’t care) that my first language is
English. Serge, the big, tough-looking but very friendly cashier at the
dépanneur once asked me: T’as un accent—tu viens d’où, toé ? (You got an
accent—where’re you from?), thinking maybe I was from a part of French Canada
he couldn’t recognize. But I don’t understand a lot of the joking and chit-chat
that takes place there, which is another reason why it feels like a village to
me. (I was an outsider in Sainte-Suzanne, too.)
Almost all the buildings in the area were
built right up against the sidewalk. If a light’s on inside, you can’t help but
look in. Everybody does. The people within will usually look right back out at
you. (The favoured colour for inside walls by far is emerald green, by the
way.) In winter big clumps of snow might fall off roofs onto your head; in
summer, people take wooden kitchen chairs outside to sit around their stoops.
Everybody has their own door, whether it’s on the sidewalk or atop a twisting
staircase. We all have back doors, too, so it’s usually easy to cool these
flats on hot summer nights.
These features are part of what makes a
flat a flat—un logement, in French—as opposed to an apartment; the two
used to be listed separately in La Presse. They’re meant to feel like
houses, with fronts and backs, front porches and back porches, and backyards as
well. They have their own hot-water heaters, and you must provide your own
fridge and stove and pay for the heating costs yourself. Landlords usually let
you decorate any way you want. They often live below—which may or may not be
convenient. I prefer the second floor: I can look out onto the street, but
passers-by can’t look in; and the floor is usually warmed by the flat below
(the insulation beneath my floor, then, is a mixed blessing.)
Most flats are heated by electricity because of its relative
cheapness in Quebec. But before that, in this area at least, oil, coal and even
wood stoves did the job, and people really blasted them so their effects could
reach everywhere inside. That’s probably why today, even when it’s twenty below
zero, you might see old men sitting in their undershirts in their (what must
be) overheated flats. There’s one shirtless old man up the street who pokes his
upper body out the window to lean on his windowsill from time to time, no
matter what the weather.
The “relatively cheap” electricity is
provided by Hydro-Québec, that great and notorious provincially run corporation
whose head office sits just west of the Village on the edge of downtown. That’s
the building with the giant letter Q, with its lightning-bolt tail. You
can’t see it from the west side because the skyscrapers block the view. And
from wealthy Westmount, on the other side of downtown, all you see are the same
corporate logos found in any other Canadian city. For the almost solidly
French-speaking Montréalais living on the east side, this big letter Q
is the symbol of the corporation that was built as the cornerstone of Québec Inc.
But, for the Village Gai, where even straights come for fun, le gros Q
is the perfect symbol of Quebec’s delight in things risqué, things sexual: Q
in French is pronounced like cul, which means “ass,” and sex in general.
Faire du cul. To have sex. So
it’s fitting, then, that the Village Gai should have emerged in its
glow—complete with its lightning-bolt tail.
[1] Friend or boyfriend
[2] Parish
[3] Small mongrel
[4] Effeminate in a maiden-aunt way