Two major forest fires are raging in my former HRM stomping ground, leading to the evacuation of 4,000 homes on the Eastern shore.
I was speaking with my friend George and he reminded me that many had warned that this might happen since much of the downed timber in the backwoods as a result of Hurricane Juan was left there to rot. Almost five years later, we could be seeing the result of inaction.
Two months into living in Montréal, I’ve had several people ask me if I miss Halifax. After all, I lived there for 22 years! Yet, generally speaking, the answer is No. But — there’s always a “but”! — in no particular order……
Other than that, no, not really. For instance, back in Halifax, I wouldn’t have done what I’m doing right now: I took public transportation to go to another part of town (the Village) to have coffee and connect via wireless Internet to write in this blog. That there’s a gay village here and not in Halifax isn’t why I wouldn’t do something similar in Halifax. It’s just that, with a 8- or 9-minute headway for the metro, it’s super easy to go from uptown northwest of the mountain to the east end of downtown, as it doesn’t take outrageously longer than by car, not to mention that it’s a lot cheaper considering how gas peaked at $1.43,4 last week and parking on the street has to be paid until 9:00 pm on weekdays. Even on a Monday night like tonight, which is mild but on-and-off rainy, people are definitely out of hibernation and walking about. Being surrounded by that kind of activity is what always drew me to Montréal, even if it’s not as “wow” as it was for me initially. Now it’s more about comfortably being, which in my mind is a different and more nuanced notion than being comfortable.
Indeed, things change over time, as do plans and perceptions. A few don’t, though. My dwelling is much as I long imagined and in some ways better. What I didn’t see coming is that there would be a roommate with me in Montréal, and no, here I’m not referring to Esposo. As I told many friends and colleagues at work, the move here would not have been as successful had Cleopatrick not been there. And we’ve agreed that until Esposo is able to move in, Cleopatrick will live here, too — at first part-time, although eventually full-time as he gets his footing back in Montréal. I have to admit that I very much like having him around. We lived together before in the early ’90s in relatively tight quarters, back when we were together, and like with the Queen of Sheba, we didn’t get in each other’s way and still don’t. It’s not easy to find someone like that, and I think it gets harder with age as we get more settled in our ways. But for me, the current arrangement with Cleopatrick works perfectly: he does the lion’s share of the cooking and cleaning, at which I’m horrible (especially the latter), and he pays for some food and stuff which amounts to way less than half the rent since he’s putting in his fair share in kind.
I also didn’t anticipate the time-consuming complications resulting from Québec bureaucracy, let alone the bumpy first two weeks courtesy of Bell. Nor did I know that two months starting from the move until now would be unusually busy time at the day job. I’ve put in way more overtime than I care to think about and been asked to participate in peripheral projects I knew nothing about before leaving Halifax. Regrettably that’s been a setback for the seemingly endless to-do list outside the day job. And one change I really didn’t expect, which I only learned about last Friday, is that The Woman is being promoted (deservingly) and will no longer be my boss. Hers will be big shoes to fill and I’ll miss working with her, for while she can be demanding, she is irreproachably fair and the furthest thing from a micro-manager.
Of course, as recently as a year ago, I wouldn’t have believed you if you had told me that I would be married, let alone to a beautiful, tall, long-haired Mexican who absolutely rocks my world ♥♪♫♥, which would then lead me to enrol in Spanish classes some 15 months later. Exactly a year ago, I hadn’t unequivocally decided to move to Montréal, although I had been thinking about it for a very long time and finally convinced myself to take the plunge through a five-part series of blog posts later in June of last year. The only thing I knew is that since I turned 40, I’d been itching for change. And indeed, after a rather long stagnant period, how I made sure to change just about everything!
Halifax has been my town for more than 20 years — half my life and pretty well all my adult life.
I would be dishonest if I claimed that Halifax hasn’t been good to me. It has. And so have the ’90s. Sure, I had 3 years in there when I held a soul-crushing job, but I had my first university teaching gig at 27 and then did it regularly from age 32 to 36. And, without capital much less two clues, I took the risk of starting my own business. I don’t know if I would have had the guts or comfort level to do that in a large city, for here I had the luxury of being a big fish in a small pond.
Plus, 15 years ago, the year of the 10th anniversary of my coming out, I recognized that as far as my sexuality is concerned, I had only made myself feel miserable by expecting “more” to come out of …well, you know, situations when things come! I had assumed orthodoxy for myself, assumed that’s what I wanted; but, in truth, that doesn’t fit my temperament. You might be tempted to say that it’s the time when I recognized that I’m a slut tramp, but that would be a unidimensional generalization. However, I will say that it’s the time when I recognized that, after being pegged as a square for as long as I could remember, I had assumed this etiquette to be true …but it wasn’t. It’s the time when I recognized that, but for one exception, I had always “fallen” or “drifted” into relationships.
Strangely (or not so strangely), a major turning point for me was getting my first car, Gildo. I travelled over 33,000 km the first year I had him. That first summer is when I re-found nearby Crystal Crescent Beach, where I had gone only a few times with Madame A in 1985, except that summer I wandered far beyond the so-called third beach because I had been told that’s where the horny men hanged out. That’s how I began learning what “no strings attached” meant, that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of, and that it wasn’t deserving of so much smug judgment. And there is, after all, such a thing as “taking precautions,” both physically as well as emotionally.
However, it’s also around that time that I discovered that, in a small conservative city like Halifax, there IS a harsh judgment of those ordinary guys who enjoy indulging occasionally in such naughtiness if you’re not a buffed god or a dude who otherwise exudes uncontrollable magnitism. But in a bigger city, nobody could care less. People in bigger cities are more likely to say “Whatever floats your boat” and shrug it off. Because that’s just the urbane thing to do.
Also, this city has gone from dabbling with tentative forms of urbanity to pushing unbearably strange political rectitude, like the whole no-scent nonsense. The city has practically become the world capital of environmental sensitivities, and that’s just a tediously boring distinction to hold. Yet at the same time, too many Haligonians have begun believing that this IS a major international city instead of the important regional centre that it really is. After Halifax hosted the G8 summit in 1995, the mayor at the time mused that perhaps the city should consider bidding for the Olympics; 12 years later, the city made an ass of itself by pulling out of the bid for the next best thing.
Anyway, around Thanksgiving 1999, I visited Cleopatrick in Montreal. It had been 5 years since I had been there. And that’s when it really dawned on me: not only could I see myself living in Montreal, but also I realized that the Halifax “Cool Factor” had evaporated.
I returned to Halifax and announced to everyone that within a year or two, I would be moving to Montreal. But here I am, still, almost 8 years later. Until recently I had only one excuse, but I think it was a damn good one: I had too much debt. And by preserving the status quo, I knew I could keep my head just above the water line. I couldn’t be so sure of that if I moved too far away from my client base.
But then, of course, I got my day job, basically got out of debt — I still have to pick at it, but it’s well on its way — and things are going well. And while I don’t wish to count the chickens before they’ve hatched, there are encouraging signs that it could become a steady gig. Since I work from home, whether I’m in Halifax or Montreal is of no object. So maybe, finally, the time has come.
Maybe it’s time to say farewell to Nova Scotia.
There are some cons, of course. For instance, most of the people I knew in Montreal no longer live there. And I’d definitely miss living in the same city as BeeGoddessM and Stephanie, as well as the Queen of Sheba. However, leaving a city is not synonymous with abandoning friendships. And for sure I’d miss the proximity to my beloved beach in the summer, but staying in a place for the sake of one beach that I may be able to enjoy a half-dozen times a year is getting to be a thin excuse to stay put, and besides, I love how summers in Montreal are generally real summers. As for the practical plus sides of Montreal, it’s a comfortable driving distance from Mom in Moncton and even Halifax, and I’d be 2 hours away from my sister. I also love the idea of living in French or English after so many years of being in an exclusively anglophone milieu. Plus my door will always be opened for out-of-town guests now that I’ve accepted that it’s better that I hire someone to do my housecleaning regularly.
So yeah, this rambling look at my many years in Halifax is all about my realization that I may soon have a choice, and that I’ve run out of excuses for not making it. It’s also about remembering how, at 19, I had the nerve to make a similar choice so that I would stop wallowing in regrets. Life is too short to waste it away in regrets. And while I’m not exactly a geriatric case — shut up! — I’m most certainly well into the second half of my life. I should endeavour to fill it with as few regrets as possible, so……
Maybe it’s time to say farewell to Nova Scotia.
Because I had transfer credits from the U de M and chose to go to summer school, I completed my PR degree in 24 months. It was cheaper that way, and it meant that I finished my undergradute studies only a few months later than if I’d stuck to the translation program. I also took a part-time job at the university in my second year, and that placed my foot in the door for my first “real” job: managing editor of Atlantis. While today most students at MSVU and the PR program are from Nova Scotia, back in the ’80s, the PR program drew people from all over the country. Many very much liked Halifax and hoped they could find work here, but the market here was (and is) too small for the annual crop of graduates; I considered myself one of the lucky ones who managed to stay.
Yet, in many ways, Halifax is an odd place for me to have taken roots. While it is intrinsically linked to my coming of age, this rather conservative seaport city in “New Scotland” has absolutely no grounding for me, a first-generation New Brunswick francophone whose ancestral roots can be traced back generations in Quebec. Plus, ever since I first visited Montreal at the ripe age of 7, I have harboured a fascination for big cities — cities with populations greater than the whole province of “New Scotland” or even the four Atlantic provinces combined. When, as a teenager, I would long for the day when I could begin living, I always imagined myself in such a city.
But, it must be said, notwithstanding my rose-coloured glasses of youth, Halifax in the ’80s and ’90s was more vibrant and edgier than it is today — certainly more than one would have expected from a city its size. The promise of offshore oil and gas was fuelling the development and clean up of downtown; music from the East Coast was coming of age; a naughty and fun underground was thriving; daring, progressive politics were nascent; the gay community was political and could boast being the only one in Canada to fully own and operate the local bar… It was also a period when colourful, eccentric mayors presided over the city, which simultaneously was a source of embarrassment and amusement. It all made for a quirky little city set in beautiful surroundings, where out-of-control urban sprawl had not yet taken hold and a 30-minute drive in any direction led to some of the most idyllic spots one could ever imagine. And what made the city even quirkier was that it was located in a province with painfully old-fashioned ways, where only a few gas stations were opened on Sunday (on a rotating basis, no less), where stores were closed on Sunday and “shopping nights” were Wednesday to Friday when shops stayed opened until 9:00 instead of 6:00, where establishments licensed as “taverns” closed at 11:00, and where booze couldn’t be bought on Sunday except if served with a meal at a restaurant. Even my home province of New Brunswick was far less uptight!
I have this odd, very unscientific theory about what may have precipitated the change to what I perceive Halifax has become. Back in the early ’80s, many Maritimers viewed Halifax as a mini anglophone Montreal by the ocean. In fact, I find Haligonians back then, with their memories of Expo and the Olympics still relatively fresh but fading fast, used to identify more with Montreal than Toronto. And I think there were two tangible reasons for that: the fact Montreal only then was losing its status as Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan city, and there were two daily trains between Halifax and Montreal instead of today’s six per week. While plane travel was extremely commonplace, so was travelling by train because it was cheaper and still convenient. As Toronto surpassed Montreal as the country’s dominant city and planes became the postmodern equivalent of Greyhound buses, Haligonians have been engaging and identifying more with Toronto, where the dominant language is the same as here. I know you’re probably all thinking that I’m just setting up another cheap shot against Toronto, a city for which I have avowed little affection, but I can’t help discerning the milquetoast hegemony of Toronto slowly imprinting itself on this little seaside city.
That being said, it must also be recognized that in the ’80s, Haligonians themselves planted some of the seeds for what their city has become. For instance, when I “discovered” Halifax in the early ’80s, the phrase “The Spring Garden Experience” was coined to describe the two city blocks of delightful little shops housed in the ground floor of unremarkable walk-up apartment buildings. By the mid-80s, misguided marketers failed to grasp that the “Spring Garden Experience” referred to cachet, not shopping; so they built not one, not two, but three malls on that special stretch of Spring Garden and promptly destroyed what had been a very good thing. The first mall (Spring Garden Place) might have fit in had it been the only one; the second one (Park Lane, a.k.a. Park Drain) has been downsized considerably since it opened; the third one (City Centre Atlantic) was a spectacular flop that no one dares talk about today for fear of recalling the horrors of that egregious mistake. And it was game over when Mickey D opened in the Lord Nelson Arcade. Today, no one remembers the phrase “Spring Garden Experience,” as there is nothing memorable about the product of cookie-cutters, easily exchangeable with what can be found in any other city.
And yet… Damning as that assessment is, I can’t deny that when I found myself driving along South Park at Spring Garden the other evening, with the sun shining and the leaves out and the pedestrians everywhere, I think I saw the ghost of the city with which I had fallen in love a quarter century ago. I wondered for an instant if perhaps my eyes had changed with age and thus were preventing me from seeing that the beloved is still here, or if indeed, as I fear, the beloved has withered to a pale shadow of its former, vibrant self.
I do know that my reaching middle age has to be taken into account. But as I kept driving along the city streets on my way home, I concluded that I had, in fact, only seen a pale shadow back there. A lovely shadow in its own right, mind you, but a shadow nonetheless.
Because my 1987 move to Halifax was Ma-and-Pa-sanctioned, pretty well the whole family pitched in to help me settle into my downtown apartment in what I would eventually refer to as “Chateau Ghetto.” At the time, it was the kind of building where there were signs that sternly declared, “No spitting and swearing in the elevators.” And I still remember how mortified I felt as my father — rest his soul — gleefully read one such sign out loud as this towering, menacing, “don’t fuck with me” black dude was standing by us as we all waited for an elevator. Spot the Bumpkins.
But how I found this apartment would seem like an implausible stretch of the Armistead Maupin Tales of the City variety, yet I assure you: All my stories are true!
When I had lived in Halifax in ’84-’85, I had been in a relationship with Hardluck. Although I shared an apartment a block away from work on the Bedford Highway with JD, whom I had met through my Summer of ’84 Boyfriend (a.k.a. Park Bunny), I ended up by November or so always staying at Hardluck’s dumpy apartment in Central Halifax. I guess at the time I was confused and thought I was a lesbian, bringing a U-Haul on her second date. Anyway, Hardluck also had a roommate, a really nice straight guy in the Canadian Navy whom we named Fitz and who had the unfortunate tendency of bringing back crabs (of the Kwellada variety) after each of his tours of duty. Fitz and Hardluck’s landlord was an unspeakably vile piece of work who believed he was within his rights to tell his tenants that they could never have company, especially overnight. Inevitably, of course, one evening in February just a few days before Fitz was to return from one of his tours, Hardluck and I got busted big time because not only was I there, but so was a friend of mine visiting from Moncton. Arriving to find out he/we had been evicted from that dump, Fitz frantically began searching for a new place and found one posthaste.
In Chateau Ghetto.
Hardluck and I ended up breaking up about two months before I was to move back to Moncton, plus Hardluck moved out of Chateau Ghetto around the same time to live with a short-term flame that lasted about four minutes. Fitz and I left on good terms — quirky as he was, he was the one who introduced me to Mike Oldfield — but I never saw him again and we didn’t keep in touch. I learned from Hardluck about a year later that he got engaged.
So back in Moncton one day in June ’87, I bought what turned out to be my first and only copy of the local Halifax rag, The Chronically Horrid, to find myself an apartment. I would have to find myself a roommate once in Halifax, but first I needed to find a place I could afford. And there it was, in black and white: an apartment to sublet whose general description fit Chateau Ghetto and whose (dirt-cheap) price had not changed much since ’85. And yes, you guessed it: when I called the number, the young lady who answered the phone confirmed that [a] it was the same building in the complex of three high rises, [b] in fact, it was the same apartment in which Hardluck, Fitz and I had moved, and [c] she was Fitz’ wife and they were being transferred to British Columbia.
But if that’s not enough for you, allow me this digression. Three years later — in 1990 — I had graduated from Mount Saint Vincent University the year before and had become the managing editor of Atlantis: A Women’s Studies Journal. I regularly hired students as part-time proofreaders, and two of them at the time were living in the dump from which Hardluck, Fitz and I were evicted. Not only that, but one of them became Pouponne’s partner for 9 years. And in the apartment next door to them dwelled the inimitable Cypriot Fruit with whom the polar-opposite Hiker had a fling that same summer.
Please understand that Halifax is not THAT small of a city to have that many coincidences occur. But you have to agree that if you’d read this plot in Tales of the City, you would have busted your eyes out of their sockets. Yet I assure you: All my stories are true!
Moreover, the coincidence of 1987 especially served to assure me I was doing the right thing. For you see, when I had decided to apply for the PR program at MSVU, I questioned my motives. I kept asking myself whether I was doing it because I really I wanted to study in that field, or because I wanted to come back to Halifax. I asked myself the same question from multiple angles. I recognized that prior to my ill-fated choice of translation, I had thought of becoming a journalist, and prior to that, a writer, so PR wasn’t a choice from left field given its emphasis on writing. I also recognized that MSVU offered the only undergraduate program in PR and I was given less than glowing reviews (perhaps undeservedly) of the program at Humber College in Toronto. And I recognized that the PR program seemed broad enough that, unlike translation, it wouldn’t lead me to one narrowly defined kind of job. In short, it seemed like it was mere coincidence that the program I wanted was in Halifax.
So, the Chateau Ghetto coincidence came as a kind of confirmation — a flaky confirmation, perhaps, but a confirmation nonetheless — that I was destined to return to Halifax.
Except this return was for the right reason.
So, I returned to Moncton in early August 1985 and went on a trip to Ottawa and Toronto before starting university in September. I remember feeling rather miserable about being “back home” and, in hindsight, I should have taken that sense of unease as my first clue that I had come back for the wrong reason or, rather, that the reason for which I had come back, which I hadn’t challenged in years, had changed over time.
Yet what was — and to some extent still is — more intriguing is that I was feeling so dejected even though I hadn’t lived the high life in Halifax. Far from it! I seem to recall making $4.16/hour, which I think was about a half-dollar more than minimum wage at that time, and learning how hard it is to make the ends meet with so little. But I had done it for 15 months without touching a penny of my education fund, so I had proven to myself that I really could make it on my own. And I had made it while living through experiences that could be chronicled in a book bearing the title, 1984, or; Gay White Trash in the City.
That year in the translation program at the Université de Moncton is a bit of a blur for me today. Oddly, it felt like I was back in high school. It’s not that the courses weren’t university calibre, and it’s not that my relationships with other students weren’t good. In fact, comparatively, I can hardly speak of “relationships” while in high school because I went out of my way through those years to blend into the walls, which wasn’t the case anymore at university. But I think that’s the time when the cold reality of translation started to sink in: one the one hand, I was gearing myself up for some 30 years of translating boring administrative dribble no one would ever read, and on the other hand, I started hearing tales of translators lasting maybe 10 years in the profession before they finally cracked, became hippies, took on a barely legal lover or three, and ran off on a permanent retreat in some blackfly-infested cabin in the Yukon.
I remember the summer of 1986 being particularly bleak, despite being in the good company of my inseparable companion at the time, Sara. It was one of those humid summers when it rained during the day and cleared up at night — the exact opposite of an ideal summer. However, summer soon led to September, and after the second class of Christel Gallant’s “Introduction à la traduction I”, it dawned on me that the only argument I had in favour of completing this degree was that I didn’t want the faculty to break me. And realizing that this attitude amounted to doing a degree out of spite, I headed to the career counselling centre on campus immediately after class.
In one of his “This & That” entries (I think), Tornwordo wrote that young adults should only be allowed to register at university five years after graduating from high school. I couldn’t agree more. I think I was in Grade 9 when I was “oriented” towards translation. In other words, I was 13 or 14 years old at the time and I was never advised to critically re-examine that decision afterwards. Or — and this is a plausible explanation — I not only never allowed myself to revisit the decision once I had made it, but I also did everything in my power to convince myself that “I’m going to be a translator” was the only true narrative. I’d been taunted as the “brainy kid” all my life, and translation was definitely a “brainy” profession, so how could it not be the right decision?
Well, the fact this 21-year-old fag wearing expensive cologne and mousse in his hair — yeah, 1986 — was sitting in the career counselling centre and having concurrent epistemological and existential crises testified that it had definitely not been the right decision. It took another 19 years before I would reach a state of crisis that was even as remotely destabilizing, namely when I sought my brother’s advice on my business and he essentially suggested I put it on the back burner and seek an outside job. Clearly, because I’m basically a “glass half full” kind of guy, I have to see the glass bone dry before I finally yet relunctantly concede, “Well …maybe not.”
At any rate, maybe half an hour after I sat down at the centre and began riffling through pamphlets to figure out what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, The Quad, whom I hadn’t seen in several days, rolled in with his new attendant. Indeed, on the very same day, we had decided to drop out of our respective program. And even more strange, on the very same day, we had independently decided to look into studying public relations or communications.
At Mount Saint Vincent University. In Halifax.
By the end of that week, I broke the news to my horrified parents, promised to get a job — I even had two for a few months — and saved up some more since studying outside Moncton would require a lot more mullah.
In a typical Maurice digression in this post, I wrote that “I think I’m finally reaching the point where Halifax itself is getting on my tits after 20 years, so I should do something about that.” And I think I need to address that now.
I still remember that beautiful warm sunny day in July 1982 when I “discovered” Halifax — a day very much like today, in fact, except without the “Come here and blow me” guy portrayed in this picture at the Public Gardens. Halifax was nothing like I expected it would be. I was expecting it to be a lot like Saint John, New Brunswick: old, a bit seedy, industrial, smelly, a bit dull — a city whose better days were the late 19th century.
But instead I found a “small big city” with a remarkable blend of old and new, and lots and lots of trees and green spaces. Street names like “Spring Garden Road,” “North Park” and “South Park” — this was well before the cartoon — added to my sense of this city being like a seaside urban playground, and the people going about their business seemed immensely more sophisticated than the dullards in my hometown of Moncton. I still remember seeing a young woman stepping out a corner store on South Park Street late one afternoon, carrying a six-pack of Perrier water. To the impressionable teenager that I was who had never seen a non-geriatric person drink Perrier in his hometown — remember, this was 1982 and nobody drank ordinary bottled water, let alone Perrier — this struck me as the height of sophistication. My friend The Quad and I used to call such sightings “big city-ish.”
In 1982, I still had one year of high school to complete. And as I told you in “Guilty (and Not-So-Guilty) Pleasures, Take 2″, when I was 17, I desperately wanted out of high school so that I could “begin living.” Halifax seemed like the kind of place where living could be good yet not completely destabilizing: it could be different enough to force me to step out of my comfort zone, but not too far. However, I already had plans for university after high school, namely to become a translator, and the best undergraduate program in that field at the time was at the Université de Moncton. And the demand for translators in Halifax, I thought, was likely slim to none compared to Moncton, Fredericton or Ottawa. I completed my senior year of high school in Moncton, yet in spirit and in my dreams, I constantly drifted to Halifax.
A few months before graduation, I grew resentful of believing my whole life was already mapped out before me: I would get my translation degree, land a job in the public service 4 years later and stay there until I croaked. I wasn’t 18 yet, and it seemed like “living” wasn’t part of the plan. So I decided to take a year off and work as The Quad’s personal attendant, yet continue to live at home and sock away most of my income for my university studies. In hindsight, this was my personal brand of very safe “sovereignty association.”
That year, I would hang out with an Albertan woman about my age named Sue, who had spontaneously decided to live with her grandmother in Moncton after her grandfather passed away. She used to live just a small block away from me, and whenever we’d walk back home from wherever we’d been out that night, I walk her home. Evidently our conversations were peppered with a lot of “Halifax this” and “Halifax that” remarks from me, for one night she had had enough. I still remember like it was last month how she just stopped dead in her tracks in the middle of the slush on Lockhart Avenue that night in February ’84 and gave me the verbal kick in the ass she’d clearly been wanting to give me for a long time. “Just fucking go to Halifax already,” she said, her voice full of exasperation. “Stop just talking about it and do it!”
Even at 18, I was cautious before doing anything significant. The understanding I had with my parents was that I could live with them rent-free as long as I was saving for university, and I was always a man who honoured his word. But, I thought, if I promise to set aside my earnings from that point onwards, I could live in Halifax for 3 or 4 months and try to find a job there. If I did, I’d stay one year and return to Moncton to start university, but if I didn’t, I’d come back to Moncton and start university that fall. I moved to Halifax around April 22 and started work on June 13, so I ended up applying Plan A.
And indeed, as promised, I quit my job and moved back to Moncton in early August ’85, satisfied that I no longer needed to wonder what it would be like to live in Halifax. I had done it, loved it, but gotten it out of my system. There was a concert on Citadel Hill the weekend I was leaving, and appropriately some group sang “Farewell to Nova Scotia” (mp3, 2.3 MB, 3:20).
I had no reason at the time to believe I would live here again.
I began writing this entry in early March, a day or two after I came back from Montréal. I can’t believe it’s been almost six weeks since I was there, and that I’ve been at my new job for a month already. At any rate, I figure I should salvage this entry if only because it’s a shame to waste the time I put into it…
Yes, I’m back in Halifax. And you know what? I’m actually glad to be back.
It’s not that I didn’t have a good time in Montréal. In fact, this little escape was precisely what I needed. I would’ve been filled with regret if I hadn’t gone, and Montréal remains a city where I want to live one day, if only for its faster pace, cosmopolitan feel, and Frenchness. But at the same time, I can’t help but conclude that (A) the lurr of Montréal has changed for me with time, and (B) Halifax, though more limited in what it has to offer and comparatively prudish, is not such a bad place after all. Whether it’s becuase of my age or the times we live in, I don’t perceive places as I used to just a few years back.
Montreal, in particular the Village, has really changed, though. I stumbled upon the first noticeable change within an hour in the Village: the closing of the Presse-Café du Village. Understand that Presse-Café is in fact a smallish chain of coffeeshops, but this location next to the Beaudry metro station has been a meeting place in the Village for what seems like forever. It was one of the few coffeeshops that still had a smoking section, and it was where I was given the cheesiest but most amusing come-on line in my life years ago by a bespectacled Armenian who’s well known in the Village. Confronted by the locked door — although all the lights were on and Christmas decorations still adorned the walls — I couldn’t help wonder how such a hopping place could have gone under.
I found the answer in the daylight the next day (click each to enlarge).
So it’s not that the place went under as much as it almost toppled over! Apparently this happened one weeknight just before Christmas. The place was immediately evacuated and that part of Ste-Catherine blocked off in anticipation of the full collapse. But it didn’t come down, and those steel beams were added a few days later to prop up the failing wall. Given how much the old building has moved, though, it seems unlikely that it’ll be salvageable. But according to my host Michel at the bed and breakfast (which I highly recommend to all gay guys visiting Montréal), maybe things are being left to stand as they are while insurance companies figure out what to do. It still surprises me that the structure is deemed safe enough to let people up close.
Given that I arrived in the Village around 8:00 pm and hadn’t had supper yet, I needed food. Cleopatrick had taken me to a noodle house at Ste-Cat and Montcalm once upon a time, and I mentioned to Michel and Sylvain that I thought I’d go there …but their eyes grew as big as quarters and they finally asked (in French), “When’s the last time you’ve been there?” Apparently the place changed ownership a few years back and it’s a dive now, so they recommended EstAsie for eastern food or Le Saloon for “a sure bet every time.” In the end, I opted for the latter and I’m glad I did; I had a yummy pasta that night and returned Saturday night for a TexMex chicken salad. Despite its name, Le Saloon is a hopping, trendy, techno place that attracts a diverse crowd, from lipstick lesbians to muscle marys and every variation in between, of all ages, shapes and sizes.
Le Saloon is the kind of resto that makes Montréal what it is. And on that point, I think I owe an explanation of what I mean by that to those of you who aren’t familiar with this city.
Montréal has a unique style that is both North American and European, multicultural and bilingual (though predominently French). It is also, as one CBC Radio commentator once said a while back on Definitely Not the Opera, the “libido of Canada” — a characteristic that is manifested in so many ways.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Montrealers don’t only have savoir-faire; they have savoir-vivre. And that, perhaps more than anything else, is what makes Montréal so appealing to me.
However, I can’t deny that it felt different this time around …and not in a good way. One reason, perhaps, is that I still can’t get used to the idea of Cleopatrick, a quintessential Montrealer in my mind, not living there anymore. But I suppose there are many other reasons, including the fact this was my second trip to Montréal in the dead of winter, which is a despicable time of year anywhere in Canada, safe perhaps Vancouver; the fact that Québec, like most other jurisdictions in Canada, is adopting strict anti-smoking laws (which I wouldn’t mind so much if I could only successfully quit that dreadful habit), and the fact that the Village is now run over by the nastily aggressive panhandlers that the residents of the Ontario Street area, just to the north, have managed to push out of their neighbourhood. Overall there’s a feeling, which my B&B host Michel expressed, that the Village is not what it used to be just five or six years ago, that it is in decline. It is becoming edgier, but not in a good way.
That aside, I so very much enjoyed my Friday evening with Cleopatrick and his “hubbies,” who made the nearly two-hour trip into town to take me to a lovely restaurant in Little Italy. The veal, prepared by the restaurant’s 83-year-old doyenne who could barely speak French or English, was to die for. Afterwards we made our way back to the Village for coffee but, beforehand, we had what I can’t help but call a Montréal moment.
The boys needed to stock up on poppers (which, for the record, I don’t do) from a sex shop on Ste-Cat. However, what should have been a simple transaction quickly became an awkward “why is he telling us this” moment as a result of the clerk who, for whatever reason, decided to give us a Reader’s Digest version of his life story in the guise of an explanation of why he doesn’t use poppers anymore — the fact he was once a gym bunny (which was hard to tell looking at him that night), that he was a good friend of Tina and poppers …until the evening he had a spectacular collapse while visiting his mother, landing him in hospital and death’s door for several weeks. Sad stuff indeed, except it was difficult to reconcile hearing his tale with the tails …namely those on the hardcore porn movie, which so happened to be playing just above his left shoulder, that featured young men with freakishly large appendages, …while the other store clerk was behind him and making all kinds of gestures which clearly were meant to draw favourable attention to himself (for, contrary to his colleague, he definitely had a naughty look to him that made him more suited for a job in a joint like this). As we walked out, we couldn’t help think that the clerk’s segue from “I personally can’t touch poppers anymore” to, well, his really sad story was ……I dunno. If not “inappropriate,” then certainly unexpected. It’s the kind of confidences I tend to draw from strangers while I’m on a long train trip, not during a short visit to a sex shop.
The next day I was to meet up with Mr. J for a 10 o’clock coffee near Concordia University. He works the graveyard shift, so the plan was to get together for a few hours after he got off work and he’d head back home around 1 or 2 for his day’s sleep. But for whatever reason, the Presse-Café we had chosen to meet was also closed, so we headed back east to the Village and landed at the Club Sandwich, where we’d met up a year earlier.
While Mr. J is from Halifax, we actually didn’t meet while he was still here. Rather, we were introduced by phone after he’d moved to Montréal, by none other than Indiana Jones. Today, while Mr. J and I talk and talk and talk about just about everything, we can’t help comparing notes occasionally, and what’s frightening to me is how our experiences with him are so similar …sometimes right down to the same words and the same gestures. Even as we look back, neither of us can understand why we were so keen on cutting him as much slack as we did despite the overwhelming evidence of the extent to which he was using us. We figure we must have a “SUCKER” tattoo stamped on our forehead, which only he can see.
Neither Mr. J nor I had a watch that afternoon at the Club Sandwich, and it was overcast that day. But suddenly the sun did peek through the clouds and we both thought the same thing when it did. “Wow, the sun’s awfully low… it must be… well, later than I thought…”
When I dropped him off at the Beaudry metro station, it was 4:50. So much for his day’s sleep.
The rest of my weekend in Montréal I spent pretty much on my own, haunting coffee shops and ploughing through The DaVinci Code. I love just hanging out and reading while in Montréal, but I think the next time, I’ll try to go in the summer so that I can do so under a tree in various parks in the city. There’s something about being able to take it easy as the rest of the big city bustles around you…
A recent but unrelated entry in another blog reminded me of strange place names around here and how they should be pronounced.
Shortly after I posted my last entry, I went for a walk around Point Pleasant Park. The BeeGoddesses were supposed to come along, but the one who landed in hospital during the Holidays couldn’t make it. So I went on my own — a feat for me when you think about how much I hate the cold and, moreover, how sedentary I am. But walking is all part of the Reform of Maurice.
To be sure it was cold this afternoon; despite the glorious sunshine it was only -10C (15F). But how truly pleasant Point Pleasant is! Since 1866, nearly 1,000 acres of the southern tip of peninsular Halifax has been preserved as a forest surrounded by the sea on three sides. The way the sun shone through the branches and on the snowy pathways, I could think of only one phrase, in French, to describe what surrounded me: “C’est beau à fendre l’âme”. Roughly translated, “So achingly beautiful that it feels as though your soul is splitting.”
I’m one of those fortunate people who can create a near vacuum in his mind — really think of nothing. Just be. However, I did have a few thoughts run through my mind as I walking, specifically about what I had just posted in this blog. And I realized a few things.
First, that this park in which I was walking seemed so disconnected, so far from today’s horrors (a.k.a. politics).
Second, try as they may, humans will never be able to create from scratch anything as intricate as a forest.
Third, I’m not the hard-nosed, non-spiritual person I often pose as being.
Now back at home, I’m seeing the full moon rise over the harbour and I’m thinking that it really is a beautiful world. Too bad humans are so bent on destroying it.
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