by Robert Markland Smith.
Do you remember being seventeen years old, and coming of age? Do you remember what prompted you to change from a jock to a joe college and thence, to becoming a bohemian? Somehow, the Church didn’t speak to you any longer, your parents didn’t seem very hip and the internal politics and dynamics of your family seemed morbid and repressive, didn’t they? You argued about labour unions with your dad, and he kept telling you that you were imagining things, and he wondered what they were teaching you in college… You read Les Fleurs du mal by Baudelaire, you read the Comte de Lautréamont, and that figures, because you were a literature student. When you first started college, you tried to join a frat, but they rejected you because you wore a goatee and a tiki around your neck. You attended a couple of chug-a-lug parties, watched a couple of frat movies about becoming a successful businessman, and you weren’t interested. You cultivated a taste for jazz, and long before you had peers, or friends your own age, you went to clubs like L’Ermitage, on Côte-des-Neiges, like the Black Bottom, on St. Antoine Street, and finally, the Penelope, on Stanley Street, in Montreal, of course.
You were acquiring a sense of identity that lasted through most of your adult life.
When you first moved to Montreal, your father set you up with his friend Maurice’s daughter. Now, Maurice would come to your house and argue that at every session of the United Nations, they should begin with the Lord’s Prayer. In other words, he was a bigot. And even when you were sixteen years old, you knew that at the UN there were Muslim countries, and communist countries, and you were kind of embarrassed by your father’s friend. As for the daughter, well, you remember taking her to a Jacques Lussier concert at Place des Arts, and she commented that she only liked the Bach, whereas you liked the jazz, and you remember walking her home to Outremont, across Park Avenue, and she said, with scorn in her voice, that these immigrants were so vile and stupid and dirty and disgusting. She was a tight-assed little bitch, and her pastime was to sit by candlelight in her bedroom and listen to Bach and read Kierkegaard. Mind you, there is nothing wrong with Bach or Kierkegaard, but when you are sixteen years old, you are expected to have a bit more piss-and-vinegar than that. You would take her out on dates, and sit in the park, in Outremont, and she looked so prissy and uptight that you never even made a pass at her. (I guess you secretly hated her.)
So, to sum up, you were dissatisfied with the father’s friends. You wanted to hoist anchor and leave traditional ways behind.
One night, and it was perhaps in February of 1966, you were sitting in the Bistro on Mountain Street by yourself, having a beer, because that’s what macho guys did, they drank hard. (Perhaps you were also a budding drunk, but that’s another story.) Anyways, you were sitting there, by the door, when in walked a college buddy, Marcel. He was in your English Romantic poetry class at Loyola, and he joined you for a beer, and you two got to talking, and he asked you if you wanted to go to a really neat place nearby.
So, you finish your beer, and you both walk down to a place called The Hawaiian Lounge, on Stanley Street, right beside the Esquire Show Bar. You walk in, and you’ve been there perhaps ten minutes, when you start noticing something funny, something strange going on. For instance, there is a lady with a platinum-blonde wig and a beauty spot on her face, and wearing a fancy white blouse with frills and a crotch-high mini skirt, and she comes up to you with a dirty smile and pinches your cheek. And when she speaks to you, she has a man’s voice, a deep, sexy, raspy voice, and she tells you her name is Sugar. And there is something going on here, and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?
And you look around the room, and it’s full of boys dressed up as girls and girls dressed up as boys, and you are a middle-class Catholic kid, and you decide to play it by ear. You sit with Marcel and order a beer, and you watch the floorshow, because there is a huge stage right plop in the middle of the bar. You watch nervously at first, while a stripper dressed at first as a woman, strips down to a pair of underwear, and oh my god! it’s a man, and he starts cracking a whip, and jeez, this is vulgar. You watch a lesbian singer called Carole Berval belt out Otis Redding songs about girlfriends. And there is Alice.
At the next table over, there is a cute young thing with long, curly black hair, and the blackest, darkest, most evil mascara you have ever seen, and she is wearing a micro mini skirt, and she is sitting with a butch that looks like E.G. Robinson, with short black hair greased back, and wearing a man’s suit, and smoking a cigar. Anyhow, the girl is called Alice, and she is dancing on stage, and you ask her to dance, and she dances with you, and you speak French together, and you are a bit disappointed that she is so vulgar. Now, your sun is in Virgo, your moon is in Scorpio and your rising sign is in Scorpio, which means you are in love with Alice, the woman in black. Anyways, after a while, Marcel tells you not to dance with her anymore, because her butch lover wants to kill you.
And Marcel keeps going to the other side of the room, and disappearing for half an hour at a time, he goes to the other side of the stage, and meanwhile, someone from over there keeps buying you beer. You ask the waiter who is ordering you free beer, and he says it’s someone over there. So what the hell, you don’t care, you drink the beer first and figure you’ll ask questions later. After all, a free beer is a beer, right?
So this goes on until about one o’clock in the morning, when Marcel tells you he’s leaving. And you tell him you’re staying behind, and you’re going to watch the show by yourself. And the band keeps playing, and you are trying to look hip, and finally, it’s three o’clock in the morning, and it’s closing time. Last call.
At this point, a big, muscular guy built like a professional boxer comes to your table, and he’s wearing a suit, and he says to you, “Come with me.” You ask what is going on, and he says your friend sold you to him for fifteen dollars, and you now have to go with him. That goddamn Marcel. So that’s who was buying you free beer from across the stage! So what do you do?
Okay, let’s go. You get your winter coat, and you (slowly) walk down the stairs with the boxer, and you (slowly) open the door, and you (slowly) and carefully walk down to the street, and THEN, BY GOD! YOU HEAD FOR THE HILLS, RUNNING AWAY FROM TROUBLE, AND YOU TURN AND YELL AT THE GUY, IN FRENCH, “I’M SORRY, I AM NOT GAY!!” And he doesn’t run after you, he just stands there, brokenhearted as his date runs away.
Well, you kept going back to the Hawaiian Lounge, for about six weeks, and buying drinks for Alice, and you phoned the friend’s daughter, and you told her you were leaving her for a lesbian from downtown, and she was shocked. But then Marcel had the kindness to tell you that Alice was NOT in love with you, she was REALLY a prostitute and she was ONLY interested in you because she thought you had money. So what goes around comes around, and you were disappointed, to say the least. You were still a naïve bourgeois kid, and it took some time before you woke up, quite a long time indeed.
December 29, 1998