The Center of Montreal
The Peter’s Scene
Guy had been divorced for some time when I first met him, and he claimed to still be quite the ladies’ man. However, he made it clear that he still didn’t trust women. “S’il y a des plottes qui s’accotent sur moi, je leur dis, Colle pas sur moi! Show ton portefeuille—et là, elles partent toujours,” he laughed. [“If some cunt comes and leans on me, I tell them right away, hey back off! Show me your wallet—and then they always leave me alone.”]
For several years now, he’s been coming here every afternoon to drink a few “big ones” (“les grosses”) with his many friends who also frequent the place. His best friend is a bilingual guy from Victoriaville, with an English name but claims to be French, although Guy is quick to point out that “c’est un rouge”— a Liberal, non-separatist— “mais il est correct.” Guy was living comfortably alone in an apartment in the East End, surviving on his combined military, company and old-age pension. By the way he’d keep bringing up his once-substantial wealth in conversations, though, you could tell he wasn’t all that wealthy anymore. Still, his seemed to be a happy existence, and at least he never got addicted to the lottery machines like most of the other regulars (and even staff) of Peter’s.
Despite being an ardent separatist, Guy defended English, saying Quebecers should learn it if only out of politeness. He favours bilingualism, but he thinks immigrants should speak French at least. He bitterly remembers how French Canadians were once told to “Speak English!”
“Dans le temps de Mackenzie King, tabarnak, les ambassades du Canada parlais juste l’anglais!” [“In the time of Mackenzie King, all the Canadian embassies spoke only English, for fuck’s sake!”]
He cited the expulsion of the Acadians in 1763 in underlining his continuing hatred of the British. I had to concede from my knowledge of history that the British seemed harsher and less tolerant of the peoples under their control than the French were. He said the British triaged the Acadians before throwing them out, trying to make sure they didn’t kick out any of the more competent ones. He’s very mad still that “they invaded us, took our country and said ‘Here, you guys can keep St. Pierre and Miquelon.’”
He’s particularly incensed about the Queen, for whom he was sent to fight WWII to defend. “La reine, qu’est-ce qu’elle a fait pour nous autre? La reine, je la bourra avec de la creme glacée et puis je la fourra dans le cul!” he said, his mouth working his gums overtime on this one. “Le Canada, ca appartient encore à la reine, ca!” [“What did the Queen ever do for us? Fucking Queen, if I saw her I’d grease her up with some ice cream and fuck her up the ass! Canada still officially belongs to the Queen, you know!”] The others at our table agreed that it’s an absurd situation, that we’re still officially considered “subjects of the Queen.” We all agreed the Queen should be taken off our money at the very least, that she had no business being there.
While discussing Canada’s subjugation to the Queen, I asked Guy what he thought of the aboriginals, whether he noticed any change in attitudes towards them through the years, and especially whether he thought they were also an oppressed people. The question seemed to him to come from left field—his gruff reply was, “Les autochtones, qu’est-ce qu’ils on construit? Rien, rien dutout. Quand qu’on est arrivé nous-autres, il n’y avait rien de construit. C’etait vide. C’était des sauvages. Si ils avaient des villes qu’on avait conquis, ça sa sera différent.
“Toute les affaires qu’ils ont là, les sauvages, c’est nous autres qui les ont donnez. Ils auront rien eu si c’était pas pour nous autres.”
[“The aboriginals, what did they ever build? Nothing, nothing at all. When we got here, there was nothing built. It was empty. They were savages. If they had built some cities and we’d conquered them, then it would be different. But everything that they have now, the savages, it’s us who gave it to them. They’d have nothing if it weren’t for us.”]
I didn’t reply, but found his outrageous statement interesting (and unfortunately probably a sentiment echoed by most Canadians– certainly those who recently voted against Native rights in BC.) It seems like in Quebec at least, one of the first things the long-oppressed French Canadians started doing when they finally gained some power was treat the aboriginals like backwards, uneducated second-hand citizens. I don’t doubt that it’s similar to how children who are beaten by their parents end up more likely to beat their own children, but it would be nice, in the wider social context that comprises the long-stormy Quebec-Aboriginal relations, if the once-oppressed oppressors remembered their own long struggle, and acted a little more sympathetically about the whole thing. Perhaps Guy’s argument is at the heart of it, the thought that there was nothing there but a bunch of warring primitive tribes—but the problem is the extension of that to the Indians of today, who really still do have a very distinct thing going in a very distinct part of the country.
Anyway, although heated arguments are very far from unusual at Peter’s, more complex topics such as aboriginal affairs throughout history don’t survive the alcoholic haze of the patrons for very long. Now if we’d been discussing the date of one of the Canadiens’ Stanley Cups or something, and someone got it wrong, then there would’ve been some serious arguing…
Despite what he said about aboriginals, Guy came off as very respectful of the cultural diversity of the city. He mentioned with some pride that all the nations of the world had a place somewhere along the Main (which, for out-of-town readers, I should explain is a boulevard some eight miles long that runs down the center of Montreal and contains just about every nationality you can think of.).
The last time I was at Peter’s, in August 2002, I was sad to hear from André Ouellet that Guy Boisvert was no more. He died in February, 2001, from lung cancer. Apparently it was a good thing, because his last three months were very painful. I asked André if Guy’s son still came here sometimes, and he said no, and that “Guy Boisvert’s son is just a bum anyway.” He didn’t seem to care so much about Guy either, but personally I felt a loss at the thought that this cantankerous character wouldn’t be there anymore like he always seemed to be, at the same table, with the same beer and cigarettes…
ONE SUMMER NIGHT AT PETER’S
One hot summer night, in August, 2002, I walked in for a beer just to get refreshed. A very old-looking man was cackling at me from his table. I soon noticed he’d make remarks to himself and cackle whenever anyone walked into the bar. Eventually, he began leaning over to share his indecipherable comments about the patrons with me, comments which seemed like the funniest things in the world to him. I wasn’t sure if he was all there, but as I made out more and more of what he was saying, it seemed like he actually was. The more I would listen, the more he would say, until he began telling me full-out stories.
Two tables away from us was this late-forties-looking dude with a beard sitting in front of the jukebox and mouthing all the words to Stones, Who, and Bob Dylan tunes. The whole time he just stared at the jukebox, mouthed the tunes and swigged his beer. Near the door, some dudes were playing pool, and occasionally a whore (each one old and ugly— I think no whores under 35 are doomed enough to enter the place) would saunter in, stare all the guys down, and head for the john. From their fast pace it seemed like they knew full well this was all they could get away with while André Ouellet was on duty. André had told me unaccompanied women were once barred from Peter’s, and it was his job to keep actual prostitution from happening in the place.
At one point, two of these old hookers were in the bathroom together, and when I went to pee I heard them talking from across the hallway. A rather large, downright portly one was listening to a much skinnier but by no means younger black chick slap her ass and say “That chick thinks she’s got it forever, but baby you know how it is, give her two or three more years, it’ll be hanging down like ours is, yeah that’s how it goes, baby! That’s how it goes!” Slap! Slap! She kept slapping her own ass for emphasis, and I could only think Shit, who pays for this kind of saggy wrinkled ass? Obviously lots of people. Thank God I could only hear it and not see it. Ugh.
Another snippet of conversation struck me: one of them was saying, “She did 15 in a row, but you’ll see, you’ll see, she can’t keep up with us. After 15 she stopped, man, she was tired. She won’t be able to keep up with us.”
Oi! I just kind of shuddered. I shuddered again a few minutes later when I was back at my table, talking to the toothless guy, and I saw them both come out of the bathroom, followed by a smiling portly white dude who obviously just sauntered out of the women’s side with them. Poor André Ouellet, I thought, he’s not supposed to take any of this shit. He’s worked here 31 years, for chrissake. He’s supposed to keep this kind of trash out. He did try: I saw him refuse one of them a drink when she first came in.
I had to physically avert my eyes to dispel this hooker’s stare when she walked past me, as she singled me out quick as being 15 years younger at least than anyone else in the place (and I’m fucking 32!) Anyway, once she was out of the bathroom she got the dude she blew (or whatever) to buy her some beers and got the other pool table going. A reluctant André was soon ferrying four or five beers at a time to their spot next to the pool table.
When ordering another beer myself, I asked André if he was still there every day or what. Oh no, he said, just when they need me, on call you know. He said it was a busy night because of the nearby Jazz Fest. Looking around at the clientele, though, I don’t think anyone in there had any connection to the jazz fest at all.
As for Toothless Guy (I never did get his name), he seemed to realize suddenly that none of the other super-old dudes were still around. When did you get here? I asked him. Oh, since they opened… 9 o’clock. 9 o’clock? In the morning? Well yeah, he said. Jesus Christ! It was about 11 p.m. by now. But I think my willingness to hear his stories gave him another wind. He got himself another beer and continued babbling.
He said he was in the Navy in WWII but never saw combat, since he was drafted right near war’s end. He got to keep the navy outfit they gave him when he left the service, though. As I began to catch on to his curious, part-Maritime English, part Quebec Francophone bilingualism, tinged as it was with hours of drinking and his toothlessness, I was able to start jotting down notes fast enough to capture his stories. I regret to inform you readers, however, that there were a couple of moments where he said things that were so funny, usually because they were so suddenly crude, that I laughed too hard and he kept going so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to write them down.
So it was 1945, he was 18 years old, freshly released from the Navy and wearing this fully-equipped Navy outfit while drinking in the bars around here. While hanging around the corner of St. Laurent and Ste. Catherine one evening he sold his navy outfit to some guy for $20. A twenty was a small fortune back then, probably equivalent to around $150 today. He spent $14 of that on a train ticket to Port Arthur, Ontario, where he quickly found employment as a stevedore. (Port Arthur was the largest grain port in the world back then.)
As much as being a stevedore may have provided him with honest employment, it wasn’t long before he tried other things for money in Northern Ontario. He began pulling petty heists and train-hopped from small town to small town, being a “hobo” as he put it. (Here he paused to ask me if I had any idea what the word “hobo” meant. Well of course, I said, you were hopping trains, going from town to town—you were a hobo. OK, he said, young people don’t usually know what it means when you say hobo.)
I told him that I knew some people who hop trains today, they’re hopping them as we speak and they’re a lot younger than I am. He seemed unfazed. Some of them, I told him, they go all over the continent, and some are called “crusty” because they never bathe and can tell if their friends passed through a random town somewhere just from their lingering smell.
He let me finish this then continued with his story. It soon became apparent that I was just making a fool of myself by telling him all this, because he hasn’t left the train-hopping “scene” in over 50 years. Two or three years ago, he said, he was on a freight train headed towards Calgary. There was a 19-year old kid in the boxcar with him. He didn’t think the kid was really up to what he was in for, because it was a long ride. After a couple days the kid seemed very, very hungry. At one point, the kid almost looked like he was going to starve—“He was almost finished” is the way he put it—and for some reason the train had stopped for several minutes. Maybe the head of this very long train was unloading something, who knows, but in any case, there was an apple tree full of apples not far from where their box car was stopped. The minutes dragged, and he himself was not all that hungry—he was more prepared than the kid for this—but the kid just kept staring and staring at this apple tree, wondering if it really was what he though it was. Finally, the kid couldn’t take it, jumped off the train, ran towards the tree, grabbed maybe 20 apples or so in a frenzy and ran back just in time to hop on as the train began rolling again. The drunken old-timer was watching the whole thing and was laughing his head off by the time the kid climbed back on. He said he was better prepared for the long ride, and when the kid offered him an apple he turned him down. The kid ate at least six of them very quickly and got pretty sick right after. I didn’t doubt from his experience riding the rails, and the nonchalant way he told it in, that he was aware of the dangers of, say, eating nothing for two days and then quickly eating a half-dozen acidic wild apples…
He continued on with stories about those days way back when, his late teens and early twenties in Ontario when he did a variety of things for money. For awhile it was bank robberies. After looking me straight in the eye and making sure I was not a cop, he confessed to having carried out a number of robberies while living in northern Ontario. Back then, the cops were all on horseback, because aside from the CNR (Canadian National Railroad), there were no established roads, no highways, nothing. He’d managed to hold up a very small bank for everything they had, taking off with $1800
While he bummed around Northern Ontario, carrying out robberies and shady dealings, he would sometimes find himself on the run and looking out for cars or trucks to sleep in at night. The best thing, he said, was to find a nice truck that was parked in a field, and sleep in it for the night to avoid getting bitten by bugs. Nobody locked their cars or trucks in these areas, he said, because there was almost nobody around. He related one incident when a farmer caught him sleeping, but simply climbed into his truck and drove off with him in it. The farmer drove quite a distance, while he pretended to be asleep the whole time. When the farmer finally stopped to check on some horses in a stable, our friend bolted out of the truck “and headed for the highway, head first!” He ran and ran and ran, and “when I finally made it to the highway,” he told me, “I was so happy, so happy I made it to the highway.”
After listening to a few more of these brief stories of his, I ordered another beer from André as he passed by, in French. The toothless guy stared at me and said in English, “You speak French? Or are you English?” I told him, I speak both, very easily, and I’ve done so all my life. Having told me all these stories in English but with a French accent, it seemed to surprise him. But alas, after downing the last few gulps of his large beer, he didn’t seem to have many stories left to tell tonight. He said he should get going, suddenly acting much more civil and normal than the cackling old toothless drunk I saw when I first walked in.
It was very interesting to hear this guy tell stories that he otherwise wouldn’t have bothered recalling because the scene there wasn’t usually the most inspiring crowd to relate a coherent story to. He gave me a bit of a wave and a nod before staggering out, and I jotted down what remaining bits I felt were important to jot down, before finishing my own beer and heading out myself.
It was this same hot summer night that I learned that Guy Boisvert was dead. Not two weeks before, I had sat transcribing Guy’s rough slur (and even rougher choice of language) from old interview tapes for this article and thought, I’ll just wander back there one of these afternoons and catch up with him, maybe double-check on some facts. No more. No longer. And as André told me this time, any day now, the sun might set on this place as well. It could be tomorrow, or it could be in ten years.
I told him before getting my last beer, just before he stopped serving, that I may as well have another, just in case it’s closed tomorrow. As I left, and he unlocked the door to let us out, I told him I hoped to see him there a lot more often than just tomorrow. But there seemed to be no attachment to this place on his part. It’s as though his 31 years there just made him weary. And just the fact that there is always, always at least one old dude wanting to rant on to me makes me think none of these people smell much of a future to this place, and feel compelled to explain that it does at least have a past. And that they, at least, have a past. Like that time when…
God, André can’t be right. The “Gang of Greeks,” as he called them, can’t be planning to raze the area to the ground, keeping just the facade, evicting all the rooming houses, closing all the hot dog stands… Surely, the current building boom will die out before that is feasible.
“What about all the fucking parking lots all over downtown?” I said to André.
“We need housing,” he answered. “But not condos, going for $145 000 each.” I agreed, mentioning that I made $30 000 a year myself, and couldn’t afford one of those. But he asked me what do you make after tax, maybe $350, $400 a week? I said yeah, pretty much. You have to pay at least $400 these days for an apartment, he said. You have to work a week just for that.
He didn’t mention anything else, just went on serving the next person, but I’m sure in the back of his head he was thinking of the days he told me about when they could make their rent in one day’s tips alone. And the city of Montreal was half fields and farms then…
Ah, what can you do, what could you do… I should at least hang out and talk to these people more often while they’re still around. So many stories live in these people, and in these buildings themselves… I think it helps a lot when the two of them go together.
