‘Someone smashed the window of the pharmacy on the corner there. People were spraying perfume at the cops. The cops reeked of perfume- the whole area smelled flaky. The cops did nothing, they just stood there. A bunch of people headed down St. Laurent, breaking windows and shit. They made it all the way down to the SAQ by Prince Arthur, stole loads of booze, then just scattered to go drink it.’
We walked down the street after and everything seemed pretty normal, except for a few broken windows and the lingering smell of perfume. What was weird was that later in the afternoon, a friend called all the way from Kitchener, Ontario just to see if I was OK. Then I realized that this thing somehow made the national news, coast to coast, and suddenly punks were an issue, a big problem. ?!? The fact that some of them squeegeed windshields for cash was played up in a lot of articles by journalists seeking to portray characters who were as colorful as possible. It’s true that a bunch of them did used to squeegee right in front of Loonie’s, the city’s main punk bar, usually just for beer money. The coverage, though, apparently ended up putting the idea in a lot of poor or just bored kids’ heads ‘cause in the following months, there were just more and more kids doing that till eventually there were kids doing that all over the country. Goes to show, the media doesn’t just objectively represent reality like it claims to, it often actively (if usually unknowingly) affects it.
I talked to a friend of mine to get the story straight on what actually happened in front of Café So that night. Just in case the cops are still hoping to arrest some of the people they videotaped there, I’ll call my friend C… in case they decide they need to find him and question him.

C: … so whoever booked it scammed Café So into thinking they were just putting on a rock show. Of course, all these kids show up mesced out of their minds. And of course it’s on Rachel between Clark and St-Laurent, they had a nice terrace where they go in, watch the band, come back out, then drink store-bought beer, cause no one’s gonna pay four dollars for a beer. They only had this one bouncer, I mean, he was huge, but still, what could they do. They should’ve just called the cops right then, but they must’ve been thinking, well, we gotta just go through with this. So eventually they panicked, because all these kids were like, coming in and out with their beer, sitting out there with their cases of beer. So they said “OK, we’re not letting anyone back in.”
Louis: I heard they’d pulled out some fire law, too many people in the bar…
C: Well, yeah, they said it was over the legal limit, but I mean, these were people who’d paid, these were kids who had legitimate reason to wanna come back in.
L: That’s a formula for a riot right there.
C: Well, yeah, justifiably, they had their hands stamped, they should’ve let them come back in. But they’re like “No, no, we’re not gonna let anyone back in, forget it.” Me and the people I was with got our money back, because we were reasonable about it, but most of the other people, they were flipping out,
L: They really wanted to see the show.
C: Yeah, so, it got out of hand, the bouncer panicked, pounded a couple of kids, you know, this 200 and something pound big jock bouncer guy, and these little scrawny, squeegee—crusty kids (they were called ‘crusties’ until after all the post-riot publicity changed it to ‘squeegees’). He took a shot at one of the kids, I remember at one point he had one of the kids in an armlock, and I mean, probably a ninety pound kid, you know, of course, they went to his aid, swarmed him, and… if they just called the cops quietly then when the cops showed up most of the kids would’ve just taken off. But then this idiot roughed up one of their friends and that was it, it just snowballed from there.
So after he pounded this one kid, they swarmed him, they were just hanging off him, like one off each arm. Eventually they pushed him through the plate glass door, they rushed him into the door, he lost his balance and fell through the door. So then this car comes up, this unmarked car, and these two guys in regular clothes come and like, grab this kid and throw him into the back of the car. Obviously they’re plainclothes cops. What they were thinking was maybe that they were gonna scare the kids into dispersing? (neither of us is convinced)

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