Before I left for Montreal, I returned most of the trophies back to the prairie, a little worse for wear, bits of string and glue holding them together to be found hundreds of years from now and wondered at by new civilizations. Then she watched me scrape a little depression in the ground outside, and press each piece of flotsam back into the earth. Hatred had a stranglehold on her.
Not for Montreal. Of all places! Maybe you can be like your aunt, the queen of Regina. Spend your life surrounded by whispers about who or where your father ended up, on top of why you skip with girls, throw like a girl, sound like a girl and above all, flirt-and-then-some with Monsieur Delvin the French teacher, like a girl, then yes, Montreal is of all places where you go. There are no such trophies to be found on rue Ste. Hot August wind shifts papers and wrappers aloft and tosses them between buildings.
But the concrete is warm on my rear end. I got a job and, up until last month, Montreal has kept me fed and sheltered. Thanks to events , or occasions, weddings, openings, vernissages , lancements βI was learning new words everyday. There were funerals on the steps of one church and weddings on the steps of another. Georges needed staff because someone had booked Le Parisien, not just one theatre but the whole thing, for a film debut, and wanted him to cater the whole fucking affair himself.
Georges said there was a hundred in it for every waiter who was there for set up, our first fifty, and tear-down, our second one. Celebrities wandered the red carpet, Jacques Villeneuve, the singer or the race-car driver how should I know? Diane Dufresne. All Quebecois icons whose larger-than-life brooding faces graced the placards at Place des Arts.
Gino Fucking Vanelli! Oh my God! Maintenant , us waiters were getting refills in the lobby office, drinking what we could not pander, to make up for the teetotalers, and then, with a tug of cuffs, cummerbunds and bow ties, we magically balanced another full tray across the lobby, while Georges forced a smile and, with the flattened palms of a traffic cop, directed us back up the grand staircase towards the popcorn concession for refills, like one huge grain conveyor of stone-faced waiters.
