Waking up to Biscuits ‘n Gravy
Rue St-Catherine, you are not a beautiful bride to wake up to. Fact is, you have a bit of a problem with your upkeep. You emit the quality of being a stain, an oozing wound on the body of mammalian Montreal. And yet, you are its frenetic artery, pulsing with current, with dank and perfume, and I think I love you.
I used to drive to work, a twenty-minute drive along the Gardiner highway in Toronto into the industrial parks of East Mississauga. A commute with absolutely no beauty, it was memorable only for being so imprinted in my memory that I could drive all the way home without conscious awareness that I was in the car. The traffic began to coalesce into patterns that I was able to recognize and navigate mindlessly. I took the same shortcuts, dodged the same potholes and poorly paved offramps, seethed over missed parking spaces using the exact same expletives. My commute, she was a woman without an ounce of mystery left. She was a dinner of beans and rice for twenty years. Two lifetimes, one in each direction, spanned the duration of these daily drives to oblivion and back.
Now, I walk past Iranian and Lebanese, Chinese and French, and a few flavours of Homeless. To your south, staid, corporate Rene Levesque, to the north, purposeless, meandering Maisonneuve. Ste-Catherine, you are a corridor of bleak decadence and dirty neon, filled with human beings stripping each other with their eyes. You are a three dollar whore inside a raging beehive wrapped in Douppioni silk and dipped into a bucket of beef gravy. It doesn’t mean I can’t love you.
In the morning I open the sluicegate and wade out into this churning chute of human depravity. I dodge redolent trails of tossed water trickling towards the street, and I weave past hordes of blank-faced teens on cellphones, ogling the Louis Vuitton shopfront. I drift on past the homeless man outside the Scotiabank, who nods humbly to passers-by, monklike. He carries a found bank card for swiping you into the lobby. He is grateful to even be noticed, an admirable quality.
Thank you, Ste-Catherine, for Sexe Cité, which reminds me of the greatness of other people’s sex lives from its snug display window between a used bookstore and a take-out shawarma restaurant. Pleather-clad mannequins, sex-themed board games, and tubes of personal lubricant start a fire in my heart every morning. It fizzles out after a second or two. Excellent.
Thank you Club Super Sexe, for being you, and thanks for your dirty little brother Club Super Contact, who inhabits one of the more interesting buildings on the street. You make worthy homes to Rigaud’s finest, and to the shills who stand outside barking the beer prices. Thanks for the cavernous Peel Pub, which I can safely ignore, much like the entirety of Rue Crescent. Thanks for 3 Amigos and both locations of Reuben’s. Thanks for turning the act of walking six blocks into sensory overload. Thank you for compacting the best and worst, the tackiest and the most subtle of Montreal into twenty minutes of sidewalk and two underground tunnels. And while I can offer no thanks to the batallions of awestruck human road cones blocking my path every day, maybe it’s just as well that they are learning to love you too.
And no thank you to that fucking Spoon Man.
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