A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Sorry, Andre

Last Saturday in Montreal I did a bad, bad thing. It made me feel so good. I’d been strolling along Sherbrooke Street with my shoulders hunched inside my barn coat against the bitter wind and my neck a squeezed accordion inside my tartan scarf. Christmas is coming and I was popping into shops and galleries shopping for a gift for Ann but nothing spoke to me. As is always the case when I’m out and about in my hometown, I found myself at Crescent Street.

Leonard Cohen’s giant face watched me make a shivering beeline for the confines of Ziggy’s Pub from the towering wall of a high-rise. Five steps down from street level, the joint is my unofficial headquarters. I like the autographed photograph of the Flying Bobby Orr on the wall and the signed Keith Richards guitar bolted to the ceiling near the toilets. I thought a cold pint of Keith’s Red would warm me up.

Ziggy himself was manning the bar. A lone customer nursing a Bloody Mary was watching the Manchester derby match. The digital juke was playing, set on random enticement, pay to change the sound. I was going to insert five dollars but it kept spinning Rolling Stones songs, not their tired warhorses but album tracks or what are cringingly known in this day and age as deep cuts. I wasn’t going to mess with karma.

I asked Ziggy if I might have a look at the Saturday New York Times crossword in his pub’s copy of The Montreal Gazette. He said, “Go for it.” I fished a blue ballpoint from my coat pocket, one I’d lifted from the Inn at Laurel Point in Victoria’s inner harbour. I filled in the obvious clues around the grid. Southernmost team in the N.B.A.? MIAMIHEAT. Allen Ginsberg, e.g.? BEATPOET. Abu -? DHABI. Pomme de – (potato: Fr.)? TERRE. “That’s my cue!”? IMON. Longtime CBS drama spinoff? NCIS, which led to IDEATE and SENDER. I nailed the only two words I can remember from my grade seven Spanish class: USTED and HABLA. Three three-letter, one-syllable words formed: ASH, KID and HEN.

Crossword puzzles are ciphers. You have to get into the puzzler’s head to address the homonyms and synonyms beyond the simple factual solutions. If an answer seems too obvious, too easy, chances are it’s wrong. There is the arcane: God knows what a one-point throw in horseshoes is called. And then there are the riddles and puns which require intuitive leaps, hunches. Relative of a tweet? CHEEP. Best of all possible whirls? DREAMDATE. Commanding lead? ACTORDIRECTOR. Cooler filled with juice? ELECTRICFAN. Usually, solving one or two nine- or ten-letter clues will blow a puzzle wide open making for an easy sprint to completion.

Two pints later I was stuck. Certain I’d made a hasty mistake yet convinced I hadn’t. Oh, the arrogance of ink with the Saturday New York Times crossword! Meanwhile, Ziggy had turned control of his establishment over to his bartender who’d just arrived for her shift. I went outside for a sidewalk cigarette and mulled 24-down: Reversible word. I had an O, R, I and a P for the last letter, and eight other squares to fill. INSIDEOUT did not fit. I was vexed. Big Leonard was a smirking sphinx, no golden voice of enlightenment from that mural. Bastard.

I ducked back inside and ordered another pint of beer. When the bartender brought it over she gasped, “You’re doing Andre’s puzzle.”

“Who’s Andre?”

“He’s a regular. He does the crossword every Saturday.”

I said, “Uh-oh.” In past lives I’ve enjoyed the misfortune of being a barroom regular. I understand how irksome it can be when a stranger sits on YOUR stool and reads YOUR newspaper and then does not refold its pages properly. I get that. I said, “Should I put it back? What time does he normally get here?”

She said, “Not until five or so. I’ll just tell him the paper didn’t come today.”

Nobody likes a used crossword, especially an uncompleted one, a stained and tainted grid. That faux-pas would smear me in the eyes of a fellow FIEND. Everyone’s a critic. I studied the puzzle, double-checking my work. Reversible word. Reversible word. Reversible word. A reversible word would read the same front to back, a palindrome. And then it hit me like a boomerang: 24-down was SEMORDNILAP, "palindromes" backward reading from the bottom up. Clever bastard, this puzzle-maker. I didn’t like the plural, bit of cheating, I thought, but it fit with the tense of 23-across: Puts through a sieve? RICES, the R coming from ATBIRTH when Apgar tests are performed.

I finished the crossword. The puzzle was unsullied by messy corrections. Above the grid I wrote, “Sorry, Andre.” I signed my name, “Geoff.” I refolded the section, reassembled the entire newspaper in sequence and then replaced it at the end of the bar where I’d found it. I finished my beer, paid my tab and slipped away into the rest of the afternoon, warmed and smug.

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