HUMAN WRECKAGE

Who Am I and What Have I Done?

The first of May marked a quiet personal anniversary, the mid-point of a divided life: thirty formative years lived in Montreal and thirty more formative years lived in Alberta, awkwardly split between the province’s two major cities.

I’ve no faculty for language beyond my mother tongue. English is difficult enough and the tip of my tongue is frequently mute. I default to “fuck.” French fluency, forget about it. I was fed up with the politics of language and language politics in Quebec. I realized I was facing a hardscrabble dead-end in my hometown. The place I loved was no place for me.

I sought work in bilingual Ottawa where my father lived, faraway close to Montreal. I came close, a job in the advertising department of a major department store hard by Parliament and the Rideau Locks. The manager said it might take a little time to sort out but I must remain patient. When he phoned me back with what I expected was an offer, he told me his department was being shut down and its work outsourced. I’ve never dwelt on that untrodden path, my alternative personal history.    

In the spring of 1990 I purchased a Canadian Airlines ticket, Montreal–Edmonton-return which was significantly less expensive than a one-way fare. My older brother Bob met me at the airport; I had a soft landing. On the way home to his place we made multiple stops, ran errands. I’d just left the only life I’d ever known behind and here I was standing damp and shivering in a coin-carwash bay an hour off the jet. I was sure my head was going to explode; Bob could hose down the mess.

Six weeks later I had my first job in advertising, a grocery chain, my first white collar job. A family friend, a Montrealer with extensive business ties across western Canada had put in a word and I’d passed the audition. A new work colleague remarked that my English was impeccable and wondered why I didn’t speak it with a French accent. I thought, “My God, what have I gone and done?” By September I’d rented a downtown apartment and my toddler nephews were no longer haunted by “The Man Who Lives in the Basement.”

Within three years I was transferred from the division office to corporate headquarters in Calgary. There I was no longer “Frenchie” but “one of those new guys from Edmonton.” I lived and worked in Calgary for the next 20 years. And that’s all I did, live, and work chasing salary increases. I never established an emotional connection to the city; I was just there and Calgary was just where I was. I made good friends and I had good jobs but I always felt at sea, adrift.

Meanwhile, the tenor of my trips home to Montreal had changed. Most of my childhood, high school and college friends had left town long before I came to terms with my own inevitable departure. Mystery shopper, I didn’t recognize any of the employees’ faces in the grocery store where I’d managed the night shift whilst trying to establish myself as a writer during the day, young enough to toil through traditional business hours, forgo sleep. The baseball Expos had limped out of town. The places I’d loved to haunt, the record stores, the newsstands and the taverns, had all closed. All that was left were a few fragments of family and the hockey Canadiens gliding into mediocrity in a ritzy new arena. I did not belong; time had recast me as an Albertan.

The Crooked 9 has an Edmonton postal code. I vote and pay my taxes here. It is home, a place I’d been searching for since long before I left Montreal, somewhere to feel comfortable in my own skin. And yet I often feel like a Canadian version of Schrödinger’s cat. I’m not inside the box with the creature so much as inside its head, that bottle cap-sized brain that logically assumes that the weather outside the front door must be different from the weather outside the back one.

The paradoxical question isn’t whether I’m alive or dead but “Where do I fit in?” When I now hear members of the provincial government, local authorities and broadcasted talking heads reference “Albertans” I imagine every citizen in Alberta gathered under some sort of midway pavilion and me on the outside a few feet away, socially distanced, the same as I’ve always been.                                                                 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative record of alienation since 2013. Sign up for e-mail alerts from the Crooked 9.