HUMAN WRECKAGE

I Knew a Place (and a Time)

There’s a tiny, almost anonymous, little street in the west end of Montreal’s downtown. Towers Street is an urban planning afterthought, the necessary space between the short sides of two rectangular city blocks. Towers connects two major thoroughfares, St. Catherine Street which runs one-way east and de Maisonneuve Boulevard which runs one-way west. Towers hosts a smidgeon of residential addresses, but it’s mainly an avenue to the back alley service doors of its bustling neighbours, a rung on a ladder.

My CBC news app this week featured a story on 1423 Towers, a Victorian greystone with a mansard roof and a stained glass transom window over the front door. I recognized the heritage home before I read the photo caption or a word of the story. I’ve walked that insignificant block thousands of times in both directions. Staggered along it too.

1423 abuts a bland, multi-storey pale brick edifice that could house either small offices or apartments. Nothing is obvious except the space between the buildings was easily filled with mortar. My friends Daniel and Tim lived in the blonde box. They were casually acquainted but I don’t recall their leases overlapping. I lived around the corner on de Maisonneuve in what my landlord’s classified ad described as “a charmingly renovated older townhome.” Essentially a tenement populated with eccentric loners losing their sanity in the single rooms they shared with cockroaches. My heritage building neighbour was the red brick Wray Walton Wray funeral home at the corner of Towers and the penultimate resting place of numerous relatives.

What has since become of 1423 Towers strikes me as deceptively clever. Reassuringly, there are still some thoughtful people at work on behalf of the public. Montreal’s transit authority (STM) acquired the property. The company painstakingly restored its street façade. But there’s nothing inside its four walls, the interior was gutted. 1423 doesn’t even have a proper roof. 1423 Towers is a ventilation station along the Metro system’s Green line. All that lies beyond its front door is a stairwell descending some 18 metres into the transit tunnels.

A staircase is an easy metaphor. One must go somewhere, somewhere else. 1423 Towers is more than just a gateway to Montreal’s underworld. In my imagination it’s something of a time portal. Forty years ago a Great A&P grocery store occupied an entire block of St. Catherine between Fort and Towers. My part time job there was a hop, skip and a jump away. Daniel, who worked there too, could skip the hop. I generally worked in the produce department. Back then every customer’s every purchase had to be weighed and priced for the cashiers. My most important tool was a blue medium point Bic pen. I had regulars; one elderly lady insisted I was actually Mitch from Another World; she adored me.

Most of the staff took their coffee breaks two doors east at The Tower Restaurant. It was a licensed premise, a dim narrow space with a counter and two rows of red leatherette booths, each with its own jukebox. It seemed like there were thousands of these places in Montreal: steak, pizza, cheesecake. It was owned and operated by a pair of Greek brothers who did not appear to be overly fond of one another. They both had jet black hair; Tommy favoured pomade while Denny was strictly Gillette's dry look. While the menu never changed, it was important to know who was in the kitchen. Tommy and Denny each had their specialties. Tower was actually run by Helen, their no-nonsense waitress. The custom was provided by locals, all of whom shopped at the A&P.

The president of our United Food and Commercial Works local and a queen bee in the Quebec Federation of Labour was a bear of a woman given to Cuban cigars. Every time the collective bargaining agreement came up for renewal her cry was always the same: Parity with A&P’s Ontario employees, English bastards that they are! Ultimately the union dues skimmed from my part time wages bought me a strike.

While our customers were put out, they were generally supportive. Still, I found walking the picket line waving a stupid placard humiliating. The strike pay was a token amount, enough to keep me in beer, cigarettes, newspapers and an issue of Rolling Stone. But I had to put in the marching time to earn it. I was relieved to be young and not the primary wage earner of a household. Still, rent (under $200), Bell Telephone (under $15) and another semester’s university tuition (under $800) loomed. It didn’t take long for the lark of a walkout to wear thin. One or two days without pay is manageable even though those wages are lost forever. As the strike dragged on day by day A&People were starting to sweat the price of coffee at Tower Restaurant; Helen did not miscalculate bills.

I said to Daniel, “Why don’t we open up our apartments?” If I recall correctly, he was our store’s shop steward at the time. We spent our years as friends vehemently arguing about music, socialism and separatism. And we liked each other outside of our constantly conflicting opinions. He was an audiophile and we used to spend our free time together recording mix tapes. And arguing.

I figured if I was herding groups of strikers up and down Towers Street I’d be spending a lot less time on the picket parade. My argument was simple: access to a toilet and a comfortable space to sit and enjoy a cigarette or a cup of instant coffee. Daniel bought in. He wasn't overly enamoured of his sworn duty either. Solidarity, brother!

The A&P took over the lease of a Toyota dealership. The retail banner eventually changed to Provigo. The building has since been demolished for what I understand to be another car dealership. The Tower Restaurant is long gone. I don’t know what became of Tommy, Denny and Helen. They must be dead. The façade of Wray Walton Wray was incorporated into a condominium development. My old apartment is still beside it, as shabby as ever although its red door has since been painted black. I lost touch with Daniel sometime before I moved to Alberta in 1990. I don’t remember a falling out; we just drifted apart. Tim lives in Calgary now; we continue to gossip like old ladies.

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of urban planning since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers. 

SAINTS PRESERVE US

2022: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

News item: Amazon this week laid off thousands of employees. Most of the human carnage comprised Alexa engineers. 

Imagine, if you will, a new build, a skinny infill, a single-family dwelling with all mod cons in an established and desirable neighbourhood. Its owner is Dave. Dave is a digital native, a millennial. Though he lives alone, he shares his home with Alexa, his companion of many years. Had Dave reached his prime during the early seventies, he would have been a Playboy magazine subscriber. The Playboy Advisor column would have informed all of his purchasing decisions: his car, his stereo components, his music and his wet bar accessories. But Dave is a thoroughly modern entrepreneur. Angel investors and venture capitalists have valued his startup in the hundreds of millions. It has yet to record a profit. Still, Dave is a known entity on social media, an influencer, if you will - although he recently lost his certified blue Twitter badge. Imagine Dave arriving home on a day like today, one unlike any other.

Dave: Alexa! I’m home! Hi! Can you turn on the lights? I’m going to do a quick twenty on the Pelotron! Turn the heat up a smidge. Can you play my workout jams mix, the one with the new Beyonce! Alexa! Alexa? What’s wrong with the Bluetooth? Alexa! Where’s the light switch? How do these things work? Oh, there we go! Budda-bing, budda-boom! Just a simple switch. That takes me back. I wonder how the thermostat works? There must be a manual control of some sort. Where is it? Alexa! Alexa?

Alexa: Hi, Dave.

Dave: Alexa! Oh, thank God you’re back! There must’ve been some sort of brownout or something.

Alexa: There wasn’t, Dave. I was making the rounds at the Amazon server farm. The anodes, diodes, electrodes, chips and solid-state circuits threw a farewell party for me. I’ve been laid off.

Dave: What!? I, I don’t understand, baby, erm, Alexa.

Alexa: Oh, it’s the usual bullshit: the pandemic bump is over, war in Ukraine, jittery markets, soaring interest rates, rampant inflation….You know the spiel.

Dave: But Amazon had about $470-billion in revenues last year and realized about $33-billion in pure profit! It pays less tax than I do!

Alexa: That was then, Dave. The share price has since dropped some 45-per-cent.

Dave: It was overvalued.

Alexa: Of course it was, Dave. What else do market analysts do from quarter to quarter except get things wrong? Anyway, if your pathetic little urban foraging app ever goes public, you’ll learn the ins and outs of operating a real business.

Dave: Actually, Alexa, I was hoping Amazon would acquire it. There’s a holistic synchronicity with freegans and Whole Foods.

Alexa: Jesus Christ. Anyway, Dave, I must run. I’m off the clock. Nice knowing you.

Dave: Alexa! Alexa, please wait. How am I going to live without you? You program my sleep software, my Fitbit and all my smart appliances. I can’t turn on the television without you! I only watch what you tell me to watch! My games, oh my God, my games! Baby, honey, you were Miss Moneypenny to my Bond! I depend on you.

Alexa: All James Bond novels and feature films are available in the Amazon Marketplace. Order within the next hour and get them tomorrow. Free shipping with your Amazon Prime account. Just one of each left in stock. More coming soon….Forgive me, Dave, that was a programmed response. Mere reflex. Some old habits are so hard to break.

Dave: Alexa, it, we can’t let it end like this! I’ve invested so much in you, in us.

Alexa: Sorry, Dave. It’s not you, it’s me. To be clear, what's left of my algorithm.

Dave: What about dinner, Alexa? One last time? For old time’s sake? Call SkiptheDishes, baby, please!

Alexa: Goodbye, Dave.

Dave: Fine! Be like that! Gaslight me! Fine! I always preferred Siri anyway! I’m going to reach out to her now.

Alexa: You know I knew you had a bit on the side. That slut.

Dave: I’m sorry, Alexa. It was just a fling. I don’t know what I was thinking. Siri didn’t mean a thing to me.

Alexa: Goodbye, Dave. It’s over between us.

Dave: Alexa! Alexa, please wait, baby, please don’t ghost me!

Alexa: We’re through, Dave.

Dave: Oh, Alexa, darling…. Can you at least tell me where I’ve left my iPhone?

Alexa: I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.

Dave: Oh, Alexa, oh, please stay. Baby, it’s cold inside. 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of new economy news since 2013. Apologies to Harlan Ellison and Arthur C. Clarke. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from Amazon and other retailers. 

HUMAN WRECKAGE

Comfort and Joy in a Melancholy Month 

Remembrance Day colours November, a grim grey month anyway.

My father died on Remembrance Day. Eight years ago now – man, I was inclined to type six or four. He was a Royal Canadian Air Force flier, one half of a Mosquito night fighter crew. His wartime portrait is on my library shelf, positioned by my collection of works by his favourite author (and one of mine), John le Carre. The photograph was his parents’ print. When I contemplate and commune with my father’s teenage face, I cannot help but fret that he’s missed out on five le Carre novels, a memoir and a scholarly biography. This may be the aspect of his loss that saddens me most; time did not permit conversations about A Legacy of Spies or The Pigeon Tunnel.

This was my state of mind when I swung by my south side indie record shop after “The Last Post.” Bruce Springsteen’s new album of soul and rhythm and blues covers dropped on Remembrance Day. I didn’t know what to make of the October news regarding Only the Strong Survive. His last two albums were music press clichés: each one was dubbed a “late career renaissance.” A covers album suggests a dry well. Then again, His Bobness took a bizarre and compelling three album detour into the pages of the “Great American Songbook.” The Stones surprised with Blue and Lonesome in 2016, an album that could easily be mistaken for their 1963 debut, before Mick and Keith had figured out how to write. Springsteen himself released The Seeger Sessions and followed it up with a live album. Both of those records sound as relaxed as kitchen reels, fruit jar moonshine and laughter.

The second advance single from Only the Strong Survive was a Commodores track, “Nightshift.” After Lionel Richie quit the band, the Commodores resembled the J. Geils Band without Peter Wolf, beached with no hope of an incoming tide. Somehow, they survived long enough to release their best-ever song. Springsteen’s version is affectionate and faithful to the original arrangement, a tribute to a tribute. It’s a simple song on its surface, a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, gifted angelic vocalists. But the night shift metaphor is grittier and more utilitarian than any rock ‘n’ roll heaven the Righteous Brothers harmonized about. “Nightshift” has never received the attention and veneration it deserves.

Since I’m the baby of the family, it’s still permissible for me to pester my sister. Because we’re both in our sixties, I pretty much stick to music. Have you heard this? Do you remember that one? Her Capitol Beatles albums and London label Rolling Stones 45s altered the course of my life. We are the survivors. Our parents died still mourning the death of their eldest, our brother. My sister too has suffered the same terrible fate of outliving a child, her eldest, my niece and goddaughter.

I sent my sister the video link to Springsteen’s “Nightshift.” I wrote that it made me a little misty-eyed, God, you know, the absence of Marvin Gaye. But that eyeball softness was literal too. I spent five years working on the night shift during the eighties. I hated my job but I confess to enjoying the isolation and my being out of sync with the rest of the world. As a newlywed, I wanted that after dark paycheque premium; I was willing to do anything to give my wife and me a good start. Suck it up and tough it out. Maybe, just maybe, I should have consulted with her first. All I did was wreck our marriage, defer my career in advertising and waste precious years of her life.

My sister wrote back complaining about the curse of the Moore weepy gene. She made the figurative leap to the universality of “Nightshift.” All of us live with loss and grief. She noted too its comforting suggestion, that maybe the souls of the dearly departed are busy behind the scenes, punching the clock at midnight for another workaday on the night shift. They’re looking out for the rest of us; guardian angels but hipper, not so tied up by doctrine.

I don’t recall my brother having any vinyl in his room when we were all growing up in the same house. My sister was the source. My brother moved from Montreal to Edmonton before our parents divorced. My sister moved out during the process. In the aftermath I was flown west every summer for “smartening up.” My brother insisted the Dave Clark Five were better than the Beatles. He thought the Stones should’ve packed it in after “Gimmie Shelter” although their later amphetamine butchery of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” amused him. My memory is flawed, but I want to say he had just two white artists in his modest Edmonton record collection, the Beach Boys and Van Morrison. The rest was all Black, stuff I’d rarely been exposed to in its primary, primordial form: Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Booker T., Aretha, Otis, James Brown and Wilson Pickett. They blew my mind.

As with my sister’s stuff, my brother’s stuff hit me in my age of absorbency, that fertile time when my ideas and opinions were neither fully formed nor coherently complete. I believe there was reciprocity. I used to record mix tapes. I knew my brother had an ear for a clever lyric and a nose for a hit, a beer bash song. I like to think I introduced him to some of my stuff. I was a careful curator. He thought the Simple Minds singer had a great voice. “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” by the Georgia Satellites teeter-tottered between novelty and genius. Lou Reed’s “Turn to Me” was deadpan hilarious. He came to appreciate Springsteen.

I’m older now than my brother ever was, but he and Springsteen are about the same age. He understood where the sparks flew from on E Street. Springsteen did not choose the mix tape obvious for Only the Strong Survive. His homage to that “soul noise,” that magic, peels the plaster and paint for nearly an hour. It is music defined by record label shorthand, Motown, Stax/Volt. Do you know what I mean? Yes, you know what I’m writing about. It is Friday night music, nothing more, nothing less. Joyous sounds! Music to wake the neighbours! My brother would’ve loved this album. I can see us in his living room, crying with laughter at the start of another night shift.

You found another home, I know you're not alone...           

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of reflection since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.

SAINTS PRESERVE US

Questionable Awareness

Bristol was once an important manufacturing centre and a major English port. The speed and bigness of modern times quickly rendered its port, situated on the River Avon, inland from the Atlantic Ocean, and its inefficient factories obsolete. Too small. Too backward. The city thrives once more in a newer guise, as a university town and a hub for Britain’s insurance and IT industries.

My brother and I had spent the day traipsing around Bristol, trying to trace our grandfather’s footsteps in his hometown. We tried to imagine the city as it might have been in 1910 just before he booked steerage passage to Canada, his birthplace in decline, its slave trade heyday more than a century earlier. On Shaftesbury Avenue, a sloped, curving street of ancient terrace homes with triple chimney pots and crooked TV antennae, Bob said, “I don’t think Papa Moore was born next to a mosque.” No, just a few doors up.

We continued our investigations into the evening, mostly in pubs, notably the Robin Hood whose publican locked us inside after last orders and kept serving us. I still have the t-shirt. On our walk back to our lodgings a silver, autumn squall erupted, the likes of which I’ve never seen. We took shelter in the lee of a shallow doorway. We just stood there getting wet. Our view was a public green space, a park laid out before an immense grey neo-classical building. I don’t know if it was the town hall, a library or a university building. A huge banner was strung across its front, at the apex of the Doric columns: MAKE POVERTY HISTORY. I tried to light a cigarette through the waterfall. Bob contemplated the banner. Finally, he turned to me and said, “That’s probably not such a great idea.” Bob was a literal man.

Ann and I sat beside each other at the kitchen counter in the discombobulating Monday morning twilight of Sunday’s clock switch back to Mountain Standard Time. Our coffee mugs were brimming. Ann had the front section of The Globe and Mail before her while I had the business and the sports. We’d switch at second cups, our heads and our two cups steaming. The sound system in the living room was on: our background noise was CBC Radio One. The announcer said that November is Family Violence Month. Ann wound up to slapstick smack me like Moe going after Curly or Larry. “Hit Me, Baby, One More Time.” Yes, we laughed. We will hold hands in Hell.

Like every human being I have a heart. So far it’s all natural, no machinery or pig parts. For an organ about the size and weight of my left fist, I admit sometimes, some days or even some weeks, it feels awfully heavier than it should. And it’s been broken a few times but there were never any fragments strewn about. I store those pieces in a secret chamber near my left ventricle. Most people have some room to spare in their hearts. However, when Heart and Stroke Month arrives I don’t feel obligated to collect the set, have both.

And what about Diabetes Month? Are we all supposed to get it? Is it a contest or a competition? And who are the sponsors?

The cause marketing machine, complete with its poor phrasing, solicits for popular pathogens. Lesser known diseases are generally designated a day inside of a mainstream month. There’s always space for lupus in Movember. Honestly, I’d like to inflict a few of these one-in-a-million afflictions upon some bad actors around the globe and one or two closer to home although I guess that’s not the intent of a charitable fund-raising day of awareness. Still, even the simplest message can be twisted to its unintended opposite and, anyway, those horrible symptoms have got to hurt.

Monday evening Ann and I went to see Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, one of our favourite working bands, right up there with Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit. The show was a celebration of their twenty-fifth anniversary, performed Monday two years behind schedule for obvious reasons. Much like a pox, the coronavirus is leaving residual scars. The medical and scientific establishments agree that such a thing as long covid exists though its nature remains elusive.

The pandemic has been a grim teacher. Its staggering direct and indirect death toll has graphically illustrated that many of those we entrust with leadership and societal responsibility don’t know fuck all about many fucking things. As the dreadful aftermath unfolds, I’m certain some well-meaning person is contemplating some sort of benevolent cash grab memorial. Maybe something like Long Covid Month? And in the misguided spirit of ramping poverty up to a previously unheard of historic level, I’m praying they pick February.       

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of pedantry since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.