by RAF KATIGBAK

Recently I spent an afternoon in Mile-End. Not because, like so many upwardly mobile types with disposable income, I was drawn to the young hipsters, all of whom can somehow find a break from the daily grind of their artistic/musical silk-screening epic emo rock collectives to sit at a café and talk shit all day, but rather because it is the closest place to my downtown apartment where you can enter a café, order “a coffee,” and they understand exactly what you mean.

That’s right, not a “grande half–caf steam vanilla soy cream frappucino topped with whipped cream and an angel queef” or whatever it is people order these days, but a good strong cup-a-joe that costs no more than two dollars and kicks you in the brain without leaving you with too much gut rot.

At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old man, in my day you paid 50 cents for a cup of coffee and they filled it up for free. Back then we also used to play tetherball and when our pets would die from scurvy we used their bladders to make balls. We also used to walk 30 miles to school in snow so high we would get frostbite and our legs would need to be amputated, so every recess would be filled with legless toddlers batting a cat’s bladder around a pole, charged up on bottomless coffee refills, and we liked it!

Among the patrons at one particular café last Saturday was a young woman and her 14-year-old son who—because of his long curly ponytail and particularly shrill voice—I first mistook for her daughter. As they discussed an outline for their weekend itinerary, I surmised the pair must have been tourists in our fair city (given the boy’s barely tamed mane and well-worn sandals, I’ll hazard a guess they were visiting from Vancouver).

“No offence,” he shrieked, in that 14-year-old, tinged with sarcasm way, “but Montreal’s pretty run down.”

I was taken aback. Did he just say Montreal was run down?! My first reaction was anger, “How can he say that?” I thought. “The food is great, the music is awesome and the art is top notch! We’re the only French-speaking majority on the entire continent, for Chrissake! We’re like an oasis in the cultural desert of North America! We’re...we’re...” Then I actually looked outside, seemingly for the first time, at the rust marks on the dilapidated balconies, the greying duplexes, the half-assed graffiti, the poodle-bombed sidewalks, and the litter blowing down the streets, “...we’re... actually...pretty shabby.”

My ex-Edmontonian friend immediately came to Montreal’s defence. “Well, we’re more interested in renovating the interior of our homes, not razing buildings to the ground and building new shitty condos everywhere. Well okay, that’s sort of happening...” He had a point. I was bummed.

For the next few days my friend and I walked around and started seeing more signs of Montreal’s shabbiness, coupled with grossly mismanaged city ordinance. “How can they spend a million dollars on trucks with robot arms that squirt water on a single sidewalk plant,” he pondered as we walked past the contraption in question, “but they can’t find money to clean up the beautiful architecture around town?

“But then again,” he continued, “I love how kind of shitty it is. In Edmonton things boomed in the ’70s, so when I grew up everything was new in that bad ’70s kind of way. I was so happy to come to Montreal; things were old, they had a history. Hell, I lived in apartments that were older than my hometown. Sure it sometimes feels like the city doesn’t give a shit, but maybe that’s okay. Maybe Vancouver—with all its steel and glass—is trying too hard, and Toronto is mostly a Disney-fied corporate wasteland. Montreal is shabby, so what?! Embrace the shabbiness!”

Just as we were about to high five in that epic end-of-an-’80s-movie kind of way, where we would freeze in mid-air and the credits would roll over a Simple Minds track, we both stepped in one of the many huge doggie doo-doo mines littering the sidewalk. We looked at our shoes, then at each other and said, “Awwww, fuck this town.”

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca

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