Rescue dives

by RAF KATIGBAK

Every time I see a bumper sticker that says “Save the whales,” I have to laugh. For some reason, people think that extinction is a terrible thing.

Here’s something to think about: if it wasn’t for extinction, we wouldn’t be able to do amazing things like developing cures for diseases and checking our MySpace pages every two minutes, because most of our time would be spent trying not to get eaten by fucking dinosaurs.

Extinction is a natural feature of evolution because for some species to succeed, others must fail. According to science people, since life began, about 99 per cent of the Earth’s species have disappeared and, on at least five occasions, huge numbers have died out in a relatively short time.

However, despite little evolutionary farts like dinosaurs getting wiped out, the total number of living species has, until recently, followed a generally upward trend. Hurray! We’re not completely fucked!

But just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s not sad. That would be like hearing your beloved Grandma Shirley died and then shrugging your shoulders and going, “Well, them’s the breaks.”

For instance, it saddens me to know that I’ll never be able to ride a saber-tooth tiger like I was He-Man, or that I’ll never be able to laugh at a dodo bird’s stupid name, right to its face.

Perhaps what’s more saddening is how our environment is becoming extinct. I’m not talking about how the last 10 Faviero de Wilson trees in Brazil will probably be deforested forever in a few years, or even the fact that coal companies are blowing up entire Kentucky mountaintops. I’m talking about endangerment on a local scale. I’m talking about Montreal’s dive bars.

My first red flag of this now gravely endangered species was the closing of the Brasserie Alouette. I had remembered many a drunken night drinking cheap gin listening to classic rock on the jukebox. Then recently I walked past Bar Sherbrooke to find it was closed, seemingly forever. The feeling was something akin to finding out the last Canadian beaver had just been shot, skinned and turned into a hat. For those who have never had the mind-blowing pleasure of downing a big bottle of Blue in the Ste-Catherine-and-Sanguinet dive, the first thing you’ll probably notice is that it’s not even on Sherbrooke.

Having spent the past 10 years living on Ste-Catherine, I had always been intrigued by the front window filled with 8x10 glossies of local smiling part-time country acts in bad fringy Western shirts with pure laine names like Jean-Guy Devost or Nathalie Bernard-Laroche. The first time I actually stepped into the bar was for a screening of a friend’s film, a documentary about Dwight Leroux (real name: Danny Leroux), the LaSalle-based 25-year-old who was trying to make it big in the Quebec country scene and who made his downtown Montreal debut at the bar.

Bar Sherbrooke was a special place. Not only for being, I believe, the only Franco-country bar downtown, but for its rather open-ended patron policy. Basically, as long as you didn’t attack anyone with a shiv, you could sit down, and Ti-bob, the four-foot, cockeyed, fidgety broomstick of a waiter in a leather vest would serve you a drink.

And so it became a refuge for the city’s old, poor, homeless and mentally unstable (in other words, your average country music fan). A place where toothless natives would start a rousing sing-along over clinking oversized bottles of Blue as a grey-haired gentleman would thunderously mime classical piano accompaniment to French versions of Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline. A place where regulars were rumoured to have contributed some money during renovations just to have their own stools at the bar, and where prostitutes would warm up playing VLTs on slow nights.

Much too gritty for hipsters to go slumming on a regular basis, Bar Sherbrooke was an oasis from the trendy cookie-cutter minimalism of newer, chic watering holes.

But beyond being a dumpster for Montreal’s wayward souls, it was also a community—albeit a completely fucked up one. There were line-dancing lessons on Thursdays and a show almost every night. Most importantly, it was unpredictable. In most bars, the most impromptu thing that could happen would be that you run into an old friend. There, you had no idea if a septuagenarian woman in a bright blue spandex body suit would sneak up behind you, kiss you on the neck and begin showering a string of obscenities that would make a sailor run screaming into the St. Lawrence.

It wasn’t necessarily a place where anything could happen, but whatever did happen was guaranteed to be strange. I will miss it dearly. 

Riff-Raff@sympatico.ca