Thank you for teaching me how to eat oysters. I feel like I’m stepping in on some private memory when I have oysters, as if I should apologize, but its my memory, its me. Maybe twenty, eating oysters for the first time. God, twenty’s so young. We totally overdid it at some oyster joint on Queen West and went on a celebratory pub crawl for your birthday, spending entirely too much money on oysters, nice wine and high-end debauchery. I was unused to this. Not the drinking, but the ‘nice’ part of it, out somewhere that didn’t have needles in the bathroom stalls and the sour smell of vomit on the patio, somewhere that kept the lights low for ambiance, not to hide the cockroaches and sticky floor.
Today I went out to buy them fresh from the dock in town and felt like a real person for a minute. Sometimes I pick up a few from an oyster bed when I’m out walking the dog. There’s always an oyster knife in my coat pocket, or purse, or knife roll because I never know when I might need one. You told me about buying oysters from Marche Jean Talon and not having an oyster knife, and I think about this when I’m there, too.
You sat on the counter-top once, drawing maps of Montreal. We were drunk, and this is when we were still drunk and happy, instead of drunk and silent. And you’re told me all these crazy stories about parties in Montreal and nights out in the city’s vibrant underbelly, mobsters trying to buy boys and elephant costumes and all. That map is superimposed on my travels throughout the city.
Once we sat across the table from one another at a table at The Only and were completely silent for several beers. I doubt lone space station astronauts contemplating the vistas of earth have been so lonely, or deep sea divers untouched by the last, straggling rays of the sun, surrounded by strange creatures. I ran. Remember? You had just come back from running away to Montreal. You knew what it was to fall into a city, searching, running, who knows. Plumbing alleyways and parks and the dark corners of bars, the sticky, sour smell of old beer. It’s my turn to run away to the city, on trains and buses, driving my car, hitching a ride. I run to it over and over again. The first time I got off the train and went to a hostel, before I had friends in the city. I went for a job interview at a fancy restaurant on Maissoneuve, but the glow had gone out of restaurants already and I hated the thought of a strange kitchen without Jamie, Bob and the familiar playlist and beloved menu. Maybe it wasn’t working in kitchens I loved but just that one moment in Toronto where I felt cemented into place and like a part of something.
I spent the better part of a winter in Hochelaga with a friend and fell into the city. I felt like I half knew it already. I’d dreamed of it. Dieu du Ciel came out of the frigid evening like a holy shrine of golden light and warm wood and charcuterie, and I met it like an old friend. Once or twice I thought about Vanessa and her outrageous fake French accent dropping a board at a two top and saying “And here is your charcuterie” in that particularly obnoxious and haughty way. I went out to a local bar in Hochelaga with a pal and drank pitchers of Canadian. We got the fun kind of blackout drunk, taking the metro downtown and stopping at the dep for beers to drink in the park, clearing a bench of snow. The night did that thing where it took on a life of its own and blurred together in lines of light and laughter. If we were in Toronto it would have ended up the the Lake View. We wound up swing dancing at Les Katacombes with a live big band. Phil gets my jokes about Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, God bless him. I don’t know how to swing dance and neither does he, but Sophie certainly does, and it’s more fun this way, anyway. The next days I found bookstores on Saint Henri and good coffee and vintage and wandered a little guiltily around, feeling like a snoop in a city that didn’t belong to me.
One night at a warehouse rave after a group night out at Saint-Houblon with all the treeplanters, I produced fifteen tabs of acid from my purse. How did it get there and why so much? It’s confusing. For a while there was a time where I just always had some cycling through my purse or glasses case or some other small, designated pocket. Your mom once inadvertently threw out twenty tabs of acid you were keeping in your nightstand drawer, clutching to remnants of your wild self. So was I. You would have enjoyed treeplanting. Maybe you wouldn’t remember, because you didn’t remember a great many conversations we had in that year- we were always quite drunk when we saw each other and the stress of the restaurant had pervaded everything. I begged you more than once to leave Toronto and go to Montreal- hell, go anywhere! In the end it never happened and I’m thankful because I never would have gone treeplanting and gone on the crazy adventure that the past several years had been, highs and lows and all.
Anyway, in yet another probably forgotten conversation, I accused you somewhat viciously of ‘buying in’ to the vision of high paying jobs being the only single path to success narrative that your parents had been pushing, whether you realized it or not. And you told me “You’ll buy into something, some day.” I scoffed. I bought into tree planting in a pretty bad way, though. My life moves through a seasonal rhythm every year, leading up to the start of the season. I make great money. I’m great at my job. I don’t have to deal with the politics of restaurants and the machismo and abuse. In the winter, I do whatever I want. When I visit Montreal, we climb the mountain in the snow, eat bagels on St.Viateur. I have my friends filed away in their apartments on my own map of Montreal. My favorite ways to walk somewhere, my favorite places and ways to spend a sunny Sunday in February emerge. My own city bursts into life.
Two Februaries ago, right before lockdown would fundamentally change our lives, I found myself on an impulsive bus to the safe, warm and cozy pull out couch of Tony and Julia’s, ensconcing myself in the safety of a Montreal winter. From the bus I sent my boss in Guelph a text to quit my job as kitchen manager at a job that had become hell, toward the end of an endless rotation through diner land and greasy spoons and mediocre small town restaurants. Jokes on everybody else, because COVID shut down the retreat center just a few days after I called it quits and took off and I would have been laid off indefinitely, anyway. I sat drinking Negronis at Le Darling for hours on end, by myself, anonymous, reinvented, and it was the happiest I’ve been. I went back the next day in the acid afterglow, and the whole city was glowing like that. The bells rang out from the churches and it was frosty and cold and beautiful. I have come to belong here in my own, strange way. I find friends in the bars and restaurants who exclaim “It’s you”. The diverging and converging circles of friends I have made crash into each other like waves in Montreal. I write a poem for Julia and spiral staircases and black coffee on an early spring day, little do I know, the last day of normalcy before covid. I stopped at the dep to buy the 750ml bottles of Unibroue beers and stuffed them deep into the pockets of my winter coat, feeling as if I was somehow paying homage to something and making it come full circle.
MP and I spent days lost downtown, winding around. We slept with the windows open to the river at her parents house on Ile Perrot and her white sheets were cool and salty. I kissed her on the lips in the Okanagan one summer, before we drove across the country together for the second time. All of our Montreal friends were on that trip, both ways. We watched the sun rise over the mountains in Banff and unrolled our sleeping bags on the grass verge of a soccer field for the night. She and I bicycled to a concert in the March snow and I feel like a real Montrealer, thinking of your Peugot getting lost somewhere on Bloor, of your road bike against the snow and unplowed bike lanes of Toronto, thinking of you bicycling around Montreal. Let’s leave off here, if we can. You were leaving to bike off down Bloor, turning into Danforth, then home. East, east, through the city, deeper into it. It was summer time and as you biked away the small of your back peeked out between your t-shirt and your jeans. So long.
I will keep oysters, and gin and tonics and maps of places that I love.