Pute - December 2001

I should have known right off she was a whore. It wasn't like I was some babe in the woods, she just didn't look like one to me. Anyway, even if I guessed that she wasn't just another college student, there was no way I could have guessed who her father was. Or that her mother was the woman that Tony had met online and flown up from Miami to meet in person.

I would have thought the coincidences all to be signs from God at the end of October but it was December by then. I just didn't give a shit anymore. Borroughs was right, signs from God are nothing but bald face lies.
Tony talked about her nearly non-stop from the moment I picked him up at Logan and all the way up to Montreal. He wanted me to meet her too. In fact, I had just left them at an expensive Japanese restaurant on rue Mansfield before heading out for Greek food.

Deno's Restaurant was on the corner of Henri Levesque and St. Denis, it only took about 5 minutes to drive there. It had started to snow harder on my way there and I was lucky to find a parking space almost right in front on St. Denis.
Deno's middle aged son Christos had already turned off the sign and most of the lights but let me in because he knew me pretty well when I was staying at the Couronne, a block down the hill.

I had the last of the spanokapeta that Deno's wife had made and I was trying to read Voir by the light coming in the window. I was still trying to figure out who Andre was, if he was working the door that night and if the note that I paid the Ethiopian guy to bring into the club that night had reached Natacha.

It was dark and the snow was coming down in big wet flakes. Natacha had said that back in Charlesbourg they called called that kind of snow, peaux de lièvres. French people in Quebec have a lot of different words for snow too.

After talking to Christos for a bit, I left the restaurant. I was out of cigarettes again and I was heading to the depanneur a couple doors down when I saw her. We went there all the time when I ran out of cigarettes or Yves needed some beer.

I noticed her sitting on the steps next door as I went into the store. She made me think of this pain-in-the-ass chick from New Canaan that I dated in college. She was wearing tight jeans, a big white sweater and blue cowboy boots. Her face was bleached out from the flourescent light bouncing off the snow and her short, black hair getting straggly from the snow landing on it. The wet snow wasn't helping her mascara much either.

I shouted, "Bientôt!", to the depanneur's Cambodian owner as I lit a cigarette. I pulled the door tight against the wind and walked back to my car through four inches of unshoveled snow.

By now the girl in the once trendy boots was walking carefully across the wide sidewalk almost falling with each step because of their slippery soles. That part of Montreal was crawling with students, European backpackers, drug addicts, whores and other transients. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart.

"I'm trying to get to NDG but I think I missed the bus." she volunteered.

"And where my I ask, is NDG?", I laughed as I unlocked my car, popped the trunk and took out the scraper to clean off my windows.

"They say it's Notre Dame de Grace but it's just No Damn Good if you ask me", she said in a rehearsed way that told me she had said that before.

She looked at me with a perky smile and said, "You lookin' for a date?"

"No, thanks", I said not looking up from cleaning off the car.

"Where you going?" she said back, unfazed.

"Ha! I've got no fucking idea right now." Cigarette smoke had singed my eyes and I was squinting. But I was lying. I was going to drive down to the Plateau to have get some coffee at the cafe on the corner of Rue Royale and watch the people walk by.

The snow had snuffed out my cigarette. I threw it in the slush and kept cleaning off the car. The snow that got into my unlaced, LL Bean duck-hunting boots had melted while I was eating and I was ready to go back to the hotel, take a shower and call it a night.


The plan was to be in Montreal. The fortune teller back in Northampton said, "Everything that ever happens was part of God's great plan for us all, there's no point in being anxious. Everything would be alright if I just let it happen. "

Everyone knew that the musicians, writers, actors and danseuses lived in the Plateau district of Montreal. And despite a thousand bucks worth of gypsy insight, I had to come back to Montreal to make His work a little easier. Anyway, it was Friday night and Natacha would be working at the club.

"Okay, so where's NDG?" I said without the slightest carnal thought.

"It's just down Sherbooke", she promised as she opened the unlocked passenger door and got in. As I turned onto Sherbrooke she said, "Okay, it's a $150 for the night or $250 for the weekend".

The next thing I knew, I was driving up Sherbrooke to a side street somewhere on the other side of the Decarie, the north-south expressway that slice off the western third of metropolitan Montreal. I had about nine hundred bucks U.S. on me. "Screw it, I was used to paying someone to listen to me talk",  but still I wonder what would have happened if I let Him just do his work.

"What else was I doing that weekend, you know?" he was back in the room at Cooley Dickenson when he broke out of his walking dream of that weekend in Montreal. It was to bright, white and sterile. There were AA signs scattered about the room from some kind of group session that also happened there.

"You don't sound like someone who missed his wife" the clinician answered.

"I was looking for anyway possible to not think about what was really going on. I couldn't stand to be alone. I couldn't stand to be at the house anymore. " I mumbled.

"You spend a lot of time pathologizing and glorifying dangerous behaviour, do you think this is helping?" She didn't know him from a hole in the wall. Of course this wasn't helping. He couldn't stand mental health therapist and their ilk.

He was only seeing her because it was prerequisite for getting his meds. He really trusted his new prescribing physician and hoped the lithium would help.

It was February, cold and bleak. Snow had crusted over the edges of the parking lot and the trees didn't look like they ever had leaves.

Nothing tasted like anything, all the colors had gone out of the world, and nothing really mattered at all. Everyone spoke in English now. It was pretty quiet everywhere he went.