Craigslist and arrived that evening to find it located in the Gay Village. I was thirty and broke, trying to finish a novel slated to be published in a year. Every day, I wrote until the late afternoon and then went out looking for lower rent, hearing the occasional wolf whistle from a balcony. In the supermarket, a burly, shirtless man on rollerblades followed me from the apples to the crackers. At the soymilk, I called my mother. “Is this what it’s like to be a woman?” I asked.
“Until a few years ago,” she said. “Oh, how I miss it.”
For research purposes, I got a card at the McGill University library. Walking home one evening, I passed a drab, century-old row house on Rue Prince-Arthur, in what’s called the McGill Ghetto. A red For Rent sign hung in the window. I rang the doorbell, and Henry, a tall, balding man, let me in. The house was divided into cramped student apartments. He showed me his: eight square metres that smelled of bread and cheese, a chandelier occupying the ceiling like a dusty spider. He needed someone to take over the lease. He’d been selling gourmet pizzas to a caterer, using the tiny gas stove in the corner, but gambling had gotten the better of him. He was moving back in with his parents so he could regroup. I said I’d been through times like that, omitting that I was going through one right then. I agreed to take over his apartment. With the rent only $400 a month, I could afford to focus on the novel.
For the next few months, I rarely went out. As I struggled to write, a construction company began gutting the row house next door to create luxury apartments. I sat at the desk I’d bought in a church basement sale, my apartment shaking, dust and stale pizza flour drifting down from the ceiling. The workers stripped all the floors, cut the joists out, and knocked down the back wall with sledgehammers. The long summer had ended in brutal cold, and, with the house next door open to the weather, the shared wall frosted over. I cut the fingers off a pair of gloves to type, my breath turning to mist. A few times, I ventured into the alley to watch the demolition. The foreman told me they’d bring in a backhoe to dig out the basement. Without its rear wall, the empty building looked like a dollhouse. I could stare right through it.
I didn’t go outside often. Instead, I wrote, trying to contain the hunger for living, for real life, that literature stoked in me. I prowled the stairs to the top floor and back, hoping to ease this craving, to find inspiration without straying too far from my computer. During one such prowl, I stopped on a landing. There were three apartments on each floor and one in the basement, but the only people I ever saw were two neighbours, whom I’d passed in the street and taken to be homeless before learning they lived in the building. The woman kept a shopping cart locked to the porch; the old man, who shared a wall with me, howled at night. We’d crossed paths in the hallway, his face the colour of ash, his eyes sunken.
Fred, the building’s owner, was a short, stout man with dark hair and eyes. He’d grown up in an anglophone village in Gaspésie – the descendant, he proudly told me, of United Empire Loyalists who’d left America after the Revolutionary War. I met him when he dropped by to pick up the rent, and I asked who else lived there.
“Only those other two,” he said. “They were here when I bought the place. The rest have moved out.” He’d been buying up property across the city and was now too busy to rent out the other apartments, he told me. I proposed finding tenants in exchange for free rent, and he gave me a ring of keys. He also agreed to let me move into the apartment of my choice, which was on the top floor, a larger space with canted ceilings and dormers that looked down into the street.
The next day, I put out a sign. Snooping around the building, I found a blue baseball cap and a red flannel shirt. I used them to create a concierge persona, both for my own entertainment and to keep needy future tenants at arm’s length. When someone rang – often a young woman studying at McGill – out came the flannel. With the cap pulled low over my eyes, I slouched and spoke gruffly. Fortunately, there was a long lull in construction next door, and I soon rented out all the apartments.
The backhoe arrived with the spring weather. The building shook and heaved, and the tenants knocked at my door. I reassured them the noise would soon be over. We watched from the alley as the backhoe clambered out from the basement like an insect, crawled over the blocky hill of ancient compressed clay it had gouged up, and drove onto a trailer. “All done,” I told my tenants. We went back inside. That night, the building settled, ticking and creaking, producing an occasional hiccup in the floor or a loud crack in the frame, like the popping of an immense knuckle.
In the morning, sunlight flashed against my eyelids. I looked up at a six-foot-long rift in the wall. With my eye to it, I could see through two rows of bricks and out the window of the gutted house next door. I dressed and took stock of the apartment: cracks in the walls and ceilings, window frames askew. My door was stuck, and I used a hammer to knock the pins out of the hinges. When I pried it from the frame, the surrounding wall emitted a groan. I helped release the tenants, who had not yet realized they were prisoners.
Fred arrived just after the fire department, who determined that the backhoe had cut nearly a metre beneath the level of our foundation, leaving little support for four storeys of brick. The exposed clay had begun to dry and shrink. With the joists removed, the shared walls sagged. Fred threatened the owner of the future luxury apartments with a lawsuit. A construction worker said the wall was fine, but when he put his hands against it, the bricks seemed to ripple like a tapestry. The firefighters let us get a few possessions before they chained up the house and closed the sidewalk with metal barriers. It took them a while to convince my neighbour, the one who howled, to leave. Social services arrived to relocate the tenants into government housing.
“Why don’t you stay at my place?” Fred asked me. “You’ve been such a help. My wife and I would be happy to put you up for a while.” Fred’s two blond boys, maybe four and six years old, were waiting in his car. He drove us to his suburb on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. His wife, in her twenties and also blonde, touched my chest as she asked me what I wanted for dinner.
Fred offered to get a film at Blockbuster and suggested I come along for the ride. On the way there, he complained about the owner of the luxury apartments. “I’ll show him in court,” he said. “I’ll sue his ass. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll just burn my place to the ground. See how his fucking luxury apartments like that.” He laughed and pulled onto the highway.
“How far away is Blockbuster?” I asked.
“Fuck Blockbuster,” he said. “I want you to meet some guys.”
• • •
Crime has never been far from my mind. My father, a French Canadian from a village in Gaspésie, gave up logging for safe-cracking in Montréal, then holdups in the Canadian West, and, finally, the armed robbery of banks and jewellery stores in California. He spent seven years in prison and was deported to British Columbia, where he met my mother, who’d dropped out of art school in Virginia to run off with a draft dodger. My father was still manufacturing and dealing drugs and involved in petty crime when my mother got pregnant. Then he went straight – which, for him, simply meant committing pettier crimes. When I was ten, my mother ran away with me to Virginia, where we lived for the next five years.
I was almost fourteen when I learned about my father’s crimes, and the man I imagined stepped straight from the novels I’d read. I became a thief myself. I shoplifted chocolate bars to sell to classmates. I broke into cars, storage sheds, and a house. I made off with a moped and a motorcycle. All the while, I dreamed of being Steinbeck, whom I’d discovered in English class and now read instead of doing my homework.
When I was fifteen, I decided to move back in with my father, telling my mother I would run away if she didn’t let me. But she did, agreeing that I needed to decide for myself. Over the next two months, I discovered not the outlaw hero I’d dreamed of but a bitter fifty-year-old man who lived from debt to debt and illegally bought salmon from the guy at the fish farms responsible
