and he’d sell the fillets to restaurants.
He told me I had to drop out of high school and work for him, or move out and pay my own way. I moved out, too proud to tell my mother. I was still obsessed with Steinbeck. I finished high school and went to college as far away as I could, in the mountains of Vermont, and though my father often asked me to return, I refused. The Christmas of my sophomore year, he took his own life, shooting himself up with heroin and washing down a handful of pills with antifreeze.
After his death, there was nothing for me to push against, and I began to admit that I saw the world as he did: every law and convention – anything short of complete freedom – looked like an impediment. Some nights, after weeks of studying, I couldn’t tame my desire for chaos. I ran blindly through the forest or took my uninsured truck as fast as I could over back roads, crashing into snow banks, pirouetting through parking lots until I’d released whatever was in my brain – and then I just sat there, the engine idling, steam rising from the hood. I determined that the first novel I published would not be about my father. I would not echo another man’s failures.
But like my father, I was restless. I could fit what I owned in a backpack, and after college, whenever I exhausted myself writing, I set off. I rarely lived anywhere for more than a few months. During those years, I moved to Montréal several times. Garishly lit strip clubs paint Rue Sainte-Catherine, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. American businessmen and college students stumble drunkenly on the sidewalk and befriend you in bars, rambling about how cheap the escorts are, how easy it is to get drugs. Montréal doesn’t have the same puritanical varnish as the United States – its police state, its harsh sentencing. Most people I knew had few degrees of separation from the underworld. One friend sold cocaine for the Hells Angels; another sold hash for the Italian Mafia and was beaten after he dealt on a rival gang’s turf.
Every time trouble reared up, or whenever I felt stagnant, I left. Changing cities, even neighbourhoods, I breathed easier. I crisscrossed America as if on a quest for this air alone. I worked construction, took on manual labour jobs like building flea market booths or pulling nails out of old two-by-fours. As soon as I earned enough for a month or two of writing and reading books, I quit. Throughout my twenties, I lived on $10,000 a year. Some friends – those who’d found stable careers and gotten married – drew on pop psychology to diagnose me. They referred glibly to familial dysfunction and used words like trauma, though I didn’t feel traumatized. I was a pretty happy person. Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I was drawn to the pleasures of deviance. I saw this pull in those I knew from the Montréal underworld – an unquenchable desire for a freedom they couldn’t name. For many of them, the only outlet was crime.
• • •
The people Fred wanted me to meet were sitting in the basement of a triplex, watching Predator and passing around a rank, blackened bong. Fred and I joined them on the couch. Growing up, I’d had a hard time resisting bad decisions, and remaining sober when things got dicey had been my basic strategy for staying alive. The habit stuck. I sat and watched Schwarzenegger and the Predator stalk each other through the jungles of Central America as Fred drank beer after beer, his nostrils flaring.
One of the guys said, “Man, call next time or BYOB, motherfucker.” On each of the bong’s circuits, Fred took a long, hard hit. His cell rang and he flipped it open. A distant voice shouted. “Aw, fuck you,” he said, and hung up. The film ended. We switched to Terminator, but there was nothing left to drink. Fred was nominated for a beer run.
“I wanted you to meet those guys,” he told me in the car. “They can hook you up. You don’t need to be living the way you do. But tonight, you know, right now, fuck ’em.” He raced the car onto the highway and kept accelerating.
“Hey,” I said, “why don’t you let me drive?”
“Good one.” He laughed. “Like you’re my fucking mother.” His profile, with its angular nose and lantern jaw gone to pudge, flickered against passing streetlights. It was after midnight, and we were soaring for the American border, toward where Autoroute 15 turned into Interstate 87 and made a straight shot south to New York City. We passed exit after exit. The highway was empty but for the occasional eighteen-wheeler. Green roadside signs gave a kilometric countdown to the border. The crossing blazed in the distance, like a ship at sea.
Fred slowed, braking hard, and turned down a narrow road between cornfields. “I want to show you something good,” he said. A low-slung, unpainted cinderblock building came into sight. Dozens of vehicles were parked in its gravel lot, many of them pickups, one a yellow school bus with the name of an American university on the side.
“Welcome to Porkies,” Fred said. He stumbled out and crossed the parking lot, and by the time I got through the front door behind him, he’d disappeared into the crowd.
The woman on stage wasn’t a stripper – she was a naked acrobat. She spun her body around the pole, flipping over repeatedly. She suspended herself upside down and spread her legs, clenching her muscled ass for the audience’s admiration. Then she lowered herself like a drawbridge until she floated, tits to the stage lights, legs wide for the gawping crowd. The audience was composed mostly of rednecks, with a scattering of young jocks I suspected must have come in on the school bus. Women in lingerie walked by, the men turning, tracking them as they passed. There were a few different doorways through which the women entered and exited. One would speak to a man and leave through one door, and he would follow her through another.
I leaned on the bar, and the bartender, a brunette – the only fully dressed woman in the room – came over and said, “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“Pardon me?”
“Fred’s told me all about you. You’re that writer who runs his building.”
“How do you know Fred?”
“He’s my brother.”
Fred joined us. “Had to hit the can,” he said.
The woman left to serve a beer, and I asked, “Your sister works here?”
“Oh yeah, she does. And that’s my cousin up there.” He motioned to the diva onstage.
“Does your wife know about this place?” I asked.
Fred cackled. “I met her here,” he said, punching my arm. “And if she hadn’t given me my two boys, I’d bring her straight back. Jesus, she’s a pain in the ass.”
When Fred told me that he and some friends owned this place, I tried to mask my reassessment of him. His apartment building had been sitting empty for so long, in a neighbourhood where finding tenants was easy, that I should have realized it was a front.
We feasted on bags of salt-and-vinegar chips from behind the bar. Fred told me there was a girl he’d wanted me to meet, but she didn’t seem to be here tonight. I asked how the place worked, and he said the girls paid the bar $500 to come in for an evening. The bar provided clientele and helped organize visits for frats across the border. Each girl had a small room in the back, where she charged and did what she wanted. “You should give one a go,” he said.
“Nah, that’s cool,” I told him, as if I’d done it a thousand times.
On the way back to his house, the Volvo glided through the yellow pools beneath the streetlamps. Fred was in no rush. Criminals, I’d learned from experience, are lonely people.
“You’re a reliable guy,” Fred told me. “How would you like a job?”
“What
