“So now we’re fucked.”
“Well, now they want a meeting.”
“Fuck!” I paced the kitchen and picked at my nails. “And Julien’s Blood — is he legitimate?”
“I’d be surprised if he was. He’s probably just some fucking wigger from Laval.”
“A wigger from Laval?”
“I mean, he may have access to some weed, but I’d be surprised about anything else,” my brother said, staring through the cracked kitchen window. “Legitimate or not, the Hells now think we’re willing to go behind their back to try and get a sideline going.”
“So what, now you’d like me to fix this?”
“I just want to brew beer, man. I don’t want anything to do with crime, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, sighing. “I’ll look into it, all right? Don’t worry.”
We gave each other a hug.
I walked out the back and into the alley. I lit up a smoke as I headed toward Ontario Street. Don’t worry! I thought. Shit.
The noises of the city surrounded me as I made my way north — two cats screeched beneath a porch; an ambulance cried in the distance. Two forty-year-old hookers were out looking for their next fix. A bunch of kids were having a late lunch at La Pataterie, the way they always did. The smell of grease and potatoes filled the street. You had to watch your step as pigeons were busy pecking at a poutine on the sidewalk.
Our bar was three blocks over, heading west. It was neither a dive bar nor a biker bar. It was a fancy place where the newly rich flocked to after they moved into the neighborhood.
Eight years ago the city renovated that fancy plaza over on Valois Street. Shortly after that the first condos started popping up around it. We just happened to be the lucky owners of a commercial lot within walking distance of those condos.
Our father had bought the place in ’86 when no one would have even pissed on it. He ran a shoe store out of it, and when the nineties came, he turned it into a Prill discount store, which was the kind of place you went to as a kid when your parents were on welfare. And there were a lot of welfare kids back then.
Then the biker wars came and whoever had enough money to leave left. We stayed behind. The war wasn’t as bad as people made it out to be, but everybody was damn glad when the Hells won and the city passed anti-bunker laws. Not that we cared if the Hells ran the place or not; we just wanted the war to be over so we could live without the stigma of being from Hochelaga.
A few years later, wealth came back to the city, for better or worse. Rents went up, vacant lands and factories got turned into condos, and the former factory workers were forced to leave the island or swim with the current. My brother and I were just driftwood. Nothing more. We were just driftwood that happened to float up with the tide as the rest of the trash drowned underneath it.
We felt lucky about that.
But running a discount store that no one but hipsters would walk into was not my brother’s idea of a future.
When we opened our bar, we had a narrow window in the history of the neighborhood, where the dive-bar crowd was catered to by the bikers, and the newly rich were looking for a place to park their asses on a Saturday night. If they had built that plaza five blocks over, we would still be selling crap that was made in China. But we got lucky. College students, designers, accountants, artists, and lawyers who wouldn’t dare admit that they couldn’t afford Outremont anymore needed a place to drink just like the rest of us. My brother wanted to build that place.
So we did. After an eight-month class at ITHQ, my brother was a certified microbrewer; six months of technical business school, and I was deemed fit to run a restaurant. We turned our father’s old discount store into a fancy microbrasserie, equipped with wooden tables, white stools, pretentious wall art, and even a stuffed beaver for the hipsters.
Soon after opening, the Hells came to see us. We told them that what we cared about was brewing good-tasting beer, and that we didn’t think our bar was the right place for them to peddle drugs. The crowd we attracted wasn’t exactly the target market for the drug trade, with the notable exception of the lawyers, who knew better than to buy dope out of a bar in Hochelaga. We promised the Hells that if they didn’t sell drugs in our bar, no one would.
These arrangements worked for the Hells under two conditions: one, that we didn’t sell the same beer that they did, which was no problem given our menu was elite brews only; and two, that none of our drink specials would come under $6.99. Those prices would separate the haves from the have-nots, and ensure that we didn’t steal the Hells’ clientele.
This deal worked perfectly for the both of us, until now. Now some guy from way back when was fucking up our thing, and got the bikers to doubt our word.
Fuck!
Julien was white trash the way you’d imagine white trash to be. He made a living stealing his mother’s welfare money, while also cashing in his own check at the same time. He and his mom had somehow scored a four-and-a-half in an SHDM project building, with a nice view of Notre-Dame Boulevard’s trucking lanes and the Lantic sugar mill. It was the kind of apartment you’d expect a guy like Julien to have. He worked the loopholes from generation to generation, and for a guy who could barely read, his maneuvering was rather impressive.
Most of the time, Julien was inoffensive, and when he was, we let him be. He just had too much time on his hands. He mostly wasted his days in Davidson Park, playing cringeworthy songs on that shitty guitar of his, the one with a porn photo taped to the back of it. I remember when he first found that photo. He just walked into the corner store one day, didn’t even pay for the magazine. He started flipping through the pages right there in the store. When he found a chick that had tits big enough for him, he looked at the teller and said, “Hey, I like this one. I’ma take it, all right?” He tore out the page, put the magazine back in the rack, and walked out like it was a thing to do.
As I said, Julien was too useless to make it, too stupid to get rid of. Until now.
I walked into my bar. The place was full for a Wednesday. Twenty people, maybe. The weather was cool, and we opened the bay windows up front. Customers were flipping through menus, discussing what kind of beer they were going to try next. There were couples in their thirties with money to spend, a few suits, a bunch of college students slumming it out in the safest way possible.
“Hey, Richard,” the barmaid called to me. She was twenty-three and a part-time student who tried to run an independent art gallery with her tip money. I nodded in response and sat my ass on the last stool.
Hey, Richard, I thought. My name felt like a name for another time, but at thirty-seven it wasn’t terribly uncommon. Nowadays kids had fucked-up names like Anne-Crystelle or Marie-Lianne. Take the barmaid’s name, for example: Sophie-Andrée. I always thought it sounded horrible, but she had an ass like you wouldn’t believe, and as a rule of thumb, a barmaid needed a fine ass more than a good-sounding name.
“Give me a blonde, will you, dear?” I asked her.
I watched her walk to the taps, checking out the curve of her thighs in her black dress, listening to the click of her boots as they smacked the tile. Her turtleneck ran soft and tight across her chest and down to her breasts. I liked the way she was leaning back on one leg; it popped out her calf, rounded up her ass.