Brace yourselves, folks. This might get a little extreme, but I’ll try to be tasteful as possible.
My first year in McGill University was an education. So much so that I nearly flunked out. You can’t really blame me – I learned to fall in love, use condoms consistently and successfully, wash my clothes, and drink. Academics, by necessity, had to take a back seat. I learned that I could go out to a bar on a school night (which I later learned meant ‘Tuesday’), and… well… there was the whole sex thing. The porn thing. After all, this is Montreal. Sin City. For the past century, people from New York had been coming up here to drink, party, and get laid. They still do. Montreal operates by a different set of rules.
When you first walk down St. Catherine’s street, the main drag of Montreal (there’s the Main, St-Denis, Rachel Street, and Crescent Street, to name a few more notable streets, but St. Catherine’s is consistently the busiest street through the majority of its length), and there’s… a lot of sex on it. It’s not quite as crazy as Pre-Juliani 42nd Street New York , but everything is classier, as if St. Catherine’s is not ashamed to be smutty.
The first thing I saw was Club Supersex, with its marquee of sex super-heroines flying above the sidewalk. That is pretty much the first outlandish thing any young male visitor sees when he first visits Montreal; that sign was a work of genius and one day it should hang in a museum. What else? There was Chez Wanda’s, Chez Paree, De la Montaigne, Les Pussy Corps, all the sex shops, and a corner (St. Laurent and St. Catherine) that seemed entirely devoted to the sex industry – I’m not saying I necessarily went into these places beyond taking my guests from out of town there, but anytime you went downtown you saw these signs that were made to be noticed. They became trail markers: ‘Oh, there’s Supersex, so I must be near the corner of St. Catherine and Rue Universite.’
Downtown Montreal was bars, strip clubs, and arcades. Many, many arcades full of crappy, rickety video games and tilted pool tables. Beneath each and every arcade was a peepshow.
These places were beyond gross. A massage parlour or strip club would be the sensual equivalent of fast food; I don’t know where a peep-show lives in those metaphors – perhaps a peepshow would be a slice of pizza you found in the garbage.
A peepshow was a fully automated room that was nothing but booths. Rows and rows of them – little cheap black doors opening up into a room a little larger than a phone booth. There was a seat; to the side of the seat was a coinslot, and in front of the seat was a screen. A dollar coin bought four minutes of porn. Two little arrow buttons allowed you to change channels – up front there were thirty VCR’s stacked one upon the other, all playing porno tapes until they wear out. Everything was dank and and terribly dark. Sometimes there were hookers walking down the rows, knocking on all the doors. Sometimes the hookers were female, sometimes they weren’t. Ick. These places were slimy subdivided cubicles of hell and sub-brain maleness. They smelled of bleach and there were other odours underneath that never went away.
How do I know these things? I went there out of curiosity, and since these places were 24/7, sometimes my friends and I would go there at two in the morning when were were coming home from the bars. When you’re all drunk, away from your girlfriends, sometimes you feel a collective need to go someplace really gross – like a factory of porn screens. And when you’re drunk, nothing is gross. Everything is funny.
This was probably the worse thing about these places, and if you use your head and follow logic (the purpose of those rooms, the size of them, the close proximity of the screens to the seats), what I’m about to tell you will disgust you but it will make sense.
Each and every screen in those cubicles was covered in dried white goo.
I think each and every man who utilized those places for their intended purpose thought, at the moment of climax: well, since I’m here I may as well do some target practice. Sploosh! There were paper towel dispensers in every booth, as well as a sign in both official languages that begged the patrons to clean up. But I don’t think anyone ever did, so it was up to the arcade’s East Indian owners to clean up. Having moved to Vancouver, I’m now guessing that it was the lowly second cousin, formerly a chai-walla or tin-tin delivery boy, who after immigrating to Canada found himself bamboozled into cleaning up jizz off the walls and screens of his rich uncle’s peepshow booths.
That was a very visible part of Montreal that everyone saw when they walked anywhere downtown. I hear that Montreal has been Juliani-fied as well – the smutty downtown is now full of IT firms and fashion houses. One of Montreal’s oldest drag-show revues is trying for heritage status so it can avoid being torn down to make room for a monster boutique condo complex. The shadows and wrinkles that make a city so textured and topographical are being smoothed away in the name of profit and progress. It’s sad. Once you get rid of one thing, everything else falls to the wayside that much easier.
