My first apartment - Daniel Richler

This is the first My First Montreal Apartment.  I've started off with this gem from Daniel Richler, who started as a rock radio deejay here and wrote a very cool book about Montreal called Kicking Tomorrow, then did a bunch of good TV stuff. It's fitting because my own first apartment was originally his apartment, at 1042 Mackay.
    So here, now is Daniel's recollections of his first apartment.

    I got my first apartment in 1977, so I was twenty years old. Late, huh? My parents pretty much had to kick me out of home! I'd been working at CHOM-FM for about six months, mainly night shifts, and it never occurred to me to find my own place - I just slept through the days. Eventually I did venture out, but not in an orthodox way...
    I used to chat with listeners on the phone while I was doing my graveyard shift, and sometimes meet them after work. Not always a wise thing to do (Play Misty For Me, anyone?), but in this instance I basically went for breakfast and stayed for two years. In time the woman moved to France, and I inherited her lease and her crimson velvet Art Deco sofa set.
  As I recall, rent was around $90 a month, if you can believe that. Good value for the money even then. The place was in Cote St. Luc, on a quiet, leafy street. Four rooms, with an elderly lady upstairs who did not take kindly to my Marshall bass amp or my all-night poker games. I was the tenant from hell, I'm sure, bringing home floozies and rock'n'roll types at all hours. She would knock through the ceiling with her cane or broomstick, and really I couldn't blame her.
   One Halloween I hung a pumpkin out my window, and when kids came trick-or-treating I gave them promotional records I'd received at the radio station. After the word got out there was a lineup halfway down the street, half of them not even bothering to wear a costume, and a resident called the police. Worse, certain dedicated "fans", i.e. psycho stalkers, discovered where the CHOM deejay lived, and started malingering in the lobby, leaving me messages on the front doorstep of the building - jelly babies, a mandrake root, pages from Aleister Crowley set on fire, etc.
   It wasn't a particularly funky neighborhood; just comfortable, residential, lazy, but not far from the life of Decarie, Snowdon, the Cinema V on Sherbrooke and so on, and most importantly, my parents' place in Westmount just up the hill for whenever I ran out of supplies and needed to mooch.
  Not long after the second Referendum I moved to Toronto, where I'd been seeing a girlfriend long distance. I've not been back often, but when I have the old neighborhood seems barely to have changed. Except that deejay with his infernal so-called "music" is no longer there, traumatizing the street.