My first Montreal apartment: John Hood

This courtesy of Montreal-born mural artist John Hood, who is a wicked writer and whose dad Hugh Hood was a well-known novelist here in Montreal in his day.
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 I was 19 and halfway between a punk and a mod phase of acting out my teenage angst when it became imperative for my brother and I to “leave the nest”, so to speak. I remember having a violent, name calling argument with my father and leaving the house for no destination. He ran out onto the street and convinced me to come back. I remember him wringing his hands, clearly greatly distressed, and saying “I’ll go the last mile with you John” - that moment has chimed in my memory ever since. Rather painful. It was decided that we would find an apartment and move out.
   A search of the want ads (very possibly “The Monitor”) revealed a 2 bedroom on the 2nd floor of 2279 Girouard, a typical NDG brownstone at the corner of Girouard and Sherbrooke, southeast edge of NDG Park. Brilliant location. It was a large apartment, well heated but dry in winter, with two rooms each with tall double windows looking out onto Sherbrooke, and another smaller bedroom at the back with a single window facing south, from which the fire escape debouched into the alley. That was my brothers’ room. I had the central room on the north side and Kevin Noordberg, our roomie for years, had the living room. For much of our stay there, the building was literally infested with cockroaches, as was the one opposite on the west corner, where my baby sister Alexandra had HER first Montreal apartment, but that’s another story. The cockroaches used to line up around the edge of the tub and watch you as you bathed. Every so often, we would have a big “round up” and collect a bunch of the little critters in a 5 gallon tin popcorn can, like the kind you used to get at La Ronde. In a spirit of youthful joie de vivre we would them dump them down the stairwell, where they would fall to the basement. The glittering sienna rain of bugs falling earthward made a curious and revolting clicking sound.
   The apartment was located directly atop the NDG Photo store which was there for many years; we could stand atop the familiar yellow sign. The windows afforded a wonderful view of Sherbrooke Street in its 1980s glory – There was always some kind of trouble we could gleefully witness happening at the bar across the street on the north side; for years it had been “Herbie’s Disco Pub”, however, during our time on that block I think it was in its “JR’s” (western-themed) incarnation. Hah. I remember one sweltering summer night during Caribana, a huge hulking black dude driving a magenta Lincoln with a contrasting coloured roof got into a scrap with about four red necks from the bar. They rolled in the street, fighting brutally, a pitched battle. The black guy’s shirt was torn off, and he was compelled by his antagonists to roll in broken glass; you could hear the sound of the glass shattering as his broad naked back passed over the beer soaked amber shards. This unmistakeable sound drifted up through the hot thick air like hideous music played on some perverse chimes. Memories.
   Another time a tall, athletic looking guy in conservative attire accosted two smaller punk girls wearing torn fishnets and spiky hair. He serenaded them with insulting epithets culminating in the phrase “I just wanted you girls to know that I think you are the lowest creatures that ever took a shit” at which point the two girls attacked him in a screaming rage. One of them picked up a milk carton and began to smash him with it as hard as she could, which was evidently pretty hard. The two girls took some hard shots from this clown, but they valiantly stood their ground, gave as good as they got, and ultimately he thought better of the whole thing and left the scene in disgrace. Score one for the punks. Also remember looking out the window, probably earlier that same day, during the Caribana parade and noting the that entire street was thronged with people packed like sardines from one side to the other, as far in either direction down Sherbrooke as I could see. A few days later during the Canada Parade, the event was singularly less well attended.

   A great deal of hash and grass was smoked in the apartment. Of an occasion if the mood took us we would erect a little tent out of bed sheets on the bed in the front room, and smoke hashish from a home-made water pipe like a trio of Thugees till the tent was wreathed in billows of dense putrid smoke. I remember during one of these sessions coming away with the frankly nightmarish sensation that my lungs were turning into a tarry liquid inside my chest. Unpleasant to say the least; after that I wasn’t quite so high on the tent/water pipe combo. We also took a lot of acid there. Once a friend came over with his arm in a sling and told us how his arm had been broken by the girl he was living with; she had smashed him with telephone receiver in the throes of a violent rage, and he was agonising over how to extricate himself from his involvement with this seriously disturbed girl. Cut to the next week; we are all sitting around the apartment, just starting to get really, really stoned after dropping acid, and there’s that hollow, dreaded knock at the door. Who can it be now? Turns out it was the friend, arm still in a sling, AND THE CRAZY GIRLFRIEND, all uninvited. They came in and where there for a while – most uncomfortable – but no further injuries were sustained.
   Things used to fetch up on the NDG photo sign; my brother had befriended the young lonely kid upstairs – his parents used to fight and he would come down crying – Dwight taught him a few guitar chords, talked to him and really I think made a difference in that youngster’s life. One day Dwight found a hilarious weather beaten rubber gorilla out on top of the sign; he rescued the gorilla and displayed it prominently in the apartment, and we all took turns speculating how it had got on the ledge. A few days elapsed and young Glen from upstairs stopped by for a visit; he noticed the gorilla and somewhat sheepishly indicated that it had belonged to him. Mystery solved. He said that he had tossed the gorilla out of his window because he felt, in his exact words, that “he was too old for rubber gorillas”. My brother instantly rejoined – and I will remember this as long as I live – that one was NEVER too old for rubber gorillas. My brother was a moral genius and I miss him terribly. He died in 2002.

Read the entire My First Montreal Apartment series

• Snarchland: Neil Cameron's My First Montreal Apartment
• My First Montreal Apartment: John Allore
• Mike Boone: My first Montreal apartment
• My first Montreal apartment: Jack Ruttan
• Vava Vol - My first Montreal apartment
• My first Montreal apartment: Kate McDonnell
• My first Montreal apartment: John Hood
• My first Montreal apartment: Stephen Lack
• My first Montreal apartment: Taras Grescoe
• My first Montreal apartment: Dennis Trudeau
• My first Montreal apartment: Colin Robertson
• My first apartment - Daniel Richler