My first Montreal apartment: Kate McDonnell

Photo credit: Sara Morley

This first-apartment reminiscence courtesy of Kate McDonnell, whose Montreal news aggregator is compulsory reading for those interested in this city.   
 ---
   My first apartment was with three friends on the edge of Outremont, just north of Bernard. I moved out soon after turning 18, for various reasons – my folks were not getting along, the atmosphere at home was tense and it hadn't been a pleasant place to live for a couple of years. Since they wanted me to get a job and bring in some money anyway, it seemed like a no-brainer to move out and put the money into a collective apartment venture instead.
    We were three girls and a guy friend, David. The rent was $125 a month - not each, the whole thing. We inherited the place from David's older sister who at that time was married to a poet whose masterpiece was a slim volume titled Nothing Ever Happens in Pointe-Claire. My parents were upset that I was "living with a man" technically (not remotely romantically) and my dad didn't speak to me for at least six months after I moved out.
    Probably that apartment is an expensive condo now. Back then it had roaches. David's sister and the poet had painted every wall a different, intense colour – dark blues, oranges, greens. I don't think it occurred to any of us we could repaint the place, so we never did.
    The apartment was on the top floor of a four-storey brick building. There was a tiny balcony off David's room and a back door off the kitchen that led to a rooftop where one of my housemates lost her virginity one summer night. Kitty corner to us was a small synagogue and about half our neighbours were very religious Jews who somehow didn't see our young half-naked limbs.
   Although that area's gone up in the world since the renovation of Bernard Street, that corner still feels much the same. The synagogue's still there. Some things on Bernard – the health food store, a regular grocery store, Le Bilboquet and of course the Outremont cinema – are still around. One of my housemates was determinedly anti-granola and once came with me into the Mission Santé after doing her regular groceries and was scolded by the cashier about the white bread and sliced ham that fell out of her bag when she put it on the counter.
   Since it was the first apartment for anyone in our wider gang - roughly two dozen people, counting stragglers - it was where people dropped by, hoping to do drugs, try drugs, sleep with people they'd picked up, or just order food and hang around. But we couldn't even afford a phone at first because Bell wanted a down payment of $200 to open an account and none of us had that much money to spare, so if we wanted pizza we had to go down to the phone box at the corner to call Pendeli's on Van Horne.
   Some of our friends worked at a restaurant and would show up late after closing the kitchen. The only time I remember any complaints it was because those dudes had motorbikes and it was noisy when they showed up in the wee hours. But not all of them were deadbeats. One of them later became a Rhodes scholar and went to Oxford.
   David worked in theatre tech and kept late hours. I remember going in to wake him up for some reason and finding him dead asleep, an open can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee with a spoon in it by his side. Another time we were all woken by screams outside - a building on Durocher had gone up in flames. David grabbed a blanket and went out, luckily for the woman who'd screamed, because she'd run out into the winter night without a stitch on. There were a lot of fires in that neighbourhood that winter and I always wondered if I would come home some day to a smouldering pile of ashes.
   I never smoked, but one time a housemate and I were persuaded to sample some hash brownies. Nobody warned us that the high from eating is strong and lasts a long time. David came home from work later to find me, very high, trying to keep my very high housemate from freaking right out. I remember him sighing and rolling his eyes, and making some tea to calm us down.
   We held a Christmas party, to which a friend brought a piñata filled with nickel. He hadn't reckoned with the sheer explosive weight of a mass of nickels when they gushed out. We were picking nickels out of corners in that place till we left.
   One person who visited a lot was our friend Peter, who had a tragic past. His father had been editor of the Montreal Star and his older brother was supposed to be a genius. But by the time we knew Peter his father was dead and his brother had been killed along with several other Concordia students in a road accident:
    Peter once brought a woman to our place and had very loud sex with her in David's bedroom. At least, the woman was loud. In several languages. I always laugh when I see news stuff featuring her now. She was a lot thinner back then but she's always been very emphatic.
   That apartment situation only lasted a year. Afterward David married his girlfriend, who we knew but who hadn't lived with us. Most of the people in the gang have dispersed abroad, some to Ontario, some to the States, some overseas. David died a couple of years ago. I'm one of a very few still living in Montreal. And I've never had an Outremont address since then.

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