My first Montreal apartment: Taras Grescoe

    Taras Grescoe is, can I say Montreal's Gladwell? He grew up in a variety of cities in Canada before settling in Montreal where he wrote the first of his many best-sellers called Sacre Blues, describing life in Quebec from the eyes of an outsider. His latest book, Straphanger analyzes public transportation in 10 cities and is ultimately a plea to get folks riding the bus. He writes for pretty-high paying publications so it's quite a bargain to be getting this contribution for the low Coolopolis rates.
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   My first real Montreal apartment was on Rachel at St. Hubert, kitty corner from the neon of the “Verres Sterilisées” bar. I was newly divorced, my roommate Scott had broken up with his soulmate—we were in Odd Couple territory—it was December, 1996, and we were desperate for accommodations. (We were briefly lodging in a 5 and a half on Drolet, but the coked-up 3 am reggae sessions from the guys upstairs were driving us crazy.) Walking around the neighborhood, I noticed an “à louer” sign above a photocopy shop. I somehow got in touch with the landlord, Yvon, who seemed amused that two têtes carrées wanted to live in his building. We got the tour: it was the top two floors of a triplex, with a bathroom on each level, a patio in the rear, sliding glass doors separating living rooms from dining rooms—an eccentric Montreal beauty, 9 and a half rooms, all for $750. It was in incredibly rough shape, but Yvon swore he’d fix it up for us: new hardwood floors, he’d sand the balustrade, fix up the 2nd floor bathroom, the works.
   Yvon really did begin the renovations, but, sadly, he died of a heart attack shovelling his car out of a snowbank two days before Christmas. For a West Coaster like me, it seemed like a quintessentially Québécois way to go.

    His 19-year-old son inherited our building—along with 32 others on the Plateau. Ti-Yvon showed little interest in following up on the promises of his père. In fact, he seemed to be going through the inheritance as fast as he could, buying sports cars and new SUVs, blowing his money on lap dances (and, one week, red hair dye). When a couple of months went by with no improvements (and with the smell of sewer fumes starting to rise through the unfinished bathroom) we sent him a letter unilaterally lowering our rent to $500 a month. Ti-Yvon accepted cheerfully.
   Paying essentially $250 a month rent had its advantages, of course. With overhead that low—the price of a storage locker in some cities—I could travel at will, and I cheerfully pursued my travel writing career, not worrying too much about home.
It turned out that, until quite recently, the place had been a brothel. Our suspicions were raised on our first tour of the place: there was a door marked “Caisse” on the second floor, and each room included a sink and a ceiling fan. But, before his fatal run-in with the snowbank, Yvon had managed to rip out all the linoleum and fibreboard, revealing gorgeous fin-de-siècle mouldings, so we hadn’t worried too much about our home’s previous vocation. We were always reminded, though, that Montreal’s red-light “districts” had been liberally scattered throughout its residential neighborhoods, because old gentlemen, often with a few Labatts in their bellies, would ring the bell after midnight and ask for Yvette, or Françoise, or Chantal. We always had to send them away disappointed.
    The building was flipped at least three times during our three-year sojourn—the original owner’s son frittered away the family real estate empire in record time. It’s surprising Scott and I weren’t asphyxiated by sewer gas, or burnt to a crisp by the poorly-wired, unsecured baseboard heaters. (To call the place “not up to code” is like saying the Turcot Interchange just needs a few tiny touch-ups here and there.) There were barfights outside our doors on Saturday nights, the laminating machine from the copy shop downstairs would regularly fill the halls with the smell of burning plastic, ill-installed cupboards collapsed and almost crushed my girlfriend, and I once had to tussle with a raccoon that had wandered into our hallway (since there was no air-con, we had to leave the back door wide open in the summer). Eventually Scott reunited with his soulmate, and she moved in for a few months—we went from Odd Couple to Three’s Company—until they found more suitable accommodations near Parc Lafontaine. I put all my stuff in storage and set out on the journey that would become the travelogue End of Elsewhere. The place, lovingly renovated, now rents for $1,700 a month. The copy shop below has become a fancy bistro. I’m not sure what happened to those wistful old johns—I hope they’ve found new sweethearts. (Or just found their way home.)
   I sometimes wonder how we lasted so long in such a wildly insalubrious firetrap. But for $250 a month, eh, you let a lot slide.

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