My first Montreal apartment: Jack Ruttan

Jack Ruttan is a Montreal freelance writer and illustrator, and a very nice guy to boot.
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  My first Montreal Apartment was #4 - 5369 Avenue du Parc, on the second floor of a white-faced building next to Milos Restaurant but facing the back alley. Beside the front door was a tiny jewelry shop. Upstairs from that was some sort of union hall, and a friendly Peruvian graphic artist. This was in 1987, when the area of Mile End was more Greek and poor than it is now. Souvlaki shops were everywhere, and I got sick for 2 weeks after trying one for the first time. Winter was disgusting. Wet and bonechilling at the same time. Back then I took YMCA French courses (with little success) and also weathered the storm and flood from 1988.        
   Was that going to happen every year?
   The Romolo was an Italian sports bar, where I hung out with other writer/filmmaker types and played pool for no stakes. The Rivoli Theatre showed repertory films. The Navarino Bakery was where I bought quart bottles of beer for $1.75 a shot. Ate bagels from the Saint Viateur Bagel shop, and fantasized about what working there was like (subject of my only published short story some time later).
There was a terrible cockroach problem in the apt (a 3 ½), likely having to do with the restaurant downstairs. I used steel wool, diatomaceous earth, and traps, but they did no good. A bad smell hung around the place. One morning I pulled open the shower curtain to find hundreds of baby bugs clinging there. Again, fuel for the kinds of stories I was writing at the time. I did a sketch of the interior, now lost. My landlord was Greek and deaf (maybe just selectively), and his adult sons would hang out downstairs on the stoop at night just like guys would do in New York. Narrow, echoey stairs led up to my place. The black risers were decorated with blue paint applied with a chunk of sponge.
   I had come to Montreal after spending a year at the Banff School for Fine Arts. Because of the program there (and hanging out with future Giller nominees) I felt like a hot writer, but hadn't really published anything outside of book reviews in small mags. I was going to take five years and write my novel. In Calgary I sold my car and signed up for a "drive-through," which was a used vehicle they wanted transported to another location. I chose a horrible 4-wheel-drive pickup truck with twin exhausts and a sleeper cab – the kind they enter in truck pulls. Yours truly paid the gas, and a four-day drive across Canada got me to Montreal. There    I promptly smashed the rear-view mirror on a pole while going around a double-parked beer truck, but no one at the used car lot on rue Norman seemed to notice.
   Before that, I had dropped off all the boxes containing my belongings in a storage space in apartment building my girlfriend's family owned. Eventually I ended up at the University of Montreal's student residence, which became my base for apartment hunting.
   Mile End seemed the most compatible area. Not too French, but not as English as the McGill Ghetto or NDG, and not as depressing as Snowdon. An Amazonian Brazilian woman I hired helped with the move, which was easy, because everything of mine was reduced to small boxes. I only stayed there a year because of the bugs, and the rent going up, but it was my introduction to Montreal. Lots of language turmoil at the time (1988), but I was sheltered by different groups of French or English artists who met a bars downtown. I drew comics for zines, and ended up writing about visual art for the Montreal Mirror as well as doing other odd jobs. Despite some high-profile gigs, I still don't feel as if I've "broken out" much. Montreal is still that city which is relatively friendly to culture, and easy to stay poor in.

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