Drinking for the reproletarianization

News from the class war

          I’ve seen my future and it’s chips and bingo and bowling and beer and wet T-shirt contests and more beer and drunken wife beating. I just needed to find a nice local place to help me get used to the idea.

     Consider me one of those local anglos in full socio-economic freefall, having discovered that the cherished principle of social mobility carries the less talked-about possibility of downward movement. And the New World concept of meritocracy, which means that you’ll do ok if you’re not totally useless, has turned out to be bad news for me.
   You see, thanks to a flukey real estate deal my family pulled off in the 50s, I was raised among society’s cream high on the hill in Westmount.    
   But perpetuating my role among the privileged elite has turned out to be an unsustainable project. I now find myself living in a part of town where the neighbours recently set their home on fire because they were too stoned to turn off the oven. A few doors down is a basement den where drunks come and go with their two-fours, their paper-bag-sipping leader saving on laundry by sauntering around shirtless from May to September. Around here garbage is disposed of in the old fashioned-way: it’s tossed into the back yard.
   As comeuppance for being a slapped-down arriviste, I suffer severe class disorientation. On one hand, I’m not with the rich folks who blather on with their idiotically self-important ideas in their condescending Martha Stewart aristocrockery accents. And yet meanwhile, my irreversible snobbery would seemingly doom any effort to join the WWF-watching working class as they grunt in their 12 word vocabularies, sporting polyester sweat pants, dreaming crap dreams abut winning the lotto and generally being too dumb to stand upright.
   Academics call my situation proletarianization, a term I learnt in a biography of Hitler, as the author blamed the little Austrian’s pesky nature on his expulsion from the upper classes. Theoretically, the city is full of walking-time bombs in cardigan sweaters. And the fear of social decline is, of course, the inspiration of the notion of Hell which, of course, was drawn up to exploit our fears of being forced to move into a freezing one and a half in St. Henri.
   So to face my destiny I went drinking in the toughest bar in the fabled working class area of Pointe St. Charles. The Do Drop Inn on Wellington is said to the kind of place where they’ll beat you and toss you out if they don’t like your face. Don’t be fooled by the pleasantly exposed wood beams and charming halogen track lighting, this is a rough joint that – judging by its hardcore patrons - would more suitably be called, The Do Drop Out.

   Ready to earn my working class stripes, I stomped into the bar and sat next to a guy named Wilkie, or maybe it was Alkie. Down the bar a scary-looking Neanderthal with an albino tan kept urging the curvy, attitudinally challenged barmaid to tell the frequent phone callers that he wasn’t there. Baseball caps and beards were sported by just about everyone except the lone woman patron who wore a locally inspired “hair helmet” cut.
  Judging by the large heads, squeaky voices and cheap babble, I was among the genuine Irish working class. I studied the witty banter and waited for my chance to wade in with my own bonehead commentary. Soon the place started to feel like home. I wondered: could I finally have found my social equals? Were these my true brothers in jolly deprivation? Could I be accepted as a full-fledged member of the working class?
   At this moment, a rude-talking loud guy with a major beer gut noticed me. I waited anxiously as he read me with his eyes.
  "How's about it, sir?" he said. "Don't you think you should buy a round for the house?"

*This article appeared in the Montreal Mirror sometime around 1998.