Saturday, August 22, 2009

August 18, 2009

How It All Went Down… (18.8.2009)

 “Close the fucking window,” Benoît yelled without looking up from his cereal. “I’m freezing!”

 It was a cold winter in Montréal. The incessant chill stung the skin and gnawed at bones. Benoît sat back, chewing the Frosted Flakes his mother dropped off earlier that week slowly, quietly. Each bite sounded a little bit more like the crunch of hitting rock bottom. He looked across the table at the empty milk carton, locking eyes with the winking cartoon cow. Don’t give me that shit-eating grin. Benoît scolded the carton between spoonfuls. What are you looking at, Cow?

 Benoît was a little drunk, and why not? As far as he could tell, he hadn’t done anything constructive in years. He was 37, single, and unemployed. The only women in his life were his mom and his dealer, and neither of them liked to call except on holidays. Benoît lived with a couple other guys, Hahn and Laurent, two dropouts from the university, in a basement sublet below a Polish deli on Rue de Cyrano near the tracks. Hahn was reading Kerouac on his bed, ensconced in an old eiderdown quilt. Laurent, as he did every afternoon after his shift at the deli, read want-ads.

 “Close your own window, putain!” Hahn yelled back. It was in fact Benoît’s; he only had to reach about three feet to snap the single-paned fenêtre shut. Benoît didn’t really care, anyways. He just hated the silence.

 “We have to do something, fellas,” Benoît said as he pushed his bowl aside and burped. “I’m not going to sit here for the rest of my life, wishing I made something of myself.” Laurent rolled his eyes and circled a dairy farmer’s number in the paper; they needed a shit picker-upper. The three men had never held down an honest job in years: Benoît tried (and subsequently failed) to climb the ranks of the amateur Canadian boxing scene during his 20s and early 30s, Hahn was a stage musician at a chic club in downtown Toronto but was fired for stealing toilet paper and breath mints, and Laurent sold pot outside a McGill café until “shit got too real,” as he liked to put it. They were desperately poor and low on hope.

 “What do you suggest we do?” Hahn demanded with a twinge of sarcasm. He’d heard this spiel from Benoît weekly for a couple years. The ennui was palpable. “I won’t hunt Canada geese again.”

 “No, no. We won’t do waterfowl this time,” Benoît answered. “This time, I’m thinking…” He actually hadn’t thought of anything yet, and instead scoured his brain for any sort of idea. “I’m thinking art.”

 Hahn threw his book to the side and laughed. “That’s great man. You get to work on your Mona and we’ll start pimping you to galleries. Can’t miss…”

 Benoît felt like the world had him cornered; he rolled another joint. “But wait…wait,” he started again. “Let’s think about this. What do dumb, uppity people with money love more than art? And who can really say what good art is?”

 Laurent put the paper to the side. He hadn’t heard Benoît talk like this before.

 “So what are we any good at?” Benoît posited as he raised a finger, trying to look smart. “Hahn, you can still play the violin, right?”

 “Wull yeah, but I don’t have a bow anymore and I’m missing a string.” Hahn now stood, reaching for the Frosted Flakes.

 “Fuck the bow, you can play it like a ukulele!” Benoît was impressed with his own ingenuity. “And Laurent, remember that story about the time you ate shrooms freshman year and made pictures on Microsoft Paint for six hours? Can you still use all that stuff?”

 “Yeah man, it’s no sweat. All I really know how to make are weird little ninja dudes and a bunch of quick scribbles, though,” Laurent said, making the twitchy gesticulations with his right hand. Benoît couldn’t quite put it all together, but he knew he was on to something. If one of his friends played an out-of-tune violin, and another one of his friends could pretend to know what he was doing on Microsoft Paint…

 “Hot damn, I have it.” Benoît looked out, past his two comrades and towards the ankles of the passers-by on the street. “I’m going to dance," he said, sounding aplomb all of a sudden. "I won’t dance like a normal person, though. I’ll have to do it like a cracked-out toddler.”

 “What?” Hahn and Laurent blurted out in unison. They were on board before, but Benoît’s last part was too weird.

 “Hang on, hang on,” Benoît said, calmly. “My sister hitchhiked through Germany a while ago, and she said that all the dancing over there is terrible. As long as I look like I’m not trying to dance well, and in fact dance like a schizo for a couple hours, we’re golden… all we have to do is pretend we’re a raging success here, in Montréal, and convince a studio in Berlin that we’re legit.”

 Hahn slumped back onto his bed. The idea of going to Berlin was enticing, but Benoît had stretched the possibilities too far. “They’ll never go for that. Who are you kidding, man? Me trying to play violin? Laurent getting high and messing around on a computer? And you dancing like—what did you even say? A crack baby?”

 Benoît was indignant. He put his cereal away, tossed some trash through the alley-side window, and swore to no one in particular that he was sick of the pessimism. “What else are we going to fuck-ing do?” he yelled so loud, the old woman ordering her Reuben-on-rye upstairs blushed. “This idea is good! Getting artsy-fartsy folks in Berlin to pay 30€ a ticket is the only way I can think of to keep food on the table. And it’s simple,” Benoît’s diction was getting more and more majestic. “Hahn plays whatever choppy notes he still can, you mess around on Paint, and I’ll be up on stage doing my thing until they pull the curtains on us. We can even say that we have a fourth person in the troupe just to seem more artistic. At the very least, we’ll get some quick cash!”

 Laurent was still unconvinced. “What do we call this whole cherade? You’ll probably want to name it something completely ridiculous so people think you’re full of angst, huh? Is you serious, man?”

 “Exactly!” Benoît replied, not giving Laurent’s tired sarcasm a second thought. “But ‘Is You Serious’ doesn’t quite have the right syllables.” Benoît went deep into thought. Is You Single? Is You There, Papa? Is You You? Is You Me? Is You Me!

 “I think I have an idea...” Benoît said, beside himself with this rush of creative spontaneity. “So all we have to do is figure out costumes and what’s going to be on stage.”

 Hahn and Laurent put their heads down, thinking silently as Benoît practiced dancing convulsively in front of the mirror near the stairs. Laurent spoke up this time: “I can connect to a projector so I can shoot my pictures on to a wall. And I have a pretty cool screen saver – it’s just little wingdings bouncing up and down, but if my cat likes to watch it I’m sure Berliners will, too. But what about the stage? I got nothing.”

 “Hahn, didn’t you used to wear a bunch of white and black and green spandexes when you worked at the carnival? You stole those, right?” Benoît was back in his chair now. Hahn nodded and looked towards a box marked inutile merde. “Well fuck, if I make a little ramp and bounce around in pantyhose, I think we’re set,” Benoît declared.

 It was at that moment that Benoît promised himself to start showering again. The mane of botryoidal dreadlocks that bounced down his back was unfit for the stage, no matter how artsy he strove to be.

 “I’m in Benny,” Hahn said, chuckling sheepishly. He even started rummaging around for his violin, though Hahn knew he and Laurent had traded it to a pawnshop years ago for a pair of numchucks. “You still have your stepdad’s frequent flyer password, right Laurent?” Laurent nodded with an unmistakably rueful frown.

 “Let’s make this happen, guys. We leave tomorrow,” Benoît interrupted, extending his hand. Hahn slapped his mitt down on Benoît’s and the duo waited for their friend to give in. Reluctantly, Laurent placed his hands on theirs.

 “They’ll tell stories about us for years,” Benoît said with a lopsided smile. “Of how three talentless nobodies brought the art world to its knees.” 



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