These folios told the story of his life, of how he became “World Champion Number One,” as he put it. So it’s understandable that he got upset when business was less than spectacular. Antonio showed all of his emotions at once. He was a constantly changing storm of happiness and rage and sadness and confusion.
Ten dollars.
I’ll give you a dollar.
One dollar? Are you c-c-c-c-c-crazy? This is Harvey Keitel, my friend. Do you like movies? Movies make me sad. Nobody is alive anymore still. They dance and they play with each other and sometimes sing. Sing, yes. But nobody is alive. Anymore still. Anyways. Sorry.
Okay, five dollars.
You come here to my bench to insult me and the dog!
I don’t see a dog.
See what you want to see. Ha. Number-One world champion wrestler stands in front of you and you see…Ah, maybe you think I am the opera singer too cheap to sing? Here, I will sing for you. Lucky for you, today I ate the singing garlic. Today we are Italian. You also, bambino.
Fine, I’ll give you the ten dollars.
What, ten? Now is fifteen. You talk too much.
Just give me the damn postcard.
Seventy-five! Woof woof woof woof woof woof woof woof! Volare, oh, oh, Cantare, ohohoho.
Amazing how much money we made, given that most customers ran away once he started barking Dean Martin lyrics.
The priceless ten-dollar collection contained, in various layers at the bottom of the garbage bag: the Grand Antonio posing with the Dean himself, Rowan Atkinson, Jack Welch, Ed Sullivan, Liza Minnelli, Leo Sayer, Wilt Chamberlain, Scatman John, Carly Simon, Anthony Quinn, Johnny Carson, Pavarotti, Liberace. Countless others. It’s said that his garbage bag was the single most detailed record of celebrity socialite life in Montreal in the 1970s and 1980s. Antonio’s heaps of scrap paper were often the only proof that something had ever happened.
There was one postcard, I later discovered, that he never offered for sale. It was a photo-transfer of him at Birks jewellery store, looping a diamond pendant over the neck of Marilyn Monroe, past the golden curls and onto the milky skin of her neck, while she threw her head back and laughed, and a police officer fainted just behind her into the waiting arms of a priest.
There is no record of Marilyn Monroe, the hottest stutterer to sex the world, ever having visited Montreal. But there was a postcard.
Sometimes people asked Antonio questions they shouldn’t have, questions he didn’t like to answer. Sometimes they asked about me. We told them ridiculous stories, said that a construction company had sold me for a pair of nosebleed tickets at the Forum. The best way not to answer a question was to answer it wrongly. You had to say something.
He kept his money in different places. A stack in the bottom of each shoe that got so compressed that fives turned into hundreds. He had a hollowed-out loaf of crusty Italian bread in which he kept our coins. He made me lift the little cannonball once a day so I would grow strong and big like he was. I was in charge of the one-dollar bills. I kept them in my pants where no one would get them.
Our food situation was quite simple. Passersby opened their grocery bags to Antonio, in deference to his status as local royalty. He just reached his prosciutto-sized fist into someone’s brown paper Steinberg’s bag and pulled out, say, a jar of mayonnaise. Out of the next bag came a loaf of white bread. A third bag gave up salami and pickles. It was like watching a magic show. People lined up to open their bags for the privilege of making this fat man fatter.
Of course I ate the spoils. It was a dog’s paradise.
I must admit that, for most of that summer, with Antonio communicating to me in gestures, grunts, and bellows but otherwise wordlessly, I grew unsatisfied. At some point I craved to be spoken to, as any good sidekick ankle-biter does. There was a distinct absence of commands, barked and followed, in which I could anchor myself in relation to him, a tiny satellite of a huge planet, uncertain of my place. I longed to be praised, disciplined, touched, held, and taught. I needed to find an orbit.
I think Antonio eventually figured that out. Perhaps he had a frightful vision of losing another small creature to the streets. The thing with runaways is they never give you advance notice before they take off. And he was becoming attached to me. I noticed that every time I met him on the bench, he gave me a little more room, squeezing his heft impossibly into the opposite corner, as uncomfortable as that must’ve been for him.
One day, he took me to an Expos baseball game. I had never been to le Stade olympique before, but I knew all about it. I had wanted to see Michael Jackson when he came, but my mom told me he wasn’t for kids.
I hoped this would be the day Antonio spoke to me.
Just a few years after the 1976 Olympics, the city was still brand-new at being famous, and still waking up to sticky, wet dreams in the morning. The dew of dawn and promise, a planet envious, nothing like it to make people fuck and have kids; let’s make it bigger, this ripple of hope and promise and newness, let’s build weird buildings and tell people this is how the future will look. We will agree to be prematurely futuristic for the money, the tourists, and the fame. That is when the story was good. When it was all genius architecture by genius architects, geometry and concrete, tunnels and electricity, when it was fantasy islands in the river, a mountain peak kissed by fate. We will agree to forget the past. We will agree to ignore the inevitability of decline. We will agree to smile at each other, although we don’t feel like it.
But even as a puppy, I could see it all falling apart.
Antonio made sure we covered as much of the city terrain as we could. Given his size, that wasn’t hard to do. We rode the Papineau and Sherbrooke buses for free and sat where we wanted. I yelled at people when I saw them hold their noses. How dare they! I guess I got used to his smell. When we got off the bus, I rode on Antonio’s shoulders as he walked toward the stadium. I was perched several feet above a sea of people, my feet entwined in the chains around his neck. My personal mammoth. Antonio cheered all the way there, growling greetings to his admirers. But we didn’t go to the wickets with everybody else. Antonio made a detour past a construction site, another patch of corruption, perpetually unfinished, this Montreal of mine. There was a rumour that every day, truckloads of cement were being diverted elsewhere—that’s why the stadium was taking forever to finish. Once inside, he grabbed about sixteen hotdogs for free from a concession stand, and we headed into the stadium right in time for the national anthem. I found a free seat, but Antonio stood. He wouldn’t have fit.
When the anthem was sung, he chimed in with another Dean Martin aria:
When the moon eats your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore…
People came up to ask for autographs, but I think some of them mistook him for Youppi!, the shaggy orange Expos mascot.
The ’Spos were playing the Phillies. Carter hit a double his first time up, then a home run. Raines singled a rocket to centre and stole second. Cromartie with something called a sacrifice fly and the Rock took third. Double, rocket, sacrifice fly. These words came out of a transistor radio that an old man beside me was holding, but I didn’t know what they meant. Nos Amours ran around in their red, white, and baby-blue pyjamas. The Kid came out of the dugout to fist-pump and get the crowd riled up, which they responded to in the strangest way. The seats of the stadium were the kind that clacked when you pushed them down into sitting position. Hard plastic against metal, far louder than a clap. But when everyone stood up, it didn’t sound like clacks. Instead, the noise collected like atomic particles into a roar that shook the entire building. Antonio just stood there and absorbed the shaking. He was trying to feel it. Maybe he was testing himself to see if he was earthquake proof for some future unknown trial. I watched him with admiration. We rode the quake together.
Antonio could see that I was confused by the finer points of the game. He finally spoke to me during the seventh-inning stretch, looking right through me with his aquarium orbs, capillaries swimming
in a decilitre of happy tears:
The shortstop, he looks crazy. You see him?
No, which one is he?
There, one between he is. You see now? You watch, people think he doesn’t know where he goes anymore, still. But he knows exactly. To be number-one champion mondiale, you must be a good actor. Go any direction at the same time. It’s science, wrestling, baseball.
Science, wrestling, baseball?
No, it’s prosciutto, b-b-b-b-bravado.
Yes?
Yes and no. Hair also. Good, strong shortstop hair. Like yours. Shortstop is French for arrêt-court. Arrêt-court.
He petted my head to make sure the information sank in, almost as if he knew that prosciutto, bravado, and hair were more memorable than foul balls, tags, check swings, and strike zones, and would ultimately be more useful to me in life.
Why do you talk like that?
Like what, how like?
Sometimes you have trouble.
Let me ask instead, rather. What is the trouble in your ears?
We were up by a run in the top of the ninth with two out. Rogers was throwing with a little extra mustard, and maybe even more choucroute than usual. They really wanted this one. The fans had started to throw plastic beer cups onto the field as part of the pre-celebration mayhem. The umps had to stop play several times to clean up. The Phillies’ Mike Schmidt stepped up to the plate. He was the potential third out, but le Stade wanted more: They wanted his body to hang from the stadium rim where he could bleed out properly.
Rogers delivered a sinking fastball and Schmidt connected, sending it on a long arc into the outfield. The Hawk lunged just shy of the ball and missed it. Then he picked it up and dropped it. The crowd fell into disbelief and missed heartbeats, an audible choke. Schmidt was rounding second. Was he going for home plate? The Hawk recovered the ball and threw his arm off. We all watched his arm bounce at the edge of the infield, then once near the mound.
The catcher Gary Carter received three things at the same time: Mike Schmidt, The Hawk’s arm, and the ball. He did what he could.
The ump called it.
Mike Schmidt was the third out and dead meat.
Nobody could hear what happened next.
We left through the same back door we came through.
I was convinced that Antonio knew where all the missing cement had gone. Maybe he was hoarding it. It was certainly enough to build our own city with. The time would come. He would wander right to it, and I’d either be on his shoulders or sneaking behind, a mutt between mammoth legs. Maybe there would be sixty-four Miron cement trucks lined up prettily in rows of eight, drums turning in concert, revving their Freightliner engines and shifting into tenth gear to prepare for take-off, or maybe it would be an empty Pepsi can filled with a few glops of concrete and soggy MarkTen butts rising to the top. Maybe we didn’t need much. In any case, we’d have all the contraband concrete that two sidewalk Mafiosos could dream of; then they could tear this all down, the whole damn city, who cares, because we could remake it exactly how we wanted and needed to.
A QUEEREST ABDICATION
Open Letter to the People of the City of Montreal
le 26 mai 1979
I regret to announce that I have to cancel my upcoming engagement at the Montreal Forum. Actually, let me be pristinely clear about this: I don’t regret the cancellation at all. You had it coming.
The Show Must Go On, but only when there is an inkling of love.
For years I was your queen. You knew it, I knew it. We were a nonstop champagne party, baby. Montreal became my Munich, and that’s saying a lot. We had a proper relationship right from the very first limousine. The streets of Dorval were lined with flowers. I’ll never forget how you threw them on the car and the driver had to turn on the wipers just to see through the daffodils. When you gave me a hockey jersey with the number 69 on it, I knew we had officially commenced a mutual rimming and fallen in love.
Bismillah, bismillah
I didn’t take your gifts for granted. I learned French and separatism. (I’m an anti-monarchist unless the monarch is myself. My heart is split into two parts: the left is Ibiza, and the right is an independent Quebec nation.) You adopted me. Those were the good times. Because I wasn’t an English Canadian, I was not the enemy and therefore, by default, a friend. When I came out onstage nearly nude except for a Beau Dommage T-shirt and you cheered, what was that for? All that love is meaningless to me now.
Scaramouche, scaramouche
When you chose someone else, don’t you think you should’ve sent me a warning telegram via one of my stage boys, perhaps dressed in silver lamé short shorts, who would tell me, O fickle and treacherous people of Montreal, that you were planning to betray me? That you thousands, who screamed for song after song and encore after encore, bleeding me naked and dry, laryngitis be damned, had already chosen another?
When were you planning to tell me about the Prince of Papineau? The Strongman of La Petite-Patrie? The Butcher of Bonsecours? The Samson of Saint-Laurent?
And when, pray tell, O self-described Number-One fans, were you going to tell me that a 500-pound cretin who pulls buses down the street and eats fourteen chickens in a single sitting—live, dead, who knows—that this thing was going to make me his next meal? That you preferred the fallacy of wrestling, the crass, lowest common denominator physical entertainment, to the artistry of rock opera?
That you chose a beast over the very reincarnation of Maria Callas?
That you had come to see me destroyed?
You deserved what you got, but you never deserved me.
I learned some things about you that night, Montreal, and they are to your damnation. This is the rewriting of your history and future, and I have the lamentable pleasure of documenting it for you. I learned that you did not know how to do the fandango.
It was the night you screamed for a fourth encore. I had never done one before. The band left the stage, and I sat there at the piano in my diaper and Canadiens jersey, preparing to play a song I had written just for you. But your cheers weren’t for me. They were for the monster that galumphed onstage behind me, chains hanging from his neck, slobber dripping from his face, unintelligible. He had come to get me.
That is the day you chose brute stupidity over refined genius, when 18,000 people decided to dethrone me. The cement of your city started to crumble and the rebar began to show.
That is the night the Grand Antonio—this mutant, this shameless stutterer—laced his two dreadlocked ponytails around my ankles and swung me around the stage like a carrousel while the microphone captured everything—my uncharacteristic silence, your thirst for a royal dumbing down, your hopeless return to the clutches of Commonwealth. The end of your sovereignty.
I don’t suppose you care to know that under those hot lights, but hidden under his reams of fat, he tried to eat my face, and I have been under emergency beauty care ever since; a thousand young Moroccan-Dutch dancers ejaculate onto my face in regenerative and uplifting movements, the best plastic surgeons restore me to God’s glory while whispering about the night Quebec died. You deserve Ottawa.
But do tell me, I’m so curious: how did you hide that wrestling ring backstage? I never saw it coming. You are dead to me, but that ring and those turnbuckles come to me in the height of nocturnal emission…strangely, to your credit, your aesthetics have always been impeccable. I may steal it for a show.
Montreal, now you will never hear the song that I wrote for you.
It was the greatest song that Queen never recorded.
I now formally abdicate as your leader. Go get your kicks in the lower forms of humanity, among the impaired.
Yours never more, and forget my name,
Freddie Mercury
POLAROIDED
It was only a matter of time until a kid like me was picked up by the cops.
I spent way too much time outside the house. Another problem was that I’d been acting too careful around the police. Of course it look
s suspicious when you don’t cross on yellow lights. It’s damning when you collect chip bags and ice cream sandwich wrappers that other litterbugs leave behind. Model citizenry is usually a cover for something. I had nothing to hide, so I have no idea why I acted that way.
The officer who nabbed me was a sneaky one. He accused me of stealing the trash I was picking up, saying he’d book me if I didn’t show receipts from the dépanneur. Naturally, I had none, so he loaded me into the front seat and drove me to the station. Where were the handcuffs? I didn’t know you could ride in a police car like it was a taxi. My situation became a little clearer at the station.
I’m just going to ask you a few questions, okay?
Okay.
Do you want some juice? A glass of milk? We have donuts, too.
Sure, a donut.
Okay, then. Here you go.
D-d-d-do you have one with sprinkles? I like sprinkles a lot.
Sorry, this is all we have. Now, you know why you’re here, right?
Did I do anything wrong? Am I under arrest?
So young, and you sound like a perp. No, you’re not under arrest. Don’t worry about that. It’s come to our attention that you’ve been hanging around with a person of interest, a man.
Perp…What’s a perp?
Funny you should ask. Nothing, it’s just police language. Do you know who I’m talking about?
Um, I’m not sure.
Mouthquake Page 2
