My Plaza [excerp+]

2024, winter

after Gail Scott

A man is slumped on the stoop of Lana Café, head in his hands. Fellow itinerant crosses sea of honking traffic, become-Moses, to give unto his friend a couple of slaps on the knee. Friend sufficiently roused. Moseses back across Jean-Talon with friend. Simon and Garfunkel on the radio at Lana Café, where I perform most of my Plaza-leering, because it’s on a corner, because it’s mostly windows. Characters linger here (what are these?). I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told. Uncovered, today, delightful assiette végé: bean salad, quinoa, tabbouleh. Fizzy lime-ish water. A woman in a blond straight wig and denim bucket hat is texting in loitering position (but not in a position of flânage. NO LOITERING is often translated as PAS DE FLÂNAGE, such as outside the Parc Metro station where I enter each morning on my way to work (if weather-obstacled, if late) from Parc X, often to teach Baudelaire ♈︎, chief flâneur, often passing several desperate “loiterers” (if “loitering” could possibly describe having nowhere to go) often translating the sign in my head to NO POETRY). A flâneuse cannot be texting, must be looking, wandering, must have taped, briefly, a counter-sign above her desk: embrace oblivion hence why I am up at dawn these days while Taurus ♉︎ sleeps on the other side of the wall, as if in another room in my brain, one I creep into in a lull. The loiterer outside Lana Café wears enviable cranberry lip gloss. She is waiting for someone and I know this because when she looks up from her phone she doesn’t know where to look, as if the friend (date, maybe?) could be arriving from anywhere. But they are meeting on la Plaza. Another woman in a fur coat, flared jeans and grey-tipped afro turns the corner abruptly and enters the metro. Not the date. In the corner of the café, an older man squat on a wooden chair, resting both his hands on the baroque metal handle of his cane, mafia-donishly holds court. His first guest, a young man, leaves. Then a woman in crisp white boots enters the café and joins him. At the table beside me another man eats a tuna sandwich while watching a video on propped phone. It’s unseasonably warm today. Everything dripping and melting. Hipster in a long teal coat and long brown air-dried hair (so, like mine, curled in patches, flat in others) passes wearing dorky but contextually cool mountaineering backpack. Gorp-core. Turns not unto the Plaza. But a couple, she wearing a pale pink coat and woollen scarf worn over the back of the head hepburning toward her chin, he in matching pale pink turban, turns. As do two sauntering girlfriends. A woman in leopard print with glamorous sunglasses and patent leather boots texts, pigeon-toed, on the corner. A beautiful trans woman in Montreal trans-femme fashion, winding (wielding?) the profoundly risqué with the deeply elegant, a long denim skirt slit all the way up the back, fabric attaching only at sacrum (and wearing a thong to boot) turns unto the Plaza. “L.A. Woman” on the radio now. Morrison sings into your blues but I hear give me your blues. Hispanic family shuffles by. Everyone upset. Stern mother, father, daughter, and someone else who looks like she’s been crying. A screen-map leads a couple coming from the metro a few steps down the Plaza before they pivot back. Are you a lucky little lady in The City of Lights? Or just another lost angel? Me, bean-loving inside the cafe. Creamy centres. Vinegary skins. Maybe herbivorous protein deficiency amplifying love (mother ♉︎ on the phone last week, eat a hamburger already!). Enter storm clouds, weather of my youth to the city of my adulthood. Pigeons above the tabagie start to lift off one by one, grown numerous due to pigeon-sour new awning. In a pre-ethics committee phone call with Plaza chief, I learned the pigeons were the main incentive to build a new awning. Too many nests. Too much guano. In fact, I remember, in Plaza olden-days shit-dappled mannequin legs outside the Plaza (inciting disgust, despite my fondness for pigeons). This image conjuring, suddenly, my dream from last night in which I was shopping, with urgency, on the Plaza for pajamas for myself and W.B. ♋︎, finding, on the rack, polyester, floral arabesque, lotus flower and chakra motifs, fingering, in my dream, the cheap fabrics, feeling uneasy about purchasing though out of options. A line from Lisa Robertson’s “Value Village Lyric,” dog-eared on my bedside table, is scrawled in graffiti on the wall of the shop above the rack I am rigging: We want an impure image that contradicts fixity. Something deliciously insecure: the sheath of a nerve. In a dream dictionary online finding clothes reflect the dreamer’s confidence or deep-rooted insecurity that dwells under the mask they wear in public. You will be offered many metaphoric clues in your dream to see if you are suited for the role or have trouble fitting in. Concluding I am ill-suited to the Plaza. Remembering, also, that some dream interpreters believe every character in the dream to be you, reminding me of a passage by Flaubert that W.B. ♋︎ had drawn to my attention (Freudian slip just now: had drawn to my intention): Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. W.B. ♋︎, pacing, in the dream, then stopping and staring at me full in the face, saying, There are all sorts of people undone. Awakening, then, with surprise, to the question, what is fashion, exactly? Exactness not the right goal. Precision, maybe. A woman passes by wearing the jeggings I was ogling in a Plaza shop window with thick stitching drawn where seams would be as if with felt pen, with cherry red roses on the thighs and cartoon rhinestones. Glory be to God for dappled things. Phantasmagoria of denim. Someone invented those (often the sole reason behind my outlandish thrift store purchases). Briefly, I consider abandoning my writ and going back to get a pair, remembering that Baudelaire ♈︎ would wear a violet boa on which curled his long graying locks. But even poetry has its limits. So many women arm in arm today. A youngster in hijab donning Playboy sweats. Three adolescent boys preppy à la Dead Poets’ society. So Tranna, I asked you if you could show us a part of Montreal that’s like the most Quebecois, the most Montreal, most authentic and you brought us here. Sagittarius ♐︎ texts me a link to a video of local celebrity Tranna Wintour introducing Matteo Lane to the Saint Hubert Plaza. They stand outside the café where I sit: …it’s kind of like an outdoor mall except the sketchiest mall you’ve ever been to. Wintour’s enviable long auburn balayage wig dangles just above the cinched waist of her black parka. Lane dons geometric sunglasses. There is everything on this strip from sex shops, stripper supply stores to bridal boutiques, restaurants, cafes…it’s wild…and I just felt like this is a more gritty and real part of Montreal…I wanted you to experience something that’s authentic…I actually love coming here…you never know what you’re going to find. Lane and Wintour meander to a shop with large posters of women in red dresses, sentinels, with lush hair on either side of the door. Hera Beauty. This is where I buy all my wigs. They’re so nice here. I can’t live without this place. Honestly, this is an essential place for me. They have cute little—like some Linda Evangelista nineties, you know, short wigs that would look great on you. And it’s great you have the covering. Tranna points marquise-ward. So rain or shine, you can come on down to Plaza Saint-Hubert. But you’re going to start to see a lot of bridal boutiques and not just bridal but also really tacky ball gowns. If you have a special occasion, this is where you come. Either it has begun to rain or the snow melting off the awnings is quickening. Child and grandma in matching sunglasses turn to face me. Odd because the day is cloudy. The sky turns stormy. Sunglasses contrast pleasingly with grandma’s long white hair. Heavy leather fringe on her purse. I realize suddenly I saw them on the metro this morning, on my way unto the Plaza.