Roots. Part Five: Khimera Kreationz. 2000-2004.

i was nothing short of a hot mess when i arrived in montreal, in march of two-thousand. i was nineteen, pregnant and completely incapable of being alone without experiencing great anxiety. i had just been diagnosed with a non-life-threatening but rather scary heart condition and i got lodged into this vicious stress-causes-palpitations-causes-stress pattern. i barely had any furniture, the few childhood friends i had couldn't relate to me because i now spoke an international french, having long since dropped my quebecois dialect, i was about to become a mother and i now wore cat-eye contact lenses and goth clothing.

i went on an online goth forum and wrote to three different girls i thought i might have something in common with (one of them is the closest thing i've had to a nemesis in this town, the second i was friends with for several years but abandoned her due to her weak character general flakiness and the third i am still friends with) and i made plans to meet with them and most of the other forum members once i'd had my baby.

my daughter was born june twenty-ninth, two-thousand, a few months after i turned twenty. her father came to stay with us the day before. he remained with us for six months and then, to my relief, went back to toronto. it was around this time that a group of my ottawa friends began visiting on a regular basis, bringing gifts for my child and helping out but also crashing all over my apartment, eating my food and keeping me up at all hours. i briefly dated a man who was handsome but quite troubled and, despite all the ambition he possessed, he made no move to improve his life and spent his time brooding. he was creative and a fellow aesthete; things may have been different had we possessed more life experience but he was destined to be yet another one of my passengers. 

here i am in the fall of two-thousand,  just a few months after my daughter was born:

i had begun working as an event planner and part-time coatcheck girl for a goth club that was set to open new year's eve, 2000. it was there that i met a dj and fell in enough lust to break up with mister troubled, start dating the dj, get pregnant and move in with him. a month later, i realized my mistake but it was too late. we vowed to stay together until our child was born and see what happened then. my little mister was born january twenty-ninth, two-thousand-two, just six weeks before i turned twenty-two. when our son was four months old, his father moved out and i found myself alone, with two babies.

my style began to change quickly. i shaved all of my hair off but kept my bangs, sporting a chelsea haircut. my attire did not follow suit, though, as i went from being a more classic goth to wearing rivethead styles. a typical outfit was comprised of a mesh top over a tank top, an a-line mini skirt over coloured-tights and torn fishnets with laced up, knee-high rangers. within weeks of the dj moving out, i started dating an electronic musician. (that was a fiasco and my friends spent a lot of time with an eyebrow raised for about a year. he was the source of much mockery, having failed grade one four times and quite obviously pretending to play the keyboard on stage, with one finger tapping random keys in a rythmic way and the other arm straight up in the air, pointing at the ceiling. also, his keyboard was sometimes unplugged while he pretended to play.)


right around that time, i also became a dj. i started spinning noise and then branched out into industrial, eighties, ebm, synth pop, darkwave, new wave, electroclash, techno and old school goth. i was really good at it and quickly drew a crowd. for the first time in my life, i found myself seeking stage clothing of sorts and had immense fun coming up with outrageous outfits. i grew out the top of my hair and teased it up so that, when it started coming down towards the end of the night, people called me "robert smith" or "siouxsie soux". i shaved off my eyebrows and drew them on. i was the first one in the montreal scene to wear new rock platform boots, with visible springs in their six-inch soles.

here i am spinning at an 80's night, on club saphir's first floor, right as my hair was starting to grow out. these senneheisers are still my favourite earphones of all time:

when the top was long enough, i began fastening all sorts of extensions to them, as is popular among this crowd.

since my first pregnancy, i had been sketching and designing clothing at least three or four times a month but now, given everybody i was starting to know and how immersed in the whole rivethead and cyber goth cultures, i decided to sit down and draw up a collection. i started talking to other people about it and, before i knew it, i found myself with a small but enthusiastic production crew. everyone was so helpful and wonderful and, they believed in my project's success to the point of working for free. i began thinking that it would be a great idea to open up a third goth store in montreal and spent two months working on a business plan and looking into grants. i named my company khimera kreationz, which made sense at the time, given that i was dj khimera.

the man i had almost left my daughter's father for, before moving to toronto, had moved to montreal and we spent a lot of time together. we still really liked each other but he couldn't deal with my young children on a regular basis and so we remained friends. he was a great artist and made this graphic impression of me, with larger breasts and gun of course, wearing a t-shirt with my company's logo on it. (he also included my company's name and font as part of a card game he'd created).

here we are at bar passport, between my sets and right before i became wednesday nights' resident dj:

in may of two-thousand-three, i hosted my first fashion show at foufounes électriques. i figured the best way to have as many people as possible in attendance, men included, would be to book a well-known band or two and then have my fashion show open for them. i got together with another dj and two investors and, together, we booked covenant and melotron, electronic bands adored by most of the goth crowd in town. we had six-hundred-and-twenty people in attendance but, boy did i learn a lot about what not to do when organizing a fashion show! firstly, i had an over-zealous crew member who was happy to go her own way and make executive decisions regarding my clothing. she hadn't finished two outfits on time so she grabbed coloured duct tape and proceeded to tape up said outfits so that they had diagonal, duct tape strips running across them. another crew member showed up with work that was well-made but he hadn't used the right fabric and had added style elements that were not part of the original design. my sound guy, who was my son's dad, dropped out at the last minute and the new guy was a bit lost. i had foolishly decided that i should not only design, book, oversee, organize and style but host the damned thing too, so i was onstage when things ran amok backstage and i had no idea why my next two models weren't coming out. i had to gesticulate frantically to the poor gymnast we had gotten to perform during a half-time of sorts.

here are some souvenirs from the show. you can see the duct tape fiasco at the bottom left and i'm the one in the vinyl cheerleading skirt (who can't believe that sentence just came out her). my baby cousin modeled the red, velvet corset.

the response to my show was fantastic, despite all of its hiccups and it's small size. many people wanted to buy from me but the truth is that i was twenty-three, with a baby and toddler at home and i wasn't able to deal with any of it. i would only find out a year later but i was also sufferiing from grave's disease, making me hyper, skittish and unfocused as well as keeping me up most nights and experiencing migraines. everyone i had showed my business plan to liked it but not enough to finance my project, given my age and lack of business experience and so i continued to dj but backed out of the event planning and designing for a while. i let my crew down and spent a few months only going to clubs in order to tend bar or dj and left when my shift was done or his out in my booth until closing time.

i went to a few parties. this was taken a t a loft party in the gay village, with the guy who'd sewn the vest i had designed and am wearing in the photo:

i started dating someone that wasn't right for me and who was really aggressive and whom everyone around me had a hard time communicating with (we're friends now but now i also don't tolerate a tenth of what i used to back then). we moved in together and i settled into a routine. bring the kids to daycare, work, pick the kids up, watch tv with the boyfriend. i had undergone radiation treatment for my thryoid condition and now found myself with the opposite disease, hypothyroidism. i put on almost a hundred pounds, got depressed and had a hard time sticking to anything.

things would get better for me but not for another couple of years.

as with everything else i've shared in my "roots" segment thus far, this all seems like it was in another lifetime. someone else's lifetime, even. it's where i come from, though, and it's these experiences that have lead me to where i am today. next up in "roots": 2005-2007.

Posted in: club saphir,covenant,cybergoth,dj khimera,ebm,fashion,fashion show,foufounes electriques,foufs,gay village,goth roots,khimera kreationz,melotron,montreal,roots,st-henri,synthop