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i informed my dad that i was moving back in. he had finally broken up with his mentally unstable girlfriend of eight years but lived in the bottom of the duplex, while she occupied the top floor. we loaded all of my belongings into his minivan and headed east. what my dad hadn't told me became clear as we pulled into what seemed like the wrong driveway upon arriving at their home. he was moving me back in with my stepmom and the best part is that he hadn't told her. he just moved me into my old room, in that place, and let me deal with the immense scene she caused upon discovering me and all of my things in her apartment when she got home from work.
i was even more miserable than the first time i had had to occupy that room. the only differences were that now i was allowed to swear when we spoke, i was allowed to shower (she had forbidden us to shower when we were kids and, instead, made us take baths, claiming that we would "ruin the bathroom floor" if we showered), i was allowed to place my furniture the way i wanted it and i now smoked. i got a job at market fresh, in ottawa, and things really fell apart when she imposed an eleven o'clock curfew on me but work finished at ten, one province and two cities over. i started staying out at night, crashing wherever i could, and then coming home to shower and change when she was away at work. eventually, it all blew up and i was out, as we say, on my ass, at seventeen.
i was dating a twenty-four-year-old acid dealer and professional loiterer with a tattoo of lambert, the friendly lion, on his chest, and one on his back of a large skull with a green mohawk that someone was kind enough to give him while he had sojourned in prison. he was the second in a line of tall, lanky, tattooed, blue-eyed men in my life and liked to go by the name "tigger". tigger and i started out by sleeping outside, next to the rideau canal. when it started to get cold, we began squatting in a townhouse on kent street. a bunch of our friends had lived there and, when they got evicted, they left a key under their mat so that we could get in, drink the rest of the keg that was in the kitchen and get some sleep on the couch they'd left behind. when that option was no longer available to us, we crashed on couches, wherever people would take us in.
halfway through the winter, we decided it was time to find an apartment. we got one next to the infamous-but-waning hull strip. it was a newly-renovated two-bedroom for all of four-hundred-dollars a month. i worked and paid for rent and food while tigger went to school and we waited for his student loans to come in. i got a puppy from some street kids we knew. he threatened to kill it. then i found out he wasn't even going to school and so there would be no student loans. for additional icing on the cake, he cheated on me with a fourteen-year-old and spent the rent money i had been giving him on god-knows-what and i lost my job. i met a girl who would be my friend for a dozen years, she moved into the spare room, we got evicted anyway, thanks to tigger, and found a place in vanier, an ottawa ghetto.
here i am, in 1998, hanging out at the steaming bean café, on nocholas street, in ottawa.
we settled into a routine and, by then, i had become someone everyone knew, downtown. i had also, overnight, become a goth. i suppose that i would have probably starting wearing punk garb as soon as i was out on the street, except that all the punks i knew at the time didn't bathe and i couldn't deal with the stench. that is honestly the only reason i dodged dressing like a punk at that age, wore sporty labels for a year and then, one night, became a goth.
i don't really know what happened but i must have been influenced by some of the kids i was hanging with downtown. i had always listened to all sorts of music so that's not what caused it... i was playing around with my make-up one evening when i found myself with cat-eye liner and dark red lips. loving that, i ran to my room, grabbed a pair of fishnets, tore them up and put them on my arms. i threw on a bunch of clingy, black clothing, another pair of fishnets for my legs, my doc's, and headed downtown. at first i thought it quite funny that hardly anyone recognized me but that novelty soon wore off and it simple became a lifestyle, as i met up with other goth kids and became really good friends with them. what was interesting is that half the goth kids i knew were a year or two younger than me and still living at home, in suburbia, so i got to see what money could buy me and set out to find all of the same fashions at thrift stores and on sale. i did pretty well for myself, seeing as i could go to montreal whenever i wanted to and hunt through all the secondhand shops there.
until recently, that was the best year of my life. i fell in love with one of the goth kids and became best friends with his crew (we joked around, calling it a "mope of goths"). i finally felt loved and supported and, when my boyfriend moved to toronto to study massage therapy, i moved into a section of his mom's house for a low cost and got a job on parliament hill and another one at the national arts centre. if it wasn't the best time of my life, it was certainly the most carefree. it was the one year i got to be a teenager and i adored every minute of it. friends would climb up the balcony to my room, as i had only read about or seen kids on tv doing, i always had someone to hang out with, i was never teased and i felt beautiful and strong.
here is the crew at the celtic cross pub, on bank street, in 1998.
here i am with my then-chum, paul, smoking indoors (or at all, really!) and everything.
in the summer of 1998, my other friend paul and i went to montreal for a wedding. my mother had remarried and had given birth to a girl. here i am holding my new sister, geneviève.
after a few months and despite my misgivings and the fact that someone artistic and handsome had fallen for me and i for him, i left everyone behind and followed my boyfriend to toronto. that was one of the worst years of my life. i auditioned for theatre school but got put on waiting lists. i attended humber college and couldn't relate to anyone in my classes. i got accepted to theatre school in ottawa but chose to stay in toronto, with my boyfriend, even if we fought all the time. i was incredibly lonely, he hit on everything with a pulse, and we were broke. the only good thing that happened during this time (aside from me getting a job at a music store and meeting the chemical brothers), was that i started to design, as i had always done as a kid but, for the first time, i envisioned it all becoming something. not long after we broke up for the second time, i got pregnant. i was nineteen.
the chemical brothers and i, on queen west, in toronto:
my daughter's dad and i, new year's eve, nineteen-ninety-nine, in ottawa. i was a few months pregnant and he was visiting for the holidays. his mother had lent me the shawl so that i wouldn't get cold.
january, two-thousand. pregnant with my daughter and about to go dancing at barrymore's, on bank street, in ottawa.
a then-friend doodling on my arm, in my dad's basement, before going out. february, two-thousand, a week or two before i moved to montreal and four months before i had my daughter.
i moved back to ottawa, where i took up german studies at ottawa u. i lived with my dad, my brother and his new, also-pregnant wife, in a house in the country. my brother was doing a lot of drugs at the time and he was very aggressive. my depressive moods would set him off and all of this pissed my dad's wife off so nobody really got along. there was no room for me when her kids came home so i was asked to sleep on thin boat mats on the floor, in a room covered in plaster dust and being renovated. i took the couch but that pissed her off too so we butt heads. when i said a certain music made me sad, she turned up the volume; if i coughed because i had a cold, she sprayed lysol all around me, casing me to wheeze and gasp. (we're cool now but those were some seriously shaky first months). i had to rely on my dad or brother for rides into town and, often, this meant going into ottawa at 6 a.m. with nowhere to go and only enough change for a coffee and toast. i would hang out at the main mall and at the library until it was time for school and then wait at another coffee shop until my ride home was ready. all of my old friends had dispersed a bit and those that remained drove me mad with their refusal to evolve. this lasted only five weeks before i'd had enough. i called my mother, who talked to her ex, who was looking to sublet his place in st-henri, in montreal. i packed up the few belongs i had and, three weeks later, loaded it all up into my uncle's pick-up truck and we headed for montreal, where i have been since.
that time spent in downtown ottawa was the only breath of fresh air i got between one tough spot and another and, even though the memories are hazy now, i can evoke the carefree, happy state i lived in at whim and make any current situation seem better in doing so. it's also another reason i ended up deejaying at goth nights and that i still own a lot of goth and death rock clothing and will always feel a kinship to that subculture and its romantic and macabre aesthetic.
Posted in: bank street,chemical brothers,goth,goth fashion,goth kids,goth roots,humber college,montreal,my move to montreal,nepean,ottawa,ottawa u,roots,street kids,the steaming bean,toronto,vinyl skirt
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