Roots. Part Four: On The Streets of Ottawa, A Year In Toronto and When I Became A Goth. 1996-2000

i moved out of my home in gatineau, québec and into my aunt's townhouse in nepean, ontario, an ottawa suburb, when i was sixteen. the change of environment was too much for me and, after years of not being allowed to express myself or be a kid at all, really, i went out all and crammed as much ridiculous teenage behavior as i could into one year. this and the fact that i had decided to take a year off from school after i graduated resulted in me being kicked out of my aunt's home after having lived there for just over a year.

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.

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No Such Thing as a Punk Fad: The effects of mainstream fashion borrowing from subculture style

i don't remember which trend really irked me first, the faux-hawks suddenly sprouting up on runways around the world, over half a decade ago or taking my then-toddler into a cheap, accessories shop and discovering that I could buy just about anything covered in skulls and crossbones. there was a time, just before this exasperating discovery, when old women would scoot over a few inches away from me when i sat down on the subway because i had both an actual mohawk and wore skulls and crossbones on my clothing. and we'll get into the studs in just a moment, we will. 

it's normal for whole decades in fashion to be brought back with very little tweaking but, since the aforementioned elements have popped into the mainstream, it seems like we're constantly seeing design and/or style elements hijacked from one subculture or another. 

as someone whose anarcho-punk and death rock roots once kinked with anger at the thought of mainstream fashion, i feel that, over the last few years, i have grown out of the "black sheep" groove i had firmly and quite resolutely wedged myself into as a teen. i have not forgotten where i come from and evidence of these beginnings can be seen on my person most days but i guess that somewhere along the way, i just grew up and stopped hating everything that wasn't marginal.  that said, the one thing that is still guaranteed to get me riled up this particular phenomena and, seeing as i will always be a punk and death rocker at heart, in some way, i'm coming at this from a much different angle than most fashion bloggers. basically, when it comes to punk, goth, rockabilly and psychobilly and even skinhead and mod elements being integrated into mainstream fashion, i know my shit and 90% of the people that go on about it don't. 

let us briefly touch upon the studs and spikes that started to emerge onto the main stage a few years ago and are absolutely rampant, right now. once a staple of the punk uniform or sometimes of a rocker's accessories, nowadays we can easily see the average, two-step-dancing-hand-clapping-on-the-dancefloor-top-forty-listening-boom-boom-blasting-out-of-their-car girl (or even guy) covered in what appears to be hundreds of studs and/or spikes. 

i found this photo on mystyle.com and, along with it, this cringe-inducing blurb.

you're "over" the studded belt? well then good for you and screw almost forty years of punk rocker and rocker fashion, in general, because you're done with this "trend". this is where my main issue with this lies. 

secondly, yes! if we're going to talk about the studded belt coming from somewhere, let's talk about sex in the city. wait. what?

you see these ladies? 

they (or their boyfriends) worked hard to hammer and screw each and every stud you see in their jackets. this simple yet defining fashion element was pure punk and sometimes rock 'n' roll until now. you might want to check out the brief history of punk that came along with this photo. 

to put it simply and to speak on behalf of most punks out there, if you don't know who this guy is...

...then you should maybe do a little bit of research, out of respect for a subculture that has no doubt influenced you in more ways than one, if you're drawn to studs and spikes in the first place. 

although in this case it is a bit more difficult than in others, i am trying to remain objective. i'll prove this to you with a short list of cons and pros for integral fashion elements being yoinked by mainstream designers.

cons

• they are taking something timeless and, in its own right, classic, using it up and then spitting it out, rendering it passé.
• this erases the lines between subculture and mainstream, when the two are very, very different things. especially in the case of punk. if you follow all the rules and shuffle along with normal, mainstream society, then you kind of have no business wearing punk clothing. period. it means something.
• it's confusing. ten years ago, if you saw a dude walking across the street and his arms were covered in tattoos, you knew he was a bad-ass. that guy listened to rock n roll or metal or punk rock and he probably had a lot of really interesting things to say. chances are, you might already know him. now, everybody and their dog is inked and suddenly it's all, "yeah, i have tats, too, man," and "cool tats, bro," (p.s. it is never okay to say "tats". never. it's douchey. don't do it). it may seem like i'm digressing but i'm not. the woman across the street who gets up in the morning and dresses more and more like a punk but listens to rihanna and can't name one clash or sex pistols song and who was wearing whatever the hell was trendy last season and will wear whatever the hell is trendy next season is confusing. 
• there is nothing punk rock about buying clothing that is already decked out. we sew our patches and put in our own spikes. that's a huge part of what punk rock is. johnny rotten (please know who he is) used to cut up the suits his parents bought him and reconstruct them with the use of safety pins and large stitching. that is punk rock, not buying the thing already cut up or studded or whatnot. 

pros

• the punk rock kid at school who gets bullied is now a trend setter. (sadly, chances are that if he is a punk kid, he's probably as annoyed by this as i am, though...)
• that's it. the other pros i had listed were in relation to the clothing being readily available and cheaper but then i'd be contradicting my last con so there you have it. i can't actually come up with pros that adhere to punk rock values.

we are so far from seeing the end of this phenomenon. notice everyone's spring/summer 2013 "mod" collections? marc jacobs, escada, colourblocked dresses in dillard's ads? i have a whole other piece to write on the mod scene, though. we'll be seeing more mainstream pieces with goth elements, as one of the forecasted trends for fall/winter 2013-2014 is "dark romance". 

luckily, some well-known people in the fashion industry occasionally step up to the plate. they either create original punk rock wear, like vivienne westwood (alexander mcqueen was also pretty bad-ass and kept up a certain theme, throughout all of his collections) or at least defend subcultures. my favourite moment on project runway canada (wtf happened to that show, btw? we're loaded with talented designers, up here!) was when iman called montréal contestant, marie-geneviève cyr on her shit. she had created some horribly cliché, "halloween goth" outfit (i think that's what iman actually called it) and iman challenged the other judges, who somehow loved this cheesy, unimaginative mess of lace and vinyl. she was very clear and told them straight-up that goth is a culture and not some costume theme. i applauded and iman immediately became my favourite model ever. 

now a friend of mine just brought a really great point when she blamed part of this problem on one person. mainstream fashionistas are not entirely to blame when they are being lead by people who are the exact opposite of punk but claim to be so. people like, say, avril lavigne, who when asked if her influences were bands such as the sex pistols and the clash, responded with, "no. more, like, punk". if you don't grow up in a household that opens your mind to subcultures, your friends are mainstream and then this person comes along with a studded belt and a pair of chucks and proclaims that she is punk rock, what the hell are you supposed to believe, right?

it can't be stopped but i do wish people would educate themselves. you don't have to be married to david bowie to know this stuff, either. if you go through the trouble of wearing something as trendy as studded boots, you obviously don't just throw on whatever you found on your floor that smelled good so take that extra step and learn about what you're wearing and where it came from. please and thank you. 

photo sources:

studded boots-- theberry.com

sid vicious-- fanpop.com

addendum: i've heard so many rockers and punks blame the demarginalization of several style elements on hipsters. this is far more widespread. today i sat in an office and almost fell off my chair when a 60-something-year-old business woman with pink streaks in her bleached hair walked in wearing a sheer, leopard print top, a skirt with a large, vinyl panel integrated into it, a belt with a giant skull-and-crossbones buckle, chevron-print tights and studded ankle boots. i'm willing to guess she was neither a punk rocker nor a hipster. ;-)

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