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.

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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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