The Tragically Unhip

I'll tell ya where all the junkies have gone! They got pushed out by all the damn hipsters! (Photo by Genevieve D. Markle)

I live at the corner of Parc Avenue and Hell. I pay a reasonable rent to live in a small 2-bedroom apartment in Montreal’s hippest neighbourhood at its most convenient intersection. After failed co-habitation attempts with an ex-boyfriend and a spoiled daddy’s girl who mistook my garbage bag of clean laundry for trash—thus leaving my designer duds on the curb to be taken to the garbage dump—I now live alone. I never have to yell at anyone for peeing on the toilet seat or for leaving their toenail clippings beside the remote. All told, this should be an ideal, enviable living situation, right? Wrong.

My slumlord landlord, Monsieur C—, is a very nice man, but he is not the slightest bit discriminating when it comes to selecting tenants. I truly believe he would rent to a giant drug-dealing rat if he had enough money to cover the first month’s rent. M. C— is slowly getting annoyed with me because although I keep the cleanest, most tastefully decorated apartment in the entire complex and I always pay my rent on time, I am slowly driving him crazy by calling him at least twice a week to complain about something new re: the building. And with good reason.

My main problem is with the neighours. Some are of the human variety, others not. Let us begin with My Bitterest Enemies and Neighbours Across the Courtyard, Part I. This first set of enemies is the pigeons. They roost under an overhang on the roof and they paint the would-be-charming red bricks with the white streaks of their poo. The poop collects in mountains on the fire escape beneath them, measuring as high as five inches in some places. When I look out my window and across to the neighbouring building, all I see is crap. The biggest insult of all came when I returned home from work one evening after having left my patio doors open seven inches or so sans screen, only to find that the pigeons had paid me a house call; my living room was graced with multiple splatters of bird droppings. The next day I made the building handyman clean it up, and he actually showed up with gyno gloves and a paint scraper with which to remove the solidified shit from my carpet.

Part II involves the neighbours who live directly across the courtyard from me and one floor down. They are even grosser than the pigeons, but similarly vermin. Their sparsely furnished apartment is littered with beer bottles and drug paraphernalia, and their windows do not have curtains, only pasted-up newspaper to give them privacy. They are loud and disgusting and throw loud and disgusting parties on weeknights and keep me awake when I have to be up early the next day. The worst altercation occurred in November, when after a night of hard partying, the scariest one of all climbed up the fire escape and proceeded to bang on my windows and threaten my life, all because I’d been so audacious as to ask him to please be quiet when he was drunkenly banging on his own window and hollering to his roommate to “let [him] in! [He] forgot [his] keys!”

So you know how most apartment buildings have locked front entrance doors and you need your tenant friend to buzz you in whenever you come visit? Yeah, well, my apartment doesn’t have that. Installing an intercom and buzzer system would be an investment—clearly something my landlord has no interest in. As such, the doors leading to the street are constantly left unlocked, often resulting in certain non-tenants and other undesirables having unlimited access to our stairwell. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come home late after a party or left early to head to work and come across a homeless man sleeping on my landing. I went from calling the cops to personally throwing them out, like the stairway vigilante who know all the perpetrators by their first name. The final straw for a girlfriend of mine—who has since moved out—came when she exited her apartment one morning to find a used condom and its wrapper on her welcome mat. When people are doing it in your hallway, kids, you know you’ve got a problem.

Thanks to Michael Moore, the image that the general American public has of Canada is one of an idyllic, gun-free haven of polite folks and free health care. In his film Bowling for Columbine, he shows us an example of a typical Canadian housing project, which is clean and inviting, differing significantly from the towering brown-brick behemoths that have been erected in poverty-stricken districts of the United States since the 1950’s. Not to say that his representation is completely inaccurate, but I find it important to clarify that Canada is home to many a slum. I know this because I live in one.

Maybe the Village Voice had a point when they asked via billboard at the corner of Bowery and Delancey in New York City: “Where have all the junkies gone?” We, the young people of limited means, whether we be artists, activists, or students, will likely forever complain about the gentrifiers moving into our neighbourhoods and consequently rendering the cost of living unaffordable. Yet here I am complaining about the ghetto-ness of my inexpensive apartment building, one of the remaining few in my area. Perhaps the only way to guarantee myself an affordable living situation is by having to tolerate sex in the stairwell and pigeons on my patio. And that, my friends, may very well be the lesser of the two evils.