COMMENTARY BY

Robert Smith
© Robert Smith 2005

THE ALLEY CAT
“Concentration moon, wish I was back in the alley…”
(Frank Zappa)

I was walking around the streets in Montreal, and I came up to Drummond and Sainte-Catherine. I felt all of a sudden as though everyone in the intersection was staring at me. At the same time, I felt dangerous, as though I were carrying a machine gun on my back. The fact is that I was dirty, and I felt dirty: I hadn’t taken a shower in several days, I only owned one set of street clothes, which I wore over and over again; I didn’t shave, and I felt the hostility of everyone around me. Harry had told me that the hippies at the corner restaurant were afraid of me, because I was “a cross between a desperado and Charlie Chaplin.” I don’t know about any crosses, except for the cross I was carrying. I also told people I had a fish on my back, like on April Fool’s Day. I told them I felt tormented because of the fish. Sometimes, when I did a lot of acid, I felt as though I had three bodies, one I was walking in, and two others trailing behind. And I couldn’t gather my three bodies together into one center. I was off center, like a John Max photograph. My soul felt dirty and grimy, from too many bad acid trips, from too much harassment by the police, from being molested as a child (although I wasn’t aware of this). It was a dirty world I lived in, it was polluted with hatred and discrimination and violence and cheap sex. As I walked down Sainte-Catherine Street, I could see discotheques and bars and cars and a wide disparate assortment of drunks and low-life people of all walks of life. In this world, green lights kept turning red; any social structure was oppression, and the police could spot anyone with altered consciousness committing thought crime. I was tormented by the capitalist system, because salesmen would tell me things like: “Everybody’s got a price,” and “Do you want to be a hammer or a nail?” And it was a society in which “nice guys finish last,” and “it is lonely at the top.” I felt at a deep level “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill…” I was definitely at the bottom of the totem pole, and envied those who drove Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguar’s. Is it true that the last shall be first, and the first shall be last? I was lumpen-proletariat, and no one would talk to me except other street people or the police, and that to give me a hard time. I aspired in life to be a waiter, because I was stuck at being a busboy. The junkies and prostitutes were my peers, and I was impressed by panhandlers who actually made money. And yet, I knew at some level that these were not gentlemen and ladies – I had been brought up with a silver spoon in my mouth, and I could never live that down. I kept trying to escape from the aristocrats and snobs. My worst fear was to be denounced as a racist or a conservative. Some girlfriend of mine once called me a fascist. Another called me a police informer. But back in the sixties and seventies, everyone suspected everyone else of working for the police. I saw people standing on street corners, waiting and staring. “They also serve who only stand and wait…” And I thought they were spying for the police somehow. I saw the same people in Douglas Psychiatric Hospital, sitting in a hall or in one of the tunnels, crouching and waiting and staring, and I knew they had a cosmic purpose to watch for Jehovah or something. They were the original witnesses of the Higher Power. And I would see the hookers standing around and joking with their colleagues on the corner of Saint-Laurent and Sainte-Catherine, and did they have a police mission as well? Hey, every street person was appointed from above, and I was supposed to save Quebec, like Jonas. And I kept waiting to be swallowed by the whale. I had been spit up by the whale, and I felt covered in vomit. I guess it is just the feeling of having been arrested and psychiatrized, if there is such a word. And I felt degraded, by the world, by the fallen angels around me, and I remember feeling that I was a fly, with dirty wings, and a dirty body, as I rode on the bus. Sometimes, it was grimy old March in Montreal, when there was slush and mud and dirty snow everywhere, and I was a dirty old man, a derelict, a loser, at the age of 21or 22, and there was no hope for me, because I was condemned. I was under God’s wrath. And I raised my communist left fist against heaven in rebellion, and my destiny was to be crushed. Why was I doing all this?

Meanwhile, in a far-off jungle surrounded by rice paddies, in a small country in Southeast Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, the culmination of Western civilization, its logical extension to the ends of the third world, despite the opposition of all the left worldwide, was that American soldiers and their mercenaries were pouring Canadian-made napalm on little Viet Cong insurgents, for the mere crime of wanting independence from the colonial arm of technocracy. Meanwhile, in a world of rational madness revolving around materialism and domination, in a world where scientific research and market-economics gambling have spun out of control, perhaps only the homeless people are in their right minds.

 

Written with the financial assistance of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Robert Smith
© Robert Smith 2005

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