My Favourite Crime. Deni Ellis Bechard
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fire department, who determined that the backhoe had cut nearly a metre beneath the level of our foundation, leaving little support for four storeys of brick. The exposed clay had begun to dry and shrink. With the joists removed, the shared walls sagged. Fred threatened the owner of the future luxury apartments with a lawsuit. A construction worker said the wall was fine, but when he put his hands against it, the bricks seemed to ripple like a tapestry. The firefighters let us get a few possessions before they chained up the house and closed the sidewalk with metal barriers. It took them a while to convince my neighbour, the one who howled, to leave. Social services arrived to relocate the tenants into government housing.
“Why don’t you stay at my place?” Fred asked me. “You’ve been such a help. My wife and I would be happy to put you up for a while.” Fred’s two blond boys, maybe four and six years old, were waiting in his car. He drove us to his suburb on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. His wife, in her twenties and also blonde, touched my chest as she asked me what I wanted for dinner.
Fred offered to get a film at Blockbuster and suggested I come along for the ride. On the way there, he complained about the owner of the luxury apartments. “I’ll show him in court,” he said. “I’ll sue his ass. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll just burn my place to the ground. See how his fucking luxury apartments like that.” He laughed and pulled onto the highway.
“How far away is Blockbuster?” I asked.
“Fuck Blockbuster,” he said. “I want you to meet some guys.”
• • •
Crime has never been far from my mind. My father, a French Canadian from a village in Gaspésie, gave up logging for safe-cracking in Montréal, then holdups in the Canadian West, and, finally, the armed robbery of banks and jewellery stores in California. He spent seven years in prison and was deported to British Columbia, where he met my mother, who’d dropped out of art school in Virginia to run off with a draft dodger. My father was still manufacturing and dealing drugs and involved in petty crime when my mother got pregnant. Then he went straight – which, for him, simply meant committing pettier crimes. When I was ten, my mother ran away with me to Virginia, where we lived for the next five years.
I was almost fourteen when I learned about my father’s crimes, and the man I imagined stepped straight from the novels I’d read. I became a thief myself. I shoplifted chocolate bars to sell to classmates. I broke into cars, storage sheds, and a house. I made off with a moped and a motorcycle. All the while, I dreamed of being Steinbeck, whom I’d discovered in English class and now read instead of doing my homework.
When I was fifteen, I decided to move back in with my father, telling my mother I would run away if she didn’t let me. But she did, agreeing that I needed to decide for myself. Over the next two months, I discovered not the outlaw hero I’d dreamed of but a bitter fifty-year-old man who lived from debt to debt and illegally bought salmon from the guy at the fish farms responsible for disposing of batches that “went bad” – meaning they’d gotten cancer from the foods that were supposed to make them grow quickly. My father and I would cut the tumours out of the meat, and he’d sell the fillets to restaurants.
He told me I had to drop out of high school and work for him, or move out and pay my own way. I moved out, too proud to tell my mother. I was still obsessed with Steinbeck. I finished high school and went to college as far away as I could, in the mountains of Vermont, and though my father often asked me to return, I refused. The Christmas of my sophomore year, he took his own life, shooting himself up with heroin and washing down a handful of pills with antifreeze.
After his death, there was nothing for me to push against, and I began to admit that I saw the world as he did: every law and convention – anything short of complete freedom – looked like an impediment. Some nights, after weeks of studying, I couldn’t tame my desire for chaos. I ran blindly through the forest or took my uninsured truck as fast as I could over back roads, crashing into snow banks, pirouetting through parking lots until I’d released whatever was in my brain – and then I just sat there, the engine idling, steam rising from the hood. I determined that the first novel I published would not be about my father. I would not echo another man’s failures.
But like my father, I was restless. I could fit what I owned in a backpack, and after college, whenever I exhausted myself writing, I set off. I rarely lived anywhere for more than a few months. During those years, I moved to Montréal several times. Garishly lit strip clubs paint Rue Sainte-Catherine, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. American businessmen and college students stumble drunkenly on the sidewalk and befriend you in bars, rambling about how cheap the escorts are, how easy it is to get drugs. Montréal doesn’t have the same puritanical varnish as the United States – its police state, its harsh sentencing. Most people I knew had few degrees of separation from the underworld. One friend sold cocaine for the Hells Angels; another sold hash for the Italian Mafia and was beaten after he dealt on a rival gang’s turf.
Every time trouble reared up, or whenever I felt stagnant, I left. Changing cities, even neighbourhoods, I breathed easier. I crisscrossed America as if on a quest for this air alone. I worked construction, took on manual labour jobs like building flea market booths or pulling nails out of old two-by-fours. As soon as I earned enough for a month or two of writing and reading books, I quit. Throughout my twenties, I lived on $10,000 a year. Some friends – those who’d found stable careers and gotten married – drew on pop psychology to diagnose me. They referred glibly to familial dysfunction and used words like trauma, though I didn’t feel traumatized. I was a pretty happy person. Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I was drawn to the pleasures of deviance. I saw this pull in those I knew from the Montréal underworld – an unquenchable desire for a freedom they couldn’t name. For many of them, the only outlet was crime.
• • •
The people Fred wanted me to meet were sitting in the basement of a triplex, watching Predator and passing around a rank, blackened bong. Fred and I joined them on the couch. Growing up, I’d had a hard time resisting bad decisions, and remaining sober when things got dicey had been my basic strategy for staying alive. The habit stuck. I sat and watched Schwarzenegger and the Predator stalk each other through the jungles of Central America as Fred drank beer after beer, his nostrils flaring.
One of the guys said, “Man, call next time or BYOB, motherfucker.” On each of the bong’s circuits, Fred took a long, hard hit. His cell rang and he flipped it open. A distant voice shouted. “Aw, fuck you,” he said, and hung up. The film ended. We switched to Terminator, but there was nothing left to drink. Fred was nominated for a beer run.
“I wanted you to meet those guys,” he told me in the car. “They can hook you up. You don’t need to be living the way you do. But tonight, you know, right now, fuck ’em.” He raced the car onto the highway and kept accelerating.
“Hey,” I said, “why don’t you let me drive?”
“Good one.” He laughed. “Like you’re my fucking mother.” His profile, with its angular nose and lantern jaw gone to pudge, flickered against passing streetlights. It was after midnight, and we were soaring for the American border, toward where Autoroute 15 turned into Interstate 87 and made a straight shot south to New York City. We passed exit after exit. The highway was empty but for the occasional eighteen-wheeler. Green roadside signs gave a kilometric countdown to the border. The crossing blazed in the distance, like a ship at sea.
Fred slowed, braking hard, and turned down a narrow road between cornfields. “I want to show you something good,” he said. A low-slung, unpainted cinderblock building came into sight. Dozens of vehicles were parked in its gravel lot, many of them pickups, one a yellow school bus with the name of an American university on the side.
“Welcome to Porkies,” Fred said. He stumbled out and crossed the parking lot, and by the time I got through the front door behind him, he’d disappeared into the crowd.
The woman on stage wasn’t a stripper – she was a naked acrobat. She spun her body around the pole, flipping over repeatedly. She suspended herself upside down and spread her legs,