I made eye contact with the man to my right, who was pressed against the wall as well, by an officer of his own.
Novel Excerpt | Ben Ladouceur | Issue 43
Excerpt from I Remember Lights
With my chest and cheek against the wall of Truxx, I felt a sudden strong need for something familiar. My situation was intolerably unreal; seeing a friendly face, one that saw me back, would confirm my own existence to me. I searched the corner of the bar that fell in my limited field of vision. I looked for John and couldn’t find him. I made eye contact with the man to my right, who was pressed against the wall as well, by an officer of his own. In his face, I saw no trace of panic—only disbelief. He shook his head at me and rolled his eyes. It helped my anxiety subside, to focus on the ridiculousness of the situation. We had all been drinking beers and listening to music. We did not deserve walls against our faces. I looked forward to the end of this whole exercise, so we could all buy more beers and debrief. I let out one curt laugh—then felt a sharp jab on my shoulder blade.
“Qu’est-ce qu’il y a de si drôle?” asked the officer, considering himself the subject of the laughter.
A different cop shouted, “This way for the paddy wagons, ladies,” and I understood that I wouldn’t be returning to my table or buying another beer. That I had been foolish to think of that, even for a moment. Previous raids had resulted in small numbers of arrests, but this one had a different magnitude. I was being arrested, same as everyone else there.
My cop held both my hands behind me, peeled me off the wall, and led me through the exit. The cop behind us walked more quickly, and as he passed, the man in his grip looked into my eyes and said sharply, “Do you see?” He was speaking to me in particular.
“Honoré,” I said, recognizing him more by his voice than his face. He had grown a beard since our last encounter. As he was shoved forward, he turned his head to keep my gaze. His face was intense with scorn.
There were several paddy wagons parked outside the bar, one of them already full of men; Honoré’s cop shoved him into that vehicle and chained him to the bench in a swift motion. Honoré looked at me again, but this time his face conveyed terror. The door slammed shut; the wagon drove off.
Usually, when Honoré and I saw each other, at some bar or bathhouse, we would pretend not to see each other and not even say hello—though every several months, we scrapped this unratified agreement and spent a whole evening speaking. He had broken the agreement now, to share some unkind words. Do you see, he had said. I knew what he meant by this: Do you see what it leads to? The open life, the free life. Sitting in places like this. Do you see what we do to ourselves? What we’ve done to ourselves already, by deigning to forget, for even a moment, our station?
But it hadn’t mattered to me, in that moment, that his words were unkind. I derived comfort from them. A man had spoken three words to me—to me in particular—so I knew that I existed.
*
At the Reine Elizabeth, I manned a windowless, closet-sized room within the kitchen, with a dumbwaiter and a shelf with a few recipe books, all French. My job was to make drinks for the people who didn’t want to leave their rooms. When I had no drinks to make, I was supposed to wash the dishes that accumulated in the sink outside the little room.
After a few shifts, I noticed that sometimes the other dish boys were pulled to the bar if things were getting busy and the boys had proper clothes on. I decided I’d start to wear a good shirt to work, and I’d hope for the same opportunity. Just one shift at the bar would mean I would share in the tip money that got pooled that night.
I had a nice white shirt at the room-rent in Little Portugal, so I took a walk there one afternoon. By this time, I had been sleeping at Honoré’s practically every night. Tomas’s mother, Gloria, sat alone on the couch reading a magazine when I arrived. “Tomas is in my mother’s bed, sick. He puked on the sidewalk after the movies this afternoon. His vo-vo is out shopping right now.”
“I’m not staying,” I said. “I’m just getting some clothes.”
“Sit with me. There’s coffee.”
I poured myself up. She put aside her magazine and bit her lip before speaking. “You know, I think my mother isn’t very happy with this arrangement. She wants to replace you actually, but she’ll never say that to you. You know she doesn’t want just the income. She wants English practice, help around the house. That was the idea.”
I nodded.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with you. You’re young, you’re having fun, and that’s what you should be doing. You don’t need to watch cartoons with a six-year-old all day. I’ll bet you have so many friends. Maybe a girl.” She gave a discreet, indulgent look. Hearing our chatter, Tomas came out of the bedroom, wrapped in a blanket.
“I hear you’re sick today, chief,” I said.
He didn’t speak. He just crawled onto the couch and put his head on my lap and his feet in Gloria’s lap.
Maria arrived next, coming through the main door with arms full of paper bags.
“I’m leaving,” I said to her. “I can pay for the week and get my stuff out today.”
“Yes,” she said. “Okay.”
She and her daughter headed to the kitchen to unload the groceries.
Tomas looked up at me. “I knew,” he whispered.
“What did you know?”
“I knew the popcorn makes me vomit. At the matinee. It’s the butter. It’s happened before.”
“Then why did you eat it?”
“Because I love it a lot,” he said, tearing up. “It’s my favourite.” He stifled a big sob.
“I understand,” I told him. “It’s really tough.” I wiped his tears away and kissed him on the forehead, and once I knew he was asleep again, I carefully removed myself from below his head. Maria came back in, with some of the boxes she kept behind the sink skirt in the kitchen. We fit all my stuff into just one box though, and she and I shared a light moment, laughing about how little I had to pack. Some pairs of jeans, a turtleneck, a few tank tops—and my one nice-collared shirt, still clean and bright white.
Maria offered to help me get a cab outside.
“I’ll take the Metro,” I said.
She yelped: “No! You cannot!” I knew already that she was suspicious, even frightened, of the new underground system. I tried to reason with her, but she put the cash for the cab between the flaps of my box. I mentioned nothing about having taken the Metro around town many times already. Then she kissed my cheek. I wanted to tell Tomas goodbye but didn’t want to wake him.
Maria said, “Wait now.” She looked behind her to make sure Gloria was not near, and then she looked down at her hands, which played with the apron strings tied over her stomach. “I do not know this person you have. But I know, there is person, and I know he is…”
She jutted her shoulders forward, uncomfortable saying more here. “He” was all she needed to say to establish her point.
“I know it that you will…smarten up. Smart boy here. But listen to me. You must do quick. You will be a husband soon. And your wife cannot know.”
At this point she looked into my eyes instead of into her own palms.
“That will be the worst thing for the woman. But you take longer, you go further. And further. It will all be harder to…to put away. So please. Smarten up.”
She cleared her throat. Then she spoke jokingly, as though nothing she had said was all that serious. “Smarten up, young man!” she said, all jovial. She gave me a fake smack on the head and we both laughed nervously. I said goodbye and left.
On my walk to the Metro, it hit me how Maria had deduced things: underwear. Honoré’s pairs were bigger than mine, but I sometimes wore them instead of my own, because they were also much higher quality, silky instead of papery. I likely left pairs in my clothes bin, on my increasingly rare visits to the room-rent. She would have seen them and wondered why I shopped in two different sizes. Then it would have fallen into place for her. In that moment, she’d made a decision to convey something to me, some time before we spoke for the last time. She’d waited until the last minute. People do that with the tasks they find unpleasant.
I had been quiet about my private life, to her and to others. It was an issue of vocabulary. Honoré was not simply a friend, but he would never have considered us boyfriends, husbands, or lovers either, and I could not have described him that way. On the nights I spent at the room-rent, he sometimes went on dates with girls, arranged by his mother and father. But that word, date, didn’t capture the time he and I spent together. No word did, or none that was at hand. Other men at the Peel Pub used certain terms during stories.
I met a paramour at the swimming club.
A sweetheart, a gentleman, a darling.
Met eyes with a young thing. A beauty. A fruit.
But there was a sheen of irony to these terms, as though they stood in for different, more sincere language. I had yet to learn those other, accurate words; I had begun to doubt they existed at all. Riding the train with my box of clothes in my lap, I felt the earth all around me, clumpy and stable, unseen and unfathomably heavy. The excavated earth had been used to make the islands for Expo. There in the ground, where there should have been only earth, there were people like me, flung from place to place, in vehicles that moved through the dark. And where there should have been only water, over in the river, there were islands and ridiculous buildings. The water, once calm, now rushed like rapids on either side of the islands. Things were becoming possible that hadn’t been possible previously. The past was the wrong place to look for a proper understanding of the world. I felt this very strongly and clutched my cardboard box tightly.
As the train approached my stop, I resolved to be more careful about things like the underwear. More discreet. I never wanted to be spoken to again the way Maria had spoken to me, playing with her apron strings, telling me what my future would be, thinking that she knew better, or that she knew me at all. There was going to be so much love in my life—real love. It was coming for me soon; it would cover me like mud. All I had to do was wait, and a future would arrive that was limitless.
Ben Ladouceur is the author of Otter, winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and a National Post best book of the year, and Mad Long Emotion, winner of the Archibald Lampman Award. He is a recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers and the National Magazine Award for Poetry. His short fiction has been featured in the Journey Prize Stories anthology and awarded the Thomas Morton Prize. He lives in Ottawa.
Excerpted from I Remember Lights © 2025 by Ben Ladouceur. Used with permission of Book*hug Press.
I Remember Lights by Ben Ladouceur Book*hug Press, 2025
The first novel from award-winning poet Ben Ladouceur, I Remember Lights depicts a time when the world promised everything to everyone, however irresponsibly.
In summer 1967, love is all you need… but some forms of love are criminal. As the spectacular Expo ’67 celebrations take shape, a young man new to Montreal learns about gay life from cruising partners, one-night stands, live-in lovers, and friends. Once Expo begins, he finds romance with a charismatic visitor, but their time is limited. When the fireworks wither into smoke, so do their options.
A decade later, during the notorious 1977 police raid on a gay bar called Truxx, he comes to understand even more about the bitter choice, so often made by men like him, between happiness and safety.
I Remember Lights is a vital reminder of forgotten history and a visceral exploration of the details of queer life: tribulation and joy, exile and solidarity, cruelty and fortitude.
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