My Winnipeg (2007) - full transcript

Filmmaker Guy Maddin was born, raised and has always lived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a town where he says everyone sleepwalks through life. He is trying to escape Winnipeg, but isn't sure how as he isn't sure what's kept him there in the first place. Perhaps his parent's month long 65th wedding anniversary celebration (despite his father being dead for some years) where he will reenact his childhood (with actors playing his family, except his mother who plays herself) in the old family home at 800 Ellis Avenue, which was above the family's hair salon business, will provide some answers. He recounts some civic events which have affected him and the life of Winnipegers: the 1919 general strike, the destruction of the Wolseley Elm in 1957, and the replacement of the iconic Eaton's building for the new hockey arena in favor of the old Winnipeg Arena. The latter has an especially close connection to him because of a family tie and the rich history of hockey in the city (discounting what he considers the failure of the NHL experiment). As he is on the train leaving the city, he hopes that the page 3 "Citizen Girl" will be the panacea for all Winnipeg's issues.

Um, OK,

"I wasn't born yesterday, dearie."

I wasn't born yesterday, dearie.

"I know all about fur

and all about blood."

I know all about fur

and all about blood.

- "Where did it happen?"

- Where did it happen? In the backseat?

- Where did what happen?

- The real party.

We'll just do that over again.

"The real party. Did he pin you down?"

- The real party. Did he pin you down?

- "Or did you just lie back..."

Or did you just lie back

and let nature take its course?

"Or did you just lie back

and let nature take its course?"

Or did you just lie back

and let nature take its course?

"Was it a boy on the track team

or the man with the tire iron?"

Was it the boy on the track team

or the man with the tire iron?

OK, a little angrier.

"Was it a boy on the track team?"

Was it a boy on the track team

or the man with the tire iron?

- Excellent. Cut.

- Cut it.

* Winnipeg, Winnipeg

* Wonderful Winnipeg

* Hail my town, hail my home

* The world that moves

round and round.

* Winnipeg, Winnipeg

* Wonderful Winnipeg

* Where I belong

* And joys redound

in one long, happy song.

* Here are friends

and kindly faces

* Folks I'm glad to know

* Memories, familiar places

* To cherish with a glow

* Winnipeg, Winnipeg

* Wonderful Winnipeg

* It's no Eden

that you would see

* Yet it's home sweet home to me.

All aboard!

Winnipeg.

Winnipeg.

Winnipeg.

Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg.

My home for my entire life.

My entire life.

I must leave it.

I must leave it.

I must leave it now.

But how to escape one's city?

How to wake oneself enough

for the frightening task...

of how to find one's way out?

The greatest urban train yard

in the world.

Arteries. Iron veins.

Ways out.

The dream train.

Chugging, dreaming.

Sleep-chugging,

out of the lap of the city.

Out of the lap described

by the Forks,

of the Red, the Assiniboine.

The Forks,

Assiniboine and the Red.

The rivers that forced animals and hunters

alike onto the same waterside pathways.

The Forks, the lap.

The Forks, the lap.

The Forks, the lap.

The Forks, the lap.

The reason we are here, right here,

in the centre of the continent,

the heart of the heart

of the continent.

The hunted lap. The woolly lap.

The lap of my mother.

Arteries.

The Forks beneath the Forks.

An old tale from the first nations

has it there are subterranean Forks -

two secret rivers meeting,

directly beneath the Assiniboine and Red,

this double pairing of rivers being

extra supernaturally powerful.

The animals, the hunters,

the boatways, water and rails -

these are the reasons we're here.

Pulling out of the station.

Pulling out of the station.

What if I had already left

decades ago?

What if? What if?

Winnipeg... always winter.

Always winter.

Always sleepy.

Winnipeg...

Winnipeg... Winnipeg.

The train tracks cross

the streetcar tracks

and in turn cross the streets

and the alleyways...

everything beneath thin layers

of time, asphalt and snow.

Are these arteries still here?

Are they dug out every night

and reburied every dawn?

We Winnipeggers are so stupefied

with nostalgia,

we're actually never quite sure.

I never really know anything

for sure,

except that after a lifetime of trying

and many botched attempts,

this time I'm leaving for good...

again!

Back in Winnipeg's earliest years,

the Canadian Pacific Railway

used to sponsor

an annual treasure hunt.

This contest required

our citizens to wander the city

in a day-long combing

of our streets and neighbourhoods.

First prize was a one-way ticket

on the next train out of town,

the idea being that once someone

had spent a full day

looking this closely at his own hometown,

he would never want to leave.

That the real treasure

was right here all along.

And you know what? Not one treasure-hunt

winner ever got on that train and left.

Not one, not in 100 years.

Well, I don't need a treasure hunt.

I've got my own ticket.

I just have to make my way

through town,

through everything

I've ever seen and lived...

everything I've loved and forgotten.

Through the thick, furry frost

and out to the city limits,

then I'm on my way, out of here...

out from the heart

of the heart of the continent,

the woolly, furry, frosty lap.

The Forks, the animals, hunters,

boatways, trains and Mother.

These are the reasons we're here.

These are these reasons we've stayed.

These are the reasons I'm leaving.

These are the very things

that are going to help me get out of here.

The Forks, the lap, the fur.

The Forks, the lap, the fur.

Mother appears occasionally on the train

to check on the passengers.

My mother...

a force as strong

as all the trains in Manitoba.

As perennial as the winter,

as ancient as the bison,

as supernatural

as the Forks itself.

Her lap, a magnetic pole,

a direction from which I can't turn

for long.

It must be the sleepiness

which keeps Winnipeggers here.

If only I can stay awake, pay attention

to where I'm going, where I've been,

and get out of here.

Stay awake.

Stay awake. Stay awake.

We sleep as we walk...

...walk as we dream.

Winnipeg has ten times the sleepwalking

rate of any other city in the world.

And because we dream of where we walk

and walk to where we dream,

we are always lost...

befuddled.

Asleep on foot, the Winnipegger

is a citizen of the night -

the Winnipeg night.

Why is this so?

Why are we so sleepy?

Why can't we just open our eyes?

Is it the mystically paired

river Forks?

The bio magnetic influence

of our bison?

The powerful northern lights?

We don't know.

We sleep.

We sleepwalk.

We sleepwalk.

We show up on old doorsteps,

old homes - our old homes,

those of our sweethearts -

and we are allowed by civic law to carry

the keys of these old, dreamy domiciles,

of these old, dreamy addresses.

And those that live at the old homes

must always take in

a lost sleepwalker...

must let the confused one

stay till he wakes.

In Winnipeg, it's the law.

These old dreamy addresses.

Keys... keys.

Winnipeg.

Home.

Unlike other sleepwalkers who carry

with themselves great balls of keys,

keys to all their old addresses,

I keep just the one key with me

at all times,

the key to 800 Ellice.

Home.

Dreams...

dreaming...

dreaming...

Every night,

I have the same happy dream,

that I'm back

in my childhood home.

It was the biggest house

in the neighbourhood, also the strangest.

I was proud of this strangeness -

and ashamed, too,

depending on who saw me

enter its front door,

for it was actually

three structures in one -

most embarrassingly, a beauty salon

run by my mom and my Aunt Lil...

a sprawling seven-room suite in back

for my aunt and grandmother...

and up top, a big baby boomer

bedroom cluster

for my mom, dad, three siblings -

Ross, Cam, Janet

and Toby, our Chihuahua,

our long, long, long-dead

Chihuahua.

A big cube of home.

A chunk of happy home.

I've often wondered what effect

growing up in a hair salon had on me.

Designed by my mother in 1940...

I loved the noises, the shop

always a-whir with gossip,

laughter, buzzing, snipping,

the clatter of trays dropped on the floor,

door chimes, the phone always ringing.

Shrieks. Shrieks over the roar

of the dryers.

The air always acrid

with lotions,

or fuzzy with sprays -

cloudy, cloudy, cloudy

with hairsprays.

Helmets. Helmets.

Cutting of hair.

The torturing of hair.

Helmets. The drying of hair.

Helmets.

Sweepings of hair.

The hair chute for the sweepings,

leading down into the basement.

The air vent leading upstairs,

right into my bedroom,

bringing me every word of conversation

that roiled

out of that gynocracy.

At school, I reeked

of hair product -

pomades for the elderly,

lotions for the elderly.

I smelled of corn plasters

and Barbicide,

of girdles and talc,

fur coats and purses,

the insides of purses,

the smells of female vanity

and desperation.

I grew under their influences

into what I am.

I will always love this shop.

White... block... house.

White... block... house.

I can't stop dreaming of this home.

It's changed since we sold it.

It keeps changing in my dreams.

New shapes -

similar, but confusing.

All the other addresses that appear

where 800 Ellice should be...

smaller, longer, darker...

lower, older, bigger...

but never just my home.

Home. Home.

The dreams are sweet

back home, back home.

But the waking is bitter...

bitter... bitter.

Bitterness.

Bitterness, sweet as the cold

of our winters.

We're the coldest city in the world.

What enchantments this cold offers up

to the person with the right attitude!

What exuberant lungfuls

of fresh air the city has

for those who want to scoop it up

in their mouths!

Happiness,

dazzling outdoor happiness

for anyone who cares to put on

a pair of mitts and embrace it,

squeeze every last snowflake

of joy from it.

Back in 1906, we Winnipeggers

built our own Happyland.

Our own Luna Park,

our own Dreamland.

You'd never know it, but between these

West End streets of Aubrey and Dominion,

between Portage Avenue

and the Assiniboine,

sprawled the immense permanent

playground, teeming with oddity.

Wind-chilled rollercoasters

and Ferris wheels

enveloped themselves in frost half the year,

a Happyland for us

wintry Winnipeggers.

Happyland... keeping us happy.

All a dream, all a dream.

I need to wake up,

keep my eyes open somehow.

I need to get out of here.

I need to get out of here.

What if?

What if I film my way out of here?

It's time for extreme measures.

I need to make my own Happyland,

back at 800 Ellice.

In commemoration of what would be

my parents' 65th wedding anniversary,

I sublet for one month

the house in which I grew up.

Mother, as always,

is game for anything.

Eager is she to dip into

the past of her home.

I hire movers.

Tax deduction. I'm a filmmaker.

Only here can I properly

recreate the archetypal episodes

from my family history.

Only here can I isolate

the essence

of what in this dynamic

is keeping me in Winnipeg.

And perhaps, once this isolation

through filmed reenactment is complete,

I can free myself from

the heinous power of family and city

and escape once and for all.

In addition to shooting everything,

I keep a meticulous logbook

charting this strange plunge

back in time.

It's 1963-ish, a time I believe

most likely to conceal

the key to all the memories and feelings

that enervate me to this day.

In my old living room,

Mother puts everything back just as it was.

The old black-and-white TV

in one corner,

the planters,

crummy sofa, comfy chair.

For one month,

I get to sleep in my old bedroom,

the letters Y-U-G still carved

dyslexically upon its door

so Santa will know I'm there.

Everything is the same

as in my childhood.

The scope of this experiment

excludes my father.

I decide to keep him

out of the formula.

My mother, missing him terribly

since his death 30 years ago,

lobbies strongly for his inclusion.

We settle on a compromise

and pretend

we've had him exhumed

and reburied in the living room,

beneath a mound of earth

concealed by the area rug.

This seems to buy her off -

for the time being, anyway.

For the reenactments which concern me,

I hire actors to play my brothers and sister.

Finding these actors isn't hard.

In fact, I'm able to get substitutes

that bear uncanny resemblances

to the vintage originals.

My sister Janet, who in 1967

was a Pan Am Games gold medallist

and is now a member of the

Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame.

My brother Cameron,

who died in 1963 at the age of 16.

My brother Ross,

always big man on campus.

My dog Toby - lived to be 11,

never successfully house-trained -

to be played by

my girlfriend's dog, Spanky.

Actors for them all,

except Mother.

At the last second,

the woman who has sublet this place

decides she doesn't want to leave.

She put a bit of a damper

on things.

...all of our old things...

Experiment

seems to be going well.

We start with something easy

the first few hours, and everyone -

the hired actors, Mother, the strange lady

who won't leave her house -

are all comfortable enough

to gather around the TV

and watch the only television drama

ever produced in Winnipeg.

Don't try to sweet-talk me.

It's talk. talk. talk.

All you do is talk.

I'm going to do it

for real this time!

It was a daily TV drama

called "LedgeMan",

and my mother's been the female lead

in this show since 1956.

Don't think they don't know

that you're a coward and a baby

who has to get his own way

all the time.

You're looking pretty cocky

now that you've given me shingles

and made me lick dirt for

all those reporters down there.

Every day,

the show runs at noon.

The same oversensitive man

takes something said the wrong way,

climbs out on a window ledge

and threatens to jump.

- I'm gonna jump.

- And every day, his mother appears

at the nearest window and tells him

to remember all the reasons for living.

In spite of what you think. you

have never been a disappointment to me.

Don't make me do it.

Why. when you were

a child model for Hudson Bay.

I was so full of pride

I could hardly breathe.

That little checked suit.

and not a hair out of place.

Don't try to sweet-talk me!

- By the end of each episode...

- I love you. Mom.

...the son is convinced

to come in to safety.

But the next day,

he is back out there again.

Next... on "LedgeMan"...

Suicide on Portage and Main!

Mother's never missed a day in

the 50 years the show has been broadcast.

Surprisingly, after half a century

of acting on TV,

Mother is resistant to playing

the role of herself

in this exciting experiment of mine,

which could actually not just unlock

the secrets of a family,

- but create a new genre of film.

- Six alpha, take one.

Can't I have the lines?

It would be so much better for her.

She's always been stubbornly

resistant to my most important ideas.

Just to show me who's boss, she'll

forget a line or transpose its syllables,

anything to destroy a take.

OK, with the car? Oh, I'm sorry.

There's no such thing as an accident!

- Let's just try it again.

- Yeah, I just went a little off there.

I just know

she's doing it to be difficult.

Sorry, I'm getting further

and further away from the lines.

We fight on the set, but her

refusal to acknowledge the real past

becomes scientifically significant,

I think.

Very telling.

- Uh, may I hear that again?

- Sure."No innocent..."

This is gonna be a good month,

the month of my great escape.

That's good, and cut!

It's a singular chance,

this month.

Who gets to vivisect

his own childhood?

The first full scene up is

the straightening of the hall runner,

something we did every exasperating day

of my childhood.

An unbelievable source of frustration

for everyone,

for the rug could actually

never be straightened out,

no matter how much

anyone pulled from either end.

And Mother always nagged

from the sidelines.

The actors put in a limp performance,

displaying little affect,

and it's me behind the camera

who gets frustrated instead of them.

An inspired Spanky

tries to help out

by getting in the way

just as dead, dead Toby always did.

But almost none of the data collected

in this reenactment will be of any use.

But still, it's working.

Mother is in the moment.

Never underestimate the tenacity

of a Winnipeg mother.

The year 1957 saw Winnipeg embroiled

in the scandal of the Wolseley Elm

growing out of the centre

of Wolseley Avenue,

surrounded by a curb

and a fringe of grass

that Ripley's Believe It or Not declared

was the smallest park in the world.

In 1957, the city assigned a crew

to remove the elm.

In the ensuing standoff,

a dozen elderly neighbourhood women

encircled the tree arm in arm

to fend off the city workers' buzz saws.

Within minutes the police had arrived,

paddy wagons and all,

or the old biddies.

A crowd gathered. "If they want to

chop down this tree," said one woman,

"they're going to have to

chop us down first."

In the end, the matter

was settled peacefully

by newly elected mayor Stephen Juba,

who pulled up in his Cadillac

and sent the workers home.

Later that week, vandals,

obviously working for the city,

blew up the tree with dynamite.

What if? What if city hall ever listened

to the wishes of the people?

1919.

Returning soldiers

and police on the right.

Our workers, stage left.

The drama of our city's

most glorious moment,

the 1919 General Strike.

The clash of the marchers,

their grand parades surging from

each direction, meeting in the middle.

Meeting where? On this day,

in front of St. Mary's Academy for Girls.

St. Mary's Academy for Girls,

where the quaking little princesses

of the middle class

tremble out their fathers'

fear of workers -

fear the workers might actually

get paid fairly someday.

But the workers are not to be denied.

Neither police truncheon

nor the wealth of the bourgeoisie

can stall their determination.

The newspapers paint the workers

as Bolshevik rapists,

which galvanizes the girls' worrisome

fathers into a frenzy of paranoia

and sets the nuns,

those ever-opiating nuns,

foolish as the turkeys they raise,

puffing up into a gobbling panic.

Such was the crucible of the continent's

labour movement here in Winnipeg.

Brave men, doing what had to be done,

teaching the next generation to throw off

its girlish fears of the inevitable.

The workers.

The workers' night school -

and some of their most eager

students sleepwalk

right out to the barricades

to meet their new teachers.

What they want they know not,

but they're gonna get it,

and our city will be at the forefront

of the workers' rights movement

from here on in.

You can feel the spirit

of labour still

whenever you walk around

St Mary's Academy at night.

You can still see the impotent

old fence, now snow-buried,

that once tried to keep

those heroic Bolsheviks at bay.

Now a single sleepwalker

re-marches the same historic route

the strikers took past the school.

Is he remembering with his blood

those long-ago days of excitement?

Or is he just another sleepwalker

jingling his keys in his pocket?

He's barely noticed

by anyone at St. Mary's.

He is as invisible as I am otherwise.

Maybe it is I.

The closest I ever got to

St. Mary's Academy for Girls...

I remember getting lost

as a three-year-old who rode off from home

on the seat of my little green dump truck

and ending up

on the grounds of St. Mary's,

forbidden territory for a boy.

Soon, I was surrounded by solicitous

schoolgirls who coddled me, teased me,

held my hand, pressed me

into their blouses and kissed me

in a kind of competition for me,

which ended only

with the arrival of a big nun.

Now my encounters with the students

of this fenced-in school

are limited only

to little lunchtime sightings.

The girls like to smoke

at Munson Park across the street.

Delinquent girls -

nothing stokes

my mother's engines more!

Well, delinquent girls are

all in the past for me, Mother.

It's time to get back to work,

back to the task

of disentangling myself from this town.

One scene I'm anxious to get at

is the re-creation of the time

my sister hit a deer on the highway

coming back from Kenora.

I felt at the time

my mother really overreacted.

I need to view this episode again.

Was it my sister's fault?

Was it my mother's?

...and action!

Mother!

I had an accident!

An accident? With the car?

- I ran into a deer.

- A deer, on the highway?

There's no such thing

as an accident!

- What were you doing out there?

- I told you, a track team party.

Out in the woods where the boys

can run faster than you?

- Come on.

- The deer wasn't dead.

And I just stood there crying

until a driver stopped.

- And what did he want?

- He helped me, Mother.

He got a tire iron and he put

the deer out of his misery.

I'll bet.

Let's see the damage.

Now, what do you have

to say for yourself?

There's the deer fur and the blood

and the dent, just like I said.

I wasn't born yesterday, dearie.

Where did it happen?

In the backseat?

- Where did what happen?

- The real party.

Did he pin you down, or did you just

lie down and let nature take its course?

Mother. She knows

how to read all the signs,

those gentle substitutions

for dark wishes.

Who did it?

Was it the boy on the track team

or the man with the tire iron?

Mother, you're not making any sense.

You sound like a crazy person.

We'll see how crazy I am.

I know what it's like out there.

Every night, the same old story.

Take it off, put it in,

pull it out, do this, do that.

Don't try my patience.

The signs,

hiding in plain sight.

No innocent girl stays out past ten

with blood on her fender.

- It's my life, not yours.

- Well, who gave you that life?

- I never asked for it!

- Neither did I!

And so help me,

if I could turn you in

for somebody who knows how to

take care of themselves, I would!

Well, I wish you had.

I'd rather be an orphan!

Don't tempt me!

Every night I look at my pills.

One little push is all I need.

It was the man with the tire iron.

He saw the blood and the fur,

and that was that!

It wasn't like that.

You weren't there.

Did he pay you?

No! What do you think I am?

What did all the tears

for the deer accomplish?

All it did was put you

in the mood for the other.

I'll never see him again!

Of course not. It only took him

five minutes to find out what you are.

My sister hit

and killed a deer.

My mother sees through this euphemism,

for it is a euphemism.

Everything that happens in this city

is a euphemism.

Mother understands in a second

what this deer blood and fur means,

and somehow she's right.

She can read our family

and our civic secrets,

our desire and our shame,

as easily as she can read a newspaper.

Mother...

maybe the most psychic

of all Winnipeggers.

No matter where I am,

I can feel her watching me.

I can feel her hand on my shoulder

when I'm out sleepwalking,

guiding me back to my own bed.

I don't think it matters

if she's awake or asleep, living or dead,

she'll always know

exactly what I'm doing.

Winnipeggers have always been

skilled at reading past the surface

and into the hidden depths

of their city.

On a small scale, we had

Curious Lou Profeta back in the 1930s.

He was famous for de-spooking furniture

that Winnipeggers feared haunted.

The city once even hired him

to spiritually cleanse

a streetcar that was

giving passengers the jitters.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

always cited Winnipeg

as having the greatest

psychic possibilities

of any city he had ever visited,

possibly because of the lap,

the fur, the frost, et cetera,

but especially because of the Forks

and the Forks beneath the Forks.

The first nation's people knew

how to read what Conan Doyle

only sensed in this city,

for centuries burying their dead

as close as possible to the most

powerful confluence of our four rivers,

Red and Assiniboine,

Red and Assiniboine.

In the 1920s,

Thomas Glendenning Hamilton,

distinguished Winnipeg medical doctor

and politician,

held at his home

elaborately documented s?ances

in the hope

of contacting his dead son.

These nocturnal confabulations

quickly spun out

into the viscous and cottony

hallucinations you see here,

depictions of the war

constantly waged in this city

between the two worlds

in which Winnipeggers live now

and which they expect

to inhabit in the future.

The most intriguing work in

the paranormal field here in Winnipeg

was led by medium

Gweneth Lloyd back in 1939,

the same year she co-founded

what became eventually

the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.

She conducted a number

of notorious s?ances

in which she danced out,

rather than spoke,

the restless messages

from the denizens of the beyond.

The most famous of these meetings

she conducted

at our provincial

legislative building,

which also happens to be

the world's largest Masonic temple,

secretly constructed along

ancient occult specifications

in 1922 by our premier,

Rodmond P. Roblin,

who, along with his entire cabinet,

were third-degree Masons.

That's the Greek god Hermes

atop our dome,

disguised as the Golden Boy

by an armful of wheat,

our sleepy eyes never suspecting

his fearsome pagan power

and unlikely presence here

in modern North America.

Present at the medium's table that night

were our city's most respected city fathers,

including the incorruptible

Mayor Cornish

and... the madams,

or shop stewards,

of our illustrious brothel collectives,

women respected for their political acumen

and clout in the community.

Countless streets in our core area

are now named for these great women.

* It's a moody Manitoba morning

* Nothing's really happening,

It never does...

One last time through January,

the coldest, darkest month.

* To bring me a letter...

Deepest part of the winter,

no end in sight.

The condoms come off.

These are the bareback months

of Winnipeg.

Your breath freezes

in front of your face

and falls to your feet with a tinkle.

Man and dog,

we walk the streets...

my guide dog through time.

* And I like it that way

Even people who have never

encountered snow

can imagine what it's like

to walk through it.

You leave footprints, declivities.

When you step on fresh snow,

you pack it down.

You pack it down onto the sidewalk, and

when all the loose snow later blows away,

it actually leaves a positive record

of that negative space.

It leaves your footstep

as a kind of little relief record of it.

I like to think of these things

as snow fossils.

They don't last 600 million years.

They only last a few months.

But you can actually trace

through these snow fossils

your own passage up and down your

sidewalk over the course of a winter.

It's a way of walking backward

and forward in winter's time.

Winnipeg.

We negotiate the great white ways,

the snow labyrinths,

mazes of ectoplasm which determine

our paths through our lives here.

We have little or no choice

where we go, where we sleep,

what we feel.

A city of palimpsests, of skins,

of skins beneath skins.

How to decode the signs of the city?

Another civic law here -

we're not allowed to destroy

old signage, any old signage.

Instead it's kept, kept forever

at the old signage graveyard.

Dip into the layers

of Winnipeg...

a city just four years older

than my grandmother.

Sometimes so young-seeming,

sometimes so ancient.

Frightening.

Frightening is one's place in time.

When the snow starts falling,

the city starts to feel lawless -

lawless but safe.

All the painted lines on the street

are erased by snow, and anything goes.

It's a big game

of bump'em-cars out there.

The lights look pretty.

You can't even see

out of your windshield half the time.

You know you can glide sideways,

skidding through a red light,

and the cops will let it go.

In Winnipeg, it's way more fun

for us to cross the city

using only its back lanes.

The city possesses a vast network

of these unofficial streets,

a fine grid-like work

of narrow unspoken-of byways

that hold a charm all of their own.

They're not even allowed on city maps,

but the populace knows all about them

and uses them

more than legitimate streets.

A dispute between the city's

two main taxi companies was settled

by giving one company the rights

to use the regular streets,

while the other company must pick up and

drop off its fares only in the back lanes.

It's inside these black arteries

where the real Winnipeg is found,

where memories

most plausibly come alive.

The network of these lanes suggests

the grid of a secret city

laid right on top

of the known one.

Lanes with names remembered

only by word of mouth

lie on top of streets named after

politicians and land developers.

The lanes are illicit things

best not discussed - shameful.

They receive the breech ends

of the houses,

the side of the home not meant

for polite company.

They are the weedy landscapes

of shameful abandonment,

the conduits of refuse removal.

Here we strew what we no longer

want to acknowledge,

and everything,

most notably the Winnipeg special -

a mattress bent over

with fatal stains -

is quickly covered up

by the forgetfulness of our snow.

I am man's best friend,

and also man's...

In the alleyways,

strange wavelengths dominate.

The dispatcher

seems to speak directly to you.

Yes, I got that this morning...

The driving is softer,

soft as a cushion,

a white pillow plumped.

Then there's the strange case

of Lorette -

a hermaphrodite street.

It's half front street,

half back lane.

No one speaks of Lorette.

Even the architecture

in Winnipeg is sad,

has an addled concept of itself.

Emblematic of this is

the Arlington Street Bridge,

a vast span of unfrosted

steel girders

which arches over

the city's sprawling train yards,

where trains couple in the fog,

rumble on awhile, then noisily divorce.

The bridge, manufactured

some 100 years ago

by the Vulcan Iron Works of London,

was originally destined for Egypt,

where it was to span the Nile.

But a mistake in specs made the fit

with that river impossible,

and the bridge was sold at a bargain price

to bargain-crazy Winnipeg.

The bridge has not adjusted well

to its always-strapped foster home,

and it often turns in its sleep

when it is possibly dreaming

of its lush and joyous

originally intended home

and pops a girder out of place.

The sounds that groan up

from the yard at night

resemble the agonies

of some colossal arthritis.

Just as the Arlington Street Bridge

dreams of the Nile,

we have another dreaming

man-made feature of the skyline,

this one an impostor of

the landscape, Garbage Hill,

the only hill in otherwise

board-flat Winnipeg.

Made from a half-century

of the population's trash,

then grassed over and passed off

as a park a generation ago.

This great mound,

home to tobogganing children,

dreams its filthy dreams of garbage.

It's not uncommon for kids

sliding down this hill

to be impaled on a rusty piece of rail

or old car fender

that's been heaved up by the frost.

My Winnipeg.

A horrific chain reaction of architectural

tragedies started in the late '90s

when our titanic Eaton's department store

on Portage Avenue

hit that prairie iceberg and sank -

bankruptcy.

Eaton's once dominated this city,

to the point where over 65 cents

of every Winnipeg shopping dollar

was spent at this single store.

To say it defined Winnipeg retail

would be no exaggeration.

After the bankruptcy,

our civic government,

without even trying to dream up

a second life for the old store,

suddenly and unforgivably

razed it.

Demolition is one of our city's

few growth industries.

Overnight, construction of a new arena

on the old Eaton's site was announced.

Curiously, after years

of fighting, resisting, refusing

to build a new rink

for the NHL Jets,

allowing them

to abandon us for Phoenix,

city council suddenly rushed out this

new architectural lie to Winnipeggers.

The result, a sterile new thrift rink

for minor league hockey,

with too few seats

to reach the NHL minimum,

should a miracle ever give us

another shot at playing in the big leagues,

a ridiculous,

politically motivated tragedy

with the corporate name "Empty Centre".

I'm sure memories will accumulate

in this "Empty Centre",

which has nothing but low-priced newness

to recommend it.

Until then, this thoughtless

new building just sits

on the windswept downtown corner

like a zombie in a cheap new suit,

its brick coat somehow meant

as an homage to atomized Eaton's,

but coming off more as an insult

to the grand old department store,

and an insult to us.

Now the real tragedy.

Since we've suddenly ended up

with two large hockey arenas,

the real Winnipeg Arena,

the old Winnipeg Arena,

the most fabled, myth-and-memory-packed

landmark in our city's history,

has been condemned.

Condemned!

In fact, demolition has already begun.

For 50 years, this ice hockey cathedral

fit Winnipeg and its sport

like a skull fits its brain.

This building was my male parent,

and everything male in my childhood

I picked up right here.

I was even born here...

right in this dressing room.

Look at it.

Born during a game between

the Winnipeg Maroons

and the Trail Smoke Eaters.

I was bundled up and taken

straight home after the game

and brought back a few days later

to watch my first complete contest.

My dad worked behind the bench

for the Winnipeg Maroons,

the 1964 Allan Cup winners,

senior hockey champs

in the days of the Original Six.

And for the Canadian national team

as well,

as Winnipeg hosted

in wave upon frightening wave

visits from the revolutionary

juggernaut Soviet team,

years before the hubristic NHL

deigned to hold

its first Summit Series in 1972.

Here's my ticket for game three

of that series, a four-all tie,

a dull game compared

to the electrifying contests

typically held here at the world capital

of international hockey.

The NHL never liked us

here in Winnipeg.

They raked us of our best players

when we joined up with them in 1979.

I grew up in the locker rooms,

was breastfed there

in the wives' chambers,

and was often lent out to visiting teams

as a stick boy.

I met my first superstar

in the Soviet showers,

dazzled by Anatoly Firsov

as he emerged from the steam,

naked except for the lather

mantling his torso.

Positively smitten by him,

I once stole

his famed number 11 jersey,

taking it home and sliding it

over my nude body

to take a few erotically charged

secret slap shots

before tossing it into the Forks

for fear the KGB would catch me wearing it.

I nearly fainted from the touch

of its fabric and the fear.

On off days, I would go to the arena

for the strange pleasure I could produce

by flipping down

every one of the 10,000 seats,

admiring them,

then flipping them all back up again.

Urine, breast milk, sweat -

the hockey cathedral?s

holy trinity of odours.

These are the smells that will haunt

this holy site forever,

no matter what blasphemy is built

here in its stead.

And rest assured,

it shall be a blasphemy.

When the national team was disbanded

by a federal bureaucrat's stroke of a pen

in 1970, my father died.

With nothing left to do, he died.

I'd like to say he spontaneously combusted

right on the ice of the arena.

That would have been great.

But it was quieter than that.

He shrank into a puff

of cigarette smoke and was gone.

Now my building lies

like a heart ripped open in the snow,

closed to the public

which worshipped in it.

What if Eaton's

had never gone down?

What if?

But an odd assortment of players

in their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond

continues to play in the old barn despite

the first few thumps of the wreckers' ball.

The team is called

the Black Tuesdays,

in defiance of the day in October 1929

when the world crashed into depression.

The players are old Jets, Maroons,

or from earlier eras -

the Warriors, the Victorias,

even the Falcons, who won Canada's

first Olympic gold medal in hockey

in Antwerp, 1920.

Cec Browne, voted athlete

of Manitoba's first century in 1970.

Ollie Turnbull.

Buster Thornsteinson.

Curly-headed George Cumbers.

Smiley Dzama, so named

for the numerous head injuries

which have left him eternally happy.

Other veteran greats -

Baldy Northcott,

Fred Dunsmore,

greatest of all the Maroons

and best athlete

in the history of Manitoba.

As a child, lived at three different

addresses, all of them on Minto Street.

Strangely, and perhaps a testament

to the mystical synchronicities

always holding sway in this city,

his future wife Margaret dwelt as a child

in the same three houses, long before

ever meeting her future husband.

Billy Mosienko, Winnipegger,

scorer of the fastest hat trick

in NHL history of 21 seconds,

and owner of a fantastic

bowling alley on North Main.

On the Falcons,

Konnie Johannesson...

Frankie Fredrickson,

the most beautiful of all the Falcons...

Huck Woodman.

It is even rumoured that the heavily

bandaged goaltender who plays

is the late Terry Sawchuk, the NHL's

all-time leader in wins and shutouts

at the time of his mysterious death

over three decades ago.

But that's impossible,

of course.

They suit up in the collapsing

old dressing room

where they laced them up as youths.

No one knows why the Black Tuesdays

formed. They aren't saying.

I'd like to think they did it

to protest the grotesque greed

of the National Hockey League,

which made the sport too rich

for this sleepwalking,

working-class town.

Game-playing reveries,

lost in time, mischievous time.

Time flies when you're flying.

The unfeeling coroner's chisel

breaks in the bones of the temples,

gets at the memories.

With great sadness, for the last time

ever, and wearing a hard hat,

I relieve myself as I've done

a million times before

in the building's famed

urinal trough,

the last man in the illustrious history

of this temple to do so.

Within minutes,

the trough will be ripped into oblivion,

and soon, too, will the great careers

of these wonderful souls.

OK, we're gonna go.

Five, four, three, two, one.

Fire go off!

Go, Jets, go! Go, Jets, go!

Go, Jets, go! Go, Jets, go!

Kind of a strange victory.

Only the part of the arena

added in 1979

to accommodate the arrival

of the NHL in town

falls off the arena

when the dynamite goes off.

This I interpret as a sign,

a sign that we should never

have joined that league.

I really sort of hoped that this would be

some kind of stay of execution,

but, no.

Why did this happen?

Why was this allowed to happen?

The arena, my father,

the paternal amphitheatre

of our game, murdered,

all because he lacked luxury boxes.

Here we pride ourselves on

the tradition of labour,

and we allow our shrine to be outraged

for its lack of luxury boxes.

I'm ashamed of us,

ashamed to be a Winnipegger.

Farewell.

Farewell, beloved father.

One final experiment at 800 Ellice.

It was really rare for me

to side with my mother in family disputes.

I must revisit an incident

which puts her in a sympathetic light

to see if it parses out

the same way this time around.

...frame, and action.

Wake up, Mother!

Wake up! Wake up, Mother!

- Wake up!

- No! Mm.

- Mother, please wake up!

- What do you want?

You have to feed us.

We're so hungry.

Well, go and make yourselves

something.

I'm too old to cook anymore.

My cooking days are over.

- Do you want us to starve?

- I don't know where the pans are.

Well, just go make yourselves

some toast.

- We burned the toast.

- Nothing tastes good unless you make it.

- We throw everything out.

- Or throw it up. It won't stay down.

Well, I don't have any more recipes

in my head.

My cooking days are over.

Whatever you make for yourself,

we can share a little.

No. What's mine is mine.

We brought the parakeet with us.

What was that?

- We brought the parakeet with us.

- How dare you!

- You were warned.

- We tried to be nice.

- And you didn't listen.

- Oh!

- Go get her, Muli!

- Oh, get him away from me, please!

- Spray your filth in her hair.

- Oh!

My mother's always had

a strange fear of birds -

I don't know where it came from -

and messy hair, too.

I remember once we were down

in Warroad, Minnesota,

visiting some friends who had

a 75-year-old mynah bird

that had an immense vocabulary

and was allowed to fly free in the house.

It landed on my mother's shoulder,

and she smashed it to the floor.

Destroyed, just killed the thing

with one blow.

The thing had been living happily

for 75 years

and its life was snuffed out

just like that.

Oh!

Get him away from me!

I'll call him off if you get up

and make us some meat loaf.

- Right now!

- Oh!

There's another one

for the logbook.

Whittier Park, 1926,

early in the winter...

a first horrible snap of cold.

A fire in the paddocks,

started when a squirrel

scorched itself on a power cable.

The horses panicked, frightened,

wildly fleeing from the flames.

One last race for their lives,

out into that cruel snap of cold,

no other way to escape the flames

but to cross the Red River.

Swimming in the current,

swimming, fighting the current,

that current clogging with

jagged chunks of freeze-up.

The ice takes on heft, deadliness.

Horribly, everything clogs.

Both horse and ice clog together,

an ice-and-horse jam

piles and paralyses, locks -

locks each animal in place

by its panicked, bulging neck,

by its frenzied head.

The heads stay this way

for the whole winter -

five months at the Forks -

like 11 knights

on a vast white chessboard.

A great public spectacle.

We grow used to the sadness,

simply incorporated into our days.

Soon, the Holly Snowshoe Club embarks

on weekly jaunts out to the horse heads

and holds little jamborees there.

Winter strollers visit the heads frequently,

often on romantic rambles.

Lovers gather to sit among,

or even on, the frozen heads

for picnics or to spoon beneath

the moonlit dome of our city.

The horse heads are always frozen

in those same transports of animal panic,

an abandonment reading unambiguously

to the young lovers of Winnipeg.

The city enjoys a tremendous baby boom

the following autumn.

Humans born of horses.

Happiness.

Now without a racetrack

to slake the city's thirst for betting,

Winnipeggers turn to wagering

on unsanctioned, illicit events -

the Golden Boy pageants held

at the Paddlewheel Nightclub,

which sits atop the brand-new Hudson's

Bay department store on Portage Avenue,

Eaton's little sister down the street.

Man pageants.

The men are beautiful,

the betting is heavy.

Otherwise incorruptible Mayor Cornish

ignores our city's bylaws

and presides as the lone judge

at these lurid contests.

He picks the Golden Boy,

makes or loses fortunes

for those patrons in thrall

to the vice of gambling.

Trotting, trotting, trotting...

on parade for the mayor...

on parade for Winnipeg,

thoroughbreds one and all.

Women only

in the Crinoline Court section, please!

The advent of modern

Winnipeg nightlife.

What does one have to do

to be named the Golden Boy?

What is beauty?

Who knows?

That's for the mayor to decide.

Desire.

Selecting the lucky one...

the one...

the Golden Boy.

The Mayor Cornish era ended in 1940

when scandal erupted

over the high number of Golden Boys

holding down golden jobs at city hall.

These debauched Cornish years

were known as "the orange Jell-O days",

when the city jiggled

to the tempo

set by that simple but timelessly

delicious dessert

served in the Paddlewheel

as its house speciality.

Jell-O. Only orange Jell-O.

Night manna, squirting through the teeth

into the outer regions of the mouth

and then back

into its centre again.

An endless cycle,

the wheel of Jell-O, the Paddlewheel.

Betting action at the Paddlewheel,

that once-vibrant penthouse of iniquity,

drops off rapidly

in the decades that follow.

Hard to work up much enthusiasm

for the pipe-smoking contest

held every weekend in the '50s,

and by the '60s, there is nothing much

left but memories of better times.

Nowadays, I fear for the store.

Even sleepwalkers

are hard to find here.

One last time, I can still

make my way up to the fifth floor.

Unimpeded by any customers,

where the Bay rents out space

to the always nomadic

Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame.

There I can find my sister,

and of course, Fred Dunsmore.

Oh, Fred, why does the Hall of Fame

always choose such thin ice

upon which to erect

its memorial columns?

Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame has moved

many times since I first heard of it.

Every time it moves into a building,

the building goes bankrupt.

It has to pick up all its photos and banners

and sleepwalk to another home.

I worry about the Bay.

Will we always have

the Bay blankets,

the blankets worn by my dad's teams,

the famous point blankets

which have been currency

for our fur traders since 1670?

The city council can't possibly

tear this building down.

Not again would they dare

commit such a murder.

Well, why not? They've killed before,

and they're unrepentant.

What if they do it again?

What if?

Wake up.

You must make one last visit

to your beloved Sherbrooke Pool,

already two-thirds closed.

Built in 1931 as a Depression-era

make-work project,

the facility is actually

three swimming pools in one building,

but stacked vertically,

one atop another,

perhaps the only building of its sort

in the world.

Segregated by gender...

segregated by depths.

Families swam on the main level,

street level.

But one level deeper, it was girls.

Girls only.

And deeper still, in the deepest

of deepest basements,

it was the boys, only boys...

...in the steam and dankness.

Back in grade five, I was invited

for a Saturday swim at the baths

by my old school chums,

only to find upon arriving

my friends had no intention

of ever getting into the water.

Instead, they stripped naked to cavort

the day long in the changing rooms.

The little savages in their Saturday trances

wanted me to strip too,

surrounded me,

aroused with excitements,

and threatened to send high-arcing

streams of urine onto me

unless I joined them

in their downy caperings...

with engorged little members...

hairless.

Why? Why? Why?

Why don't we just swim?

While making my way

to this boys' level,

the pool beneath the pool

beneath the pool,

I always thought of the Forks

beneath the Forks,

and a mystical power overtook me.

Something shifted in my chest

the lower I went, a power shift.

It was always rumoured

the water in the boys' pool

came directly from the Forks

beneath the Forks.

I believe that rumour.

The two lower segregated levels of the pool

are closed now, since 1966.

Why?

What if? What if?

"If Day"! February 19, 1942.

At dawn, 5,000 Nazis invade Winnipeg

and declare martial law.

Fascist officers arrest Mayor Queen,

Premier Bracken and his entire cabinet.

Schoolteachers and politicians alike are

imprisoned in our historic lower Fort Garry,

which is suddenly a concentration camp,

flying the swastika.

By midmorning, Portage Avenue

is already renamed Hitlerstrasse.

Winnipeg itself

is renamed Himmlerstadt.

Citizens are bullied,

harassed, molested.

What if? What if? What if?

Talk about a terrifying detour

through time.

For us here in Winnipeg,

where time cuts many pranks,

this detour is horribly plausible.

The 5,000 Nazis are actually

Rotary Club volunteers

wearing costumes

rented from Hollywood,

and "If Day" is a huge success,

frightening Winnipeggers

into colossal war-bond purchases.

To Winnipeggers,

the word "if" is terrifying.

In Winnipeg, every day is "If Day",

and one must be careful

when changing trains

not to take the wrong line,

not to end up looping back endlessly.

That's why one must stay awake

if he actually wants to get

to where he thinks he's going,

to his Happyland.

For time, for the wrathful nature

of this ancient land,

plays one more trick upon him -

wrathful nature.

Quickly, prairie herds descend

upon us again.

From the plains of Silver Heights,

the pained cries rising

from between two mating tilinkti,

or homosexual bulls,

held to be sacred for their double spirit

by the Ojibwe,

spark a colossal buffalo stampede

down into Happyland,

trampling the playground under hoof,

leaving it completely flat

within ten minutes.

Then, a third stampede -

this one by our forgotten men -

our veterans of the Great War.

Joined by our first nation's people,

those swelling ranks

of our heartsick dispossessed,

these souls descend onto

the devastation of Happyland

and sweep up every last piece of

happiness they can, for they need it.

Every fragment of plaything -

rollercoaster, arcade and Ferris wheel,

every last sliver of... happiness -

they remove it with the swiftness

of a starving man clearing his plate.

These forgotten souls,

forgotten families, forgotten tribes

remove themselves and these odd spoils

to their secret homes upon the rooftops

to reconstitute, as well as they can

from this rubble, their own Happyland.

Out of sight, out of mind,

invisible, still there to this day...

still there to this day.

Wrathful nature...

...benevolent bison.

For Winnipeg has always forbidden

the shantytowns and hobo villages

which typically pop up

in other cities.

Still on the books here is a law

which keeps our homeless out of sight,

up on the rooftops of our city, above us,

an aboriginal Happyland in the clouds.

Aboriginal Happyland...

forgotten Happyland.

Forgotten people... Happyland.

Happyland.

I'm near the edge of town now,

time running out.

I'm really going.

How will Winnipeg be without me?

Who will look after

all its regrets?

I need to think of her as I go.

The Winnipeg Citizen

was a collective newspaper

that got the workers' word out

during the 1919 strike,

the only collective

daily paper in the world.

I know the Citizen never had

a Page Three Girl,

but if it had, she wouldn't be

just any tabloid pinup.

She would be... Citizen Girl!

A concerned comrade,

sad but strong,

strong enough to pry herself

from the inky pages

and climb to the very top

of our city

to tend to those

in our aerial Happyland.

And from on high up in Happyland,

straddling our Forks from above,

she could undo all the damage done

during Winnipeg's first trip through time.

With one wave of her hand,

she could restore Eaton's,

the Jets and the arena,

my old arena home.

She would find a gentle forest

for the Black Tuesdays,

those wonderful old souls.

She would rename Minto

after Fred Dunsmore,

reopen all three levels

of the Sherbrooke Pool.

Citizen Girl would plant a new sapling

right in the middle of Wolseley Avenue.

With one wave of the hand,

she would refill the Paddlewheel,

raise Whittier Park

from its ashes,

keep all our horses and schoolgirls

safe and right-minded,

and once again turn on the sign

at Clifford's.

She would look after this city,

my city, my Winnipeg.

She would be its new lap,

and then

I would know it was OK

to finally leave,

to leave the city in her hands -

secure, cared for, loved.

Then I could go to where

there are no ghosts.

Ghosts.

How can one live

without his ghosts?

What's a city

without its ghosts?

Unknown... unknown...

unknown.

I don't know what this experiment

did to my mother.

She really developed an attachment

for my dead brother Cameron,

gone these 40 years -

or at least for Brandon,

who played him.

It's better between us.

Yes.

Now that you've gone.

I didn't used to like

being close.

Why?

I just wasn't comfortable.

Are you comfortable now?

Mostly, I guess I am.

Me too.

That Freezie wrapper looks sticky.

I don't mind. I don't mind.

Who's alive?

Who is alive?

Who's alive anymore?

So hard to remember.

Sometimes... sometimes I forget.

I forget my brother Cameron

is gone.

I forget my father's been gone

since I was 21.

At some point,

when you miss a place enough,

the backgrounds in photos become

more important than the people in them.

The old living room where we spent

almost every waking hour,

lying on couches

in front of the TV set.

My parents and I...

lying on couches,

lying on couches,

lying on couches.

A chunk of home.

White... block... house.