My Winnipeg (2007) - full transcript

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.