ean-Louis Lamarche, a burnt-out abstract painter with a drooping mustache and rotten teeth, lived in the same rooming house. It had rained hard one night and I'd ducked into a coffee house near Rue St. Denis. Jean-Louis recognized me and with his bony fingers around my arm guided me to a chessboard. We managed a little conversation. He jerked his thumb toward a wall mural he had been commissioned to paint. "It was a fucking nightmare," he says. "Fucking weeks I am stuck trying to finish but no, I can find no answer. Den one night I sit straight up in bed and dere it is: dots! Big fucking orange dots. An' cats it. C'est fini! Fucking voile! Den I get my pay, buy new brushes and paint. Da rest I drink up an' get some new ideas. What you tink?" I say I like it. Mostly shades of blue, some black trapezoids, green geometric shadows and gestalts that hook into my irresolution, convincing me that I know something about art, and Montreal, rainy nights on neon avenues and cavernous cathedrals, afloat in the slipstream. And of course there's those explosive, eye-opening orange dots. Not academic jargon and research papers, no Haight-Ashbury grooves and vibes, no Pennsylvania Dutch pragmatism. Just French beatnik orange fuckin' dots. We were friends. He drags me to a tavern to meet his friends. A table with trays of beer in those tall slender glasses, hard-boiled eggs, smoke. His friend Jean-Marc grabs him and they hug and slap each other. Curly dirty red hair, long beard, waist- length paint- spattered army jacket, a rope holding up his bell bottoms. I sit on the fringe of their conversations understanding only their laughter. Expo and the tourists fade, job search fades. A backcheque from my teaching assistantship arrives so I pay my back rent and two weeks in advance. I buy a mattress and rattan chair from the Sally Ann, extra clothes, some fete and fruit, and begin buying rounds of beers for the artists. Beer in the morning, beer and cheese and pickled eggs in the afternoon and evening, wine or gin late at night with Jean-Louis. He is painting "cheesecake crap" for a rich man who wants art in his motel rooms, and art in his home. Jean-Louis is depressed that he has to paint shit to stay alive: women in fishnet stockings, horses in a thunderstorm. He gets drunk and morose, confesses his girlfriend is stripping again and not coming home at night. He weeps in my bedroom then drags me to the usual tavern. Jean-Marc is sleeping on the sidewalk outside. "Don't wake him! He's sleeping. He's working on his sculptings for Expo. Sacrament! He put dem out dere on da revolving fucking wheel display which has da wrong fucking turn speed, and it has breakin' up da visual lines cuz dat wheel moving too fast, those pigs, which has piss him off so he's fuck dem an' jus' fell asleep. Don't wake 'im. He's tired tonight." We step over him and step into the light of the tavern. Some days I ride the buses all day. I like the Botanical Gardens, the cactus rooms all in dome- shaped glass. The dry heat, and the sandy smell of the earth. I think of LSD, or how the gardens would look on acid. I talk to Marta and Denise, two friends of Jean- Louis', asking for some grass. They keep saying there'll be some soon, and I realize I'm thinking about it a lot of the time, to ease things, to soften up the edges, pass the time. One night, Louise, the wife of Michel-of-the-boarding-house, manoeuvres me to an outdoor concert. Michel works swing-shift at an aircraft hanger, a metal worker. Louise is younger, like a child, impulsive and loud and flirtatious. They argue a lot at night downstairs. They don't care who hears them. Soon it is pouring down rain so hard that we're soaked and the sewers can't take all the water and overflow, so we're knee-deep at some streets. When we get to the concert we have no tickets and have to climb around black wrought iron bars to get a seat. It is a hot night and the musicians play happily through the downpour, and we all rise in a steaming mass cheering wildly. Encore!