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By Root 548 0

no longer with us. Arnie, who was in my class at Fletcher’s Field High, is the nebbish I once foolishly hired to run the Montreal office of my cheese-importing business. Prompted by guilt, I kept him on when I prematurely went into TV production back in 1959, finding a place for him in accounts. Those days. Christ Almighty. One step ahead of creditors, I used to delay settling lab, film-stock, and camera-rental bills until the last possible moment. Then there was Arnie to cope with. Teeth-grinding Arnie, who was suffering from halitosis, asthma, ulcers, and flatulence, his maladies exacerbated by the torments he was subjected to by his boss, Hugh Ryan, our resident chartered accountant. One day Arnie would come in to find an entry that wasn’t his own in one of his ledgers, obliging him to waste hours in futile calculations. Another day, popping what he took to be one of his pills, he would, before the morning was out, be struck with a sudden attack of diarrhoea. Then there was the afternoon Arnie caught up with me at Dink’s and thrust his raincoat onto the bar. “I’m just coming from the cleaners,” he said. “Look what they found in my pockets.” Condoms. A vibrator. A torn pair of tiny black panties. “What if it had been Abigail who had emptied my pockets?”

I also loathed Hugh, but didn’t dare fire him. He was the nephew of our federal minister of finance and a frequent dinner guest in the homes of the presidents of the Bank of Montreal and the Royal. Without his assurances, my line of desperately needed credit would be severed. “Arnie, if you only learned to ignore him, he would stop bugging you. But I’ll speak to him.”

“One day, so help me, I’ll pick up a knife and ram it between his shoulder blades. Fire him, Barney, I could do his job.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“That’s exactly what I expected. Thanks for nothing,” he said.

Among the regulars at Dink’s these days there are a few divorcées, a number of journalists, including the Gazette columnist Zack Keeler, a couple of bores to be avoided, some lawyers, a marooned New Zealander, and a likeable gay hairdresser. Our star turn and my best friend there is a lawyer, who usually claims his bar stool at noon and doesn’t surrender it until seven, when we yield Dink’s to ear-splitting rock music and the young, there to make out.

John Hughes-McNoughton, born into Westmount affluence, misplaced his moral compass years ago. His thin hair dyed brown, he is a tall, scrawny, stoop-shouldered man, his blue eyes radiating scorn. John was a brilliant criminal lawyer until he was undone by two costly alimony settlements and a deadly mixture of booze and irreverence. Defending a notorious swindler–cum–lounge lizard some years back, a man charged with sexual assault on a woman he had picked up in the Esquire Show Bar, John made the mistake of going out to a long liquid lunch at Delmo’s before returning to the courtroom to deliver his summing up. Floating into the well of the court, slurring his words, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it is now my duty to make an impassioned speech in defence of my client. Then you will benefit from the judge’s unbiased summary of the evidence you have heard here. And following that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you, in your wisdom, will pronounce on whether you find my client innocent or guilty. But, honouring Juvenal, who once wrote probitas lau-datur et alget, which I won’t insult you by translating, let me admit that I am far too drunk to make a speech. In all my years in court, I have yet to come across an unbiased judge. And you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, are incapable of deciding whether my client is innocent or not.” Then he sat down.

In 1989, John addressed public meetings in support of a quirky new Anglophone protest party that would elect four members to our so-called National Assembly in Quebec City. He also published corrosive op-ed pieces here and there ridiculing the province’s loopy language laws, which ordained, among other foolish things, that henceforth English, or even bilingual, commercial signs would be verboten,