When rabbits are not worth chasing

David Sherman

If you chased a variety of romantic rabbits in Montreal, you’d catch them here. A street of broken dreams, unbridled ambitions and indelible memories. On good days, a strip of lightning in a bottle. Hard nights it was home to hard drinking, hard drugs and head-splitting hangovers.

It's St. Antoine St., Montreal’s Fleet St. And, much more.

Home to the city’s morning English paper, The Gazette, it meandered east and, for reasons unknown, became Craig St., address of the kings of local newspapers, The Montreal Star, when afternoon papers still reigned and La Presse, its thick, hearty French-language equivalent.

Out the back doors or through the alley, rue de Fortification -- its name appropriate to its long history -- from where fleets of delivery trucks stormed the city and country side, was St. Jacques St. and Le Devoir, a thin, must-read journal of endless Quebec political dissection and reverence, the epitome of the long-gone influential newspaper.

Also on St. Antoine, across from the Star, was one of the city’s innumerable taverns, The American. Here was typical fare for the bastion of men-only regimentation. Ten-cent glasses of beer, pigs’ knuckles and pickled eggs – appropriate for scribes who ordered beer by the table-full to get pickled during their hunt for the several hundred words to fill the allocated column inches of the six-day-a-week newspaper engine that kept chugging.

Their ideas were the coal that was their life’s purpose to shovel as it was readers’ and radio jocks’ duty to debate. This was their rabbit to chase.

Every day, staring at blank pages in a typewriter, later a blank screen on a computer, a ceiling of a dark bedroom where the need to sleep fought the anxiety over catching the rabbit of the next column or story. And then the one after that and the one after that. Yes, you were only as good as your last collection of words coalesced around your last idea.

I chased that rabbit time and again. No matter how many times you caught it, there was another to chase.

But, a block or two away, lost in the dust of time, were monuments to rabbits of different breeds. Music was rarely made without excursions to Steve’s or Jack’s, the former a labyrinth of store fronts, each dedicated to a different section of the pop-music orchestra. Strings and picks and tuners onto drums and keyboards, guitars -- electric and acoustic -- wind instruments and brass and then sound system rentals to make spinal cords twang and ears ring in venues large and small.

Jack’s guitar shop, amiable, manageable, equally venerable, where you could pluck and strum this and that and gossip and walk out with fresh strings, a half-dozen picks of preference thrown in, a reward for the humanity of conversation independent of sales.

Somehow, happenstance collided after chasing a journalistic or literary rabbit. I and tens of thousands of other musically-inclined greyhounds tracked musical rabbits, in studios and on stage and at home. After dinner, my dessert a song to imagine, lyrics to scribble, a tune to rehearse, a chord change to master, a rabbit that was caught innumerable times but remained, like most rabbits, forever impossible to hold onto. Jack’s and Steve’s a comforting home to the similarly crazed.

Next door were the venerable camera shops -- La Place and Simon’s -- where cameras were cameras and their accoutrements often hobbies and dreams for most but a profession and/or passion for many. Lenses to capture the far away, lenses to condense wide-open spaces or engrave memories, with the help of tripods and lights and umbrellas to expose varieties of films -- colour and black and white, slides or prints, various kelvin temperatures for various skies, flashes, artificial light or no light at all.

The rabbit of capturing the magic of 1/1,000^th of a second, stoked a lust for the technology that could ease its creation, usually Nikon or Leica, maybe Canon or Pentax and the filters and lenses, cumbersome necessities to harness the magic image. And if you could catch one, you could catch another.

Life was nothing but a million moments to freeze with the right shutter speed, lens, film, paper, enlarger, darkroom and patience. It was an elusive rabbit – weren’t they all? – and once harnessed there was nothing to do but to do it again. And again. And again.

Today, it’s some 60 years after I wrote a “cute letter” to the Montreal Star, asking how I could become a reporter. The reply came a few years later when I finished high school, offering a job as a “copy boy.”

It was the first snared rabbit, an entry into the fabled turmoil of a newsroom populated by indifferent white men in shirts and ties. My singular memory was “stripping” the news wire of the first colour pictures from the men on the moon, making me one of the first to see those legendary images."One step for man ..."

I was asked to stay as a “cub reporter,” an extinct profession, but for reasons unknown, chose to continue an education to chase rabbits unknown. Somehow, for the next decades, I kept returning to this strip of Craig St., finally converted to St. Antoine, as I continued the hunt for one ambition or another. And, only a few blocks away, was the Centaur theatre and the rabbit of the stage and the laughter and tears of a show six nights a week with a Sunday matinee.

St. Antoine remains but its institutions and forms of communication, their foundations of bringing us together through words, pictures and music, are today irreversibly altered or gone forever.

Up in smoke and drowned in metaphorical tears are the ambitions that propelled the street. Newspapers are rarely paper, cameras are rarely cameras and music is rarely music, all transitioned, with few exceptions, into bytes and digital imposters of what was.

In TV commercials and increasingly in film and programs, people are no longer people, but computer rendered simulations or AI replications. Why pay actors, why pay residuals and royalties? Music is often computers spitting out beats and harmonies and multiple tracks. Why pay musicians? Computers show up on time, don’t unionize, stay sober and keep time perfectly, minus heart, soul or that thing called swing.

Chasing rabbits of novels and films has finally brought me here, to this space. The guitar is growing dust next to a bookcase. Unsold novels in boxes, unsold CDs in stacks. Calluses on my fingertips from the bronze-wound strings are wearing away as the rest of life’s calluses have hardened. The rabbits have gone the way of the fabled institutions on a small strip of Montreal now transformed into glossy hotels and a convention centre, monuments not to art but to the rabbits of business and men and women who chase them.

It left behind many a memory and more than a few questions. Did I chase those many rabbits with any more reason than the frustrated greyhound?

And what is there left to chase when the dog tracks have been torn up and the rabbits are unrecognizable?