The Dépanneur Bar

It's called The Whip.

No menu or kitchen. A quebecoise Judi Dench will point to a frigo where a jar sits pregnant with eggs and vinegar. Brigades of Molsen EX are packed into four fridges, dépanneur-style.

The other patrons dutifully knock on VLTs. There is no indication of why the place is called the Whip; we draw our own conclusions.

Judi Dench brings us the Whip's oeuvre: wine bottle-sized beers with thimble glasses that might be used to allot prune juice in a senior's home.

We've brought a game of Connect Four and play a speed round robin. The loser nails back ice-cold beer, burning her eye sockets. Pours another thimble.

The room is clean, bare, no place marked vomitorium - even with the eggs, which remind me of clues to a medical history exhibit. No one ever needs to see a severed foot in fermeldihyde nor boiled eggs ogling in brine.

We skip the eggs. They ogle without our notice.

This is unfamiliar territory and we're an omnium gatherum, hodgepodge of drinkers huddled around the campfire of a Depanneur cooler beefed with bottles of beer that say "ex" as though we're here to mourn lost love over VLTs and pickled eggs.

Panic will come later. For now, responsibilities are sloughed like snow from our coats.

We're in the whip and we'll lick the lion tomorrow.

Life-size Fussball and a Caribou Martini

He offers me the red cane he holds with three fingers, his smile uneven like an orange peel. The smell rises up from the red stick like holy incense, Hail... Hail... why haven't I seen this altar boy before? the only thing to do is to grab it and drink. It is like drinking out of a flute, all the keys shut. You stop when you sputter. Amen.

I had wandered into a tent that might have been better suited as a 1950s make-shift nuclear town. Faux brick panelling, paintings, and plants furbished the inside of a tarp that was delightfully free of children. Behind me, six middle-aged middle-grown women slouched in sofas as though reserving spots in an opium den.

Our surroundings wooed us to refill the hollow cane umpteen times with Caribou. We had learnt that nothing says Carnaval more than a bison hat and a 23% sludge of red port, Cognac and maple syrup, hot as coffee. The more you drink Caribou, the more you're convinced that you're the Bonhomme Carnaval. I guess this is because you become both manically happy and scary to children.

We were getting jolly - but our French wasn't improving. I sat down on the coffee table with the cane between my knees and the carpet in the Old Man Winter pose, mulling how alcohol consumption and children could go so well together.

A life-size Fussball game was going on outside, children and adults playing together. As a friend suggested, the only thing that would improve the game is if people controlled the players from the side. Instead the teams are simply lashed to the bars. Unfortunately for spectators, they aren't flipped around.

Not coin-operated

Here on the historic Plaines d'Abraham where General Wolff had perished under an English flag and French General Montcalm had received his fatal wound, snow bathers romped with the Bonhomme; adults pulled tiny sleds laden with unconscious children, their little arms spread, welcoming the sky in one-piece snow suits. The parents didn't even glance back as the sleighs hit planters and fences, grazing around them.

The Caribou was making me meditative. Now outside, I took another swig from the cane, the alcohol rushing from the end, red liquid crashing against my face like an ocean wave and drizzling down my chin. I let out a cough of satisfaction and eyed the Olympic Torch under a Coca Cola marquee. The torch was attached to a podium. Not easily freed. But isn't that what they told King Arthur about the sword?

The Caribou had given me strength, and I felt ready to use it.

But I'm afraid of getting arrested, and even more scared of being chased by Bonhomme-suited security guards wielding batons, so I settled for getting a photo with a snow sculpture of Old Man Winter holding a candle between his legs. I wish I could have gone up close, gone between his hands and helped him light the candle, but once again someone would have paged security. It meant I had to go back to drinking excessively in predetermined nuclear towns, buying 7$ shots of bailey's in glasses made out of ice and throwing the glasses onto a heap of used glasses behind some imported potted spruce.

Everything makeshift. Fake. But the Caribou was real - the label on the bottle made me believe I was tapping a maple under the northern lights in 1616, tap the trunk, do the rights, holy incense and drink the cane. It almost gave me the courage to take part in the snow bathing competition, but I have less guts than this old man:

Drinking Caribou is simply not as warm as wearing it.

What do you mean I have a flair for boredom?

Let's talk about my voice.

For most of my life, I could blissfully ignore my teenager way of turning every phrase into a question and the way I sometimes sound like a tight rope on estrogen.

But in radio, I have to broadcast this 1980s jukebox to other people. While being taped for eternity, and posterity, so my grandchildren can know why they sound like teenage boys when they're 23-year-old women.

My newscast went great. Until it was time to say my name.

I looked in horror through the glass where the producer and my classmates smiled at me and I heard the click of the intercom.

"Say your name again, please."

I don't usually aim to sound like I'm wearing a loin cloth and leaping from vine to vine.

"And the food bank is having trouble during the transit strike.

LaurAHE-AHE-AHHH,

Radio News."

Oh my God. It sounds like my voice box is in a wrestling match with Jonathan Taylor Thomas. How the hell did he get in there? Fucking Tom and Huck. I should never have memorized the script to that film.

I fudge my name all the time in writing - but that's because cursive is all disorientating. I have to concentrate. Visa understands that Laura and Laara and Larua are all the same person.

Just as Laura and LaurAHE-AHE-AHHH are one and the same.

But spoken word is different. I can't say my own name into a microphone?

Later on, while practising my script, I was told by my radio mentor to brighten up my voice.

"You just have one of those voices that sounds naturally bored all the time."

That's just great.

I prefer sarcastic. Or deadpan. I do not want to be known as Margaret Atwood. There is a woman who sounds bored all the time. She can barely lift her gums to say "hell no."

But maybe Margaret understand why kids always thought I was making fun of them in elementary school. I'd say something nice, and they'd throw sand. They probably didn't even hear what I said. They were being lambasted by the sound of boredom. Poor kids.

Because of my self-consciousness, I'll be compensating for weeks, smiling while I talk, and making everyone wonder why I'm showing off my teeth and not blinking. As long as I can keep my voice steady while I'm saying my own name.

This isn't the first time I've had to compensate with my expression. There was that time my hairdresser chopped my bangs an inch above my eyebrows and I was forced to look surprised for weeks so others wouldn't notice. I'm sure everyone wondered what kind of lobotomy the hairdresser had given me behind the bangs.

The crazy smiling? It's so I don't insult you, prematurely. When the smile comes down - so does the guillotine. I have a weapon to wield and it's about to ruin the mood.