(man) 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?
- (woman) Where did what happen? - The real party.
(man) 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 the boy on the track team or the man with the tire iron?
- (man) Excellent. Cut. - (man #2) Cut it.
* Winnipeg, Winnipeg
* Wonderful Winnipeg
* ail 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
(train whistle blows)
(rumbling. rattling)
(train whistle continues)
All aboard!
(wind blows)
(train chugs. whistle blows)
(man. narrating) Winnipeg.
Winnipeg. Winnipeg.
- (train whistle blows) - Snowy, sleepwalking Winnipeg.
My home for my entire life.
My entire life.
I must leave it.
- (brakes screech) - 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.
- (train whistle blows) - The reason we are here, right here,
in the center of the continent,
the heart of the heart of the continent.
(train whistle blows. chugging continues)
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.
(train whistle blows)
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.
(train whistle blows)
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.
- (train whistle blows) - 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!
(train whistle blows)
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 neighborhoods.
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.
(car horn honks)
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.
(train whistle blows)
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.
Mother appears occasionally on the train to check on the passengers.
My mother...
a force as strong as all the trains in Manitoba.
(train whistle blows)
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.
(train chugs. whistle blows)
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.
(softly) Stay awake. Stay awake. Stay awake.
(train chugging. horn blowing)
We sleep as we walk...
(wind blowing)
...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 biomagnetic influence of our bison?
The powerful Northern Lights? We don't know.
We sleep.
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.
(keys jangling)
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.
(train chugging)
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.
(wind blowing)
Dreams...
dreaming...
Every night, I have the same happy dream,
that I'm back in my childhood home.
It was the biggest house in the neighborhood, also the strangest.
(birds chirp)
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.
(dog barking)
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...
(hair dryer whirs)
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.
(train chugs faintly)
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.
(whistle blows. wind blows)
Home. Home.
The dreams are sweet back home, back home.
But the waking is bitter... bitter... bitter.
(wind blowing)
- Bitterness. - (early jazz playing)
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.
(gears cranking. faint screams)
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.
- (faint screams continue) - 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.
(whistle blows. train chugs)
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, the 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 medalist
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.
(mother) ...all of our old things...
(narrator) 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!
(narrator) It was a daily TV drama called "LedgeMan,"
and my mother's been the female lead in this show since 1956.
(mother) 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.
(narrator) 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.
(mother) 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!
- (narrator) 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.
(announcer) Next... on "LedgeMan"...
Suicide on Portage and Main!
(narrator) 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. - (man) Six alpha, take one.
Can't I have the lines? It would be so much better for her.
(narrator) 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!
- (man) Let's just try it again. - Yeah, I just went a little off there.
(narrator) I just know she's doing it to be difficult.
Sorry, I'm getting further and further away from the lines.
(narrator) 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? - (man) Sure. "No innocent..."
(narrator) This is gonna be a good month, the month of my great escape.
(man) That's good, and cut!
(narrator) 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.
(train chugging)
The year 1957 saw Winnipeg embroiled in the scandal of the Wolseley Elm
growing out of the center 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 neighborhood women
encircled the tree arm in arm to fend off the city workers' buzz saws.
- (saw buzzes) - 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.
- (explosion) - 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?
(people chattering)
- 1919. - (whistle blows)
Returning soldiers and police on the right.
- (man whistles) - 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.
(crowd clamoring)
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 labor 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.
(clamoring continues)
(gulps)
(bell tolls)
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.
(bells toll. train chugs)
You can feel the spirit of labor 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.
(bell tolls. wind blows)
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.
(girls giggling)
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.
- (girls giggling) - 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?
(man) ...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?
(narrator) 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.
(narrator) 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.
(sobs) I'll never see him again!
Of course not. It only took him five minutes to find out what you are.
(narrator) 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.
(train chugs faintly)
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, etcetera,
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.
(train chugs)
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.
(animal grunts. growls)
(distorted growling)
(rain patters)
(distant thunder rumbles)
(creaking. water splashing)
(wind blowing)
(wind whistling)
(distorted growling)
(rustling)
(wind blowing)
* It's a mmoody Manitoba mmorning
Nothing's really happening It never does...
(narrator) 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.
(train chugs faintly)
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.
(train chugging)
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.
(radio chatter)
(child's voice) I am man's best friend, and also man's...
(narrator) In the alleyways, strange wavelengths dominate.
The dispatcher seems to speak directly to you.
(woman on radio) Yes, I got that this morning...
(narrator) The driving is softer, soft as a cushion,
a white pillow plumped.
(train chugs)
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.
(train chugs)
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.
(birds caw faintly)
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.
(loud clanking)
The sounds that groan up from the yard at night
resemble the agonies of some colossal arthritis.
(brakes screech. chugging continues)
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.
(loud thudding)
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.
(loud crashing)
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.
(whistle blows. train chugs)
- (baby cries) - Urine, breast milk, sweat -
the hockey cathedral's holy trinity of odors.
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.
(wind blowing)
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? - (crowd clamoring)
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 Thorstenson.
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.
- (train whistle blows) - 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 Johansson...
Frankie Fredrickson, the most beautiful of all the Falcons...
Huck Woodman.
It is even rumored 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 buzzer sounds)
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.
(siren blares)
(men chattering)
(man on bullhorn) OK, we're gonna go. Five, four, three, two, one.
Fire go off!
(crowd cheering. chanting) Go, Jets, go! Go, Jets, go!
(narrator) 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 amphitheater of our game, murdered,
all because he lacked luxury boxes.
Here we pride ourselves on the tradition of labor,
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.
(train chugs)
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.
(man) ...frame, and action.
(Janet) 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!
(bird chirps. wings flap)
(narrator) 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.
(mother) Oh! Get him away from me!
I'll call him off if you get up and make us some meat loaf.
- Right now! - Oh!
(narrator) There's another one for the logbook.
(horse whinnies. "Call to Post" plays)
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 paralyzes, 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 incorporate it 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.
(elephant trumpets)
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 specialty.
Jell-O. Only orange Jell-O.
Night manna, squirting through the teeth into the outer regions of the mouth
and then back into its center 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.
(gears squeaking faintly)
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.
- (bell dings) - 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?
(whistle blows. train chugs)
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...
- (children laugh) - ...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 rumored the water in the boys' pool
came directly from the Forks beneath the Forks.
I believe that rumor.
The two lower segregated levels of the pool are closed now, since 1966.
Why?
(train chugs)
What if? What if?
(no audio)
(gunshots)
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.
- (gunfire. shouting) - 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... - (growling)
...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.
(train whistle blows)
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.
(narrator) 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.
A chunk of home.
White... block... house.
(wind blowing)