This was the actual story that made me start this blog… brought to mind again when my buddy started some landscaping for Bob Irving, Saint Bob as he’s occasionally known in these parts. You’ll see why in a few paragraphs.
A couple years ago, back in the days when you had to leave Winnipeg to see an NHL game, me, my two roommates and a mutual friend (all guys) decided that a weekend in Montreal sounded like quite a wonderful idea. The Bombers had a road game on a Sunday afternoon, the Habs were hosting Hockey Night in Canada against the Sens the night before, and Rue Ste-Catherine is all the reason you need when you’re twenty five.
We stayed in some little hostel out on the east edge of downtown Montreal, just a block or two from Old Montreal, maybe a 15 minute walk from the edge of the fun. Two sets of bunk beds crammed into a room barely big enough to hold them made for pretty close quarters given all four of us are north of six feet.
Definitely one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I could go a hundred times, then go back a hundred more. Which is good, because there’s not a lot of this trip I remember.
Okay, I have a fleeting memory of walking into a bar after the Canadiens game, singing along with Sweet Caroline. We ran into a Hockey Canada VP (or something of the sort) who asked where we were from, and when we said Winnipeg and pointed at our Jets jerseys, replied
Oh, you guys will get your team back soon. It’s about time that little prick Bettman is learning how things are.
Happy times.
Something about a hookah bar (yes, that’s A-H) on the Friday night… being happily not the only people in Jets jerseys at the Canadiens game, even though the Jets’ return was but a dream and eight months away still… I think we dropped two hundred bucks on a Mexican restaurant largely because the waitress was cute… I have little to no recollection of getting home Saturday, but we were up and at the grocery store at 9 AM Sunday. After all, kickoff was at noon and grocery stores sell beer in Quebec.
Thankfully the owner’s English was a little better then our French… well, that and 20-something guys are buying king cans of beer at 9 AM Sunday for only so many reasons. He grinned ear to ear and gave us each paper bags so we could drink walking to the stadium like good hobos.
Fast forward an hour or two and we were walking up the stairs in the stadium to the seat when we noticed the open air press box was at the top of the staircase. Better yet, Bob Irving and Ed Tait were doing the live pregame show back to Winnipeg for CJOB. With the window open, right in front of us. So naturally, we were quiet and polite. Or something of the sort.
Off to the seats… and like every other game that horrible 4-14 year, the Bombers came up ten yards short on their last drive, Jeffers-Harris stripped from behind by Chip Cox, always a slayer of Bomber dreams. That was when Jeffers-Harris was actually trying to further his football career, but I digress. I also got a very French dirty look from a two year old… which was highly entertaining. After a decade of Labour Days’ I’ve been trashtalked a lot, but by a two year old?
On the way out of the stadium, we walked right back in front of the press box to go down the stairs. My buddy reached up and put his full beer (at $10.50 each!) in front of Bob Irving. Tait laughed a bit, Irving waved, and we stumbled off.
When my buddy walked up to Irving the other day, Irving said “You look familiar, but I don’t know where from.” “Well, I bought you a beer in Montreal… which I kind of regret doing, since it was 10.50… and you were working at the time…” “Oh.” “Yeah.”
I think that’s where the Mexican restaurant comes in… actually, we walked into another one first, one I was all too familiar with after Grey Cup 2008, where food poisoning knocked me completely for a loop 18 hours before kickoff. But that’s a story for another time. So to a different restaurant we went, then up and down Crescent St looking for trouble.
We got down to the end of Crescent St and found a hole in the wall. Actually, it felt a lot like drinking in someone’s house that a raging drunk had half-converted into a bar. We stopped to have a drink for energy to walk back to the busy part of the street. There were like, three people in this bar other then us, at something like 6 or 7 PM…. and next thing we know it’s 9:30, we’re all wasted, there’s maybe 5 or 10 more randoms in the bar, and everybody’s getting along like we’ve known each other for twenty years. There was a group from Michigan and Wisconsin… two Phoenix Coyotes season ticket holders (I know, right?)… the bartender, who was drinking as hard as anybody, and the bartender’s brother who seemed an awful lot like he might be an alcoholic.
I’m not going to pretend I have any recollection of the next few hours. I know we must’ve ordered 15 rounds of drinks. Easily. We knew we’d just balance it out at the end of the night, and we’d already been drinking for like, fourteen hours that day, so people were ordering rounds for anyone that sat at our table, the whole nine yards. At something like 1:30 AM, we called it a night, since we had a flight out the next morning.
A flight that TOOK OFF at 7:30 AM.
Like, six hours later.
So I go to get the bill, fully expecting it to be like, four hundred dollars. The bartender refuses to charge us more then fifty bucks. Like, total.
We had more then fifty *drinks*. Probably way more.
In the end, I just tipped him a hundred on top and called it even. We still got a good deal, I’m sure of it.
We stumbled home the 25 or 30 blocks across downtown Montreal… that I really don’t remember. I think it’s a fucking miracle we found the hostel. Like, really and truly, a miracle.
The alarm was 5:15 or 5:30. When I woke up, two of the other three were face down, in the clothes they’d been wearing the night before, legs sticking off their beds at some weird angle. There was some shuttle or bus or something to the airport that we’d figured out the day before left from a block away. But we woke up so completely destroyed that somebody bought a cab to the airport, fifty dollar charge (or whatever it is) be damned.
By 6:45 we were in line at security. My god, what a line that was. Must’ve had like, three hundred people in front of us. And none of us can stand, let alone walk. We were shuffling along in line like so many zombies as they kept pulling people out from in front of us for various flights, people that had left it way too close. Somehow, we had enough time, or at least they never pulled us out of line.
I’ve had some bad, bad hangovers in my life. Really, at that point I was still, I’m sure, quite drunk. But I’m not sure I’ve *ever* felt that bad from the bottle in my life.
So this goes on for like forty five minutes. I don’t think any of the four of us said a thing. Like, not one. The line snakes back and forth like eight times. We get to the last part where it snakes around one last time, and suddenly coming back at us, now only a few people in front of us, is Ed Tait.
He nods in recognition, then realizes what we look like, looks us up and down for a moment and chuckles.
Hey Boys. Rough night?
And that, my friends, is the time I got trash talked by Ed Tait.