55 Rue Guilbault Ouest

That's my door on the right. I was 19, back in Montreal after several loops around the continent. I rented this place for forty bucks a month and lived there about a year before moving on to Toronto, Detroit, Vancouver, San Francisco, and back again. Seems like it was a year-long bacchanal involving non-stop jazz, dirt-cheap wine, marijuana, hashish, half the night-dwellers of Montreal, English and French, meals of Greek bread and cheese, exotic beauties, homeless poets, bums, juvenile delinquents, scholars and professors of science and art, folksingers, drug dealers, runaway girls from Ste Hyacinthe and Cote des Neiges, secretaries, Lebanese strippers, fugitives from mental asylums brainwashed by CIA-funded crackpots, swingers, homosexuals, separatists, anarchists, eggheads, meatheads, geniuses of art and philosophy and a thousand other types to numerous to recall at a single sitting, all engaged day or night in endless debates on endless topics, spontaneous eruptions, stupors, jokes, dancing, eating, drinking, smoking, fucking, and talking talking talking. Medical students screening pornographic movies on beatup old projectors, art students drawing and painting on walls and sheets of stolen plywood, lighting fires, screwing on the floor to Ray Charles, and people showing up any time, night or day, three in the morning, dawn, noon, midnight. By the end, the phone was out, the power was out, no heat, no food for days on end and one day I had Serena cut my hair, took a bus to the highway, stuck out my thumb and was gone. This is a more recent shot of the same location pictured above. It was posted today by David Saxe in his photoblog.