Three years later The Underground Notebookswhere his alter ego was a club kid Eager for sex, drugs and techno music, Gabriel Cholette is back in the Queer collection of Triptyque editions with The straight parka book in which his double, now in his late twenties, fights pandemic anxiety by frequenting Montreal skateboard parks, heteronormative playgrounds that push him to write. “I type my moods to discover a certain dust, the shattering that formed the memory, nerves, a consciousness that crosses me by prescience, the idea that deep in my thoughts, the darkness brings out forgotten words, rarely meditated on. I gather what is imprinted by the five senses to remake myself without injury.”
On Thursday night, when “queers and trans people invade the Mile End skatepark,” the tone changes completely. Alcohol, drugs, music, sex: the party takes over. But all this takes place in relative harmony. Until the police arrive to violently interrupt these gatherings prohibited because of the health crisis. In a unique style, at first descriptive, then introspective, Gabriel gives an account of his frequentation of the “roulirouleux·ses.” But don’t think that this is a book about skateThis book is a quest for meaning, a journey towards happiness, the story of a taming, the story of a metamorphosis.
In about thirty fragments, interspersed with about ten color photographs, portraits that he himself made and to which he refers in his story, which does not fail to reinforce the effect of reality, the narrator deploys a careful and rhythmic language, undeniably rich while being studded with recourse to English, an inclusive and imaginative writing, an exuberant syntax and sometimes even intoxicated by alcohol and ketamine. “Tons of selfies later i ask What’s up to friends and cruise those who cruise me, meeting new people by feeling close to them, connected by a moment, a context, our bravery. The photos are beautiful of wigs, caps and carefully bleached haircuts.
When Gabriel meets Vivien, a skater who has the same first name as one of his former lovers, a violent man he hasn’t seen for 10 years, but whom he certainly hasn’t forgotten, the story takes a wild turn, even apocalyptic, but also frankly psychoanalytical. The relationship with his father, his mother, their divorce… everything is there. “I have a series of toxic relationships, I only think about meeting the expectations of others, and if I have suppressed the rage left by my father, I now reproduce it.”
Filled with legends and symbols, complexes and paradoxes, remorse and regrets, the conclusion is disconcerting, but cathartic, courageous, and then devilishly inspiring. “The memories that assail and torture me, I will transform them according to the rhythms of creation; this boat in the form of a story that threatens to capsize in the fog, I will pilot it towards the horizon of my hopes. Abandoning under the rubble the boy that I was, I enter my body and consider my fight with new eyes: anger is not violence.”