While I was working at Van Houtte from August to October 2006 at Palais des Congrès, I started becoming friends with a frequent customer. His name was Pierre-Antoine Tremblay and he used to come get his coffee and food quite often, and more often as we started talking. On a very boring Saturday afternoon when it was seriously pointless for me to be open, he came and started talking to me to keep me company. It was then that I learned that he was the owner of one of the neighboring stores, Galerie 2000, an art gallery inside the building. We were mostly talking about the Elton John concert that was happening in November, and he said he was going. After I closed shop, I dropped by his art gallery to chat some more.

From that point on, he knew I would come to see him often, and he was willing to introduce me to all the artists and material he had in his gallery. I really knew nothing about paintings and I thought that was really my weakest point in art (I did music, I wrote poetry, I was a film buff, but I knew nothing about paintings). He was a very snob fellow, as you would imagine are the rich elitists of the artistic world, a very stereotypical Mr. Knowitall. But I wanted to learn about art, and he was willing to teach me. During this time, one of my managers from Van Houtte left, to run an art gallery, but wouldn’t tell anyone about it.

I started showing some of my poetry to P-A, and he said he liked it, but kept telling me to change all the “you”s to “I”s, because apparently “you never talk to anyone else but yourself when you recite poetry”. I thought that was too pretentious for my writing, and almost all my poems were written about heartbreaks and dedicated to those girls. One of these afternoons at his gallery, my old Van Houtte manager walked in and started talking to him. I could tell he was uncomfortable to see me there, and he said to me “Don’t tell anyone about this, I don’t want them to know which gallery I’m working at”. At first I thought it was because he felt bad about leaving one commerce for another in the same building. But I found out later that day that he was the new manager of the Gallery 2000 boutique on St. Paul. That same week, P-A gave me a CD of some reggae music and a book by Armand Tatossian called “Poèmes en fleurs”, which he said was his latest collection of poetry, which he had written and given to Tatossian for him to paint flowers next to and publish a book together. I thought it was really horrible, and did not read more than a single poem. When I showed it to my cousin Francois, he said a gay guy must have written this, and that I should use it as a shoe carpet.

One afternoon when I showed P-A one of my new poems, he said he wanted to publish a book of my poetry. I was interested and we started talking about the possibilities. He said that he wanted to sleep with me. I can’t imagine what my face must have been like, but I recall my response being “My idea of fun is not to have a cock in my ass”, to which he responded something along the lines of “Well there’s many other things we could do”. From that point on, the conversation was mostly him trying to explain to me why men prefer men to begin with and why I should sleep with him. But he kept assuring me that he wanted to release that book.

After that happened, I told my coworkers about him being gay, and they all said that it was obvious and they had all known since day one after seeing him and made fun of him all the time. It then occurred to me that my old manager had most likely gone through something similar and that was why he didn’t want me to tell anyone at work where and who he was working for. I later found out that P-A was actually being persecuted for fraud with multiple law suits by a great deal of artists he worked with over the years. I was glad that I never worked with him.