if this montreal author's book is a cake, the frosting is park ex
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when montreal writer andreas kessaris was growing up in park ex, it was at least 50 per cent greek; 21 of 25 students in his class at barclay school were greek.
dave sidaway
/
montreal gazette
in the title story of a book of essays and recollections by park ex native son andreas kessaris, he is showing his girlfriend around the neighbourhood. it’s a sunday afternoon in april 2020 and kessaris and montreal poet and writer kelly norah drukker have been seeing each other exclusively since february.
there’s an indian restaurant today at the intersection of wiseman ave. and jarry st., but the space was once a pizzeria called the corner restaurant. the greek drivers for champlain taxi used to hang out there, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and talking as they waited for fares. one of those drivers was his father, and kessaris, the son of greek immigrants, remembers visiting him there after his parents’ “stormy marriage” had ended in divorce. standing at that spot “awakened countless memories,” he writes in the grand tour of park ex & assorted half-told yarns (guernica editions).
he and drukker walk by barclay school, his elementary school, and by a greek restaurant on ball ave. called marven’s. he points in the direction of birnam st., one of several park ex streets on which he lived during his 35 or 40 years in the neighbourhood: querbes, stuart and bloomfield aves. are among the others.
kessaris, a writer and humorist and the longtime events co-ordinator at paragraphe books, is 56; when he was growing up, park ex was at least 50 per cent greek, he said. twenty-one of 25 students in his class at barclay were greek, as was at least half the student body at outremont high school.
today park ex is home to dozens of cultural communities, including significant south asian, african and latin american populations. about 70 per cent of the 34,000 residents of the densely populated 1.6-square-kilometre area are from immigrant backgrounds; nearly 80 per cent are tenants.
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the grand tour of park ex & assorted half-told yarns is, in many ways, a love letter to the community in which kessaris grew up. its 16 tales chronicle the immigrant experience through the eyes of a child of immigrants, with their idiosyncratic accented english. the stories invite us along on a grand tour of his adventures and misadventures as he attends school, navigates the job market and looks for love. abuse of authority, as exercised by some teachers and, later, some bosses and landlords, is the theme of several of the stories.
“i look at the book as a cake,” kessaris said. “the frosting on it is park ex, the story of the neighbourhood,” and inside are several layers. characters with names like the weasel, stretch and johnny a. populate the pages. some are real and others are composites. the stories are drawn from kessaris’s own life, although he does take liberties. “instances depicted are as i remember or perceive them,” he says in his author’s note.
as in his first collection, the butcher of park ex and other semi-truthful tales (guernica editions, 2020), the stories are personal, but decidedly universal. kessaris has fine observational skills and most of the stories are shot through with self-deprecating humour. several highlight lessons he has learned. a self-confessed “lifelong poor athlete,” kessaris describes fudging the results of a fitness test that relied on an honour system to earn an achievement patch he did not deserve. ultimately, he would come to see it as “an ill-gotten gain, a symbol of my failure to make a real, serious effort.” he ends the story with the lesson he learned: “it’s alright to be just a participant, as long as you try.”
characters with names like the weasel, stretch and johnny a. populate the pages of the grand tour of park ex & assorted half-told yarns by andreas kessaris.
dave sidaway
/
montreal gazette
in 1980, after back trouble forced him to rent out his taxi, his father bought a used cadillac, a coupe deville. his mother loved the car and continued to drive it after his father went back to the taxi a few years later. but by 1989, the cadillac had become too expensive to repair and run and she sold it — but kept photos of the beloved vehicle in a kind of makeshift altar. when kessaris asked why, she replied: “it reemind me that nah-ting last forever.”
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kessaris’s father died in 2020 at 88. his mother, at 91, “is still sharp, with a great sense of humour,” he said. she was longtime admirer of former prime minister pierre elliott trudeau and one of the book’s stories features a delightful account of the time in the mid-1990s she rang his doorbell on des pins ave. for a visit.
in one story, he describes encountering donny, who had been a dreadfully abusive boss at a production company kessaris worked at as an unpaid intern years earlier. his clothes looked worn, he didn’t recognize kessaris “and he looked unsure of his time and place.”
“did he have a family? was he loved? did he sacrifice all that for his career — one that is no longer there and forgotten by most?” kessaris writes. “i watched him walk away and an uneasy feeling came over me, that one day i could be him. we all could.”
another reason for writing the book was to depict what it’s like trying to navigate the world as someone with autism, said kessaris, who was 44 when he learned his diagnosis. the diagnosis was liberating for him, helping to explain the trouble he sometimes has understanding people’s intentions, and “it gave me a better understanding of who i am.”
as their tour of park ex continues, he and drukker see a young man on a unicycle. to kessaris, it’s a sign of how the neighbourhood is changing, with younger residents and university students moving in now that the nearby université de montréal mil campus is open. indeed, rising rents and gentrification are among the challenges the neighbourhood is facing.
“when i was a kid,” he writes, “if an unfortunate soul were to try to express any form of individuality by riding around on a unicycle, the local roughs, who would have none of that, would chase them down, beat them up, and break the unicycle to pieces before their eyes.”
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when drukker and kessaris decided to move in together, he was thrilled at the possibility of moving back to park ex after nearly 14 years away, living in town of mount royal. drukker, for her part, wondered how she’d adjust in a neighbourhood she didn’t know. after looking in several neighbourhoods, they found a place in his old neck of the woods and it turns out, kessaris said, that “kelly has totally fallen in love with park ex.”
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