Club Super Sexe is located at 696 St. Catherine, just down the street
from the place where Conrad had spun into his dance frenzy on my last
trip. According to my colleagues who run the Super Sexe, there are 80
dancers on the roster, but there were only about 20 still working this
late on Thursday night.
There was something unsettling about the crowd, which consisted of
major pimps and boyfriendsโwild-looking Canucks with 14-karat gold
chains and black biker sweat shirts with chopped-off sleeves and the
dumb, nervous eyes of animals who sense they're in trouble but don't
quite know where it's coming from.
There was also something unsettling about the dancers, which was so
foreign I felt I should bring it up with the natives, just to be sure I wasn't
ignorant about some bizarre Canadian tradition.
"Is it fatigue hysteria," I asked, "or does that woman have hairy
legs?"
"Well . . . ah . . . yeah," Terrence said without much of his usual
conviction.
Just about that time, a woman came to our table and offered to
danceโMontreal's watered-down version of lap dancing. Terrence qui-
etly decHned, and when the woman was a safe distance from the table,
I leaned over and in a desperate whisper said to him, "Ye gods! Another
woman with hairy legs. โฆ"
"No, you're mistaken . . . take off your dark glasses," he said.
"Don't lie to me, Terrence," I said. "The woman has hairy legs. I
have not been in the business this long for nothing, and my eyes at this
range are like those of a snow falcon. Do all Quebec women have hairy
legs?"
He pretended not to hear, and it was just as well. It was 2:55 a.m. โ
the last danceโand I knew from my professional experience the girls
were in the dressing rooms packing their things, eager to get home, and
nobody was in the mood to discuss issues of hygiene.
~j
Montreal is a strange city. It was built about 400 years ago on an ice-
bound island in the St. Lawrence River by renegade Frenchmen who
thought they had found the New World and would soon own it.
This has not come to passโor at least not yet, according to the hard
rockers who speak for the Free Speech Quebec Separatist Party who
identify mainly with the I.R.A., Puerto Rican nationalists and the ghost
of Chiang Kai-shek. But they say it will happen soonโthat the long
screw of history is still turning and the war is not over yet.