The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

Most guests only stayed in the hostel for a few days. A week or two, max. These were the normal guests.

But then there were the long-termers. These were strange people who lived in the hostel for months and months, setting up little dens in their rooms in the hostel and slowly accumulating piles of junk, skulking around in the shadows, as they subsisted on their pitiful savings and were forced to take on humilating jobs in the hostel to make ends meet. What kind of life is that?

I was one of these people. I'd been living at the Alexandrie hostel for months now, ever since I'd arrived in Montreal in spring. Since then, the leaves had turned green and then brown, and I still had no plans on moving out. Simply put, I was staying put.

But unlike the other long-termers, I did no work and paid no rent. I was a deadbeat parasite. The only way I'd leave the hostel is if the owner kicked me out, which would definitely, definitely never happen, because he liked me too much.

There were other long-termers like me. There was Kuan, a Chinese woman who lived in a ground floor room like mine. Surprisingly, everyone liked Kuan, perhaps because she was friendly and spoke to everyone. I didn't like Kuan though. Her friendliness seemed false and I was suspicious of her. Why was she so friendly? Why was she staying in the hostel for so long?

Then there was a young, gay Canadian man called Michael. Michael was from Vancouver and he was also vague about why he was in Montreal — something about wanting to get away for a while? He always wore a blue baseball cap, backwards (and he never took this cap off by the way, not even to shower or sleep). He'd sit at the hostel table, with his baseball cap on (backwards), and bitch about the other hostel guests, pausing every few minutes to apply lip balm.

Montreal was the ideal place for gay men like Michael. It's a gay-friendly city, and we were in a gay-friendly hostel. Many people there were gay. Even the owner, Luc, was gay.

At one point, it seemed like everyone in the hostel was gay. One night, I asked a group of gay people: "Am I gay?"

A gay guy called Inyigo laughed. "You're not gay," he said.

Phew! I was relieved!

I didn't want to be gay. Not because I'm homophobic, you see. No, the reason I didn't want to be gay is because I wasn't attracted to men. I was attracted to women. So I'd prefer if I was straight.

Even so, I thought I should experiment with a man to make sure. So, one night, Michael and I went out to a club together. I had an idea that I could kiss him in the toilets to experiment with my sexuality. But when we got to the toilet cubicle, someone else was in there, so we left. I felt disappointed but relieved.

On the way back to the hostel, it was 2 am and the streets were deserted. The only movement was the flaps of an empty cardboard box fluttering in the breeze. The only sounds were our footsteps on the concrete, the wind, and the distant, faraway wail of a police siren.

The street was lit by the eerie glow of streetlamps. As we crossed the empty street, a thought occurred to me.

"Hey," I said.

"What?" Michael said.

"I know where to buy cocaine," I said.

"What?"

"Cocaine," I said. "I know where to buy some."

"Wait, what? You know where to buy cocaine?!" Michael said. "Dude!! Let's buy cocaaaaaaaaaiiine!"

"Shh, not so loud!" I said. But I needn't have worried. No one was going to hear us. The streets were empty.

I was only trying to impress him. I didn't think he'd actually want cocaine.

But now Michael was whining on and on about cocaine. He had cocaine on the brain. "Can we get cocaine? Let's get cocaine!" He was like a little kid who wants to go to McDonald's on the way home. Except instead of a happy meal, he wanted cocaine.

"Okay fine!" I snapped. "We'll get some cocaine!"/p>

We neared the park. By day, Place Émilie-Gamelin is a small park; a nice place to sit and enjoy the sun. But at night, it becomes a terrifying drug-dealing hotspot.

We looked down at the park. It was a stretch of darkness somehow untouched by the light of the street lamps. The dark trees whispered menacingly, their branches swayed in the breeze. I began to have second thoughts. And third thoughts.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked Michael.

Michael giggled nervously. "Let's do it!" he said.

So we left the safety of the well-lit street and approached the park.

A man stood there. He was a Black man, maybe in his 40s, and wore trainers, sweatpants and a hoody. I knew right away he was a drug dealer. Not because he was Black but because who else would be standing in a park at 2 am? Not Tickle Me Elmo, that's for sure.

I walked toward the man. He looked up.

"We're looking to buy some... cocaine?" I said.

"How much?" he said.

I was right! He was a drug dealer! My confidence soared. I was good at buying drugs!

Or so I thought.

"Um..." I said. "Thirty dollars worth?"

“What, only thirty?” the drug dealer cried with disgust. “Look, I don't even do bags that small. The smallest bag I do is fifty. Buy that."

But I saw through this sleazy attempt to extract more money from me and I stood my ground. "I only want thirty dollars worth," I said firmly.

Michael was watching the scene with interest. He must have thought I was an expert at negotiating with drug dealers. I wasn't. The only time I'd bought drugs was online, while in the safety of my home and dressed in nothing but my underpants. And now Micheal and I was a long way from home.

"The smallest bag I do is fifty," said the drug dealer firmly.

"Thirty," I said.

The drug dealer sighed. "Okay, fine," he said, finally giving in. "But first, give me the money."

I wasn't stupid. So I said, "No, I want to see the drugs first."

"Money first," he said.

I could see we'd be here all night negotiating at this rate, but I wanted to get home at some point, so I pulled thirty dollars from my pocket and handed it to the drug dealer. He carefully counted and recounted the notes (all three of them). Then he nodded, satisfied, stuffed the notes into his pocket and said, "Follow me."

So we followed him deeper into the park. The drug dealer stopped at a low wall and produced a small bag of powder from one of his pockets. "Aw man, why couldn't you just buy the whole bag?" he said. "I’m gonna have to split fifty dollar bag now. You could've just bought the whole bag."

I don't know why splitting the bag was such a big deal. It's not like he had more important things to do. Why, just a couple of minutes before, he was standing alone in a park, doing nothing at all!

“Keep a lookout for cops!” he urged us. Then he tipped the bag of cocaine onto a ledge.

Right at that moment, there was a sudden gust of wind. The wind blew most of the powder away. We all watched helplessly — me, Michael, the drug dealer — as the powder took flight and was gone into the night.

"You see what happens when I have to split the bag!" cried the drug dealer.

Wait — this was my fault? He was blaming me for unpredictable weather conditions?

After a lot of swearing and grumbling, the dealer finally finished dividing out the cocaine — or at least, what was left of it now the wind had taken its share.

You would think that would be it: deal done. But no. Because the dealer had another dilemma: he didn't have a bag to put the cocaine in.

"You SEE what happens when I have to split the bag?" he spluttered in anger as he rummaged around his pockets for something to put my cocaine in. Now he was blaming me again — this time for a lack of prepackaged thirty-dollar cocaine bags.

Finally, he pulled out a little white envelope from one of his pockets. He put the powder in the envelope and handed it to me.

Michael and I walked quickly home, like two excited schoolboys with a stolen packet of sweets. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was following us. But we were alone. My Nokia was safe.

Finally, we reached the hostel and hurried to my room. I tipped the cocaine out onto a shelf. Michael watched over my shoulder. He was practically dancing in anticipation.

We both looked down at the powder.

It wasn't white.

"What is it?" said Michael.

My heart sank. Whatever the drug dealer had given us, it wasn't cocaine. No, it seemed to be metallic shavings; like what you'd get from drilling into a chunk of metal. The pieces were tiny and grey. They reflected the light of my bedroom lamp.

There was no way I was snorting that. You'd have to be the Tin Man to get high off it.

"Wait," I said. "There's something else here."

Michael's eyes suddenly got their gleam back.

Inside the envelope was a passport photo of the drug dealer. There he was, in the photo, glaring at us. A photo of the guy who had just ripped me off.

So, to recap: instead of receiving cocaine, we had received

• some shit metal shavings
• a photo of a drug dealer

Whoever the man had been, he was probably laughing to himself now and fanning himself with my thirty dollars' worth of banknotes. Maybe he hadn't even been a drug dealer. Maybe his name was Clive and he worked in software development, and he did fake drug dealing as a side hustle. And he wasn't even a competent fake drug dealer because he'd given us his passport photo by mistake.

Michael went to bed soon after, unconcerned about the money I'd wasted and oblivious to the danger he'd put us through just to get some shit metal shavings. He probably fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth and a smile on his face, dreaming of cocaine and drug dealers.

I stayed up for another couple of hours, in the cold glow of a computer screen, before going to bed at the break of dawn.

Things weren't all bad, however. Because a few weeks later, I noticed that an annoyingly quiet French guy called Remy seemed spaced out.

"Je suis super high," he said.

I badgered him non-stop until he agreed to sell me drugs. He sold me an LSD tab for ten dollars. It was a small blue square, about the size of a pinky fingernail. It had an ominous yellow smiley face on it.

YES! I had a DRUG! I tucked the LSD tab safely into my wallet for another day.

I should have used that LSD tab or stored it somewhere else because a month later, a policeman searched my wallet and found it. But we'll get to that.