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Not the Jack Layton kind. Or actually, maybe the Jack Layton kind. Who knows? At any rate, they have been on my mind. They have been in my neighbourhood.
It advertises itself with one of those elaborately illustrated signs that strip joints seem to specialize in. You wonder if the illustrator hired to draw the enticing ladies suffered from some kind of Mannerist palsy. Cleopatra also has an upstairs, which focuses in transvestite shows.
The city, its developers, wanted to shut Cleopatra down, pull the whole building. Hardcore gentrification. What I am trying to get at is that if we are getting a flourishing of so-called rub-and-tug establishments in this neighbourhood, then it must be happening in nearly every quarter in Montreal, a complete diffusion, a phenomenon happening mainly underground, with only the odd neon sign popping to surface. I did a tour yesterday. I visited four but only two were open for business, it being noon on a Wednesday.
It was pretty much the same thing at the next one, right down to the smell, something like strawberry incense mixed with male effluvium, except the woman was Filipina. Walking out, I thought of a party I attended, briefly, a few summers ago. My husband and I were invited to the country home of a person in the entertainment industry that we barely knew, only a few kilometres from our own country place.
