It is a particularly bleak April and I am standing on my 7th floor balcony, perched atop an Indian restaurant named The Ganges. My friend Ned thinks this, combined with the fact that I have never lived outside of a four-block radius of Montreal, is hilarious. "Christ Almighty, you’ve seen the world without ever crossing the street," he’ll chuckle. "You were born in Little Italy, went to school on Harvard Avenue and you end each day watching the moon rise over the Ganges." Ned is a prick and an intellectual snob of the worst kind, but it’s too late in the day to go looking for new friends.

Worst of all, the prick is right; I am an inch-thick in neighbourhood dust. Sure, I have things that Ned lacks, like a job and a bus pass and the occasional woman who didn’t look too crestfallen when I drop my chinos. But I’ve never seen the sun set over anything other than the pharmacy on the corner, never felt the ocean bite my skin, never smelled the filth rising of the Ganges. Well, not the real Ganges, anyway.

Standing there, 100 feet from ground zero, I entertain familiar thoughts, namely, what would it take for a person to chuck it all and Geronimo himself into the street below? Is it the ex-tremes of sadness and grief that gives the jumper that needed nudge, like a buccaneer’s sword tip in the small of a gangplanker’s back? Or is it something more damning, more insidious and everyday – the horrible point in which a person stops giving a fuck?

Yes, seven floors is a long way down – that first step is a fucking doozey – but is it long enough? Even from that height, a jumper would have to go headfirst because landing on his arse might do nothing but bust him up real bad. Mash his bones into strands of white toothpaste without killing him outright. Poor bastard, already pushed beyond all hope, screwing it up and eking the rest of his days jellyfishing around in a goddamned wheelchair and painting bad watercolors outta his mouth.

Christ, then I’d really be at ma’s mercy. I picture her pushing me all over town, brow knit and sighing like a martyr every time she had to hump me over a curb or Popsicle stick the squashed dog shit from between my treads or dab my dribbling mouth with those lemon-scented wet wipes that she swipes by the purseful from the Chinese buffet. And, sure as shit, she’d make people squirm by introducing me as "my son, suicide survivor" and gazing heavenward like Mother Teresa in lime green stretch pants. Oh yeah, she’d suck up all the sympathy that was meant for me, like she was the Son of Sons himself bearing a five-speed cross of chrome and wheels and the inert bag of flesh she called her boy. Oh fuck, what a fate. Headfirst it was.

Just by eyeballing the drop I knew a jumper would have to leap out a good five feet in order to clear the awning of the Indian restaurant below. Wouldn’t that be sweet? Sproinging off the taut green canopy like an Albanian gymnast with the Cirque de Soleil and sticking the 10.0-point landing right next to the old dude at the bus stop. Ta-dah. Only I could turn suicide into an outtake from a Jackie fucking Chan movie. No, to do it right, a guy should plunge outward, arms outstretched like one of those nutbar South American cliff divers – strong, majestic, doomed.

I shiver. Sweet shit, it’s a bad day for this kind of rumination. A cold rain hammers little drumbeats and finger snaps on my forehead and face. No rhythm, no back beat – nothing but God’s idle fingers mindlessly tapping away, not even paying attention to my insignificant musings.

I figure He’s just killing time before rolling up His sleeves and unleashing something big like a meteor shower above Moscow or a lethal mudslide in Peru. Either He doesn’t see me or, most damning of all, He doesn’t give a Lord’s fuck. As my old man would grumble to the sky when a string of bad luck was shaking him by the throat or a fuse would blow during the Stanley Cup Finals, "Obviously, Good Sir, I am nothing but a speck on the arse of a flea."

Christ, He couldn’t even inflict us with a proper rain, just a lousy greasy drizzle, a thick ooze squeezed out of some rank and viscous corner of the cosmos. It isn’t strong enough to wash away the filth. Not strong enough to really cleanse us.

In the spring, this neighbourhood is nothing but a dirty armpit; a loaded diaper, with the sidewalks covered in a dead season’s worth of rot. Each inch of melting snow deposits another layer of dog crap and garbage on the pungent stash lurking below. And as the snow thaws, the pile gets darker and more en-crusted with those sharp black pebbles that this cheap-assed city claims gives just as much traction as salt. Bullshit. By January, the emergency wards have been transformed into M*A*S*H* units littered with shattered-hipped old timers moaning while nurses tweezer those damned shrapnel-like pebbles out of their splintered haunches.

Luckily, by late March, the dull sun has completed the job that our city fathers seem so incapable of getting right. When April limps round the bend, there’s no real snow left, nothing white anyway. Just low, stubborn foothills of mud and freeze-dried Shitzu shit glistening in the light of spring’s dull promise.

A guy jumping from my balcony would have to shift all the way to the left-hand corner so as not to land on the large turd mound lurking below. Imagine, my last mortal action culminating in an ignominious face plant in thawing fecal matter. That’s all Ralph, my snotty neighbour from across the hall, needed as ammo. I can see the sneering lard-arse stepping over my corpse on his way home from another day slaughtered at the video lottery terminal and cracking wise about my "shit-eating grin." No compassion left in this cocksucking world, just cold sarcasm and lowbrow sound bites passed off as great wit.

Years ago, when I first began mulling the pros and cons of suicide, I thought that hurling myself in front of a speeding metro would be the best way to check out. Quick, good splatter quotient and something to shake the 9-to-5ers out of their terminal somnolence, however momentarily. Plus, the idea of being squashed on the windshield like a fat June bug and traumatizing one of those overpaid arrogant union jerk-off drivers tickled me greatly.

But the more I mulled, the less sweet I was on that option. For starters, I don’t want to break a five spot for fare. Don’t want to pay the bastards just to snuff me out. Secondly, I hate travelling, hate public transit worst of all. I can’t bear the thought of having to take a 30-minute bus ride just to give the Montreal Urban Transit Committee a little payback.

• • •

My old man taught me all I need to know about dreaming of payback. He did 30 years of hard time on a Molson’s bottling line. Three decades of humping two-fours onto pallets, exactly half his life squinting into bottles looking for stray mouse parts, 30 years of cursing the straw bosses under his breath while getting drunk in the company lounge after every single shift.

For the first few years of his sentence at Molson’s, he dreamed of getting promoted. After that, he obsessed only of getting even with the pricks who leapfrogged ahead of him when the cushy jobs were handed out. Pa may not have been the original conspiracy theorist, but he had the routine down pat. "Guys like me won’t never stand no chance," he’d tell me. "Not as long as Frenchie runs the show." This was the late-1970s and pa was convinced, perhaps rightly, that while Francophones, or pa’s generic Frenchie, moved up the ladder pretty fast, English blue collars, or blokes, languished forever on the lowest rungs. Guys named Smith and Hooper and McDermott would never see the sunlight, not a hint of hope. "Goddamned Swampers only help their own," pa would scowl, pulling on a beer on our back porch while guys named Smith and Hooper and McDermott scowled in agreement.

More than anything, pa wanted to get away from the white noise of the line. "A man can’t think if he’s getting pounded by all that screech," he’d tell me. "And if a man can’t think, alls he is, is a machine." Years later, I’d show up to his boarding house room with a bottle of wine and find him sprawled drunk and naked on the floor. "I could be a sales rep, son. I know it," he’d murmur, barely moving his lips. "Just driving around in the company car, you know? Got your music on, got the window down. Got summer in your face and eyes. I could do that easy."

Finally, he faked a back injury and got a sympathetic doctor to falsify an exam and began collecting workman’s comp. "Kiss my arse, Jean-Guy de Rubberboot," he’d hiss with a smile as he planted a bitter kiss on another cheque. "Free money from the bastard froggers, son," he’d grin, waving the stiff piece of paper under my nose like it was a rose. I’d smile back, but sheepishly. Even back then I could see the price for free money was plenty high.

• • •