My Favourite Crime: Essays and Journalism from Around the World

By Deni Ellis Béchard

My Favourite Crime ranges across the world and over a wide array of contemporary issues. Divided into five sections, all united by a recurring consideration of how writing helps transform our understanding of our family, of ourselves, and of the world, the book addresses such disparate topics as: the author’s tumultuous relationship with his father, exploring his struggle to make sense of his father’s criminality as well as his own, and the temptation to lapse back into crime when one has been raised with it; the illuminated gospels on Patmos, the Greek island where Saint John composed the Book of Revelation and where refugees are locked up without food or water; an American soldier transitioning between genders while serving in Afghanistan; children accused of sorcery and exorcised in Kinshasa’s revival churches; and Indian women’s responses to their country’s rampant rape culture. Including articles about Cuba, Colombia, Iraq, Rwanda, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Québec, and the United States, My Favourite Crime is current, engaged, compelling writing not to be missed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Apr 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781772013054

Deni Ellis Béchard

Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of Vandal Love (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book); Of Bonobos and Men (Grand Prize winner of the Nautilus Book Award for investigative journalism); Cures for Hunger, a memoir about his bank robber father (selected as one of the best memoirs of 2012 by Amazon.ca); and Into the Sun (Midwest Book Award for literary fiction, selected by CBC Radio Canada as one of 2017’s Incontournables and one of the most important books of the year to be read by Canada’s political leaders). He has reported from India, Cuba, Rwanda, Colombia, Iraq, the Congo, and Afghanistan. He has been a finalist for a Canadian National Magazine Award and has been featured in Best Canadian Essays 2017, and his photojournalism has been exhibited in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. His articles, fiction, and photos have been published in newspapers and magazines around the world, including the LA Times, Salon, Reuters, The Walrus, Le Devoir, Vanity Fair Italia, The Herald Scotland, the Huffington Post, The Harvard Review, the National Post, and Foreign Policy Magazine. His most recent titles include Kuei, My Friend, an engaging book of letters that discuss racism and reconcilliation, My Favourite Crime, a book of journalistic essays that explore our sense of family, of the world, and of ourselves, and White, a riveting novel that explores whiteness, modern humanitarianism, and the lies of American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

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Author’s Preface

This book brings together many parts of a journey that began when I was growing up poor in rural British Columbia and Virginia, struggling to make sense of my ex-con father and his past as an impoverished, largely uneducated Québécois. As I began writing about him, I became increasingly aware of both his and my place within the larger history of our rapidly changing society. But to document change, one must look at the tools of change, and as I did so, I understood the ways that the act of writing could transform cultures and that education and political knowledge could shape my life. What I couldn’t have imagined was how much my study of the historic forces that had influenced my father would help me engage with social and political change elsewhere on earth. The journey often felt faster than I could keep track of – from my earliest memories of living in a run-down trailer without running water or electricity, to earning several university degrees, to doing journalism in dozens of countries on five continents, writing about women’s rights, the environment, and the impact of war on people’s lives.

The essays and journalism in this collection offer many glimpses of that journey. They show my growing engagement with writing, my struggle to understand the impulse toward adventure and rule breaking, and how I learned to channel that desire to transgress into creativity. In these pages, art is often the instrument of inquiry and its subject. Just as I used art to extricate myself from the painful circumstances of my youth, I increasingly tried to align its emancipatory powers with the creative efforts and achievements of others, expanding the scope of my work while attempting to shed fresh light on theirs. Compiling this book, I was reminded of the circular nature of growth and the ways that learning, sharing, building solidarity, and creating art are inextricable. Similarly, just as studying my family history made me aware of larger, global histories – whether canonical or obscured by oppression – doing journalism overseas taught me how to understand the impact of North American culture elsewhere, which led me to turn a far more critical eye on the countries where I grew up: Canada and the United States.

Despite these central concerns, the writings here cover a wide range of subjects in a variety of ways. The collection begins with essays about my father and criminality before shifting to long-form journalism and then shorter dispatches from Afghanistan and other countries, among them Cuba, Iraq, and the Congo. It concludes with a series of essays that reflect on the role of writing in my life and the importance of political engagement, social accountability, and a sense of outrage at the abuses of the governments that preside over the places I have called home.

PART I

Essays on Crime and Family

Mon Ami, Vice

(2015)

One summer, after a few years of travelling, I decided to return to Montréal, where the living was cheap. While waiting for my flight in Charles de Gaulle Airport, I arranged an apartment rental through Craigslist and arrived that evening to find it located in the Gay Village. I was thirty and broke, trying to finish a novel slated to be published in a year. Every day, I wrote until the late afternoon and then went out looking for lower rent, hearing the occasional wolf whistle from a balcony. In the supermarket, a burly, shirtless man on rollerblades followed me from the apples to the crackers. At the soymilk, I called my mother. Is this what it’s like to be a woman? I asked.

Until a few years ago, she said. Oh, how I miss it.

For research purposes, I got a card at the McGill University library. Walking home one evening, I passed a drab, century-old row house on Rue Prince-Arthur, in what’s called the McGill Ghetto. A red For Rent sign hung in the window. I rang the doorbell, and Henry, a tall, balding man, let me in. The house was divided into cramped student apartments. He showed me his: eight square metres that smelled of bread and cheese, a chandelier occupying the ceiling like a dusty spider. He needed someone to take over the lease. He’d been selling gourmet pizzas to a caterer, using the tiny gas stove in the corner, but gambling had gotten the better of him. He was moving back in with his parents so he could regroup. I said I’d been through times like that, omitting that I was going through one right then. I agreed to take over his apartment. With the rent only $400 a month, I could afford to focus on the novel.

For the next few months, I rarely went out. As I struggled to write, a construction company began gutting the row house next door to create luxury apartments. I sat at the desk I’d bought in a church basement sale, my apartment shaking, dust and stale pizza flour drifting down from the ceiling. The workers stripped all the floors, cut the joists out, and knocked down the back wall with sledgehammers. The long summer had ended in brutal cold, and, with the house next door open to the weather, the shared wall frosted over. I cut the fingers off a pair of gloves to type, my breath turning to mist. A few times, I ventured into the alley to watch the demolition. The foreman told me they’d bring in a backhoe to dig out the basement. Without its rear wall, the empty building looked like a dollhouse. I could stare right through it.

I didn’t go outside often. Instead, I wrote, trying to contain the hunger for living, for real life, that literature stoked in me. I prowled the stairs to the top floor and back, hoping to ease this craving, to find inspiration without straying too far from my computer. During one such prowl, I stopped on a landing. There were three apartments on each floor and one in the basement, but the only people I ever saw were two neighbours, whom I’d passed in the street and taken to be homeless before learning they lived in the building. The woman kept a shopping cart locked to the porch; the old man, who shared a wall with me, howled at night. We’d crossed paths in the hallway, his face the colour of ash, his eyes sunken.

Fred, the building’s owner, was a short, stout man with dark hair and eyes. He’d grown up in an anglophone village in Gaspésie – the descendant, he proudly told me, of United Empire Loyalists who’d left America after the Revolutionary War. I met him when he dropped by to pick up the rent, and I asked who else lived there.

Only those other two, he said. They were here when I bought the place. The rest have moved out. He’d been buying up property across the city and was now too busy to rent out the other apartments, he told me. I proposed finding tenants in exchange for free rent, and he gave me a ring of keys. He also agreed to let me move into the apartment of my choice, which was on the top floor, a larger space with canted ceilings and dormers that looked down into the street.

The next day, I put out a sign. Snooping around the building, I found a blue baseball cap and a red flannel shirt. I used them to create a concierge persona, both for my own entertainment and to keep needy future tenants at arm’s length. When someone rang – often a young woman studying at McGill – out came the flannel. With the cap pulled low over my eyes, I slouched and spoke gruffly. Fortunately, there was a long lull in construction next door, and I soon rented out all the apartments.

The backhoe arrived with the spring weather. The building shook and heaved, and the tenants knocked at my door. I reassured them the noise would soon be over. We watched from the alley as the backhoe clambered out from the basement like an insect, crawled over the blocky hill of ancient compressed clay it had gouged up, and drove onto a trailer. All done, I told my tenants. We went back inside. That night, the building settled, ticking and creaking, producing an occasional hiccup in the floor or a loud crack in the frame, like the popping of an immense knuckle.

In the morning, sunlight flashed against my eyelids. I looked up at a six-foot-long rift in the wall. With my eye to it, I could see through two rows of bricks and out the window of the gutted house next door. I dressed and took stock of the apartment: cracks in the walls and ceilings, window frames askew. My door was stuck, and I used a hammer to knock the pins out of the hinges. When I pried it from the frame, the surrounding wall emitted a groan. I helped release the tenants, who had not yet realized they were prisoners.

Fred arrived just after the fire department, who determined that the backhoe had cut nearly a metre beneath the level of our foundation, leaving little support for four storeys of brick. The exposed clay had begun to dry and shrink. With the joists removed, the shared walls sagged. Fred threatened the owner of the future luxury apartments with a lawsuit. A construction worker said the wall was fine, but when he put his hands against it, the bricks seemed to ripple like a tapestry. The firefighters let us get a few possessions before they chained up the house and closed the sidewalk with metal barriers. It took them a while to convince my neighbour, the one who howled, to leave. Social services arrived to relocate the tenants into government housing.

Why don’t you stay at my place? Fred asked me. You’ve been such a help. My wife and I would be happy to put you up for a while. Fred’s two blond boys, maybe four and six years old, were waiting in his car. He drove us to his suburb on the south shore of the St. Lawrence River. His wife, in her twenties and also blonde, touched my chest as she asked me what I wanted for dinner.

Fred offered to get a film at Blockbuster and suggested I come along for the ride. On the way there, he complained about the owner of the luxury apartments. I’ll show him in court, he said. I’ll sue his ass. And if that doesn’t work, maybe I’ll just burn my place to the ground. See how his fucking luxury apartments like that. He laughed and pulled onto the highway.

How far away is Blockbuster? I asked.

Fuck Blockbuster, he said. I want you to meet some guys.

• • •

Crime has never been far from my mind. My father, a French Canadian from a village in Gaspésie, gave up logging for safe-cracking in Montréal, then holdups in the Canadian West, and, finally, the armed robbery of banks and jewellery stores in California. He spent seven years in prison and was deported to British Columbia, where he met my mother, who’d dropped out of art school in Virginia to run off with a draft dodger. My father was still manufacturing and dealing drugs and involved in petty crime when my mother got pregnant. Then he went straight – which, for him, simply meant committing pettier crimes. When I was ten, my mother ran away with me to Virginia, where we lived for the next five years.

I was almost fourteen when I learned about my father’s crimes, and the man I imagined stepped straight from the novels I’d read. I became a thief myself. I shoplifted chocolate bars to sell to classmates. I broke into cars, storage sheds, and a house. I made off with a moped and a motorcycle. All the while, I dreamed of being Steinbeck, whom I’d discovered in English class and now read instead of doing my homework.

When I was fifteen, I decided to move back in with my father, telling my mother I would run away if she didn’t let me. But she did, agreeing that I needed to decide for myself. Over the next two months, I discovered not the outlaw hero I’d dreamed of but a bitter fifty-year-old man who lived from debt to debt and illegally bought salmon from the guy at the fish farms responsible for disposing of batches that went bad – meaning they’d gotten cancer from the foods that were supposed to make them grow quickly. My father and I would cut the tumours out of the meat, and he’d sell the fillets to restaurants.

He told me I had to drop out of high school and work for him, or move out and pay my own way. I moved out, too proud to tell my mother. I was still obsessed with Steinbeck. I finished high school and went to college as far away as I could, in the mountains of Vermont, and though my father often asked me to return, I refused. The Christmas of my sophomore year, he took his own life, shooting himself up with heroin and washing down a handful of pills with antifreeze.

After his death, there was nothing for me to push against, and I began to admit that I saw the world as he did: every law and convention – anything short of complete freedom – looked like an impediment. Some nights, after weeks of studying, I couldn’t tame my desire for chaos. I ran blindly through the forest or took my uninsured truck as fast as I could over back roads, crashing into snow banks, pirouetting through parking lots until I’d released whatever was in my brain – and then I just sat there, the engine idling, steam rising from the hood. I determined that the first novel I published would not be about my father. I would not echo another man’s failures.

But like my father, I was restless. I could fit what I owned in a backpack, and after college, whenever I exhausted myself writing, I set off. I rarely lived anywhere for more than a few months. During those years, I moved to Montréal several times. Garishly lit strip clubs paint Rue Sainte-Catherine, the city’s main commercial thoroughfare. American businessmen and college students stumble drunkenly on the sidewalk and befriend you in bars, rambling about how cheap the escorts are, how easy it is to get drugs. Montréal doesn’t have the same puritanical varnish as the United States – its police state, its harsh sentencing. Most people I knew had few degrees of separation from the underworld. One friend sold cocaine for the Hells Angels; another sold hash for the Italian Mafia and was beaten after he dealt on a rival gang’s turf.

Every time trouble reared up, or whenever I felt stagnant, I left. Changing cities, even neighbourhoods, I breathed easier. I crisscrossed America as if on a quest for this air alone. I worked construction, took on manual labour jobs like building flea market booths or pulling nails out of old two-by-fours. As soon as I earned enough for a month or two of writing and reading books, I quit. Throughout my twenties, I lived on $10,000 a year. Some friends – those who’d found stable careers and gotten married – drew on pop psychology to diagnose me. They referred glibly to familial dysfunction and used words like trauma, though I didn’t feel traumatized. I was a pretty happy person. Still, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I was drawn to the pleasures of deviance. I saw this pull in those I knew from the Montréal underworld – an unquenchable desire for a freedom they couldn’t name. For many of them, the only outlet was crime.

• • •

The people Fred wanted me to meet were sitting in the basement of a triplex, watching Predator and passing around a rank, blackened bong. Fred and I joined them on the couch. Growing up, I’d had a hard time resisting bad decisions, and remaining sober when things got dicey had been my basic strategy for staying alive. The habit stuck. I sat and watched Schwarzenegger and the Predator stalk each other through the jungles of Central America as Fred drank beer after beer, his nostrils flaring.

One of the guys said, Man, call next time or BYOB, motherfucker. On each of the bong’s circuits, Fred took a long, hard hit. His cell rang and he flipped it open. A distant voice shouted. Aw, fuck you, he said, and hung up. The film ended. We switched to Terminator, but there was nothing left to drink. Fred was nominated for a beer run.

I wanted you to meet those guys, he told me in the car. They can hook you up. You don’t need to be living the way you do. But tonight, you know, right now, fuck ’em. He raced the car onto the highway and kept accelerating.

Hey, I said, why don’t you let me drive?

Good one. He laughed. Like you’re my fucking mother. His profile, with its angular nose and lantern jaw gone to pudge, flickered against passing streetlights. It was after midnight, and we were soaring for the American border, toward where Autoroute 15 turned into Interstate 87 and made a straight shot south to New York City. We passed exit after exit. The highway was empty but for the occasional eighteen-wheeler. Green roadside signs gave a kilometric countdown to the border. The crossing blazed in the distance, like a ship at sea.

Fred slowed, braking hard, and turned down a narrow road between cornfields. I want to show you something good, he said. A low-slung, unpainted cinderblock building came into sight. Dozens of vehicles were parked in its gravel lot, many of them pickups, one a yellow school bus with the name of an American university on the side.

Welcome to Porkies, Fred said. He stumbled out and crossed the parking lot, and by the time I got through the front door behind him, he’d disappeared into the crowd.

The woman on stage wasn’t a stripper – she was a naked acrobat. She spun her body around the pole, flipping over repeatedly. She suspended herself upside down and spread her legs, clenching her muscled ass for the audience’s admiration. Then she lowered herself like a drawbridge until she floated, tits to the stage lights, legs wide for the gawping crowd. The audience was composed mostly of rednecks, with a scattering of young jocks I suspected must have come in on the school bus. Women in lingerie walked by, the men turning, tracking them as they passed. There were a few different doorways through which the women entered and exited. One would speak to a man and leave through one door, and he would follow her through another.

I leaned on the bar, and the bartender, a brunette – the only fully dressed woman in the room – came over and said, I’ve heard a lot about you.

Pardon me?

Fred’s told me all about you. You’re that writer who runs his building.

How do you know Fred?

He’s my brother.

Fred joined us. Had to hit the can, he said.

The woman left to serve a beer, and I asked, Your sister works here?

Oh yeah, she does. And that’s my cousin up there. He motioned to the diva onstage.

Does your wife know about this place? I asked.

Fred cackled. I met her here, he said, punching my arm. "And if she hadn’t given me my two boys, I’d bring her straight back.