May 30, 2005

I awoke Friday morning with a sore throat and an ache to leave the city. By the time I finished breakfast Laura was on my doorsteps dressed in stripes and smiling. “Let’s go to Toronto,” she said. I told her stripes are awful.

She laughed and we drove around Kitchener for a while to pick up sleeping bags, batteries, coffee, underwear, and bras. Bra stores are an unexpected rainbow of vibrant colours — everything looked so pretty I wanted to buy something. “One day we’ll come and buy you a bra,” she said. “Sears sold me underwear for $1.47 — I don’t think you can beat that,” I said.

After we dropped off her car at the other end of the city, we met up with Dave (who offered us a bed for the weekend) and Amy (who offered us a ride to Mississauga). We told them about my new underwear, and rode towards Toronto happy about our clean underclothes.

We reached downtown Toronto in the middle of the rush hour and nearly got trampled to death by angry pedestrians on Bay street. We changed into clothes that didn’t smell of sweat, lust, and car rides, and went to see DigiFest, an annual showcase of “cutting-edge digital products and innovations.”

Trevor’s display on Painting the Myth was captivating, as was the Reading Toronto exhibit that made us feel as though we were on the set of Blade Runner.

Unfortunately, most of the “innovative new technologies” on display were neither particularly new nor particularly innovative. A few designs stood out while the rest used ambiguous phrases to describe mediocre ideas. The adjustable lamp, for instance, was supposed to provide “individualized lighting scenarios,” even though we had a hard time adjusting it.

The bathrooms at DigiFest were painted blue and offered blowjobs. Laura and I drank wine, contemplated art, and met new people to chat with in the dark corners of the exhibition. We also swore at each other during interactive games and took a break to stroll through the city to search for cough drops.

When we came back, Martha was there dressed in green and her hair was as fantastic as a lion’s mane. For a moment I didn’t recognize her. We talked for the first time in five months and I didn’t have a single intelligent thing to say. “I’m hungry,” I said. She told me about a place in Toronto’s Entertainment district whose name she could not remember. “That helps,” I said.

Somehow, I expected our first meeting to be traumatic, violent, different. In the back of my mind, behind the numbing pain in my throat, a series of what-ifs began to unfold. What if they served free cocktails and I got drunk and naked and smashed laps that wouldn’t worked and urinated on paintings and nursing instruments, just to collapse later on the red sofa and be sodomized into unconsciousness by vengeful art patrons?

We said goodbye with a handshake, and I walked out into the night with Laura to wander through the city and find food and entertainment. We watched Star Wars, drank expensive coffee, and at two in the morning met Dave, Greg Smith, and Sean who just returned ecstatic from a Kid Koala concert.

“Our baggage is locked inside the bus terminal and we can’t get it out,” Dave said. He was carrying a robot mask with him and the robot looked sad. Dumping the baggage in one of the lockers seemed like a good idea at the time, but at two in the morning, as we were prowling around the building trying to bribe janitors, we realized we should have checked the terminal’s hours of operation beforehand.

Dejected, we took a street car towards Dave’s place in The Beaches, and when the street car refused to take us further we walked in the cold night for what seemed like hours. My throat was killing me. At four in the morning I finally collapsed in a warm bed in Dave’s basement, and Laura was near me, naked and wonderful.

And that was the first day, and we could hardly even move.