leaving NYC at sunrise

entering Toronto at dusk

I’ve been asleep for ninety minutes when the door buzzer goes off. I roll over in denial. The clock unapologetically reads 5:30am.

It’s Lam, followed shortly by Tony. Tony observes that I have packed “like a kamikaze pilot”--everything I’m going to need for the trip has been laid neatly on a bench by the front door. (I like to view everything at once before putting it into a bag.) We grab all of our shit and head to the diner for coffee.

At 6:14 we hit the open road. Or the closed tunnel, to be more accurate. The Holland is our gateway to freedom.

All of us are sleepy but I’m the only driver so I have to stay awake. Traffic is light but my foot is heavy. The car is a rocket spewing exhaust fumes and Steppenwolf across the New Jersey Turnpike.

Four hundred miles, three states, a McDonald’s and a Wendy’s later we’re at the border, being questioned by a cute Canadian border guard. She’s all-natural, brunette and freckled. Got sort of a winsome-but-tough thing going on. The “winsome” part is her face, the “tough” part is strapped to her hip and presumably loaded with live ammunition.

She asks us typical border questions like “What is the purpose of your visit?”

“To propagate an American cultural hegemony, take advantage of the weaker Canadian dollar and buy maple syrup” flashes through my head but instead I say “Vacation.”

“Where are you staying?” “What’s the address?” “Where are you from?” et cetera, et cetera. I answer all questions politely.

The last question she asks us is “Do you have any firearms in the car?” and for some reason Lam laughs out loud. For a moment I’m worried we’re about to have a Jackass moment but the guard lets us through. We drive on in silence, all of us obviously wondering what it would feel like to ride around on horseback with the cute border guard.

The ATM at the gas station spits out Canadian money, the first I’ve ever seen. It’s blue and has a picture of some guy, maybe Bryan Adams. The gas is sold in liters so I have no idea how many Bryan Adamses it will take to fill the car.

On the highway the speed limit is posted in k.p.h., meaning I have no real idea what the speed limit is, though I’m fairly sure we’re exceeding it. Everyone on the northbound QEW (Queen Elizabeth Way) drives like America’s about to be nuked. The pack of cars I’m folded into is doing 90, 95 m.p.h. easy.

I look around for Canadian cops but don’t see any. They call them Mounties, right? Do you address them as “Mounties?” All this confusion with terminology and metric units could get us in trouble. I can just picture us getting pulled over:


ME: Good evening, Mountie.

MOUNTIE: Good evening, gentlemen. You have any idea how fast you were going?

ME: No, I don’t! In fact I have no idea how tall I am or how much I weigh.

MOUNTIE: I beg your pardon?

ME: I mean I know I’m more than a meter but less than two meters. And I probably weigh, I dunno...fifty liters.

LAM: I bet I weigh sixty.

TONY: Oh please. You so do not weigh sixty liters.

LAM: I’ve been working out, so why don’t you shut up.

MOUNTIE: Er...“Liters” is a weight measurement for liquids, gentlemen. Solids are measured in Kilograms.

ME: Oh, so you have to type the word “STOP” instead of using a period, right? ...Oh wait a sec, that’s Telegrams.

TONY: I bet I’m two meters tall.

LAM: If you’re two meters tall then I weigh at least sixty liters.

ME: Alexander Bell invented the Telegram. Who invented the kilogram?

LAM: No one invented the kilogram you fucking idiot. They discovered it.

ME: Oh okay, well I guess you know everything. Douchebag.

MOUNTIE: I’m going to let you fellows off with a warning, for no reason other than that I feel sorry for you.

ME: The human body is 90% liquids, so I must weigh at least fifty liters.

Couple hours later we blow into Toronto. You know you’ve reached the city because you can see the skyline coming up in the windshield. They’ve got a space-needle-type building that’s pretty distinctive.

Lots of people say God is their co-pilot but I prefer Tony. He breaks out the map and begins navigating us through the unfamiliar city streets: “Bloor,” “Spadina,” “Glebe”...seems like the streets here were named by someone who just finished reading “The Jabberwocky.” We find a parking space in Chinatown and pull over to stretch our legs/cultural dominance.

Okay, Chinatown was fucking depressing. Back in the car, we head over to Alex’s early, even though it’s only 5pm and he doesn’t get home until six.

I park on Alex’s street, recline my seat and go to sleep. Lam and Tony get out to stretch their legs/heavy-handed foreign policy objectives.

By 6:15pm the three of us are sitting in Alex’s living room with his two roommates, Ed and Howard. Their apartment is spacious, white-walled, high-ceilinged and clean, which surprises me; I totally thought it would be a pig-sty.

Alex’s bedroom, on the other hand, is much what you’d expect: A storage facility for porn, with cumshots all over the ceiling. The bed had been humped into a hideous wreck and the headboard was smashed. In the corner was a locked wooden box (about the size of a midget) that shuddered and thumped violently until Alex kicked it and whispered something through a blowhole in the top.

“Have a seat,” said Alex, dropping some cookies into the top of the box and kicking some blow-up dolls aside. Okay I’m just fucking around.