We wake up in Alex’s living room and the first thing I see is, it’s snowing outside. Hard. The flakes are coming down so thick and dense that the window looks like a TV getting no reception.

For my sleeping surface I scored the couch, because I drove. Tony had the floor, Lam slept on a horizontal surface abutting the windows.

After performing quick self-checks to confirm none of us was anally raped last night, we get up and start getting dressed.


LAM: Did you rape me?

ME: No. Did you rape me?

LAM: No. Tony, did you rape either of us?

TONY: When?

LAM: Last night.

TONY: Last night in Canada, or last night in New York?

LAM: In Canada.

TONY: I can’t remember...probably not.

ME: Let’s get some breakfast then.


Me, Lam and Tony are the only ones here; everyone else is at work.

Last night Alex, Howard, Ed and Suzanna took us to a local pub, which was pretty chill. It was Halloween. I met some people and every once in a while a zombie or an angel would walk past in the background. Our waiter had a crudely-rendered maple leaf painted on his face but no supporting elements to suggest it was a costume. You could tell the boss made him do it, I wish I could have seen that conversation.

Hapachan was there too, visiting Mahalia in town. The last time I saw Hapachan the Twin Towers were standing and Scrubs was just a concept. Time flies if you don’t watch it.

Lam, Tony and I retired from the bar early, because a) we were tired, b) we’re getting old and c) we heard rumors that when Alex gets drunk he likes to put people in figure-four leglocks. Him and Howard are both the size of small studio apartments. You get the sense that when these guys drop a tool under their car, they lift the entire car to retrieve it.


ALEX: Dude, where did you put the Volvo?

HOWARD: I left it on top of the house.

ALEX: I looked, it’s not up there.

HOWARD: I mean I left it on top of Suzanna’s house.

ALEX: That’s on the other side of town!

HOWARD: Well, there was no room.

After feeding Alex’s midget the three of us walk out and have breakfast at a place called I Can’t Remember The Name But The Waitress Was Kinda Cute. They make a variant of Eggs Benedict here with a dill sauce rather than Hollandaise. I highly recommend it. Good breakfast.

Next we hop back in the whip and tool around town looking for a cheap hotel. I used to be good at sleeping on floors but I suck at it now; I need a bed.

We end up at a nearby HoJo’s, located on a street that all of us notice is named Avenue Road. “Man, they’re not even trying anymore,” observes Lam.

After dropping our crap off we wander down Bloor Street and check out this store called Roots. I expected Canada to be lily-white but I was wrong. The store staff is white, black, Asian, and Arabic and everyone generally appears to get along.

Noting this, the three of us soon start discussing the seeming lack of ethnic strife. At the same time the group of us realizes something: Canada never had slavery. America is essentially polarized into an uneasy coexistence of black and white (with Asians, Latinos and everyone else generally hewing to one side of the line or the other) that never quite recovered from acts begun hundreds of years earlier.

U.S. race relations are essentially poisoned by the knowledge that at one point in history, one of these races “owned” the other. The trickle-down effect of this is one of America’s largest negatives and you can see it in the boardrooms and on the streets. But the three of us out-of-towners don’t see that going on here, and it’s a welcome, if unusual, sensation.

The bathrooms are shockingly clean in Toronto. Like, you’d be surprised to find a dead hooker in one. You know what I mean? Like let’s say you walked into your typical filthy New York bathroom and found a dead hooker in there. You might be grossed out but you wouldn’t be surprised. You wouldn’t be like “OH my GOD!”, you’d be like “My day keeps getting worse and worse.”

Anyways, here, you’d be surprised.

Any city I go to, I look forward to taking the subway. You can tell a lot about a city by its trains. The subway is Toronto is spotless and pretty quick. There are only two lines so I’m not sure which one we were on. At any rate it’s fast, at top speed it moves like the 4- or 5-train back home.

What’s weird is that they take cash. You don’t have to buy tokens if you don’t want to, you can just drop cash into this little box by the clerk booth and go through the turnstile. A one-way is $2.25 Canadian but I don’t think the clerk was even checking the amount.

The parking meters here take American quarters! Pretty cool but kind of shady if you ask me. What are they doing with all those American quarters. I was gonna say “Playing drinking games,” but they have quarters in Canada too. Maybe they hand them out to Canadian citizens at the border so they can use American laundromats, or call home to report anti-Canadian atrocities.

Speaking of which, I almost committed an anti-Canadian atrocity (quite by accident, I assure you) but I’ll get into that later.