The day started with a Class-A fuck-up for me and ended in marital bliss for two other people.

Suz, the bride (it’s short for Suzanna and as far as I know no one else calls her “Suz.” Like I’m gonna let that stop me) has deployed a friend to give me a lift to the wedding.

So here’s the thing. Moneygrip’s coming to pick me up at 10am. But today’s the day I check out of the Bosman and into the Riviera so I’ve gotta hustle. So I wake up, get dressed in a suit and tie, check out of the Bosman and start hightailing it over to the Riviera, hoping the check-in won’t take long.

The walk isn’t far at all, maybe 10-20 blocks, but I look at my cell and see it’s already 9:50am. It wouldn’t do to keep Suz’s friend waiting when the guy’s nice enough to go out of his way to pick my ass up. That and the fact that I’m starting to sweat in the suit convince me to take a cab.

I’ve bestowed nothing but platitudes on Vancouver, but let me tell you--what a lousy city to catch a fucking taxi in! I only saw three or four in the space of five minutes and they were all full. What kind of barbarism is this? In order to be useful, taxis have to be like superpowers: You may not use them all the time, but you should be able to summon them at a moment’s notice.

I finally managed to grab one in front of some hotel, and two minutes later I was at the Riviera.

“Oh, you’re Mr. Noe?” says the South Asian desk clerk, giving me the feeling I’ve done something bad. “Where were you yesterday?” he asks sharply, like I stood him up for a date.

“What do you mean?”

“We had you booked for two nights, starting last night.”

Aha! The guy at the Bosman fucked up, not me! I knew there was no way I’d book a $120/night room for two nights.

“Um, sorry. I think there was a mix-up,” I say.

“Well, since you didn’t show yesterday, we gave your room away. And you’ll have to pay a no-show fee.”

“What? But if you gave the room away, then it’s not like you lost out!”

“I’m sorry, it’s our policy.”

Jeez Louise. “Well, do you have another room available?”

“I am sorry, we are all booked. But the penthouse is available.”

“I don’t need a penthouse,” I said in a Jesus Christ, look at me tone.

“If you take it, I won’t charge you the no-show fee, which will be ninety dollars.”

“And how much is the penthouse?”

“Two-hundred and ten dollars a night.”

Jesus fucking Christ!

I turned around to walk out with my bags, then spied the clock. 10:10am. My ride would be here any minute.

I stepped back over to the counter, beaten. “I’ll take it.”

I didn’t have a chance to check out the “penthouse,” just threw my bags inside and headed back downstairs.

Waiting in front of the Riviera, I found that despite my efforts, I was still sweating. In a suit.

A few moments later an SUV pulled up. “How’s it going, I’m Kelvin,” said the cat behind the wheel. Clean-cut, upstanding-looking. He was the first in an extremely decent line of people I’d meet today.

I happened to be standing by the limo when the bride arrived--she looked soooooo happy! You should’ve seen her, it was like she was generating her own light. She’d planned the entire wedding, too.

The ceremony was short, sweet, and mostly in English, so I could follow along. The bride and groom both looked picture-perfect and everything went off without a hitch.

However, at the dinner last night I got to see a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the massive, massive logistics required in bringing something like this together. It’s fiendishly complicated. If the future Mrs. Noe is reading this, babe, we’re getting married in a T-shirt and jeans. Let’s do the City Hall thing, yeah? On the subway ride back, we can each put in one ear bud from the iPod and listen to “our song.”

Since the reception wasn’t until evening, Kelvin dropped me off back in the West End, and I walked around a bit before heading back to the hotel. Figured I may as well check out the “penthouse” since I'm paying for the damn thing.

It was, as I suspected, super-cheesy! Décor about ten years out-of-date and with a sad-looking, unstocked little bar. I pulled open one of the curtains to discover it was ripped. The bed was a king-sized.

It was also roomy, which is the last thing I need. When I travel I’m typically looking for a clean bed and maybe a TV, but I don’t care if the room’s the size of an elevator. I could have a party for twenty up in this bitch. Too bad I have no friends in Vancouver.

This room was costing me more than twice what I was supposed to pay, all because I’d failed to plan my trip in a detailed and organized fashion. If I had printouts of my itinerary I wouldn’t have made that mistake at the Bosman.

Depressed, I went out to find a Tim Horton’s, to drown my sorrows in coffee and donuts. There aren’t that many in Vancouver.

Back home people are always stopping me to ask me directions. Not sure why, I guess I look like I know where I’m going. Lately I’ve gotten in a habit of actually approaching people if I see them standing on a street corner with a map and looking befuddled. I’m volunteering directions at least every other day. I do it because it takes ten seconds, it’s no skin off my back and these poor bastards could use the help.

The strange thing is, this habit has come to Vancouver with me. I saw a girl standing on a corner with a map, and I actually started to approach her before realizing I still didn’t know my way around that well.

Stranger still, a Japanese girl stopped me on Davie Street to ask if I knew where the liquor store was, and I actually did. (I’d passed one after eating at Vu Le Vu and heading back to the Sylvia.)

Kelvin came by to pick me up in the evening and we headed out to the reception, about thirty minutes outside the city.

Everyone at this wedding seems to have known each other for a minimum of ten years. Me, the only person I know is the bride.

So here I am, seated at a table of strangers. Luckily I was seated next to a cute girl. And when she turned her head I saw she had not one, but two ponytails! Not pigtails on the sides (though I’m super into those also) but two rear-mounted ponytails. Awesome. I kept wishing a loud noise would come out of the kitchen so she’d glance over and I’d get another look. I thought about slipping the waiter a twenty to go in the kitchen and break some dishes.

The girl and I small-talked for a spell, and then she said “Okay I have a confession to make.” I figured she’d tell me she once ran somebody over on a dark country road and left him to die. People, especially strangers always seem to make random confessions to me. Once, at a party a girl I knew for about eleven minutes told me she’d been experimenting with lesbianism, but asked me not to tell anyone. (I told her I wouldn’t, but I lied because I just told all of you.)

“I was seated next to you on purpose,” Pony-twins continued. “Suzanna asked me to kind of talk to you and keep you company. She knew you didn’t know anyone here.”

How sweet of Suz! And how shitty for this poor girl! I felt a little bad, like she’d been assigned to babysit me. Still, Suz is sweet for thinking of me, and I could imagine worse “handlers.” I wanted to keep Pony-twins entertained but couldn’t think of any funny stories.

"On three, both of us should turn and
punch this photographer in the kidneys.
Ready? One...two...."

Over the course of the reception, a bunch of people close to the bride and groom got up to tell childhood stories about them. As these events unfolded it became clear to me I’d never been to a wedding like this in my life. This is complicated, let me try to explain it.

In New York, I feel like it's a constant struggle for my friends and I to just be decent human beings. I feel my first tendencies are almost always bad. Lam refers to it as “The ability to laugh when people fall.” The other day I was walking down the street with my friend Lil when some cat tripped and almost did a faceplant in front of us, and both of us couldn’t help it.

We’re not jaded or cynical because frankly, it’s too primitive for us. We’re well beyond it, into far darker shit. If you could hear some of the things that make us laugh you’d be appalled. I feel like my instincts are mercenary, my feelings callous, my relationships tenuous.

Anyways, so here I am this wedding and I realize, Holy shit, this is what Good people are like. Everyone around me is good, clean and decent. I’d always felt Canadians were a lot more earnest, which impressed me, but this wedding took the cake. Everyone here seemed a stand-up. No emphatic cursing or dark and mean-spirited jokes at another’s expense.

A friend of the groom’s got up to tell a story that particularly moved me. I can’t remember it line-for-line--I tried scribbling most of it in my notepad, but couldn’t get half of it--so I’ll paraphrase here.

“Charlie and I were on a camping trip, we must have been about eight years old. We were about to get into a boat on this lake when I realized I’d forgotten something back at the campsite.

“I went back to get it, taking a shortcut between these two trailers. What I didn’t realize was that between these two trailers was an angry pit-bull. I saw it and squealed in terror!

“I turned around and started running, scared out of my mind. The dog ran after me. Eventually he took up all the slack on his leash and was yanked to a stop, but by then I’d crashed into a table, fell over, hurt my leg and was crying.

“Then I saw that Charlie had been running towards me, and reached me just then. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked, and I saw he had something in his hands.

“‘What’s that you’re holding?’ I asked. He showed me and they were rocks. He’d grabbed a handful of rocks and was running over to defend me from the dog.”

These guys were eight when this happened. When I was eight I was running around my neighborhood in Staten Island with the other unenlightened kids, calling each other “faggot.” There wasn’t much in the way of rocks but we’d occasionally throw small pieces of broken cinderblock through the windows of abandoned houses. I remember shouting matches between angry fathers in the street. One time my friend’s dad slapped me for saying “‘A fangul.”

I found myself rather stunned by the dog and camping story. If I ever managed to raise a family, I would hope that they turned out like this. But if the apple truly doesn’t fall far from the tree, I guess I’ll be spending some time sorting things out down at the Principal’s office.

At points I looked over at Charlie and Suz’s parents and grew kind of quiet. How did they do it?

After the reception, Pony-twins offers to give me a little guided nighttime tour of the city. Killer! I figure she’s a safe bet, since she’s Suz’s friend and all, but as soon as we get in her car her voice changes.

“So, do you normally get in cars with strangers?” she asks, putting the whip in motion. “How do you know I’m not a psychopath?” For a second I had the thrilling sensation I was about to be stabbed.

“You normally pick ‘em up?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“No,” I say.

She takes me down to the waterfront--or is it waterback, since there’s water on both sides of Vancouver--and we shoot some flicks with our digitals. She’s into photography too.

Then some night-driving, moving streetlamps, quiet city blocks. Pony-twins has got good taste in music, the soundtrack is ‘40s jazz standards. We get out periodically to shoot or stroll. An hour or two goes by and I get some decent flicks.

When she finally dropped me off back at my hotel, I gave her my knife. She opens it, looks at the blade, then closes it. Figure I can’t get it on the plane so I’ll come back for it at some point, maybe drive it across the border.

I’m in the penthouse, unable to sleep, lying diagonally on the still-made king-sized and listening to Radiohead while the sun comes up over Vancouver. In a few hours I’ll be getting on a train out of here, and soon after the trip will be over.

Also in a few hours Charlie and Suz will be getting on a plane to Hawaii and starting their new life! I’m really happy for them. I picture the lucky couple smiling, happy and exhausted from the wedding, while their plane cruises towards paradise.

Meanwhile I'm giving a small knife to some woman I just met. I suppose it’s a weird thing to give someone to hold onto.

I hope she doesn’t stab someone with it, since my fingerprints are all over it.