20 years ago today I was beginning my final two weeks of preparation for the biggest trip of my lifetime, year-long cycling trip through Europe and Asia. When the anniversary of the start day arrives on March 5, I will begin a "20 years ago today" day-by-day account of that 49-week trip. I have the diary I kept during the first half of the trip, and a notebook on distances I traveled each day and people I met along the way.
The rest of the details are in my memory banks, which have been stored in the incubator of my imagination for the past twenty years, where they have slowly crystallized into fiction. Memory, after all, is just a broken series of flashes, glimpses of what truly happened. It takes fiction to connect the dots and make sense of it all, even if the result is distorted and filtered. But this is what I do know.....
The trip was two and a half years in the making. It had not been my idea at first. It was the brainchild of my boyfriend at the time, Joseph. We had met in the Gay Pride parade in June of 88, the year that I marched with Toronto’s gay outdoors club, Out & Out. More accurately, I rode my bicycle beside those who marched because I was part of the cycling group. It was my cycling shorts that attracted Seph – as I used to call him. He was wearing a pair too, and he told me he was looking for someone to ride with. With that twinkle in his eye, I thought he was just giving me a line but it turned out to be true.
But he had competition. Another young lad named Ron had met me earlier at a pre-parade breakfast, and he was determined to sink his teeth in me before the day was out. He was skinnier and not as cute as Seph, but he definitely horny. But I wasn’t really interested in either of them. They were both more than ten years younger than me, and I was focused on a pre-arranged rendezvous in the beer garden with a mesmerizingly handsome man named Paul, who I had also met earlier that day.
The beer garden was in Cawthra Park, at the end point of the parade route. By the time we got there the whole park was filled with celebrants and the line up for the beer garden was half way around the block. I joined the line pointlessly, in the hopes that I could still find Paul somewhere in the crowd. But Seph and Ron grew restless and hornier and began pulling on my opposite arms as though I was a wishbone. Frustrated and disappointed over Paul and not wanting to start a fight by choosing one of the boys, I decided to leave.
Later I met up with Seph because he lived two blocks from my house. Things went better than I expected and I ended up sleeping at his place. That’s how it started. We fell into being lovers with surprising ease. We began doing almost everything together, but more than anything it was the cycling that kept us together.
Seph had had a dream to do a year-long cycling trip through Europe for a while. I had already cycled in Greece, France, the US and the Canadian Rockies in previous years so I encouraged him to do the trip. I taught him what I knew – how to plan a route and how to save and budget. To help him stay on track, I encouraged him to find extra evening work. He didn’t want to spend time apart from me so we both took jobs as waiters at the Pantages Theatre, that was showing “The Phantom of the Opera” extravaganza at the time. (Remember Garth Drabinsky?). We also both became door-to-door canvassers for the United Nations Association, though the commissions weren’t rewarding. At first, I didn’t think about joining him on his trip, even though he begged me to. I had a full-time, permanent position in the planning department of the City of Toronto that I would not be able to regain if I left, and I also co-owned a house with a business partner, David. He had lent me he front money to purchase my half of our house and I had agreed to make monthly repayments to him. These were walls preventing me from joining him, but he was free of such obligations.
But to my delight, my walls proved to be mirages. My employer was willing to hire temporary staff to replace me for a year and David said he was fine with me not making repayments for the year if he could charge me a year’s interest to the monies I still owed him. I was definitely enlisted on the trip. Seph and I opened a joint bank account with the agreement that we would do our best to add to it without keeping track. Everything was full steam ahead and for the first few months it seemed to be on track.
PHOTO: Me (left) and Seph (right), July '89
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