20 years ago – Introduction, part 2…

Our plans started to go off track about a year later. Saving money was not a skill that Seph savoured. There was a 4-digit number of dollars in our savings but only $20 of it was his. When his restaurant laid him off in the fall, he decided to focus on his acting career, although he had never had a paid role, justifying it by saying that taking another job would interfere with his ability to attend possible future auditions. So I pulled the plug on our joint account arrangement and gave him back his $20. I was committed to the trip and he’d have to save enough to go with me on him own.

But other parts of our relationship were failing too. We had agreed to an open relationship, after he started fooling around with other men, and his wanderlust for sex was overwhelming his wanderlust for travel. At the start of 1990, I told him I wanted a break from our sexual relationship, although we still shared my house and bed, but I became a closer friend. We still cuddled, cycled, took long walks, and ate meals together but that was as far as it went. Several months later I overheard him telling mutual friends that we had broken up. When they asked him when it happened, he said I broke up in February and he broke up in May.

In the last months before departure, when it was clear the Seph would not be joining me, I was able to entice a member of our gay cycling club, Michael Silk, to take his place. That would cut the loneliness factor and accommodation bills, but everything else seemed to go wrong. The Canadian dollar had plummeted against most European currencies (this was before the Euro). Seph had overspent the limit on the charge card I had acted as a guarantor for to establish his credit rating again, and the bank put a hold on $2000 of my funds. At the last moment, David went back on his word and asked that I repay the last of what I owed him in spite of our agreement. He said his job was in jeopardy and that he needed the money as a possible buffer when I was gone, but as soon as I left he spent it on something else anyway,

It wasn’t the most joyful travel launch ever. A temporary assistant had been hired to replace me already so I was out of a job for a year, and David had arranged to rent my furnished room to soon-to-be tenant. I probably couldn’t afford to travel the whole year and that gave me dreadful nightmares of returning to Toronto homeless and penniless to live with my parents in the bleak, icy suburb of Malton all the next winter.

I also had been seeing another fellow since Sept had left, and that wasn’t working out either. On one of our last dates he finally took me to his home to spend the night. He wasn’t the most forthcoming with me. His ex-lover roommate hadn’t broken up with him as long ago as he said, probably even in just the past few weeks, and the scene turned pretty ugly. His other idiosyncrasies kept surfacing and I began to think he might have serious mental health issues. I was still a bit hung up over him when I left, but part of me was also relieved to be rescued by that big silver bird in the sky.

Twenty years ago doesn’t really seem that long ago, but it was. It was the age of technological dinosaurs, and I was one of them. This was before the general public had phone cards, cell phones, international ATMs, no on-line "couch surfing", Internet cafes or even e-mail. I let my friends and family know where I expected to be six weeks ahead of time and they wrote to me c/o “Poste Restante”. Sometimes I got what they sent but I never knew how much of it. It frustrated me to think that some letters weren’t reaching me, but it scared me more to think I was receiving everything when I found nothing waiting for me.


PHOTO: Me (background) and Michael Silk (foreground), Jan '91