Sleeping Around

by Brian Thacker

  I woke with a fright as a huge plate of pumpkin pie was plonked down in front of me. How long had I been asleep? Thirty seconds or ten minutes? Rob seemed to be the only one who’d noticed that I’d nodded off, but he wasn’t talking to anyone so I was okay.

  As soon as Rob finished his dessert he said ‘I gotta go’, stood up and left. He hadn’t said a word the entire meal. We all sat around the table for a while after dinner, but I think that was mainly because we were all too bloated to get up out of our seats.

  ‘Rob doesn’t say much,’ I said to Jeremy on the drive back to his place.

  ‘Talking to him is like pulling teeth,’ Jeremy said. ‘And I haven’t seen him for four months!’

  ‘Does he have a girlfriend or a wife?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he’s gay. Everyone in the family is fine about it, but he’s not.’

  ‘When did he come out?’

  ‘He told my parents when he was nineteen, but Steve and I didn’t find out until a few years later. We only found out because when Steve was leaving home he was having a heated argument with Mom about whether he was sleeping with the girl he was moving in with. He said: “She’s just a friend. What about Rob? He lives with two girls and you never hassle him.” “That’s because the two girls are lesbians and Rob is gay,” Mum said.’

  When I told Jeff that I was planning to go to Niagara Falls, he told me to ‘push all the American tourists over’. There was one small problem with his request. I couldn’t see any American tourists. Or any other kind of tourist for that matter. Niagara Falls might get 18 million visitors a year, but I imagine not many of them get there via the three-hour local bus service from downtown Kitchener.

  The North Niagara Bus Terminal was in the middle of several blocks of derelict buildings on the edge of town and I had to walk through the somewhat shabby suburbs to get to the falls. At least they were easy to find: I just headed for the source of the rising mist that was drifting languidly over the town.

  Oscar Wilde described the falls as ‘simply a vast amount of water going the wrong way over some unnecessary rocks’, but I can’t see how he couldn’t have been even a little impressed. Once I had conquered my inexplicable desire to hurl myself over the railings, I stood watching the cascade for ages, as if hypnotised. It was only after the gushing gallons prompted a very urgent desire to pee that I was able to drag myself away.

  I eventually found the tourists. They were all joining me in wearing identical bright-blue plastic ponchos on the Maid of the Mist boat tour. As the boat approached Horseshoe Falls the buildings above faded in the mist, the roar of the cascading water grew deafening, cartoonishly perfect rainbows appeared in the enormous curtains of water falling above us and I was busting to go to the toilet again.

  Perhaps Oscar Wilde would have been mightily impressed with the centre of town. Or blinded. Only a few hundred metres away from the falls was a mini Vegas, but tackier. The main drag, which was full of fairy-floss-eating children, was lit up with a dazzling jumble of bilious neon signs advertising a whole universe of worlds including Lego World, Super Hero World, Hot Dog World, Fun World, Dinosaur World (incorporating Dinosaur Mini Golf), Criminal World, Frankenstein World and WWF World. Perched on top of most of the ‘Worlds’ were monolithic effigies of monsters, super heroes and a rather gross-looking hot dog. I was impressed. The Canadians had somehow managed to even out-crass the Americans. I thought I might check out one of the Worlds, but when I got closer to Frankenstein World I realised that it was actually just a Burger King masquerading as a World with a colossal Frankenstein on the roof eating a giant whopper.

  I had my own private bus on the way back to Kitchener. I was the only passenger, but that didn’t stop the bus driver stopping for long spells in deserted bus stations along the way. It was 9.30 by the time we crawled into a wet and windy Kitchener and I put my electric-blue Maids of the Mist poncho on to walk back to Jeremy’s. As I was trudging through the rain, someone honked their car horn at me. ‘Yeah, yeah, very funny,’ I mumbled to myself. ‘I know I look like a giant blue jellybean.’ They honked again. I turned around and was just about to abuse them when I saw that it was Jeremy. What a lovely fellow. He’d looked up the bus timetable on the net at work and had come to pick me up.

  ‘I thought I’d take you to see some real culture,’ he said as I hopped in.

  We drove out into the suburbs and pulled into the car park of a large and somewhat unremarkable building called RoXXanes.

  ‘What’s this?’ I joked. ‘A strip joint?’

  ‘Yep,’ Jeremy said matter-of-factly. ‘And tonight’s amateur night.’

  The place was jumping (or rather sliding up and down) as men, including two fellows in lederhosen, ate their dinners while girls flashed their fannies in their faces.

  ‘The winner gets fifteen hundred dollars,’ Jeremy explained. ‘Anyone can enter, but it’s mostly uni students and a few tellers from the bank.’

  As we sat down with our ludicrously priced beers, a girl in skin-tight jeans jumped up on the stage and began her striptease act. Except there was a lot more teasing than stripping as she clumsily squirmed and squeezed her way out of her tight jeans. While she was finally frolicking naked across the stage, Jeremy casually said, ‘I used to date a stripper’.

  ‘What was that like?’ I said, staring at bouncing breasts.

  ‘She was nice, but my mates used to go to her club and watch her spread her legs and play with her clitoris. I couldn’t handle it.’

  As Tight Jeans Girl struggled to get her pants back on I said, ‘There must be a few drunk girls who wake up in the morning and say “Gee, I had this weird dream last night that I danced naked in front of a hundred men.”’

  We didn’t stay to see who won. I couldn’t afford to buy another beer.

  I lost a few years off my life in the middle of the night. While I was slumbering away peacefully, Bentley (the cat) leapt from the top of the bookshelf onto my chest. I jumped so high out of bed that I sent Bentley bouncing off the ceiling and onto the television. And just when I had been about to give Jeremy's couch the highest rating so far. Instead, he got:

  Couch rating: 8/10

  Pro: Comfortable and cosy couch

  Con: Confounded and crazy cat

  Bentley was giving me a wide berth at breakfast while Jeremy got ready for work. When I asked Jeremy what I could do with my last day in Kitchener, he suggested I could go gawk at some god-fearing Mennonites, who Jeremy described as a bit like the Amish but without the pointy beards. Five miles out of town in the village of St Jacobs is Canada’s largest Mennonite community.

  I started the day at the Kitchener farmers’ market, which, although it had been operating since 1839, had moved recently to a modern building in the centre of town. Jeremy said that I would find Mennonites there selling homemade bread, jams, cheese, sausages and vegetables. Unless Mennonite farmers grow junk jewellery, Miss Loo’s Scottish soaps, cheap shoes or emu oil, there wasn’t much produce for sale. Admittedly, only about a third of the market was open, but the only Mennonite I found was a skinny fellow with a table full of turnips.

  When I arrived at the market, the heavens opened and the torrential rain hitting the market’s roof sounded just like Niagara Falls. I grabbed a cup of tea from one of the food stalls and picked up a copy of The Echo, the local weekly newspaper. The lead story was headlined ‘Welcome to Dullsville’, and the first line of copy read ‘Was this the most boring week in the history of Kitchener?’ They were so short on news that on the second page they had rehashed a story that happened twelve months previously. It was a good one, though, in a very ghoulish way. A local man who had committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree in his front yard was left hanging in the breeze for four days because passers-by thought the corpse was a Halloween decoration.

  When the rain subsided, I wandered through town to the bus station. The folk of Kitchener sure did love their Oktoberfest. There were people doing normal daily errands like going to the bank and
picking up dry cleaning dressed in lederhosen and dirndls. There was also a dizzying array of lederhosen for sale at the Hans Haus Oktoberfest shop— which was open all year in case you had a pressing need for novelty beer mugs. Oktoberfest was being celebrated in other shops as well, with German-inspired displays in butchers, clothes shops, banks and, my favourite, the Stag S&M leather shop. The mannequins in the window had huge breasts and were wearing ‘mini-skirt’ leather dirndls. A sign underneath read: ‘Whose pretzel will you straighten this Oktoberfest in your dirndl of desire?’

  There were no buses to St Jacobs. Of course there wouldn’t be. No need really. Not when everyone plods around in horse-drawn buggies. I caught a bus to a mall at the edge of town and went the rest of the way in a taxi.

  I’m guessing the traditional Mennonites must live out of St Jacobs, because most of the houses in town had a truck in the driveway instead of a buggy. The main street was mostly Ye Olde Arts-and-Crafts Shops selling quilts and maple syrup. In the centre of town was the Mennonite Museum & Information Centre. The curator seemed surprised to see me. Actually, I think he was surprised to see anyone at all and he had to turn off the lights and plug in the projector in the theatrette so I could watch the ‘Mennonite Story’.

  The start of the film showed gawping tourists taking photos of Mennonites in their old-world attire. Personally, I think the Mennonites were at least equally entitled to gawp at the tourists’ attire. The film was shot in the 1970s and the camera-wielding cats were all wearing outrageously flared pants, platform shoes, body-fitting floral shirts and boofy haircuts that made the Mennonites’ bowl cuts look stylish.

  The film described the Old Order Mennonites’ way of life. They don’t date and only meet the opposite sex at Sunday evening sing-alongs; weddings only take place on Tuesdays and the entire wedding meal is prepared by the bride; phones must be black (with no accessories or call waiting); they don’t use hairdressers and the ‘young men’ have ‘haircut parties’.

  Sadly, the Maple Syrup Museum was closed, so I dropped into a Mennonite bakery for lunch where girls in traditional handmade outfits and bonnets were selling homemade bread from wicker baskets. The bakery also had a bar and a large plasma TV playing MTV pop videos.

  There were no taxis in town, so I decided to hitchhike back to Kitchener. I didn’t have much luck, though. Cars zoomed by without even looking like slowing down. When a fellow in a horse and buggy plodded past me, I smiled at him and stuck out my thumb in jest. He pulled over.

  My new Mennonite friend was Matthias Brubacher and he was on his way to the mall. He explained that there’s a ‘high-rise’ horse-and-buggy park at the mall for the convenience of low-tech shoppers like him. It’s a barn. Matthias, who was in his early twenties, lived with his parents and his seven brothers and sisters on a farm where they made and sold butter, apple butter and maple syrup.

  ‘We go to bed at eight and get up at five-thirty,’ he told me proudly.

  I was tempted to ask him if he had a spare couch. An early night was just what I needed.

  ‘Is there a traditional Canadian restaurant?’ I asked Jeremy as we drove around later looking for somewhere to eat. It was my last night in Canada and I wanted to go somewhere truly Canadian.

  ‘Chains,’ Jeremy said. ‘Canadians love restaurant chains more than anyone in the world.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘They like to be able to go to another town and eat somewhere familiar, ordering off the same menu.’

  ‘What about that one?’ I asked, pointing to the Swiss Chalet Restaurant.

  ‘Yep, all over Canada,’ Jeremy said. ‘Whatever cuisine you can think of, we have a chain of them.’

  The largest chain in Canada is truly Canadian, but I didn’t fancy it for dinner. When ice hockey star Tim Horton retired in 1964, he decided to open up a doughnut and coffee shop and called it, wait for it, Tim Hortons. There are now more than 3000 Tim Hortons outlets around Canada.

  ‘Do you like Indonesian?’ Jeremy asked as we passed Bhima’s restaurant.

  ‘Is it part of a chain?’

  ‘Probably,’ he shrugged.

  It was Indonesian, but with a Canadian twist. I ordered bison gado gado.

  We dropped into the Concordia club, the largest Oktoberfest venue, on the way home, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I could feel a cold coming on and, to make things worse, it was Country & Western night. The menfolk were wearing lederhosen and cowboy hats, while Canada’s second most popular female country singer (after Shania Twain) was ‘yee-haa-ing’ and twangin’ her gee-tar.

  The venue, which was basically a big circus tent, seemed quite busy for a Wednesday night. Or maybe it just looked that way because there were so many security personnel inflating the numbers.

  ‘My mom’s here,’ the singer announced towards the end of her set. ‘But watch out, cause she loves country and she loves to dance like crazy.’

  The security goons were immediately on their toes looking into the crowd for a crazy old lady dancing in a cowboy hat.

  It was a crisp and perfectly clear morning as I made my way to the train station. As I tramped through a carpet of gold maple leaves past tidy houses, I thought this is a nice town. Quiet, but nice. A well-dressed middle-aged woman stopped with me at the traffic lights. ‘Oh, where are you going with that big bag?’ she asked politely.

  ‘To the airport,’ I said.

  ‘I wish the fuck I was getting out of here,’ she muttered as she shuffled away.

  ICELAND

  10

  ‘Occupation: Mathematics student, speculative fiction author, professional encyclopedia maintainer, programmer, project leader and beer connoisseur.’

  Smári McCarthy, 22, Reykjavík, Iceland

  CouchSurfing.com

  My head felt like it was about to explode. I don’t think I could have chosen a more unsuitable country to go to with an aching head full of snot. The name Iceland doesn’t really conjure up images of the sort of place that could lessen the misery of having a cold. If only I’d gone to warm and sunny Cyprus instead. Cyprus was another country on my shortlist as a potential European couch-surfing destination. Applying my criterion of going to places where I hadn’t been before— given that I’d already visited 32 other countries in Europe— my choices were quite limited. In the end I chose Iceland because that was where Casey Fenton, the founder of CouchSurfing.com, surfed his first couch.

  For such a small country (Iceland’s population reached 300 000 in the same month that America’s population hit 300 million), there were certainly plenty of couches to choose from. I sent requests to a bunch of people, including Gudmundur Thor Palsson who ‘used to be a fat pig, but now I’m a little thinner, but still a pig’ and whose interests were ‘army, porn and drinking’. I tried Geiri who said: ‘If it matters to anyone, I’m gay, but my couch is beige.’ I sent a request to Lluks Jón Gunnarsson simply because he lived in a town called Hofudhborgarsvaedhi. I’m not a clown dentist, so I thought I might have a chance with Theodóra Þorsteinsdóttir who said: ‘I have two phobias. I’m scared of dentists and I shit my pants whenever I see a clown. So I don’t want to host a dentist or a clown . . . or a clown dentist.’ I also tried ‘programming hippie drummer’ Johann Fridriksson who lived with his robot Benjamin. But it was ‘half-Icelandic, half-Irish’ Smári McCarthy who emailed straight back offering me his couch:

  You’re welcome to my couch.

  I should note, however, that I’m a full-time student these days, and therefore I spend more than my fair share of time studying, so I won’t always be available. And when I am, I’ll probably be very intent on drinking heavily—I hope you can appreciate my situation. I’m not going to try and over glorify my liver’s alcohol processing prowess, but I dare say that when it comes to this it is rather advantageous to have both Icelandic and Irish genes floating about there. So condition one is: You have to keep up with me.

  Drinking heavily seemed a good idea when I accepted Smári’s couch offer, but
now I just felt like snuggling up in bed watching DVDs and eating Mum’s homemade chicken soup. There didn’t seem much chance of that happening, though. Particularly the DVD part; Smári didn’t even own a television.

  Aeroplane flights have a wonderful knack of exacerbating the symptoms of a cold, so by the time I shuffled through customs at the small, but incredibly shiny, Keflavík airport, my head was spinning. There was a bus waiting in the car park, but I only got two steps out of the terminal before I scampered whimpering back inside again. ‘Bloody hell, it’s cold,’ I gasped. Over the next few days I would say this, and I’m not exaggerating, at least a hundred times. It was that type of bone-chilling cold that, err, really chills your bones.

  I missed the bus. By the time I’d put on every item of clothing in my pack, the bus had gone. Oh well, I thought, there’ll be another bus along in a minute. Wrong again, Einstein. Try three hours. All the buses’ departures were timed to coincide with the rather infrequent arrivals of international flights.

  After finding the bank, tourist office and bus ticket counter all closed, I went for a wander to find something to eat. Feed a cold, starve a fever, they say. Except I didn’t think that I’d be able to afford to feed my cold. ‘Bloody hell, it’s expensive,’ I gasped. Over the next few days I would say this, and I’m not exaggerating, at least a hundred times. A basic (as in the cheapest) sandwich was twelve dollars. This was in the upstairs and somewhat up-market cafe. Maybe the small airport shop downstairs would be cheaper. It was. The same sandwich there was only eleven dollars. Well, I think the thing I was looking at was a sandwich. It looked like an egg sandwich, but it was called a sómasamloka rækjusalat. When I read the rest of the label I realised why it was so expensive. The sandwich also contained those rare ingredients and (try saying that with a mouthful of sandwich).

  Iceland itself looked yummy enough to eat. As soon as the bus pulled out of the airport car park, we were driving through a surrealistic lava field that looked like large blobs of melted dark chocolate. There wasn’t a tree or blade of grass in sight.