oh right, canada is cold: magik markers tour part three
toronto
i’ve never slept with my head next to a traffic light before, but there’s a first time for everything: my amazing friend sasha’s living room window is wedged right up against a stoplight on bathurst street, though since i fall asleep with the birds this is less of an issue than one might think. there will be fewer than 20 waking hours to spend in toronto, so i get up soon after to breakfast with sasha and ride the subway around town in a daze.
there are a couple of things about visiting toronto that are weird: one is that it feels like i never really left, that nothing is that different and i should be able to just walk home from wherever i happen to be (sadly, inconveniently, no longer true.) the other thing is that it also feels like i never moved there at all: i truly see the city as i did before i spent that decade there, before the friends and the reading series and the crawling through unbuilt subways and the cancer hospital and the long spring walks and the meandering ontario drives, all of it. it’s a city i see as so new to me again, yet where i know my way around so well. it’s also, by the way, completely fucking freezing.
one way to handle having too many people you want to see is to just turn up at their homes or places of employ unannounced, and amazingly this works all day: my homies are at mercury espresso, sam james is at his new cafe, shawn and sebastian are at home in cabbagetown, peter and chris are at the comix shop, and on and on. i wander with shawn and bus and streetcar around the deceptively sunny toronto day and try to see who i can without being a rushed jerkface about it, settling in for a perfect dinner with kate and nousheen before heading to the garrison (which was a portuguese billiards hall last time i was in town) for the markers show.
nevermind the weird intersections that occur once i get there — canada is a real small country, as it turns out — but the night takes a weird emotional pitch that’s met perfectly by this show, tell me a story where you leave your home, ok.
the morning comes too quickly again, and there’s a little time to sneak out for a baked pancake and some peameal bacon with howie and susan, and pester the shopkeep at the monkey’s paw, the best store in toronto. if you don’t know it’s the best store in toronto, you’re a fool, plain and simple. i rejoin my marker people for the long drive to montreal, for which we will definitely need to lay in a supply of (west) indian burritos from the inexplicable queen west dive called “new york subway” (no relation to new york or any form of a subway, though it is next door to an actual subway sandwiches shop.) have i told you about this place? curried vegetables, roti filling style, topped with shredded lettuce and thousand island dressing and served as a burrito. okay? also, the place is gross, kinda. but the food is so delicious! it’s spicy, though — luckily we still have root beer!
we’re off to quebec, faced with the usual roadside distractions (pingle’s fun farm? nuclear info centre? ZooZ? corn maze? nudist colony? canoe museum? mrs mcgarrigle’s mustard hut?) and along the way we call up this dude adam, who our friend pete in brooklyn told us to contact. none of us remember why exactly we are supposed to contact him other than that we trust our source, and suddenly the friendly stranger has invited us over for dinner in his home, which — though this scenario might socially intimidate even me — turns out to be 100% the right thing to do, and not even because the food is great, just because you’re supposed to take chances like that since sometimes the person on the other end turns out to be completely awesome, which he does. thanks for dinner, adam!
casa del popolo is twice as big as last time i was inside, and the new stage room is great, perfect for magik markers and for a chilly quebec night like tonight (why, why did i think it would be spring here when i packed?) we’re back from adam’s sausage party in time for a petit pre-show chill out; leah quimby, former magik marker, is here, as is john’s bandmate in son of earth, aaron, who thinks montreal bagels taste like sand. the markers set is one of my favo(u)rites of the tour, raw and langourous in that slightly scary way connecting the old style markers vibe with the song-strewn one of now. pete seems to be grinning throughout, an energy only complemented when elisa’s fever breaks in the middle of the set. she’s on the edge of a sickness and her throat’s too sore to go on and on and on, suddenly partway through “bad dream” she’s gone from the stage like a walk-off home run, and nolan and shaw finish up in no hurry at all, a false ending or a false start of sorts that leaves the audience with no idea if the show is over. i like this grey area and i loved that show.
