My Recent Travels With Sky

It seems appropriate, though by no means necessary or even advisable, to allocate a few words to a formal account of what transpired on my recent journey to Chicago and then to Wisconsin with my friend Sky Goodden. She, at least, will benefit from this short history, as she was sopping drunk the entire time and remembers nothing. For myself, I find it difficult to reminisce, because whenever I turn my thoughts to that week on the road, my mind is overrun by the sounds of Big Willie Style, Will Smith's break-out rap album from 1997, and certain things Sky said she would do if I ever talked about what happened.

Our trip started in Toronto at Wheels-4-Rent in Kensington Market. Sky showed up pulling a small trained bear in a little wagon, bitterly wasted and accusing me of stealing her armoire. They almost didn't let us take the car, but in the end I convinced Sky to leave the bear behind. After much haranguing, we were finally underway, feeling footloose and fancy-free. Things seemed to be looking up until we pulled onto the Gardiner Expressway, when Sky mistook me for a stranger and began attacking me with a pair of heavy binoculars that she keeps in her purse. We laughed about it later.

We arrived in Windsor just in time for the dejected aftermath of a party in our honor. We ate cold chicken under the spinning globe lights in Sky's mom's kitchen and we all cried. Sky's brother flirted with me relentlessly all night and then challenged me to a push-up contest. He did one hundred to my ten and then I cried again. The night came to an abrupt conclusion when Sky's mom caught her free-basing in the cupboard under the sink. We were all sent to bed.

The next day Sky and I travelled to Pelee Island, which is a small island located in the middle of a very large lake near their house. On the way we stopped at a Value Village for cassette tapes, as the car had no cd player. Our musical haul included: Bobby McFerrin, Ace of Base, Salt'n'Pepa, Great Violin Concertos, Beethoven's second and sixth symphonies, a Beethoven medley played over nature sounds such as the ocean ("Beethoven Naturally"), a tape of Vietnamese children singing church music all dressed up like Marvin Gaye, and of course, Big Willie Smith. Somewhere in the course of the morning Sky had picked up a middle-aged Ukrainian man curiously named Sven and was trying to sell him on a pyramid scheme while speaking only the language of scat. We all danced hard in our seats to Ace of Base until Sven suddenly did a rolling exit from the back seat going 80 on the highway. Sky popped her lips in disgust.

Pelee Island was a dream. We rented matching bicycles and peddled around the whole island, hailing the local fisherman as we passed and stealing bunches of grapes from the island's many vineyards. For the first time in my life, I felt truly happy on the inside. We sat on the beach and I told Sky of my dream to become a dance choreographer. Sky told me of hers about being attacked by a banana in the desert. Margaret Atwood lives on Pelee Island in a sleek tower made entirely out of the Future. She stalks around the shore in a dress of snake skin, finding beach glass and throwing it back into the water. Later, on the ferry ride back, Sky tried to push me overboard and then pretended she had just lost her footing.

On Saturday we finally drove to Chicago. The drive was for the most part uneventful, except that Sky insisted on calling me Boris and seemed to think that there was someone in the trunk. We stopped at a cigarette discount outlet and I bought the most beautiful baby blue pack of Dunhill's you have ever seen. Sky mysteriously had some business to attend to with the car and didn't return until four hours later, squinting through one black eye. She was wearing a slinky red dress under an enormous fur coat and fanned about a dozen one hundred dollar bills at me as she climbed into the car. "What happened?" I asked. "Just drive," she said. She also had an older Greek gentlemen with her who simply stared at me fixedly in the rear-view mirror for the rest of the ride into Chicago. No one spoke.

We got into Chicago late and without a place to stay. After two hours of driving around and screaming at each other, we finally found a hostel. It was perfect: one sweltering room with two beds for Sky and the Greek gentlemen and a narrow closet for me. I went out to park the car and promptly got lost for an entire hour. I walked for miles, only to discover that I had actually parked a five minute walk from the hostel. It was midnight by the time I dappered up in my new vest and Sky and I hit the town. We found the perfect bar to huddle together and murmur eulogies for Bob Dylan and John Grady Cole. We kicked off the dance floor, shut it down, had a burger, and went to bed, but I woke up after only three hours to find Sky singing obscene lullabies quietly to herself and trying to set my bed on fire.

Saturday morning it was all Weekend at Bernie's carrying Sky around Lincoln Park until she regained consciousness, and when she finally did come to, she insisted that I continue to carry her. So we walked to the zoo with Sky on my back and her hands over my eyes, shouting incoherent directions to me in Spanish. More than once she tried to walk me into traffic. I think the zoo was nice, though Sky never did let me have a peak, so my whole experience consisted of listening to her bizarre taunts and cat-calls to the animals. The only time I actually got to see an animal was when she took a hand away to feed the last of our money to a zebra. It had stripes, I think.

Penniless, we drove four hours north into Wisconsin on stolen gas to spend a couple of nights with my old friend Mitch. Mitch received us at the door outfitted entirely in swaths of crinoline and led us directly to the garage, where we were stripped and hosed with coconut oil. We spent the night in his pale menagerie of life-size, papier mache sports stars. Monday morning Mitch's entire family woke us up with a light operetta in bed, and then carried us singing and dancing into the seraglio for Fruit Roll-Ups and punch. We spent the rest of the day playing hoop ball in the driveway, and feasted that evening on Wisconsin fire bats. We didn't get a wink of sleep that night, as Mitch kept us up with delightful anecdotes about the artifacts in his porcelain clown collection.

I woke late on Tuesday morning to find Sky doing blow off of a piece of broken mirror from the bathroom with Mitch's ten-year-old nephew. It seemed like we might be making ourselves a nuisance, so we got the kid to grab his grandma's purse for us and we slipped out the window. We got into Chicago around suppertime and found the perfect bar within minutes of parking the car. We both got ourselves deliciously, wonderfully, magically sauced, and then unpleasantly over-sauced, and then I was dancing balefully by myself in front of the dj and Sky was up on the bar cutting herself. That night we slept in the car, two bloodied ragamuffins on one crazy adventure in the Windy City. (Her wounds were self-inflicted, mine were from when she started biting me after I passed out.)

Wednesday was the last day of our journey and a bit of a recovery day. We took showers at the Y and ate stewed beets in a snappy little restaurant. Sky had managed to shave her head in the car the night before with a broken piece of glass, and now she spoke seraphically of the Middle Way in all things. I was thinking about wearing more collared shirts. It seemed that a lot had changed for both us. We drove home in a mood of vulnerability and quiet reflection. We played MASH, this time for keeps. That night I dropped Sky off in Windsor and drove in the rain and the dark to London. Not the one in England, the one in Ontario.