Another random story from my past.

1995:

After my first failed attempt at university, I shamelessly begged money from my mom and travelled out to Vancouver.  I wanted to create a life as far from Ottawa and my family as possible and establish my independence (with mommy’s money) … and for a while made it work.

After crashing at the house of my mom’s friend Leslie for far too long and being a huge imposition, I found my own apartment in Marpole, a pretty and sketchy South Vancouver neighbourhood.

I  got a job driving rental cars between offices, doing rents and driving people to and from the airport.  I barely made enough money to eat (plus, I was smoking like a chimney at the time, which ain’t cheap) but I was thrilled to be on my own again; after two years of boarding school and a year at university in Thunder Bay, being back at home was not what I was accustomed to.

Boring backstory done, honest.  Here comes the good part.

A few weeks into my new job, I was tapped to drive a customer to the airport when he dropped off his rental.  The guy was in his late 2o’s to early 30′s, tall & skinny, and to my trained eye, very gay.  When I asked, he said he’d come to Vancouver from Seattle for a conference on AIDS-related something or other and confirmed my assumption.

When I didn’t freak out at the idea of that kind of conference or the idea of being in a car with someone who’d gone to one, my passenger kind of gave me the “oh” look – “oh, you too?  I didn’t hear my gaydar go off, I’ll have to get it looked at” expression.  We chatted more, blah blah blah, he was interesting and we got to the airport.

I hauled out my passenger’s luggage and we awkwardly shook hands.  Kind of hesitantly, as if he wasn’t sure if it was appropriate or not, the guy hauled out all the Canadian change in his pockets, which looked like it came to a few dollars.  To me, it looked like dinner, which until then was going to be the last Cup O’ Noodle I had sitting in my crappy little kitchenette.

My new American friend jumped a little as I untactfully retrieved my newfound wealth from his hands while he was in mid-sentence about whether or not I’d like a tip, and I stuffed it into my jeans while giving him an awkward “that was kind of rude of me, but you wouldn’t believe how hungry I am, so no apologies” grin .  He waved, I waved, and off he went to the US Departures terminal.

I was in Vancouver for another few months before abject poverty won out, and went back East for another stab at post-secondary education.  That one ended with my enlisting in the military, so you know school didn’t go well.

I was here, at Carleton University, sitting in Oliver’s Pub and drinking beer with some friends when one showed me the local weekly free rag – you know, the newspaper with the ultra-left editorial slant in front and ads for out-call “massages” in the back.  This one was cool, I was told, because there was a sex-advice column every week by this gay guy from Seattle.

I checked it out and read the column, which had questions prefaced with “Hey Faggot” (memorable, I’ll give him that) and was hooked by the content (always interesting) and the writing (snappy, snarky, always interesting).  In fact, I continued to read the column every week for a few years before I actually saw a picture of the author…

…who, unless you a) have been living under a rock or b) are my mother, you already know is Dan Savage, world-famous sex columnist and the guy who still remembers the awkward tipping after his ride to YVR.

So, you can add Dan to the short list of Drew Barrymore and Tom Green in terms of the celebrities with which I have had an uncomfortable exchange.  This is why I try to spend as little time as possible at Jeff’s work, just in case Jewel Staite shows up there again and I wreck every association I have with Firefly.