Feeling the Way, CH 04 (Patreon)

Reaching the Canadian border took a day longer than I planned because of the snowstorm. I stopped in Albany, New York, found a playmate and passed the time.

There are only three major entries to Canada in the Province of Quebec. Lacolle, Philipsburg, and Stanstead. Since I was going to Quebec City, Stanstead made the most sense, except that in the winter, storms could hit without warning in the mountains. 

My bike can handle a lot, but I hate riding when I can’t see the road under my wheels. 

Then, there was the issue of having to avoid New York City. We are not welcome there anymore. When I said we, I meant the whole of the Society, not just my family; we had nothing to do with what happened there. 

Reaching Philipsburgh also meant dealing with New York City, and on top of that it was a longer trip. If I have to avoid New York City, I was better off driving up the 87. Which is why I was in Albany when the roads became too bad.

It still snowed the next morning, but the roads were cleared. I left my bed companion to recuperate from our wild night and hit the road. Three hours later, I was at the border.

“R’garde l’idiot sur sa moto,” the officer at the booth told his companion, “tu pense tu qu’essaille de s’tue?”

Now, I’m not going to bother translating what he told her. But from this point forward, I will. Unless I say otherwise, assume that while I’m in Quebec, all conversations happen in French. Yes, I am fluent, I barely have an accent.

“I have winter tires,” I replied. Their stunned silence gave me the time to take off my helmet and pull my passport from the inside breast pocket.

“Reason for your visit?” He took it and looked inside before scanning it.

Before you panic, it’s valid; it’s my actual passport. I have another one proclaiming me a Canadian citizen, also valid, and one that states I’m Mexican. These days, if I wanted to hide who I am, when entering Quebec, I’d claim to be Mexican. Until I can lose what’s left of my English accent when I speak French, claiming to be English Canadian will not make entering this province simple.

But I’m not hiding anything this time, so I can be who I am, and being able to speak French as an American actually puts the Quebequois on my side.

“Business,” I answer.

“Duration?”

“That I don’t know. I haven’t been told what the project is yet.”

“And what do you do?”

“Industrial Consulting,” I answer, reaching into another pocket, this one containing business cardholders. I feel the Braille on the lip for the right one and hand him the business card for Wyatt Orr, Industrial Design Consultant for Gold Design.

The company isn’t real, but the number connects to someone paid quite well to say that yes, I work for them. I’m a decent employee, and that I do mostly on-site consulting. The web address looks good enough, the woman managing it regularly complains she’s not supposed to be fielding quote requests.

“And what exactly does an Industrial Consultant do?”

A quick note, I’m sanitizing the dialogue. A few swear words might slip by, but just like I’m keeping the details of sex out of it, I’m keeping the language mostly clean. My family swears, a lot. I remember my fathers blushing at the level of swearing they heard when we came to Quebec fifteen years ago. The Quebecois do love their swearing.

“I go over blueprints, look for areas where they don’t meet code, and also where they can make their employee’s lives easier. Proper sized break rooms for the number of employees they have, have the restroom located in practical place from where they work, that kind of stuff.”

I’m not really a consultant, the company being fake should have given that away, but Wade’s gift means that I learn things easily. How do you think I learned French to this level? Or Braille? I read two dozen books on architecture and I know enough to bullshit my way through a conversation with most architect.

“You weren’t involve with our building, were you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t rate government work.” Which I don’t. A couple of incidents when I was nineteen that my fathers refused to have erased. Something about learning the consequence of my actions. Which is borderline hypocrisy if you know them.

“Do you have more than ten thousand dollar accessible via net-access?”

“I do.”

He didn’t even blink an eye.

“Weapons?”

“No.”

Word of advice, never try to be funny with a Custom Border Officer, like mentioning that yes officer, I have claws, and I’m trained in eight martial arts. I’d say that keeping that quiet is a good idea at any border, but especially the Quebec one. After the Alma protest resulted in twenty-eight injured due to claws, Quebec has been fighting to get declawing laws on the books. The Federal Government is doing all they can to stop it, but Quebec has a history of not caring what the rest of Canada wants. I mean, it’s not like Canada was okay with them removing English from their official language charter.

Yes, if you can’t read French in Quebec, you are kind of in trouble.

“You have two days to call to let us know when you’ll be leaving the country.” He hands me my passport and card, along with another card with a number on it.

“Will do officer.” I put them away and put my helmet back on, then I’m riding again.

I bypass Montreal entirely. I don’t need to bring up the routing program to know the roads in the city are a mess. They’ve always been a mess. Fifteen years ago, it took my family six hours to go from one end of it to the other on the national interstate. That is six hours to travel less than a hundred kilometers.

That sixty miles for those of you adamant about sticking to the antique system.

Now, we enjoyed it, but that was because it was all of us in the vehicle. I’m traveling alone and on a bike, I can’t really have the fun I did back then.

No one has been able to prove this, but I agree with those who claim magic is being used to let you enter the city, but make it as difficult as possible to leave it. I’m telling you, only magic can be responsible for the cluster fuck that is Montreal’s roadways.

I grab the 30 east and stay on it. I could take the 20, and if my plan was to make a straight line to Quebec City, I would; but they aren’t expecting me, so I can make a detour to a small town I went to the last time I was here. 

The 30 connects to the 55 at the bridge to cross the St-Laurence, it keeps going past it toward Quebec City, but it turns in to a two-lane road at Leclercville, and it follows the shore, making it a longer trip than it needs to. It’s a touristic route rather than a business one.

Crossing the bridge to the north shore puts me into Trois-Rivieres, fourth largest city in the province that felt like a small town the last time I was here, and driving through it now, still feels the same.

I get a room at a hotel outside downtown proper. If you ever want an experience, walk through the downtown area during the holidays; the lights are amazing. In the summer, they have multiple music festivals, but I’ve never attended one of them so I can’t speak to the quality, check the online reviews. Trois-Rivieres is a city for the arts.

But that’s not why I’m stopping here. I have Albert’s gift for the arts, but no passion for it. Which, considering my comment to him the other night about artists being emotional, has got to be ironic.

No, I’m here because of a small gay club I went to the last time. That six-hour delay in Montreal meant we had to spend the night in Trois-Rivieres, and while my brothers and fathers caused a ruckus at the larger clubs, I walked around the city, and yes, it was during the holidays. We ended up spending three days here. Even that gang ended up enjoying the holiday lights.

Adam drives back every few years just for them, and the guys.

So, if it wasn’t clear yet, let me state it. My family is sexual, very much so. We have very few hang-ups and some of the things the others get up to sickens even me. So now you have an idea why I’m not giving details.

Now, it’s not by choice that we engage in more sex in a week than you’ll probably see in a year. Our god is one of Male vitality and potency so we need it. So much so that there’s a failsafe built into us that if we try to abstain, we will draw men to us for it. Trust me, it’s not something that ever kicks in unless we’re tied down to a bed for like weeks at a time. Of course then it’s not fun when your asshole brothers intercept all the men you’re drawing and have fun with them.

That was not a fun time for me, let me tell you.

So the club, yeah, the name doesn’t really mean anything if I translate it, So I’m going to call it Rail Roaded, on account of the disused railroad station sitting across the road from it, and I just like how that sounds.

It’s still here and looks the same. It’s three stories, with the ground floor a bar. The clientele looks to be the age my fathers actually are. They look in my direction and go back to their drinks and discussion. The music from upstairs registers as a reverberation in my bones and nothing else.

I like clubs in small towns, there’s an eclecticness to them you don’t find in clubs in larger cities, where they can have enough club each one caters to a specific subgroup. Small town will only have the one club so everyone goes there, or, in the case of one town in Arizona, the one club there is only gay two night a week. Now that was a lively club.

I put the sound dampeners in my ears before opening the door to the upstairs club. As soon as I open the door, my bones rattle at the strength of the base. The club is mostly as I remember it. One dance floor in the center, a bar at the back. The music booth on a platform at what would be the third floor, with a balcony going around with tables on it.

The people in the club, those have changed, and that was the indication that, as much as the city felt like a small town, it no longer was one. The crowd was young, mid-twenties at most. I didn’t often felt old. I did that evening. I thought my plans for an evening of dancing and sex was sunk, unless I located one of the other clubs, but before I could reach the bar, I’d been pulled on the dance floor by a twenty-something poodle.

Like everyone in my family, I have a type.

Unlike all of them, for whom that type is defined by physical characteristic, my type is a guy I can connect with. It’s an empathy thing. Now, I can take any guy to bed, and I’m going to have fun, there’s just something special about connecting with the right one.

Having said that, you probably think that coming to a club where I need sound dampener to remain sane defeat the purpose. Conversation is usually expected to figure out if you connect with someone, right? And you are correct, but dancing isn’t the only thing I do. Eventually the guy I’m dancing with runs out of energy and we grab a drink. If we’re lucky, we find a table on the balcony where the sound dampeners there keep the music at a reasonable level so we can talk. If we’re not, we talk and drink standing up.

On top of a type, I have rules.

No one drunk. If I want a guy who can’t think straight in my bed, I can cause that myself, and at least that way I know what to expect. Drunks are horrible, especially since it’s almost impossible for me to get a proper read on someone drunk; their emotions are all over the place because of the alcohol. 

Or high, no one on drugs, not even pot.

No sex in public. That one’s more flexible than it should be. My family and I have this thing about living dangerously. No matter how careful we try to be, we’ll do something stupid, more times than not it involves sex. So I try to keep public sex to places where I won’t get the other guy into too much trouble if we’re caught.

Nothing nasty. I have enough trouble keeping my depression under control with my normal life, I’m not going to add BDSM stuff to it, no matter how often Dominic tells me how cathartic it is.

So yeah, at about midnight I connected with this guy, early twenties, a wolf, not muscular, but in shape. He kept up with me on the dance floor longer than most. He claimed to be a computer engineer, and he knew enough I put him as a university sophomore. He was funny, passionate about his subject and loved corny comedies.

I lost myself into the conversation, into him.

No, I’m not in love with him, I’m not wired that way, but this is probably the closest anyone in my family comes to it. By two am we were walking around the city. He pointed out things he founds interesting about where he lived. The pier, where he told his best friend he was in love with him. They tried to make it work, but ultimately, his friend was straight. The cafe where the owner gave him free coffees in exchange for quickies in the back. The owner was close to seventy. The bakery where he worked every summer, and could usually count on hooking up with a guy a few times a week.

By four am, we were in my hotel room, and I spent the next ten hours showing him what I’m passionate about.

Maybe Albert is right after all; maybe I am an artist too.