A Chronicle from Sarnia

After I crossed the bridge into Canada, they asked me a few questions.

“What’s your business in Canada?”

“I’m seeing a concert with friends!”

“What concert?”

“It’s for a band called Saoirse Dream¹, my friends are actually in the band.”

“Where’s the concert?”

“Um… I don’t remember the name of the venue, but I think it’s on… Queen… Street… West?”

“Huh. Could be a lot of places. Enjoy your time in Canada.”

I pulled up to the Immigration and Customs lot where officers were waiting to search my car, or so I thought. They waved me into a spot and I promptly shut the vehicle off, leaving me to awkwardly open the door when I probably should have just rolled down the window.

“Where’s your orange slip?”

“Oh, I don’t have one.”

“What did they tell you?”

“Uh, ‘enjoy your time in Canada’?”

“Oh, you don’t need to be here. Just follow the lines and it’ll loop you back onto the highway.”

And onto the highway I went.

God, I love going 130.

Okay, I’ll admit it was km/h and not mph, but still. For the next three hours I was cruising across Ontario. I had no internet, no cell data, just the local radio and a pre-loaded map. It was blissful. And the local radio was broadcasting pure wisdom.

“LCBO [the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, I would later find out] has just ended the sale of all American alcohol. As they should! Elbows up, Canada!”

I was crossing the border the same day that American tariffs were supposed to hit. In the perverse way so many Americans on the left fantasize about Canada, I was also hopeful Canada would feel better than the U.S. I was leaving behind. Being in another country always makes me feel different--the defamiliarization gets me out of my head and it’s refreshing.

My brain was still set to that eyes-open, high-absorption frequency when I arrived at the venue, a vintage resale that priced everything by the pound (or by the item, whichever way is cheaper). The crew was setting up inside, but people were gathering in the lot. Even though I had printed out setlists and CAD merch prices to deliver to the band inside, I loitered with everyone outside. There was a great wall of glass that fed us warm light from inside. I knew through that glass wall someone would see me when they needed me, and they would fetch me when they needed me. For now, they seemed busy enough with sound check or mic check or whatever other set-up--the venue was usually a resale shop where you bought by the pound (or by the item, if you thought it’d be cheaper) so they had pushed things back and set up a fence to create a cozy music nest up front.

Outside, people clustered in groups to pass around cigarettes and stories. I don’t smoke and I wasn’t sure I had enough to butt into an existing conversation, so I approached a fellow straggler standing alone. Let’s call him Ricky².

“Have you been to this venue before?”

“No, I haven’t. Actually, it was hard to find, kinda.” He wore a big white jacket that had been written on all over with paint markers. He had a curly head of hair and a slightly frenetic vibe about him. He was smoking a joint all by himself. “It looks sick, though! Everything by the pound? Super cool.”

I agreed with him about the coolness and also the difficulty of finding the venue. (I had had to circle the block a couple times to understand which warehouse was hip enough to hold a hyperpop concert, and it didn’t help that the wrong address had been posted online.) Then, I found out this was the band’s Number One Fan. His Spotify wrapped put him in the top .01% of Saoirse Dream listeners. Once he found out I was vaguely ‘with the band,’ he asked how the miracle of this concert had befallen him.

“So since you have kind of a behind-the-scenes knowledge, I gotta know, why Toronto?” I was befuddled. Isn’t Toronto, like, the biggest city in Canada? I told him as such, with enthusiasm. He was just as befuddled and even more enthusiastic.

“I have no idea, man,” he told me, “I have never been out of Canada in my life. I have never been out of Toronto in my life, except for one time I visited my cousins in Nova Scotia. When I heard Saoirse Dream would be here, I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘How is this possible? Did I do this somehow?’”

That last part has really stuck with me. I’ve been a fan before, and I’ve felt that feeling. When you’re out in the audience and the band does something cool and you’re cheering or singing along or crying, it feels like you’re part of one greater organism with the band at its head. I imagine that feeling is even more intense for smaller artists and their fans, especially when the music is about being trans and figuring out how to build a magical life in an otherwise pretty grim landscape. Saoirse Dream has been thinking a lot about magic, and Ricky felt that magic. Saoirse Dream was Ricky’s fairy godmother, and she was real and she had appeared on the windowsill to save the day. (At one point during the set, the lead singer of Saoirse Dream would ask out into the audience for some water. I was conveniently located near the orange Igloo on the bar and poured her a cup. Ricky, though, asked to carry it over, to hand it off to the lead singer, in hopes of meeting the Saoirse of his dreams. “Thanks for letting me have this one, man,” he told me. “Go give her her water!” was all I said back.)

After we all started milling into the building for the show’s actual start, I got a better look at the crowd. It was a good group: there were so many proud trans people, so many hot goths and punks, and a good handful of furries (often overlapping with the other two categories). People seemed extremely free and comfortable with one another, even though it seemed like most people were strangers. Still, they threw their jackets on the side of the room and left them there. People were enjoying the music however they wanted to, too. At one point I saw someone pull out a Kindle Paperwhite (notably not an iPad) and read a book in the middle of the show. Before things really got kicked off I overheard this conversation:

Audience 1: *puts in their earbuds*

Audience 2: Oh! That’s so smart.

Audience 1: I know, it makes it so much more enjoyable for me. Do you want a pair? I think I have an extra.

Audience 2: No, I brought my own! You just reminded me to put them on.

Some people danced, some people stood against the wall, and some people stood outside for most of the night, but everyone enjoyed themselves and the environment the music created. There were three sets that night and each one had, quite frankly, a radically different vibe from the last. The first performer had a DJ setup and mixed the range from Nine Inch Nails to kid’s pop. Then, Saoirse Dream took the stage and did a live version of hyperpop, with a lot more bass and drums than you can normally hear on the tracks. We finished the night out with a screamo band (outside, a few people lovingly called the genre ‘creamo’). The common denominator was transness, not genre. This seemed to be the key to the crowd, too. Not that everyone was trans, of course, but everyone seemed at home with the messages that came from trans community here: Sometimes you have to figure yourself out in ways that don’t make sense to other people. You need to look out for each other in case the government doesn’t. Things can be really hard and ugly and yet beautiful and life-improving at the same time.

Between sets I went back outside, as did most people. I ended up in conversation with Toni. Toni was tall with dirty blonde hair and an outfit that really caught my eye (coveralls with a jacket and rubber boots). Toni smoked a cigarette in an ornate little cigarette holder, and enlightened me on the habit when we had finished other small talk about the show.

“I love smoking. I love Diet Coke, too. But I’ve been trying to cut back.”

“Ugh, I love Diet Coke, too.” I had a Diet Canada Dry under my arm--when in Rome, I figured.

“But I’ve been trying to cut back, so I alternate between the two. On a day where I smoke, I can’t drink Diet Coke. If I drink Diet Coke on a day, I don’t smoke that day.”

“Whoa, so do you do one day smoking then one day Diet Coke then one day smoking?”

Toni shook her head, inhaling then exhaling, and explained. “I don’t strictly alternate. Most days I just smoke.”

“You know,” I started over-explaining, “I read that smoking increases your caffeine tolerance. So you’ve really got it figured out--if you were doing both at once you wouldn’t even be getting the full rush anyways.”

Toni pondered this, eyes narrowed, head nodding, smoke steaming out of her mouth. Did I say something stupid? Had I pointed out a profound truth about the universe? I couldn’t tell.

Suddenly, in one smooth motion, Toni loosened her jacket off her shoulders, lifted it up, and pushed her neck to the side. The new posture reminded me a lot of a scarecrow, actually.

“This jacket is from the TTC,” she told me. I gathered that I was supposed to be looking at the tag in the jacket as a mark of authenticity. I looked at it, but to be honest, I didn’t know what the TTC was and I could hardly make out anything in the dim parking-lot lighting. Still, though, I made noises of appropriate admiration. (I later found out that TTC is the Toronto Transit Commission, and I do find this genuinely impressive.)

After the show, we stuck around to take things down and pack stuff up. The hijinks of the night were only getting started. There was still Pizza Pizza to be eaten and Scott Pilgrim scenes to be recreated. We galavanted until the wee hours of the morning, and then at a reasonable 9:30 AM we parted ways again. The band was headed onto Montreal and I was headed back to Michigan.

At the border, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent treated me like I had an attitude before I even opened my mouth. He tried to catch me in lies I hadn’t told. We talked shockingly fast, the way you’d answer rehearsed questions, but I had no idea what he was going to ask me.

“Where’s home?”

“Xxxxx, Michigan.”

“So this car isn’t yours?”

“No, the car is mine. I have an out of state license plate because I’m a student at the University.”

“What do you study?”

“Linguistics.”

“What language?”

“Arabic.”

He paused. He eyed me with further suspicion. I was too tired for this. I was too hungry for this, too--it was Ramadan and I had decided to fast in solidarity with my friends. I wasn’t planning on telling that to my Border officer, though.

“What year in school are you?”

“I’m actually a graduate student.”

This was a relief to him.

“Ah, okay, ‘cause it’s kind of weird for a White person to be learning Arabic.”

Then he told me how much he, a White person, had struggled with learning Arabic. You know, back when he was in the military. But he learned a lot about Farsi, “a type of Arabic.” He was really wrong about that but, for some reason, I let him be wrong. In exchange, he let me go without searching my car or even looking at the registration.

So much for my suspicious attitude.