Thursday
Flying to Vancouver to marry another man under a full moon in October was either folly or inspiration, only time would tell, but after 22 years of submitting to each other’s ardent thrustings, Bobby proposed and I accepted, what the hell. We had tried to get married in Amsterdam in 2001, but they required one partner to be Dutch. No dice. Now Canada, or precisely Ontario and British Columbia provinces, will marry any two souls at least 19 years old regardless of origin, citizenship, or perceived genital preference, and Bobby said, “Let’s do it right away, before they change their minds.”

“What’s the point?” said B’s 87-year-old father in remarking that such matrimony would be unrecognized in these United States, but you know what, we didn’t care a fig for that as we are only nominally citizens of any political structure, and given a choice would not be American.

And marriage, what’s the use of that, exactly? The merest peek at the divorce statistics informs that marriage is a legally tenuous position. I was married and divorced once, it was a mistake, we had a lovely son and needn’t have legalized the matter, but being married forced us to get divorced, and brother, that’s no picnic.

Friends even suggested that with our rap sheet of 22 years of monogamous domesticity—shit, we spent a week apart only three times in that span, and never had a lover’s spat lasted more than a single night in the guest bedroom before blubbering reconciliation, it might be a disastrous mistake to get married. A fatal blow. I was scared.

But he proposed and I said yes and so we flew Icarus Airlines to the frozen tundra in search of the legal high.

The taxi from Long Beach to LAX seemed to terrify my fiancé. He was trembling and blushing and coming down with SARS as the cholo driver hurtled through the carpool lane of the 405 as if bent on combustive impact. It was only two days after Governor Arnold overthrew the throne, and California was feverish.

The shoe-security man at the airport was incomprehensibly rude, a mean motherfucker, not content to search our bodies and bags but needed to accompany every sweep with a snarling insult. I wondered what he gained from such anger. There must be some motivation for that much resentment. Obviously, every passenger was innocent, but this guy acted like we were all potential Evil Scum of the Universe. Fortunately, after he advanced me to the upper echelons of security, the next taskmaster was a kindly 60-year-old Filipino gent with gray hair and a calm affect. “You’re clear!” he cheered, after looking into my pants.

O.K., now the truth comes out, we had free tickets. Almost. After spending countless thousands of dollars, we’d earned “miles” on Delta, but not exactly enough to avoid a nasty $143 charge for the extra—still a cheap fare for two heading to the altar. And the hotel was reasonable, $90 a night Canadian, which is, what, $70 American, who can ever keep track, but not a king’s ransom for a downtown location in a respectable early 20th-century landmark building renovated by a chain.

The wedding itself costs $100 for the license, which you can buy at convenient banks and insurance offices, $75 for the marriage commissioner’s fee—the person who does the ceremony—and $5.25 tax. You need two witnesses, who are not officially paid anything, but, if you’re from out of town, the marriage commissioner will line them up and it’s polite to give a tip. So, it’s like $200, $250 Canadian, and you’re legal. We bought lighthearted thank-you cards at the Sav-on Drugs in Long Beach and figured to stuff them with Canuck cash from the ATM at the Vancouver airport.

Because the seats were allegedly complimentary, we had to fly to Salt Lake City with a four-and-a-half-hour “layover,” suggestive but despairing. There, we learned the local youth are hunky, white, crewcut, dollboys, curiously sporting nametags as “Elder” this or that when they couldn’t have been more than 20. Unnh, unnh, unnh. It was unsettling to find ourselves suddenly plopped into a world without homeboys, bangers, slant-eyed gooks, working girls, gangstas, hos, pimps, or fruits—just toothy, all-American Mormon-type Thanksgiving Day turkeys.

At LAX I’d purchased a copy of Dennis Lehane’s novel, Mystic River, although I never read trashy crime fiction, because the book’s been made into a movie by Clint Eastwood that opened to stellar reviews and I’m in the movie business, specifically the matter of transforming my old book Famous Long Ago into a modern cinema epic from the studio that brought you Thirteen. So I was curious about how exactly a book becomes a movie and figured I’d better read the novel before seeing the film, although it was so scary and violent that now I’m not sure I want to see it acted onscreen.

The plane from Salt Lake to Vancouver was an afterthought, one of Delta’s out-of-wedlock children operated by SkyWest and NO alcoholic beverages excuuuse me, the stew looked like she’d about kill me when I asked for wine. But we landed in Vancouver around ten o’clock and after a minimal wave at customs, cabbed it swiftly in the raining October night to the heart of town—a room in the once-fashionable Hotel Georgia, across the street from the ornate city art museum and ten blocks away from the infamous Green Zone of cafés with names like New Amsterdam, Doobie Central, and Blunt Brothers.

The city was eerily quiet. Ten p.m. and nothing open. The whap whap whap of the cab tires on the rain-slickened streets. Oh, Christ, I’m starting to sound like Dennis Lehane. The bar, restaurant, and even room service were all closed for the night at the hotel. All we could do was sleep and dream. Tomorrow we’ll be married. Could it be? Could it really happen? Would it be an empty gesture, a trip to the moon, or a knife in the heart?....