I watched the hurricane pass from a small bedroom with a large window. The glass seemed thin, its panes trembling as the winds intensified. My two housemates and I sat along a low table in the living room. We drank and ate as the wind howled. I traced the storm’s trajectory along my computer screen with a single finger. A thousand pixels away, maybe.

The hurricane spun quickly up the Atlantic. I closed the thick wooden shutters, fearful a strong gust would make an easy example of the old glass. Now the three of us sat together, awestruck in precautionary candlelight. In the distance, an electrical transformer exploded, bathing our apartment in an intense light, first green, then yellow. It rained, hard, and there seemed to be no air, only wind. Police roared by as a nearby fence blew away, one piece at a time. Then the storm disappeared, but not without fantastic resistance.

The truth runs thicker, murkier, far more dismal than my own experience. As Hurricane Sandy bounded north from the deep Caribbean until dissipating near Canada, a tragic many lost their lives. Others were left homeless, stranded, or otherwise in need. A hamlet in Queens was burnt to nothing. Homes and storefronts were brutalized, roads and tunnels were flooded, and trees were obliterated. Infrastructure collapsed and still struggles a week later. Traces of this storm will exist for months, perhaps years.

It was an awful storm, a storm whose true wrath I can’t begin speak of.

I can speak of what I know, mostly from brief phone calls. The string of small towns which held host to my childhood, all along the New Jersey shoreline, were bullied and thrashed and mostly defeated. The boardwalk where my parents began their business — where I was born — was weathered into driftwood. A rollercoaster now sits in the Atlantic Ocean, a sad and useless skeleton. Across the shoreline, many homes have become shells, ideas, placeholders. Somewhere to sleep, in certain instances, though without much comfort.

Wounded, these people will recover.

Our city is a glorious orgy of things, most of all resilient. We’ve rebuilt, albeit expensively. We’ve rebounded slowly. On September 12, 2001, speeches were made atop rubble while I draped my suburban porch with an old American flag. We were strangers and neighbors, a chorus not of our choosing, and we were beautiful. I feel that now, again, a sense of calm and hope. New York City, in times of peril and strength, is an electric place.

My street in Brooklyn was left relatively unscathed. Two trees fell, one at each intersection, as if fencing us in. Such was the metaphor, feeling stranded without being so. I heard of people in dire situations, of neighborhoods underwater or at-risk. They were truly trapped, while I sat behind wood-shuttered windows and waited.

As Hurricane Sandy passed over our heaping metropolis, New Yorkers took to the internet to post offers of beds and couches, meals and safety. Many of my friends are among this improvised support system. I imagine these people didn’t have all that much: a few square feet, a bed, a bowl of soup, a handle of whiskey, an electrical outlet. I felt so close yet so far, in a little room with a big window.

Electric currents never stopped passing through the walls of that little room, a space on loan by two generous friends while I look for my own apartment. I had enough baked beans and peanut butter to last a few days. I was waiting for a paycheck, a critical document wasting away in a dark Midtown office. In waiting, I’d overdrafted my bank account $80 or so, but I was fine — fortunate, even. I had enough, a little bed and that window.

Which is why I wanted to see the dark city.

It was just after 7 p.m. I bundled up and headed west. I stopped at a little wine shop beneath a horrible condominium and wondered if my card would work. It did, so I packed away a bottle of Austrian wine, its screw-cap closure ideal for clandestine sipping. Fuel, of sorts. -$90. Onward.

Manhattan-bound, most people on the Brooklyn Bridge were walking toward me. I felt intrepid, perhaps a little stupid. Mostly, I just felt cold. My tweed blazer was the thickest coat I had, with big front pockets for a flashlight and my phone and, occasionally, that bottle. Slightly warmer. More confident.

Coming into Lower Manhattan was, at best, chilling. At worst, it was frightening. Everything disappears into darkness. City Hall was a grayed monolith, shadowed throughout. The only sound was a dull rumbling. Sometimes there was no sound. This, the financial capital of the world, was darkened beyond my most dire predictions. I loved and hated it. I took a piss on the steps to the courthouse. I kept my flashlight off and continued to walk north.

Chinatown was feat of pitch-black, a ghost town. The only signs of life buzzed across Canal Street, lit by frenzied headlights. I wagged my flashlight back and forth and ran across the street. Two cars barely paused for me. Old Police Headquarters loomed in the distance like an elegant yet gloomy silhouette. A man and woman stumbled across the sidewalk in Halloween attire, a burlesque singer and a clown. Drunk and laughing, they seemed horribly sordid given their surroundings. I smiled but quickened my pace.

A darkened patch lit up suddenly, exposing someone who had been walking ahead of me unnoticed. Come the next corner, they disappeared. I had been alone until then, save for the clown and some cops and the homeless, now more anonymous than ever before. Others began to emerge, whispering along the silent streets. Broadway was like Canal Street, only more dangerous and urgent. Walking up towards SoHo and through Nolita, those on the sidewalks kept a hurried pace. We were all strangers somehow allied, though free to appear and disappear with the simple flick of a switch.

In the city of shadows, it was hard to gauge someone’s purpose, intent, or destination. Some were home-bound. Others must have been like me, merely curious. The rest, I thought, could be looters or otherwise ill-intended. Exaggerated as it seemed, there was no way of knowing. I’ve heard stories. I was alone. I flicked my light back off, disappearing.

The bars along the Bowery and its side-street estuaries all seemed closed. The vast majority were. A handful remained open, lit modestly by tea lights. I presumed these places only accepted cash. If I had ten bucks, I would have indulged myself. Instead, I took a sip of my wine and trekked onward. A doorman nodded, as if to approve, from a dark lobby.

The trek had taken over two hours by the time I hit Union Square, or at least the dark open patch were Union Square is supposed to be. It was brighter there than elsewhere, sure, but only because the struggling electric company was down the block and each corner boasted a stainless steel trailer serving kebabs and lamb sandwiches. In lieu of skateboarders and drunks and commuters, Union Square was a hub of halal trucks. Unpredictably, they set up shop all across Lower Manhattan. Five bucks could get you a warm dinner until late along Prince Street, Duane, Hester, and at the base of each bridge.

Walking up Lexington, each street was slightly less empty than the last. More and more places were open, though not many. Some places — people, even — seemed unaware of the blackout. Again, not many. In the distance, there was light. Behind me, only shadows. Uptown wasn’t an oasis, just somewhere different. I continued through the 20s, just shy of the border. It felt foreign. I had become acquainted with the dark, with the huddled masses and the candles, the thrill, the simplicity. I took a photograph, then retreating back towards the darkened city I’d grown familiar with. I was out of town when those earlier blackouts hit, and was bizarrely jealous that everyone else got to experience it. Blacked-out New York seemed exciting because it was different, an adventure. Now I was there, drinking some wine on Astor Place and pissing where I pleased, invisible. I looked up at a candlelit window, wondering what the people inside were doing. It was almost midnight. Just like when I stepped foot into the dark of Manhattan, I didn’t know how I felt. I loved it. I hated it.

I left the new New York and came home, closed my shutters, and slept. Like everyone else, I woke to sunlight. Eight million people, alive with light. At least we have that in common.

We have one more thing in common here: the city itself. New York City is, to begin with, confused. It’s expensive and abrasive, harsh and fast. It is a city of the glamorous, geniuses, motherfuckers, and delinquents. It is unique, beautiful, and it is suffering.

But New York recovers as it suffers.

Soon, the water will recede and power will return. Homes will be rebuilt and trees replanted, our hurried pace restored. We will take the subway and complain; we’ll pay bills and get drunk and forget, a little bit, because forgetting is a part of moving on. But there will always be a reminder, through things new and repaired, through photographs shared and stories told.

The truth is, I love New York no more or less than I did last week. I won’t feel any different next week, either. Nothing has changed here but everything, and we’re accustomed to that. I don’t write this because I feel different. I write this because I feel the same.

I love this city.

In retrospect, I understand why my French friends gave me a weird look when I told them I’d been to Béziers one weekend this winter. Unless you’re going in August for the Feria de Béziers, the bullfighting festival, people don’t really go to Béziers.

The town sits on a bluff over the Orb River in France’s poorest region, the Languedoc-Roussillon, about an hour west of where I’d been living, in Montpellier. With only 70,000 residents, Béziers is much smaller than Montpellier — and also much worse off. Its population declined steadily from the mid-’70s until about five or six years ago, when the growth of the rest of the Languedoc-Roussillon — which has twice the growth rate as everywhere else in France — finally trickled down to Béziers.

But its years of population decline still show. When some friends and I drove into the city center at lunchtime, it was eerily quiet. The streets were empty and it seemed like the shops were all closed, even the brasseries. My wife and I had never been anywhere in France where you couldn’t find a café or a glass of wine at midday, and we’d planned on having both with lunch.

But seeing nowhere to get them, we decided to hold off on drinks and head straight for the city’s main attraction, the thirteenth-century Béziers Cathedral.

Part of what drew me to Béziers, I confess, was its troubled history. Like any ancient city, horrible things have happened there. But the worst by far was the massacre of 1209. Back then, Béziers was a stronghold of Catharism, which the Catholic Church considered a heresy. The Pope declared a crusade to eliminate it, and nobleman from the north of France assembled a crusader army and headed for Béziers and the Languedoc.

Once the crusaders were encamped outside the city, there was a debate about how to tell the faithful Catholics from the heretical Cathars once the fighting began. According to legend, the commander said, “Kill them all, let God sort them out,” or something close to it. And that’s exactly what they did.

The residents of Béziers, Catholics and Cathars alike, took refuge in the city’s churches, including the cathedral of Saint Nazaire (now Béziers Cathedral). The crusaders barred the doors of the church and set it on fire, and everyone inside burned to death. Then, they sacked and burned the city, slaughtering everyone else. It doesn’t get much worse than that.

When we got to the cathedral it was closed. A handwritten sign on the door said it would open at 2 p.m. so we decided to try the nearby Church of the Madeleine. It was also closed, due to the cold weather. We then found the very old and neglected Saint-Aphrodise Church nearby, which appeared to be crumbling. Large steel braces held up the exterior walls, and it looked like it hadn’t been open for a very long time.

By then it was 2 p.m. and we went back to the cathedral, assuming it would be open. It wasn’t. A few other people were standing around in the cold waiting for someone to open the doors. None of them knew why the church was closed. While the others took in the scenic view of the Orb and the surrounding countryside, I wandered around to the other side of the church in search of another entrance, but instead stumbled upon the fifteenth-century cloisters. If we can’t get into the cathedral, I thought, at least we can enjoy this. I waved them over and we went in.

One advantage of living in a less-traveled corner of France is that you can easily visit some of the oldest sites in the country without fighting big crowds. To tour the Languedoc-Roussillon, especially in the off-season, is generally to be one of a small handful of visitors at a medieval church or a Roman ruin. Sometimes, you’re the only person there.

The most surprising thing about these places, though, is not that they are off the beaten path but that so many of them have been neglected and vandalized. Throughout southern France, gravel parking lots and faded plaques are sometimes the only markers you’ll see of an ancient church or monument, many of which are defaced with graffiti and crumbling to pieces.

That’s what we found in the cloisters of Béziers Cathedral. The building dates from the thirteenth century and sits on the ruins of the church that was destroyed in the massacre of 1209. Fragments of the original church are embedded in the walls of the cloisters, while others are unceremoniously stacked in the corners and leaning against walls.

Most of these artifacts, along with the stones, columns, and arches of the cloisters themselves, have been horribly vandalized. Graffiti isn’t spray-painted here like it is everywhere else in Béziers, it’s scratched into the stones. That’s how I know “R.S.” was standing in front of a particular medieval tablet there on March 19, 2011.

Looking around, it wasn’t hard to see how this happened. A bunch of teenagers and vagrants were in there, smoking cigarettes and staring at us. They weren’t there for the architecture or the history; they were there because it was a place to hang out and mess around with shit.

Appalled and confused, we decided to forget about the cathedral and find Béziers’ Roman arena. We followed signs for it down a steep set of stairs, past a door that read “attention, chien méchant” (vicious dog), and wandered into Saint-Jacques, which turns out is a pretty rough neighborhood.

But we weren’t about to give up on the Roman arena just because the streets suddenly seemed dirty and menacing. We kept following signs for the arène romaine and soon realized they were leading us in a circle. The arena was right next to us, on the other side of some dilapidated apartment buildings, but there was no apparent entrance.

Determined to find a way in, we walked down a small hill and around a corner, where we found several haphazardly parked police cars and a group of cops engaged in lively discussion with some neighborhood residents. At that point we all decided it would be best to move along, away from whatever trouble was brewing in Saint-Jacques that day.

After a block or so, I noticed a man following us. When I turned around to get a look at him, he pretended to go into a building, slowly putting his hand on the nearest door. When I looked back a few seconds later, he was still following us.

I told the others what was going on and we decided to just get out of Béziers altogether. The churches were all closed, and the Roman arena, if it were really there, was buried in a ghetto and lost to history.

In America, when we think of our rust belt cities — Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland — we think of steel mills and factories closing down in the ‘70s and ‘80s, leaving behind industrial blight, shuttered buildings, and vacant lots. Having lived in Philadelphia and also further north in the rust belt par excellence of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, I know first-hand that the legacy of those rough decades is alive and well, and that our rust belt continues to struggle with unemployment, crime, and spectacular decay.

But the difference between our rust belt and France’s is that our cities are fighting back against what happened thirty, forty years ago. Photos of Detroit’s decline make for good slideshows, but what’s more revealing is that “>Detroit and a bunch of other rust belt cities are becoming destinations for young entrepreneurs and artists, who see a chance to remake and rebuild and create something new out of the old and broken. While they still face huge problems, these places don’t have a pervasive sense of societal malaise and cultural torpor — they have a renewed sense of energy and determination. They haven’t given up.

That’s not happening in the south of France. There is no movement of aspiring entrepreneurs and artists working to revive urban centers. The brightest and most ambitious young people you meet in the Languedoc-Roussillon want to get out, to Paris or London or somewhere in the United States. You don’t get a sense that anyone is fighting back against decline, but that the next generation is instead languishing in a rust belt of depressed cities.

Béziers is not a microcosm of France. But having lived and traveled in the Languedoc-Roussillon, the ruinous state of that city strikes me as a sign and a symbol of things to come. Although the rest of France has fared better than Béziers, as a whole France seems like a country that’s come out on the wrong side of history, whose future has somehow been snatched away.

Dostoyevsky famously said that you could judge the degree of civilization in a society by entering its prisons, and something similar is true about observing the poorest parts of a country. You can tell something’s gone wrong in France by entering its most troubled cities in its most troubled region, the Languedoc-Roussillon, where pervasive neglect and urban decay confront you at every turn, and headlines about the economic crisis are manifested in the shocking number of homeless and jobless people you meet.

The defaced monuments and crumbling landscapes of cities like Béziers reflect more than just a permissive European attitude about vandalism and graffiti. France’s problems run deeper; their roots are societal and cultural, and top-down government schemes to reverse the country’s waning cultural influence don’t seem to be working. Small cities in France are shrinking, even as the ghettoized suburban banlieues, where youth unemployment tops out at 40 percent, continue to grow.

It’s easy to think of France as a prosperous, cosmopolitan center of culture when you’re strolling the banks of the Seine in Paris or sipping wine in a Bordeaux vineyard. But life down in the Languedoc-Roussillon, where the unemployment rate is highest, doesn’t fit the stereotype.

From this vantage point, France looks more like another sick man of Europe, like its neighbors to the east and west who are teetering on the brink. The difference is that France was always supposed to be one of the economic and cultural cornerstones of Europe, one of the pillars of the continent. But standing on the blighted, empty streets of Béziers, you can’t help but feel like you’re looking at the future of France, and all of Europe, whose citizens are living in the ruins of a waning culture.

Read part one

When we regrouped after splitting up an hour earlier in the Toronto Music Garden, Coe had an important announcement to make. Our helplessness might finally end: He found a full rack of rental bikes. So maybe, just maybe, something could pan out for us. We were three miles south from wherever we were supposedly meeting Jess that night. Nobody wanted to walk that far anymore. So we put our credit cards through the kiosk to rent bikes and then pedaled 16 blocks north on Spadina Avenue.

After turning down a street of dingy warehouses, we found Bellevue Square, a scrappy, little park that looked like Kensington Market’s drug-addled little brother. Bastardized hippies. Mangy dirt patches. Sleeping homeless men. Possibly dead homeless men. A rental rack for our bikes sat in the park’s southwest corner. But, of course, it didn’t have enough available spaces for all seven of us to lock up and abandon our rentals. If we had access to that app, we could have checked in advance. But no. Three of us had to pedal halfway back the way we came, just hoping that the nearest bike rack on the hardcopy map at Bellevue had enough spaces for us. Surprisingly, it did. But that was the last thing that went remotely well all day.

Meeting back at Bellevue near Kensington Market, the seven of us decided to split up to search for dinner. The place appeared to be full of bars and restaurants when we walked through hours earlier, so we assumed that it was going to be crowded shoulder-to- shoulder.But when we returned, most of the shops had pulled down their metal gates. The Canadians’ sole recommendation was now virtually empty aside from a few people who looked like they hadn’t had anywhere to be since 1992. The only restaurant open was a mediocre burrito shop that Bunge — the only one of us living near the Mexican border — declared disgusting. Coe, who had been a cancer researcher since college, said, Fuck it, and walked outside to bum a cigarette from somebody. He started a conversation with a girl in a green hoodie, hoping that she might give some coherent suggestions for our night. She was pale and extremely frail. She looked like she’d been hiding in her hoodie for months. Her speech stopped and stuttered. Coe couldn’t figure out if it was because she didn’t speak English or if it was just because she’d taken way too many drugs. When Coe asked her what we should do, she pointed behind him and said, “You could hang out at the burrito shop.” Jesus Christ.

At that point, the four of us were so incredibly fed up with the fact that absolutely nothing was going well that we decided to buy some beers and drink them in Bellevue Square. But we couldn’t even do that right. We spent 25 minutes looking for a liquor store, asking locals where the nearest one was, but most of them acted like they’d never been to a liquor store in their lives. When we finally found a liquor store — or more accurately, a beer store, because they didn’t sell liquor — the place was unlike anything we’d seen in the States. The store’s full selection was listed on a giant white wall, like arrival times at a train station. Beer labels were pasted to a board with individual prices beneath each. All of it was incredibly expensive. And we no longer had the old-fashioned sense to just vocally ask for directions on how it all worked, or even for recommendations on what was worth the price.

We stepped up to the counter and ordered the cheapest beer they stocked: Sleeman’s, which we knew nothing about beforehand. The sign next to the Sleeman’s label curiously said that the beer came in 12, 18, 24, and 30 packs. Thirty. Why not? And it’d obviously come in lightweight cans because we’d never seen 30-packs of bottles. The beer rolled out to us on a long conveyor belt and we suddenly saw that we’d just bought 30 heavy bottles. Awkwardly hauling these things six blocks back to the park, we expected the rest of our party to greet us with wreaths and bouquets of flowers. Maybe some ecstatic cheers. But they glared at us with angry disbelief. Mitchell had that perfect scowl where he wasn’t exactly angry, but he was sure as hell disappointed in all of us.
“What took you guys so long?” they asked. “And why do you have 30 bottles of beer?”

“We thought you guys were getting food at the same time as us.”

“No, we were going to go in short shifts.”

A massive miscommunication that phones couldn’t have even saved us from at that point. We couldn’t even communicate one-on-one anymore. We didn’t even apologize because we were certain that we’d agreed to all get food and come back to this park at the same time. And they were absolutely certain in their own recollections. The two factions looked incredibly irate with one another — except for Seth, who’d managed an absurd coup while we wasted daylight in the market.

Now, none of us are exactly the types of men who walk up to random strangers, asking them in broad daylight if they know where to buy marijuana. But after an hour or so of being abandoned in that park, having no idea if we were ever going to return from dinner, Seth let himself be that kind of guy.

Walking up to a pair of young men working under a car’s hood, Seth nervously asked, “Hey, um, so, uh, do you guys know where to get… marijuana?”

“Are you a cop?” the guy quickly asked, sizing Seth up from head to toe. Then the man smiled. “I’m just jokin’ ya. I know ya aren’t a cop.” And he laughed this mad little teehee of a laugh. “You see that white Rastafarian over there?” He pointed across the park at a white Rastafarian.

“Uh, yeah,” Seth said.

“He’s got you.”

So Seth walked across the park until he penetrated the inner sanctum of this white Rastafarian. The man wore all-white clothes and ratty, blond dreadlocks. A drum circle played nearby. Then one of the Rastafarian’s minions rose his arm over Seth, snapped his fingers, and pointed down at him as if announcing one of the king’s subjects.

“Here’s how it’s going to go down,” the Rastafarian said. “You’re going to go into that public bathroom over there. Wait five minutes. Then this guy here will come in and make the exchange. Don’t worry. He’s not going to jump you.”

Judging by the drum circle, Seth decided to take his chances. Though when he walked into the bathroom, he didn’t know what to do for five minutes. The place was disgusting. Somebody had unflushable diarrhea earlier — unflushable because it was on the floor and spread across the walls. Seth didn’t need to use the urinal, so he nonchalantly washed his hands for five minutes. When the dealer finally showed up, he didn’t have correct change for Seth. So the guy told Seth to wait at a park bench nearby, and he’d bring back change. And with this being a particularly upstanding Canadian drug dealer, he actually returned with Seth’s change.

Finally regrouping with Seth and a very hungry Vince and Mitchell, the three of them made some sarcastic comments about taking their time with dinner and didn’t give us a real hour that they’d return. So Bunge, Coe, Compton, and I sat on two park benches with 30 beers hiding beneath us, not knowing when they’d return, and not knowing what we’d do with 30 bottles of beer between the four of us. Bunge didn’t care anymore. Coe didn’t care anymore. Compton and I didn’t care anymore. Bunge pulled some newspaper off of the ground and wrapped it around a bottle like a cheap floral bouquet. It’d have to do in place of a brown bag. All of us made our own newspaper arrangements and drank as children played at the playground beside us. A police car circled the park every ten minutes. But what actually put us ill-at-ease was that when we uncapped these beers, we quickly learned that Sleeman’s is disturbingly bad, as if we couldn’t have gathered that from the name alone. It was sour and metallic. If mercury has a taste, it’s likely Sleeman’s. But we had 30 bottles to get rid of, and we paid a lot of money for it, so we began slamming it as fast as possible. Bottle after bottle. Which was incredibly hard to do, because it was like drinking muskrat piss out of a cow’s udder.

While we were choking down these beers, the other three were getting wrapped up in their own precarious situations with Seth’s weed: Just to spite the four of us, as they admitted long after the trip ended, they decided to abandon us for as long as possible by hunkering down in a marijuana bar near the park. It wasn’t one of those cheery, New Age bud bars you hear about in Denver or L.A. The place was virtually empty aside from a couple flimsy tables and red-eyed 18-year-olds. A semi-comatose DJ spun dub step under low lights. The guy behind the counter looked like he didn’t know whether any of this was legal. Mitchell said he thought he was going to get mugged the entire time. “But it was a risk I was more than willing to take at that point of the day.” In fact, the incredibly lax oversight of marijuana laws in Toronto allowed our guys to smoke their street-bought weed on a back patio.

When they finally returned after dark — they were true to their word in taking their time — they looked none-too-happy about having to finish these beers off before we went anywhere else.

“We didn’t tell you to buy this shit.”

But we did. More than $45 for 30 of the worst beers in Canada. For the rest of the night, I thought I was going to vomit. Not because I was drunk, but because this stuff twisted my stomach into sailor knots.

After polishing off 360 ounces of beer, we anxiously turned to the public bathroom only to find that it was now locked for the night. So every single one of us was waddling through this neighborhood, looking for a place to piss. Between cars. Against houses. Crouching behind bushes. Nearly unzipping in front of people taking out their trash. That block glistened in our Sleeman’s piss.

When we finally did meet up with Jess again at a restaurant on College Street, there was a palpable hostility between us. The exciting energies of a friendly road trip had turned into angry, spiteful energies.

We got a table in back while Jess finished up dinner with her boss — a woman who upon seeing us seven men seemed to second-guess why she employed Jess. We did not look good: unwashed, shifty-eyed, reeking of cheap booze. We were not the usual, good-humored group of men, kicking back with beers after a successful day of exploring. Most of us were quiet, tired, looking at each other with suspicion. We didn’t quite trust each other anymore. We all knew the day was a tremendous failure. And we all seemed to blame one another for it. How could we be so stupid to have not planned ahead for this? It was everybody else’s fault. And I felt more ill as time passed, making me grimace and sneer at the people around me. I sat at the head of the table, not wanting to say a word. The stereo system played mind-numbingly loud music above us — strange, Canadian alt-rock that sounded trapped in 1997. It was nearly impossible to hear each other without yelling. Then Bunge, being too fed up with all of us idiots throughout the day, leered at me and said, “You should move down to the end of the table so that Jess can sit there.”

“What? Why?”

“So it’s easier for everybody to talk to her over the music.”

But I stared back, dumbfounded, feeling like the Sleeman’s was tearing apart my stomach.

“No,” I said. “I’m not moving right now.”

He began getting agitated with me, or even more so with the day. He’d traveled in a conversion van with us for a very long time at that point. He wanted to hear new voices. But I could not give a shit. My stomach squeezed together and ate itself. The only thing that could get me to move was if I puked on myself.

When Jess and her boss did join us, they sat at the far end of the table, far, far from Bunge’s ears: He looked like he was about to flip out at me. Feeling malicious by that time of the day, I just laughed at him as he squeezed out of the booth and moved down toward them. He eyed me like just I shit on his lawn. Things were not going well. But as Vince quickly found out by sitting next to her, Jess’s boss was completely incapable of saying anything remotely interesting. So half of the table was consumed in silence as terrible music blared through the stereo while the other half of the table was consumed in terrible conversation. It didn’t matter. Each half eyed the other half with annoyed envy.

“Hey,” Seth said to me, looking for any sort of reprieve. “Do you want to smoke this joint?”

I still felt like I might vomit. But to hell with it. I was going to smoke that goddamn joint out on the street. Maybe it’d at least make me puke up that awful Sleeman’s jumbling around in my stomach. And by the time we got outside, I had a monstrous headache. The beer had already given me a hangover. Seth and I smoked in a park of hardened mud. And I tried. I tried to vomit the Sleeman’s. But the smoke didn’t coax anything out.

When we got back into the restaurant, everybody decided to go to another bar; but without many options, we ended up at a strange billiards room called Andy Poolhall. Everything inside was bathed in a sickly, blood-red light. Gaudy, red pleather couches dotted the floor. It looked like the set of a vampire porno. The place was gigantic but only one other group of people stood in the room while ear-deafening 90s R&B played on the stereo. If this place didn’t make me vomit, nothing would.

Seth, Vince, and Jess tried starting a dance party but it was half-assed and everyone looked like they were only pretending to have fun. Unable to feign even a half-assed dance step, I staggered toward the bathroom.

Opening the door, I suddenly walked into the kung-fu climax of Enter the Dragon. Mirrors covered every inch of the room. I became reflected back and forth a million times over. But stranger still was that the bathroom was technically unisex. Each stall was its own bathroom. You just knew that people had sex while locked behind those stalls. I concealed myself behind one of the mirrored doors and held my head over the toilet.

Nothing came up. And in trying to vomit, my headache only grew worse. I spit into the toilet, hoping for anything more. But that Sleeman’s was going to coagulate inside of me till morning.

Sauntering back into the main room, I heard Jess suddenly say that we had to leave right away because the subway was about to shut down for the night. We quickly rushed out, looking first for a bus that would take us to the nearest subway. We saw a bus pull away and head toward the station but we had no idea if it was the last one of the night — no phones to check, and no reliable schedules to be seen at the stop. Thinking another would come, Vince decided to buy some street meat. Everybody was hungry, but we had to catch that subway. It was closing in minutes. But then Bunge got in line for food as well. After ten minutes in line, and after these guys meticulously covered their sausages with condiments, we realized that no other bus was coming. We had to start running as fast as possible to get to the train station. People cheered as we raced past.

But the gate was closed when we arrived out of breath. It shut down just a minute earlier. And I was absolutely irate with these guys for wasting ten minutes getting food. As I was about to flip out after running with this headache and Sleeman’s-stomach, Jess finally said that we could still catch a bus back to her neighborhood. Why the fuck didn’t she say that before? Christ, if we’d had smartphones, we could have bypassed all of this nonsense by looking up the transit system.

When we got on the bus, I scowled at Bunge, so annoyed with him for making us run all over the place: Too discombobulated to think straight, I decided to blame everything on him. And he was still annoyed with me from our exchange at the bar. The bus was tense. Some of us couldn’t stand being with each other anymore. The ride felt menacingly long until we finally got dumped off back in Greektown. Everybody was agitated. Or just happy to finally be ending the day. We could barely talk to each other anymore.

Walking down the street, Bunge sidled up beside me, trying to be the better man, and asked, “Hey, are we going to be okay?” as if we were in a marital spat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you going to stop being as rigid as a witch’s cunt?”

“All right,” he said, and quickly walked ahead of everybody else.

“Come on,” I said. “That was funny.” But I was far too serious for it to be even juvenilely funny.

Walking back into Jess’s apartment, everybody was about to collapse. Very few words were exchanged. Everything was far too touchy. And we were about to sleep crammed together in a narrow room. Nobody said a word, fearing that the entire trip would end right there.

We brushed our teeth. We changed into sleepwear. We rolled out our sleeping bags. Then Bunge, all six feet of him, appeared in the shadow of the bathroom door. He wore a hot-magenta dress. Its hemline barely covered his genitals. Barely.

For the first time all day, everybody smiled in unison, and then laughed so hard we probably woke up the neighbors. Bunge hadn’t told anybody about this dress all week, as if he was saving the joke for the perfect moment. And here he was, grinning so happily with the gag, and making us remember how to communicate with one another. When we first became friends more than ten years before, perhaps none of us had even heard of the term “smartphone.” Hell, I got my first email address at freshman orientation in 2000. But after being saturated in technology for over a decade, it took Bunge, in a hot-pink dress, to remind us of what we still had in common, without iPhones, without the internet or God-knows-what-else. We still had humor. We’d talk again after all.

The next morning, we got the hell out of Toronto.

Photo courtesy of Small

Some of our break-ups with technology are more extreme than others. Last year, a Canadian man used his GPS to guide himself through Nevada roads that don’t appear on current-day maps. He hasn’t been seen since. A Las Vegas nurse and her 6-year-old son drove into Death Valley in 2009, relying on nothing but GPS, which sent them down a road that’s no longer truly a road. They got stranded for five days. The boy died. It happens so often that a park ranger has coined a phrase for it: Death by GPS. But the lesser consequences of our failing technology—high schoolers going absolutely bat-shit when Wikipedia shut down for a single day in January—would merely be laughable if they didn’t show how dependent we are on that technology, and what we can become when we lose our complete grasp of it.

I certainly don’t know the horrors of drinking my own piss and watching a child die beside me after getting lost in 115-degree heat for a week. The six friends that I traveled with on a man-cation around the Great Lakes last summer certainly don’t know them either. But when we left Detroit and crossed the border into Canada last July, none of us 29-year-old men had really planned ahead for the fact that our phones would not work in a foreign country, even if that country was only Canada. Our smartphones became paperweights. And for whatever reason, we never looked into what we might want to do in Toronto before actually arriving there. Like many contemporary travelers, we failed to bring a hard copy “map” to chart out what to do. In our first night in Toronto, everything was fine. We had a guide. We were together. We were naked. There was a water slide. But by noon the next day, we were already guide-less and splintered, unsure of each other, oftentimes completely unable to communicate: First, simply because our phones didn’t get service. But as we became more and more lost without technology, the agitation steadily grew, making it hard to communicate even one-on-one by day’s end.

No, we did not come remotely close to death. But in a matter of hours, we devolved from the upstanding men we were—teachers, cancer researchers, kind husbands and boyfriends, etc.—to a pack of homeless degenerates who loafed around shady Toronto parks, drinking the worst swill that Canada offers in a bottle.

That Saturday morning started out fine enough. We had been friends for a decade or more: Bunge, Coe, Compton, Mitchell, Seth, Vince, and myself—seven men all on the cusp of turning 30, and without any ideas about what to do in Toronto. In all of our previous stops around the Great Lakes, we either had reliable friends guiding us or we planned ahead with Internet research. Everybody forgot about Toronto, though.

The first innocent rumblings of “What should we do today?” began circling our table at a greasy-spoon diner in Toronto’s Greektown that took more pride in its Detroit Red Wings paraphernalia than in its Greek omelet. Coming up with nothing ourselves, we turned to the end of the table at our bespectacled hostess, Jess—a stranger, really, who we barely met the night before through friends, and was surprisingly nice enough to put up seven of us for the weekend in her tiny apartment. Jess, however, had only lived in Canada for a year, and apparently did nothing in that year but work and frequent bars. No matter. She’d have to do in place of our iPhones, even if she didn’t actually use one herself. She’d be our Yelp reviews and Google Maps. We prodded her until she remembered the one touristy thing that she could actually recommend: the Kensington Market. People go there, she said. Tourists and locals. They do? Great. We didn’t need technology. We had Jess.

The Kensington Market looked something like a medieval street fair for drug addicts. Most of the shops were basically open-air shacks overflowing with random tchotchkes—Canadian Army fatigues, water bongs, racks of knock-off sunglasses. The scent of falafel poured off of deep fryers. Patchouli. Pedestrians packed the streets and sidewalks, often shoulder to shoulder. Cars sauntered past like stubborn mules. Bunge, a strong man with stronger opinions, recommended that we split up and meet after an hour; we’d be hopeless pushing through this crowd as a single entity. So he disappeared, and the rest of us split off into pairs. Mitchell and I immediately grew bored of shopping and accidentally squeezed out of the market, finding the only remarkable thing within a five-block radius: two life-sized ceramic moose perched over a home’s porch, each wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey. Satisfied with the painfully Canadian find, we checked the time and realized we still had 45 minutes to kill, but no way of telling everybody else that we were ready to move on.

After everybody finally found each other 45 minutes later, Bunge and Coe recommended renting bicycles from the public racks scattered throughout the city: It’d be a faster way to see Toronto, and it’d at least be something to do. But it was impossible to find seven rentals locked together in one place. If our smartphones worked, we could have used an official app to find seven together within walking distance. But we had already realized that we wouldn’t have things as ridiculously easy as we usually had them. Our white-people problems began rearing their stupid, white faces.

Already feeling aimless by noon, we decided to stop at the Java House on Queens Street to mull over what to do over a couple of pitchers of beer. Beer was easy. Beer didn’t need an app. But while sitting at an outdoor patio on the sidewalk, a pair of irate finches kept dive-bombing our table. We probably should have heeded their warnings then—just given up and stayed inside a bar all day. Because the more we asked, “What should we do today?” the less we figured out. Without some simple technological resources, it was like we already forgot how to answer on our own. When the waitress returned with nachos, we asked her for suggestions: “How aboot the Kensington Market?” she said. Well, thanks. But no thanks. There was a park, though, on an island, Jess said. She’d never been but it sounded like… something. Mysterious even. But then Jess, our guide, our Internet, our oracle, said she needed to leave us for work for the rest of the day. Standing outside on the sidewalk, Jess wispily said, “A ferry will take you to the island.” And she disappeared completely.

Okay, we said. Okay, but where is the ferry?

We walked in the opposite direction of water. Nobody wanted to put their foot down and say, “Let’s just go to this island.” Maybe if we had some random voices out of the ether to tell us ‘yea’ or ‘nay.’ Instead, we ended up at another bar, but it was far worse than the patio with its angry birds. The cavernous room was dark, dank, and full of televisions playing rugby games from around the world. It lent a gloomier mood to the vulnerable feeling already percolating amongst us. Aside from the bartender, only three other people sat in the room: two women and a man in their early 40s. They were getting happily drunk at 2 p.m. Annoyed with our inability to do anything on our own, Coe leaned over and asked these people if they had any recommendations.

“You could go to a bar,” they said.

OK, but what would you do if you only had one day in Toronto?

“You could go to Kensington Market.”

Jesus Christ, we’ve already been to the market. Anything else?

Nothing. Just a trio of drunks. Finally, Mitchell took the reins and said, “Let’s just go to this island.” It’d be good for us. Nature. We’d only seen cities at that point of our trip around the Great Lakes. So with some simple directions from the bartender, we learned that we just needed to get on Bathurst Street two blocks west and it’d take us straight to the ferry. But it was nearly three miles away. So we climbed onto a city bus and, this nearly felt miraculous at this point, it began pulling away. We started feeling like we were actually doing something. We were going to explore something. We only had to wait until 3 p.m. to get our technology-addled minds in order.

Stopping a few blocks away from Lake Ontario, we began following signs for the ferry: Something was finally happening. We didn’t need the Internet to figure out what to do. We felt triumphant. The ferry terminal was sparkling, new, busy with ferry-goers, day-trippers. We were one of them. I noticed that a lot of people carried luggage with them. Whatever. That’s not so strange. There must have been a hotel on the island. We crowded onto the escalator to the second floor, smiling, looking forward to the mysteries of this island that nobody seemed to know anything about. Cresting the second floor, a pair of flight attendants in maroon uniforms sat on a bench, curiously watching us walk past. Looking again, we were the only people in the terminal without luggage. Flight attendants? Sensing something was amiss, Coe walked up to the information desk and when he sauntered back to us, he didn’t need to say anything. His sluggish pace already said it: This ferry only went to an airport across the water—no enchanted island by any stretch. The ferry that we wanted was nearly two miles up the waterfront.

What the fuck are we going to do now? It was too late in the day to figure this all out before dark. So we walked outside, crestfallen, in the sun. We needed that island so badly. But we didn’t even know if it would have been worthwhile. Jess had never been. The drunks at the bar were baffled when we asked them about it. We didn’t know anything anymore. Maybe even each other: Some of us started eyeing each other, like, Why’d you make us come all the way to this airport? Or, Whose fucking idea was it to come to Toronto? We walked along the waterfront until we crossed the Toronto Music Garden—a manicured swatch of green space between the city and Lake Ontario.

Somewhat bewildered with each other and how wasteful our day had been, we decided it was time to split up again. We just inherently knew that things were going to get tense if we stuck together, complaining to each other about the day. Bunge disappeared to God knows where. Vince, Seth, and Compton sprawled out on a patch of freshly-cut grass and fell asleep like the hapless bums we were slowly becoming. Mitchell and Coe stared at the harbor boats. The sun slowly began setting and it felt as if we really weren’t going to do anything in Toronto. When Coe asked another Canadian if he had any recommendations for tourists, he could only suggest going to the park that we happened to be standing in.

Hoping to ward off some of the atrophy, Mitchell and I ran across the street to grab coffees at a Tim Horton’s, and drank them at a man-made beach on the lake.

It was an odd slab of a sandbox: probably 15-yards wide by 30-yards long. Tall, metal umbrellas sporadically dotted the ground. A young couple felt each other up on a metal chaise lounge in front of us. Mitchell and I discussed how the hell we were going to salvage the day. But nothing came to mind. We discussed how people were starting to feel on edge. We looked across the water at a stretch of land far across the harbor.

“Do you think that’s the island we were going to?”

“I have no idea.”

We didn’t know a goddamn thing in Toronto.

Read part two

Photo by philsquires