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Welcome to my Friends for Life Bike Rally Page

The reason that I started doing this thing was because I was having a beer with my friend Harvey in 2011. He told me what a great experience he had participating in a fundraiser for people living with HIV and AIDS . It was a six day bike ride from Toronto to Montreal . Over the beers I told him about my friends Mark, Kent,  Bill and Grant who had died from AIDS and that I would like to do something like that to honour them .  This was after a few beers and when I woke up the next morning I was thinking about the previous night and thought to myself “ Self – there is no f***king way I am getting on a bike and riding it to Montreal .”

Later that day I started feeling guilty about saying I would do something and not following through for my friends . I signed up to the bike rally online and sent out my first ask for donations on Facebook. I was still somewhat hesitant about doing it.  One of my friends from the street in North Bay that I grew up on  sponsored me . Instead of feeling happy I thought to myself “holy shit – now I have to do this.”  

These are the friends who made me do it .

I moved into a house at DuPont and Bedford in Toronto .

A friend of mine from North Bay was living there and said that there was a room available. At that point I was living in Mississauga and the people I lived with were moving out. The landlord was a man named Jonathan. He worked as a hairdresser at spa in Yorkville . There were seven or eight of us living there at the time.  Mark was Jonathan’s boyfriend .  Mark was a year or so younger than me. We joined my first gym together. He used to read movie star biographies. I borrowed Shirley Temples from him. He loved Belinda Carlisle’s song Heaven is a Place on Earth and Mad about you. He worked as an extra in movies. One was with Michael Keaton. He needed to wear a pair of cowboy boots in it. I forget what it was called but we went to see it at the theatre and there was a glimpse of Mark in it. And my boots!    He liked playing pranks . He would stand in the kitchen with the window open and when people walked by he’d yell things like “ oh my god please put the knife down !

We joined our first gym together. It was The Village Geen Fitness Club .

After a year I moved to my first apartment .  It was a bachelor on Maitland Street and the rent if I remember correctly was 500 dollars a month. A little while after I moved out, he came over for a visit and told me that he had AIDS. We both cried. He got sick really quickly. He tried to keep weight on by drinking Ensure. It didn’t work. He used to come to my place and read and nap while I was at work. He started to get really sick, and he went back home to his mothers and father in North Bay. He died there soon after. I was a pallbearer at his funeral. I met one of his friends there. We shared stories about Mark and laughed a lot. We had to stop because we were getting loud and even though it was our first we knew it wasn’t appropriate funeral etiquette. My name was listed in the obituary. I wish I had saved it. 

I worked for Budget Rent A Cars reservation telephone call center . There was another Rob working there so I used my middle name when  I answered the phone . I would say “Thank you for calling budget , my name is Fredrick . How can I help you? I met Kent there. He was a tall, slim , goodlooking man with good taste in music .He made me a mixtape which I still have although I have not had a tape deck for decades . I also have the vinyl extended version of Sinead O’Conner’s song Jump in the River . compliments of Kent.  Budget had a contest and Kent won a trip to Dallas where the American reservation centre was located. Part of the prize included a luxury car rental which he got into an accident with while leaving the airport. He was ok. The car was not.  He got a new job as a bartender at a bar called Boots (where I came out of the proverbial closet to my colleagues who were not surprised) .Kent got sick very quickly and stopped working . He called me one night and told me he had taken pills and was saying good bye . I called 911 and they took him to the hospital. I saw him at his house a few days later and he pointed at his skeletal self and joked that I had saved him for this. He went home to his family and died.  

I also met my friend Bill at Budget Rent A Car. He had long hair and wore leather vests and big boots . He was a fun guy. We used to pre drink at his house and then go dancing at Boots. He had done drag and performed with other Queens called The Great Imposters. That was before I met him. He had a poster of Madonna on his wall which I posed in front of once with a pre digital camera. I still have the photo. One of my biggest regrets in life is missing seeing Sinead at the CNE because Bill and I (who had tickets) decided to go to a bar instead. The review in the next day’s paper was amazing. He found out he was HIV positive. His health was good for a while and Bill moved to a place near Huntsville where I visited him a couple of times. He got sicker and moved back to Toronto and live in a place called Fife house . He has pneumocystis and a few Kaposi’s sarcoma spots on his body . He had to be hospitalized. I remembered having a conversation with him about DNR’s and how he didn’t want extreme measures taken. I was visiting him in the hospital once and he asked me if I saw the ladies in the room behind me . I tried to humour him ( there was nobody there ) and say there was and when he was more cognizant he asked me again and  he told me not to lie to him . At one point near the end he told me that he didn’t want to die.  . He changed his mind . He didn't want to die  And he died . His sister invited us over to his place after that and said we could have something to remember him by. I chose a plant which I managed to keep alive for a pretty long time. It moved with me to a few apartments. Then it died.

Grant and I were really good friends. We met at Pizza Pizza (the first call centre I worked at ) He was cute and blonde and had a wicked sense of humour which I loved.

He showed me the ways of gay life in Toronto and as a young man I reveled in it all. He used to win games on the radio by calling in and redialing a million times until it rang and rang and rang and finally Marilyn Dennis or another DJ would answer and he would win  money or concert tickets – He took me to my first Madonna show at the Skydome and Tina Turner and Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham at Canadas Wonderlands Kingswood Concert Theatre . He won a trip to a Club Med in Mexico and took Mike and myself and his friend Linda for an all inclusive week . He was a generous guy. He found out he was HIV positive and went on disability and asked me not to tell anyone about his status. I didn’t. He was in good health for a while as there were medicines available to him. Our friendship changed a bit as it sometimes does and we didn’t spend as much time with each other as we had previously. One of his friends told me that he was partying too much and hanging around people who used crack cocaine , He would call me late at night after he’d had a few drinks and I used to get annoyed because it was late and I had to work the next day .He called me late one  Thursday night and left a message on my answering machine ( the kind with the little cassette )  after he’d had a few drinks . I didn’t return the call. I found out from his mom the next week that she had tried getting a hold of him and he wasn’t answering so she got his dad to check his apartment . He was dead apparently from pneumonia related causes. His funeral was the Saturday of the great power failure in North America. His mom took me aside and asked me not to mention anything about HIV or AIDS and that his family all thought he had died from cancer related causes. There was so much stigma and shame associated with the disease at the time. I still feel guilty about not returning his call.  

This is the 15th year I’ve participated in this event and it has always been one of the best and sometimes the hardest weeks of my year but I do it with the nicest people in the world. Thanks for your support ! You are also the nicest people in the world :-)