In the summer of 1988 I was freshly graduated from elementary school. I was a bold 13 years old, energetic, and developing facial hair. It was during that summer that I went to visit Bradbury. The last time I last saw him we were both 10, less bold, and had smooth skin.

When I asked my mom if I could go to see him in his Detroit suburb, she was initially adamant that I should not. I bet that lots of bad thoughts crossed her mind when she imagined her little baby making the hazardous trip across southern Ontario. She probably visualized me plummeting head-first into the Detroit River as I crossed the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor to Detroit.

My mother most likely had the idea that I'd get lost in the mean streets of Detroit, wind up with a heroin needle in my arm, and be found sprawled in an alley, unconscious, inside a cardboard box. Detroit certainly had its own problems in 1988, seeing as the entire downtown core was an empty wasteland. Bradbury however, lived in one of the suburbs, near Dearborn I think, and so I wasn't very worried about being accosted by gangsters.

Day and night I harassed my mother for the cost of the bus trip. Night and day I reminded her about how good it would be to see my cousin again. I guess after two weeks of endless nagging she finally caved in and agreed to let me go, though she made me work for that money. I can truthfully say that I have never spent so much time in the bathroom and the kitchen. Every three or four days I had to put on big rubber gloves and scrub out the bathroom. I started with the old bathtub. The porcelain was so worn that it could never be scrubbed whiter than a pale yellow. I scrubbed it with a damp sponge, scouring the entire thing from top to bottom with that blue Ajax powder. A delicate scent of chlorine would rise from the tub, and it lingered even after I had completely rinsed it clean.

I still wonder why people insist on cleaning with these chemicals. Maybe parents become immune to foul smells. Maybe there just isn't time to worry about the noxious fumes, since as soon as the tub is done we immediately go on to clean the sink. Some other horrible liquid is used there, and then the toilet bowl is doused with a third terrible substance. Once the cleaning is done, and all the chemicals have been applied to their own respective domains, it is possible to get a well deserved high from the unique toxic aroma mixed in the air.

Every three or four days I would rotate to the kitchen, so that I was cleaning something every second day. Here, in the heart of the woman's bully-pulpit, I would clean the burners of the stove, remove crumbs from the toaster, wash the counter, and mop the floor. Then when all of my work was done, I would suffer an inspection of my work and get notification of my success or failure. Most days I would pass with prejudice, but on occasions mom would find a bit of orange peel sitting here or a fleck of toast hiding there. At those moments I would be the recipient of the sternest and most gratuitous warnings of impending doom, as if my ability to clean the kitchen were a predictor of my future ability to succeed in life. Or maybe it was a predictor of my eternal salvation, if there was one.

Finally it was time. During the last week of July my mother decided that I had worked long enough to warrant the trip, and so she gave me the money. I called Bradbury's family in Detroit and let them know I was coming. I booked my ticket at the downtown bus terminal.

I got to the bus terminal at around six in the morning. It was no Grand Central Station. Yes, it was an old building with gargoyle-style ornaments. Yes, it had drunks sleeping across the chairs in the waiting area. No, it was not an historical and romantic hub of metropolitan transportation – it never has been and it never will be. It was more of a regional staging area for common commuter routes: Hamilton, London, Kitchener, and through Windsor, Detroit.

So there I was, standing in the middle of the terminal, with the rising sun peaking through the east windows and casting long lazy shadows. The sun lit up the overgrown red beard of a passed-out vagrant fellow who was gently snoring and who was still sleeping when I finally boarded the bus. The chairs he was slumbering on in the waiting room were all plastic; shades of red, yellow, and brown. They were tied together by metal foundations and were arranged in strict rows and columns. They cast upon the whole building a feeling of rigid and nervous eagerness – or perhaps it was the neon-lit "Bagel Bagel" coffee outlet that created the subtly garish atmosphere.

I got my ticket from the nondescript and very bored guy sitting behind the wicket at the counter. I bought a small hot chocolate from the "Bagel Bagel" outlet, and I sat down in the waiting area as far away as I could get from the various drunks splayed out around the room. I actually sat directly across from Red Beard for the whole two hours that I was there. I watched his stomach heave and up and down as he breathed, and I looked at his whiskers rustle when he exhaled. If I had to pick my favourite person in the bus terminal, I'd have to say that it would be Red Beard. I don't know what it was about him; I can't say exactly which of his many wonderful qualities attracted me to him. It was probably his overwhelming peacefulness. The other drunks shook and made noises and disturbed the universe with their passed-out antics. My drunk just slept, motionless and seemingly at peace the entire time that I was staring at him.

I wonder what Red Beard was before he became a drunk. By the looks of him I could say that he might have been a bricklayer. His hands were large and heavy, the type of hands that belong to a person who is methodical and unceasing. His nose was large and heavy looking as well, though I attribute that to the years of alcohol. Did he have a family before his trip to the bottom of the bottle? I could only hazard a guess, but I would have to say "yes," because he was wearing jeans. The type of jeans that a hard-working family man would wear.

After the long wait was done, I finally got on the bus and took a seat near the back. I sat close enough to the back so that I could reach the washroom easily, but far enough from the back so that I would not endure any unwanted odours. And so time went by as I experienced another interminable wait as the ticketed passengers straggled aboard. I spent my time staring out the window, looking in at my Red Beard, wondering if he'd suddenly wake up and find that I had abandoned him.

Finally, the bus disembarked and as we drove by I watched the bustling of people on the street. I saw women wearing suits, which made them look like they were trying to be men; and men in suits, who looked emasculated and whipped by their careers. We passed by Toronto City Hall, that strange looking building that seems something like a flying saucer flanked by a pair of giant false finger nails. How sweet the city looks when one views it through the tinted glass of a bus that is heading away!

We rolled across the city, down to the waterfront, and then onto the Queen Elizabeth Way, which goes directly to Windsor. It was an easy and clear road leading out of Toronto. The morning flow of traffic went mostly towards the city, and I could see an endless stream of gridlocked cars waiting to get downtown. We sped past them as we fled the urban landscape, and I felt sad about how so many people spent every morning idling on the highway. Had they no better thing to do than commute eternally?

Well, after about an hour the Greyhound was already passing Hamilton, and I could see the forests of smokestacks smogging up the sky with crap from the steel mills. Hamilton was called Steel Town, which is not a very creative nickname, although it is truthful. This small city has always been a minor influence on Toronto. About the only nice thing that I could say about Hamilton is that it is built around a large hill. The rich built their mansions on the hill, so that they could be above the poor rabble and literally look down on them.

Somewhere after Hamilton, about the place where the highway joins up with the road from Guelph, I noticed this old Volkswagen coming from the area of that boring little farming town. It was one of those mini-buses from the sixties. It had colourful flowers painted on it and bead curtains tied back to let the light in the side windows. Inside there were a bunch of girls, all happy and giggly. They looked like smelly hippie girls – all doused in that lingering stale marijuana odour – the type of girls who would listen to Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell. And what it all came down to really, is that they were too busy putting their hands on each other to take a shower.

Those hippies couldn't keep up with the bus. Their old VW just didn't have much power. Or maybe all the oil in their hair was weighing them down. Whatever the cause, they gradually fell further behind until I couldn't see them anymore.

And so it went on like this for eight hours: mile upon mile of small towns, forgotten and depressed, all identical except for their names, which were just a formality. Mile upon mile of unyielding pavement, beaten silly by the daily pounding of a million tires. Mile upon mile of faces of stupid people peeking up from behind their steering wheels and wailing a collective silent cry for forgiveness for their stupid lives. These are the thoughts that one has when traveling across the barren-boring expanse of nothing that sits between Toronto and Windsor.

We drove through Windsor in a flash, which was good, because I am loathe to describe it. It was a non-event anyhow, seeing as the place was all clean and white and manicured and meaningless. The bus stopped at the entrance to the Ambassador Bridge. Here there was a guard house sitting in the middle of the road and a motorized arm that spanned the width of the lane. A guard came out from the house and entered the bus. The driver provided some papers, which the guard, wearing a maple leaf emblem on his shirt, inspected briefly. Then he turned toward everyone in the bus.

"Anybody here not Canadian?" he asked.

Nobody answered, so he said, "have fun," and left the bus. The arm raised, and he waved the bus through.

We drove across the bridge and stopped at another guard station. Another man, who had an American flag patch on the arm of his shirt, came aboard the bus. He made a cursory inspection of the papers and asked us "Anybody not a Canadian citizen?"

Nobody answered, so he said, "Welcome to the United States of America," and left the bus.

Back in those days, crossing the border was an easy meaningless thing.

It was early evening by the time we got to the Detroit bus terminal. I got off the bus, feeling a mild tightness in my legs from sitting for so long, and wandered into the building uneasily. I was unsure of what to do. I heard someone call my name. I looked around but I didn't see anybody.

"Over here!" I heard. I looked to my left. "Over Here!" I heard again. I looked to my right. "No, over here!" I heard for the third time. I looked forward, and there I could see, a little ways away, a thirteen year old waving his arms in wide arcs.

He ran toward me and when he got closer I recognized him for who he was. "Bradbury!" I shouted. He grabbed me in a big bear hug. He had the biggest smile on his face, which I hadn't seen in three years.

"Wow! Bradbury!" I laughed in delight, and I looked at him up and down repeatedly as if I had to see as much as possible before he disappeared for another three years. I saw that he was cultivating a delicate little goatee under his lower lip, and it made him look sort of like an awkward rogue.

"Man you look different!" he said excitedly. I didn't think that I had changed so much, but it is a thing about human nature – we get used to our own appearance as we age, and we believe that every wrinkle on our skin has been there since birth.

So we walked out of the terminal and into the smarmy Detroit night. The downtown was mottled, dirty, and rundown. If the suburbs were the donut, then Detroit was the empty donut-hole. No wealth, no class, just lots of businesses operating by daylight. And at night everybody went home to their donut, leaving the hole all by itself. This was the direction in which every major city in North America was heading at the time.

Bradbury and I went back to his place on a Detroit public transit bus. It was a poorly painted metal-grey aluminum block on four wheels with a turbo-diesel engine stuck up its ass. It groaned and strained along the streets on its way toward Bradbury's home. I believe that we passed twenty-seven different suburbs before reaching the correct suburb wherein Bradbury's family was situated. I say twenty-seven, although I don't know exactly how many there were. I just want to get these two sad points across: that there were a lot of them... and that they were all identical.

And in these suburbs, which were arranged in a practical grid system by the city planners of old and sub-divided into bite-sized square blocks full of paved front lawns and sculpted miniature conifers, there were houses. These houses were all the same, or if not so, they were almost the same, there seemingly being three or four architectural models endlessly repeating and alternating. If it were a forest, the trees would be laid out in rows and columns and arranged so that they were always in the order of pine, birch, maple, oak, pine, birch, maple, oak.... and boringly so on.

Those pines, with their bay windows and brick-veneer sheathing, were the most luxurious. The birch were little bungalows with finished basements and green-shingle roofs. The maples were aging homes held together by garish yellow siding with sepia tones standing in for leaking sap. The oaks were middle class and stuck-up: not as rich as the pines, but still wealthy enough to put on airs.

But within each oak, and in each pine, and in each birch, and in each maple, the sameness of it all is like a joke. All living the same bourgeois life, the same job, the same routine: fuck, sleep, slave, eat, and zone out on television. All the same, except that the ones with higher wages would put up satellite dishes. But from the oak to the birch it's all the same people all pining for that day when they can finally outdo their neighbours and prove that they really are the big shit. Or so I gathered while going by on the bus.

I arrived at Bradbury's home, to find that he lived in a modest oak. I felt happy for him, in a consumerist way. The door was unlocked, and Bradbury did not act surprised when he opened it without needing a key.

"Come in," he said. I followed him in. I saw that the house was in moderately better shape than his old house in Toronto. "My bedroom is over here," he said. He pointed to a door adjacent to the living room. I figure that they must have converted the study into a bedroom for him. Still, it was a nicely sized bedroom, nowhere near as cramped as it could have been. So it was a step up. And it was neatly kept. Not psychotically neat like Jon's bedroom in Rosedale, but along those lines.

That night, we dined on round-roast, mashed potatoes, and corn. Bradbury's mother and father were civil, though not warm with each other. The four of us made small talk while we were at the dinner table, and it was an awkward but cordial type of conversation that went on in brief spurts interrupted by audible chews.

His mom and dad looked about the same as before. There was no evidence of the ubiquitous beer bottles that used to be such an important component of the house decor. It seemed strange to me that there would be no alcohol nearby, especially considering that Bradbury's dad was a factory worker at a car plant.

Dinner ended shortly and mercifully, and I went with Bradbury into his bedroom/study. There we spoke about all the things that had gone on while we were apart. Bradbury told me, in not so many words, that he was bored with his prefabricated suburban lifestyle. He told me, in not so many words, how unhappy he was with his life; how his parents were a constant source of pain. He sometimes wished that he were dead, or in Toronto. Now it seemed to me that what he meant was that Toronto was preferable to death, though only slightly so. He told me this, but in not so many words. We slept that night, but our sleep was soon snatched up into the arms of the morning, whereupon we went downtown to have brunch at Hart Plaza.

Downtown wasn't very different from Toronto's downtown. I think Bradbury might have been happier if he just lived in the downtown. There was about ten times the number of vagrants than in Toronto, so it wasn't an identical match – Toronto and Detroit were never sister cities in that way. Perhaps the average income of the typical downtown dweller was a lot lower in Detroit as well. Its problems aside, I bet that inner city Detroit would have been a lot more exciting and stimulating than the suburbs.

The suburbs, hmm... it's such a boring place that you are driven to do drugs at an early age. If you want to raise hedonists instead of children, move to the suburbs. At age twelve they will be smoking ganja; at age fifteen they'll be going on drinking binges. By the time they are eighteen, they'll be experts on the various mushroom varieties and adept at the proper use of diviner's sage. Those aren't cigarettes they're smoking out there in the boonies.

And so brunch was day-dreamed away and became lunch as we relaxed at the plaza. I spent most of the time staring up at the office building that faced us to the left. The river was to our right. Bradbury, who was munching on some celery, was busy updating me on all that had gone on in his new life. I found it strange being there with my goatee-chinned friend. He looked very different and acted different. He ate vegetables, which was something that he never liked to do. And it occurred to me, in the way things always occurred to me for no good reason, that something was wrong with my cousin Bradbury. I noticed the shadow of old stitches across his left cheek.

"Dude, what happened to your cheek?" I asked, while he was nibbling on a carrot. He seemed startled and almost dropped the carrot when his mouth opened with surprise.

"Dude!" he exclaimed in response. "I got into a fight with my dad!" He smiled and brushed his fingers across the old scar. "It looks cool, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it looks cool." I didn't press it any further. I followed my own of my own rules: don't get involved in other people's personal matters.

After brunch-lunch was over, we took a quiet stroll downtown. We passed by notable landmarks such as The Sony Store. We hung around, and lazied about, and loitered near all the cool downtown places, none of which were worth the hype. And so we did this and that – and nothing much – until the day wore on and the moon came up on the east horizon. Then we went home.

At home there was more food and more coolly formal dinner conversation. I got the feeling that I made Bradbury's parents uncomfortable. Later on, when the two of us were lying in his bedroom, we got to talking. It felt somewhat like we were back in his Aunt's place, in the shadow of the nuclear reactors, and discussing radiation-induced ideas. We were talking about an awesome movie called Die Hard. Then Bradbury got that look on his face that he used to get sometimes – an introspective and sensitive look. He said, "Mom and dad are being nice just for show."

I asked him what he meant and he told me about the fights. They didn't fight for a while after they moved to Detroit. But his parents started again in the last year.

"It's really bad sometimes," he said. I listened as his problems bubbled up from beneath the surface. "They just want you to think that things are really good, so they're trying really hard to not fight."

Bradbury went to sleep soon after that, but I laid there awake for a few hours. I spent part of the night thinking of ways to fix things, and part of the night thinking of ways to escape things. I spent part of the early morning thinking of ways to work around the problem. Finally I became exhausted from all the thinking, and my body willed me to thoroughly pass out.

In the morning Bradbury woke me up. He told me it was time for breakfast. And so it was: time for stiff and formal eating around the breakfast table. We had eggs and toast, and Bradbury's mom stared at me oddly while we ate. His dad read the newspaper, most of the time holding it up in front of him. And so, like the paper walls in a Japanese house, he was partitioned away from us.

We went downtown together, to the bus terminal, and I said goodbye to him there in the waiting area. We talked until my bus arrived. Then I went on my way home, several days too soon. Bradbury didn't offer to drop his pants and show his birthmark.

Here ends the story of my childhood. The heady years of the teen come next – not so pure and yet not sullied, and clawing at the future with naïve energy.