Two cops had shown up at the opening reception of a new exhibition, unplugged the speakers, and were in the process of fining us for selling beer out of our kitchen fridge without a license. They confiscated all eight cases of it. What the hell did they do with all that beer? The fine was hefty. We posted a photograph of it on Facebook and people offered to start a fundraising campaign. The challenge was we would never actually qualify for a liquor license as there weren’t enough washrooms and fire exits and we just didn’t have the energy to get raided again, which was only a matter of time now that we were on their watch-list. And the next infraction would shut us down for good.

But there was a larger problem at hand.

Will and I were more or less broken up by that point and sleeping with different people. We’d never had any kind of terminating fight or even a conversation about it, though, and continued to share a bed. We even continued to shower together in the mornings, as there wasn’t enough hot water for each of us to have our own; a formerly intimate and sexy ritual had been reduced to a purely functional choreography. Half of what had kept Videofag electric was the current of desire that had been arcing between him and me and that had more or less burnt out. He’d started spending time with a guy named Juan after inadvertently locking his bike to Juan’s outside a coffee shop, offering to buy him a coffee as an apology, somehow exchanging numbers, and fucking him that same night. Before long I found myself sleeping on the couch and waking up to Juan and Will making breakfast in their underwear in the morning.

So I started crashing at Ana’s. Over the years she had transformed her apartment into a kind of Bedouin tent of scarves, candles, cushions, quilts, tin lanterns, thrift-store oddities, folk art, costume racks, and various musical instruments she couldn’t really play. In the mornings, we’d lie in her bed talking as the sunlight filtered in through various layers of drapery. We’d take turns getting up, dumping the used grounds from the espresso machine, refilling it, lifting it from the stovetop when it began to sputter, and returning with two handle-less, baked-clay mugs of too-strong coffee, which we drank cross-legged on the bed like monks. I spent my weekends writing in the library and began working nights in a call centre, on a nondescript floor of cubicles along with a corps of listless millennials and newly landed immigrants with university degrees.