So...where do I sleep?
by Cameryn Moore
Billet. Homestays. Couchsurfing. When I explain the concept to non-touring people, or, let’s face it, people who are well off enough to be able to get a hotel room any and every time they travel, they look at me like I’ve suggested collecting bed bugs as a viable protein source for when grocery money is running a bit low. “Doesn’t it get a little … weird?” Well, yeah. But they’re more afraid of me than I am of them.
Seriously, many of my hosts are a little afraid of me. I’m a special case. I’m a pain in the ass for billeting coordinators across Canada, because I’m a real-life, still-doin’-it phone whore. I try to keep working for my phone-sex company while I’m touring (10am to 3pm Eastern time, with the five-hour shift starting progressively earlier as I travel west). This means I need a private room, at the very least, with no kids around and no barky dogs, and I always ask for a landline, just in case, rather than paying international roaming charges for the privilege of taking company calls on my cell phone.
And I have a car, right? The Deerinator needs a place to rest at night, a place that isn’t going to take my wallet and wring it out. And, well, I’m not as young as I used to be, so I need an actual bed of some sort, or a futon. A couch in a pinch, but something long and wide and not for more than three nights, please!
Yeah, this is the stuff I bring them, and you know what? In spite of all of those conditions and restrictions, I am consistently and amazingly lucky. I’ve asked strangers to sleep in their house everywhere from Regina to Nashville, with conditions ranging from a 6-hour layover in South Carolina with a fellow phone sex operator to my current 6-week room + bathroom + own fridge + private entrance SWEET set-up in Montréal. I’m a good house guest, but really, a good billet is where someone else lets me cherish the illusion, at least for a couple of weeks, that I am in my own space, that I have a great roomie, and I am home.
He made kick-ass midnight salads, when he was partly drunk and we were totally hungry.
I learned early on that the quality of home takes on different forms; there are different constellations of qualities that have made some of my places seriously delightful. For example, in Montreal for 2010 and 2011 I didn’t have my own space at all—it was a very comfortable futon out in the living room—but the host has become a dear friend over the course of two years, and the billet was stunning, for lots of eclectic reasons. Like, he didn’t care about the phone calls, in fact, found them slightly amusing and very interesting. He generously offered me and my roadie the occasional use of the boom-boom room, in case we had guests. He made kick-ass midnight salads, when he was partly drunk and we were totally hungry. When I twisted my ankle within 10 minutes of arriving in 2010, he had my boot off and was rubbing Chinese medicine on me for a half hour. AND he happens to live within two minutes of both the best bagels and the best lattés in Montréal. So it was okay that sometimes slightly disheveled strangers passed through my sleeping space, and that there was no landline. EVERYTHING ELSE MADE UP FOR IT.
(I didn’t know I’d end up writing a billeting love letter to you, Paul!)
The quirks are what make billeting so awesome: the New Orleans room, with a fan and drawer space and excellent parking availability (even though it was within walking distance from major tourist attractions), provided by a costume designer and fellow Fringe touring artist, whose living room was excitingly crammed with feathers and trim, and whose commitment to coffee rivals my own. The single-wide bed at the venue director’s house in Alabama, one night only, upon which I collapsed gratefully after the show; turned out it was her bed, but she insisted on sleeping on the couch, and the next day she fixed something delicious with egg and tomato and we ate the brunch out on the porch and watched the autumn leaves twirl in the sunlight. The dungeon/sex-club space in Seattle with LOTS of clean sheets and very wide beds where I was able to recover after my mid-tour emergency root canal last year; yes, I had to change rooms because a beginning beating-and-kicking class was coming in, but I WAS BILLETING IN A SEX CLUB.
She got a cease-and-desist letter from park management, and I had to be resettled
I want to say that all billets are good billets, or at least decent, or at least slightly preferable to the alternative. Hell, I’ll go ahead and say it. There have, of course, been a few exceptions:
- The trailer park in Calgary, where neither the host nor I reckoned on how well sound transmits between two mobile homes quite near each other. She got a cease-and-desist letter from park management, and I had to be resettled; she was pissed at management, not at me, but I was just… embarrassed.
- The narrow-ass living-room couch in Vancouver, with two college girls as host. Least private, most vanilla environment I’ve ever billeted in, a fact that became abundantly clear the night that the hosts came home, an hour and a half earlier than they had said they would, and caught me jacking off on the couch.
- The basement sex-club space in Portland, which I had billeted in uneventfully in 2010, but when I came back in 2011, there was a man rooming down there, separated only from my sleeping and work space by a thin sheet. In spite of the senior tenant (my host) telling him the terms and condition of my stay, he resented my presence and played guitar at 6 in the morning to make sure that I knew it. Yeah. Awkward.
But for the most part, the greatest part, my billeting experiences are awesome. It’s the only way that I could afford to do what I do; I think that’s true for most touring artists. So, if you’ve ever billeted an itinerant performer, BLESS YOU. If you’ve never done it, do it. You might not end up with a phone sex operator, but you’re guaranteed to be helping someone who really needs it.
Cameryn Moore will be at the Montreal Fringe June 15-23, at Zoofest and at the Winnipeg Fringe July 19-29
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