May 7: When we were kings

It was 1994 when I first wandered into Words Books & Cappuccino Bar on the corner of 17th Street and 17th Avenue SW in Calgary. Words was one of three stores in a tiny commercial building on that corner. I'd arrived to apply for a job at a balloon store at the west end and got a haircut at the barber shop in the middle. Words was at the eastern end. I walked in to say hello and I met Rook St. Peter, who soon became one of the most important figures of my early 20s.

I was 21 and I was in the middle of sabotaging my senior year as a theatre student at Mount Royal College. I didn't have a girlfriend, I still lived at home, and I wasn't making a living as a magician. I was angry - nay, furious - about all these things. That was partly because I was too stupid to realize how dangerous it is to think of yourself as a genius. If you want something, you have to work hard for it.

It was May of 1994. Twenty years ago. Wow. Hard to believe.

Rook was a tall skinny man with thick black hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He was smoking a cigarette and playing chess with an even taller man named James, who, it turned out, was a poet. His day job (or night job) was bouncing at a few Calgary bars but his passion was military history, especially during the medieval period. Rook was also a writer. He told me that one week ago, he and James and another writer named Zin had hosted an open mike writers' night at Words. He was hoping to make it a monthly event.

I felt like an orphan who had just been adopted.

I asked Rook if I could read and he said that I could. About three weeks later, I found myself sitting on a stool in front of a room full of strangers. I couldn't see most of them, a thick cloud of cigarette smoke hung in my face like a wet blanket, but I could hear them. I read the first couple of chapters from a hardboiled private eye novel I'd written a couple years earlier. James read a poem called Defender of the Faith, which is still one of my favourite poems of all time. Zin was there and he read a stream-of-consciousness type piece about peeling potatoes. Rook read a short story about a man named Thead (anagram of Death) and I do believe that my friend, Michael Nenonen, was there and he read a chapter from his novel, Submergence. Later, Michael and I went to Earl's where he learned that I am a Christian and I learned that he is an atheist. He did not try to stab me with a dinner fork. I think I asked him what he considered to be the most persuasive evidence for God's existence and he referenced a philosopher who found evidence for God in the universal constants that are found in music. Much later, I would learn that this philosopher was St. Augustine.

And there was Tanya, who may or may not have been a feminist poet(ess.) There was Janet, who was working at a 7-Eleven and dreamed of publishing her Star Trek Deep Space Nine novel. There was Will, who had a voice that could melt butter and who was a computer genius and had written an episode of the X-Files. There was Laura, who I may or may not have been in love with, who wandered into Words one evening shortly after her 17th birthday and eventually got a job there. There was Kerry, a chainsmoking grandmother who wrote obscene sexual poems about vegetables.

And there was Joe.

Joe was an alcoholic security guard, well into his 50s, who would often get falling down drunk before it was his turn at the microphone. Once he read a piece called Police Story and it was this gem of a line:

"Murphy could feel a shit coming on so he got up to use the bathroom. 'Time to give birth to another nigger,' he said."

Man, when he said that, it was like the temperature in the room went down by 30 degrees. This one writer named Darrel, who was a bartender at the Cecil Hotel and a pretty darned good poet, got to his feet and walked right out of there. Other people groaned and most of them left the room. Later, during the break, people berated Joe for the racist tone of his story. Joe insisted that he wasn't a racist, that he simply had a character in his story who was a racist. He said that racism is a part of life and that he wasn't going to use his fiction to pretend the world was a hunky dory episode of Diff'rent Strokes.

Then someone told Joe that his theory might have been correct but his attitude was not. "I have no respect for you," this person said (he was a young person, probably only 19.) "You know why? Because you don't have any respect for your audience. You show up drunk and you get up to read when you're drunk. Well, as a member of the audience, I think I deserve better. As such, I'm not going to cut you any slack when you read garbage like what you read tonight."

And Joe was banned for a while, but he came back.

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I became a king at Words when I realized that people respond differently to the spoken word than they do the written one. I don't care if you're reading a Pulitzer Prize winner, if you read it in a monotone, you're going to bore your audience.

I began performing my material rather than just read it. I began selecting material that I thought audiences would enjoy more (lighter fare, minimizing the number of characters.) Thus, when I read from my magnum opus, I stopped reading angst-filled bits about the protagonist's struggles with his Christianity and, instead, read about his occasional descents into hedonism. I read about toonies. I read about the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. I read about Laura.

And the crowd loved it.

Once a writer from Red Deer came down to Words. He said he was trying to start a writer's festival in Red Deer and he'd personally come down to see us so he could invite a select few to perform up north. I was not one of the four selected. Some of the writers said that I should be outraged by this but I was not. But I did go to Red Deer to support my writer friends and I learned that the man from Red Deer was not only reading in his festival, he'd selected himself to be the grand finale. 

As Paul Harvey said: "Now you know the rest of the story."

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See, up until that day in 1994, I hung out with magicians. I still know a lot of magicians today and most of them are good decent people. But the magicians I hung out with in Calgary in the early 90s were negative soul-suckers.

Then I started hanging with other writers and my world kind of turned around. I got a girlfriend, I got a steady job, I got a renewed purpose in my life that ultimately led me to where I am right now - a journalism career.

Rook died about 10 years ago. Cancer.

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I miss those days.