More Public Airing of Pryvett

I met Pryvett for the first time on New Year's Eve 1999. He was drinking beer and tequila and wine coolers and smoking a pipe. He was the friend of friends, and I never really caught the connection Pryvett had to them other than he had once "gamed" with them. This was a memorable New Year's Eve night. I was drinking Smithwicks and Gibson whiskey, and at one point re-enacted salient moments of my favorite TV show All in the Family using our host's Nativity scene figurines. Pryvett responded well to this. As the night wore on and outrage after outrage poured out Pryvett, my wife -- who was my fiance at the time -- kept asking (as other girls in the room were asking) "Who is this guy?!" One friend -- a very talented writer -- said to Pryvett, "You're like the love-child of Don Rickles and Andrew 'Dice' Clay!"

That night blurs into fragments: me doing my Riverdance with our host's throw rug over my shoulders as a cape, each of my ill-placed steps rattling the windows in the house; my wife -- who was my fiance at the time -- the unfortunate designated driver for the night, looking around at my friends, gape-eyed, watching the consumption of alcohol and the unending verbal-marking-of-territory.

And then Pryvett.

About four seconds after midnight, Pryvett rang in Y2K by lurching up the creaking staircase -- vomiting every step of the way -- lumbering toward our host's single bathroom to chortle one last coughing dry heave into the expectant toilet. Pryvett returned to festive living room some unspecified amount of time later, red-eyed, gasping, sweating, looking like he had just French-kissed the devil.

Pryvett once told me of the time a friend -- whose parents came from eastern Europe -- had an aunt come to Canada for a visit from that unnamed eastern Bloc nation. I guess the friend's father was a hardened anti-Communist and took every opportunity to show off the North American lifestye to his visiting sister. When he brought her to the A&P she refused to believe it was real. She believed it was a phony store, a set, built by the government to impress visitors from Communist countries. She was literally staggered by quantity and variety of food available; just didn't believe it was possible. On the way home after shopping, the friend's dad sought to drive-home a deathblow to his sister's illusions about Communism. As he navigated the family's enormous brown station wagon, he reached into one of the grocery bags and pulled out a turnip. Turnips were apparently the most sought after and enviable food in the country his sister came from. A single turnip would virtually be the entire meal for Christmas dinner. The dad took a huge sloppy bite of the turnip and then tossed the rest of it out the car window. His sister shrieked with horror and surprise at the waste of so valuable a food item. Satisfied, the dad grinned around his mouthful of turnip, and summed up all of his experience and knowledge of North America in a single sentence: "You see, in this country we can waste food!"

Pryvett is of Presbyterian stock, though his people have the hearts of Calvinists. The town from which Pryvett's father hails is called Orangeville, after William of Orange and the fun-loving Orange Order. Weirdly, the town was predominantly Roman Catholic. One day in the 1930s there was a commotion among residents when one of the devout churchgoing people lost his rosary. It was like the search for the tin whistle on the BBC show Father Ted. The town was turned upside-down looking for this rosary. Days later a Prostestant man carrying a shovel approached the shop where the lost-rosary-owner worked. The Protestant man held out the shovel with great distaste, as though carrying some particularly revolting dung. In the shovel he carried the lost rosary.

Of all of Pryvett's follies, his employment record is a particular sore spot to him. During his forty-four years of life, Pryvett has held about as many jobs. He's one of the only people I know who has been fired from more jobs than I have been. For instance, his lack of eye/hand coordination hampered his ability to fill beer cases with empty bottles at The Beer Store, so his career there ended in an afternoon. The eye/hand coordination also ended his career at a bagel shop when Pryvett proved incapable of producing a fully outfitted bagel sandwich in the allotted time -- as his boss stood over his shoulder with a stopwatch. As a waiter at the Olive Garden, Pryvett once dropped an entire tray of drinks on the table of people who ordered them. Being a man of prodigious carriage, Pryvett once worked in a Big & Tall clothing store in the mall. One day, as a female colleague was measuring the waist of a spectacularly fat man, she actually broke her measuring tape. Witnessing this, Pryvett broke out with spontaneous career-ending laughter. He was sent home and asked never to return -- even as a patron.

Focusing on Pryvett's hapless moments, however, does not do him justice. He is a cultured, enlightened person. He is an historian, first off. He has a tremendous love of books and film, and has put me onto countless classic movies I might not have ever seen without his prodding: the work of Werner Herzog, Ingmar Bergman, Chan-wook Park, the Ju-On series, and numerous other wonderful Japanese horror films.

Pryvett is also enormously generous with his meagre funds. He works his ass off at PHC, but is always ready to buy coffees or pay my way into a movie (my being a hopelessly broke writer). During the winter last year, he treated me to a fabulous 1960s samurai film at the Detroit Film Institute (a gorgeous oldtime movie theatre located at the Detroit Institute of Art). The film was excellent, and the experience all the more enjoyable due to the wonderful vintage movie theatre in which we sat. Pryvett even drove that night. It was a hell of a snowy night and the side streets had not been plowed. After the movie, as Pryvett made his way down the sloppy street, a huge fat guy in a parka dashed across the street in front of us. All in one multi-tasking moment, Pryvett hit the horn, hit the brakes, and uttered a sonnet of profanity. In my own cloud of surprise, I exclaimed, "Holy shit, five-hundred-pound guy was pretty ambitious!" And this has become a fun running joke with Pryvett and I -- commenting on 500-pound guys we see while out for coffee or browsing in the bookstore. We are both Rabelaisian figures, make no mistake, and so we experience added admiration and disbelief on viewing men who surpass our stout steerage. I've imagined creating a TV show called Five Hundred Pound Guy, and sing snatches of a theme song I have composed: "He's round, he's sly, he's five-hundred-pound guy!" Or, "He's hip, he's fly, he's five-hundred-pound guy."

When he stopped to get gas one night, I looked at the price total on the pump as he made his way inside to pay. The read-out said $6.74.

CDs found in Pryvett's car: The Pogues, Joe Jackson, the soundtrack to Clueless, In Yo' Face: History Of Funk Vol. I.

Check out Pryvett's blog: Going Postal with Pryvett Rawgers.

A Public Airing of Pryvett

Pryvett is an improbable personage. At first glance, he resembles a melted snowman, a shapeshifter stuck between two ambitious shapes, but he is not to be underestimated. Watching him dig through a palmful of change to pay for his coffee -- glasses on the table, his nose nearly touching the coins, he is seemingly unable to distinguish between dimes and dollar coins, dropping pennies and quarters and nickels onto the restraunt floor -- one must never forget that Pryvett has fired automatic weapons, has taken automatic weapon fire, survived hand-to-hand combat with skinheads and militia members, frequented Detroit movie theatres and endured more than six years working for the fiercest freight shipping company in the region, PHC, where he has been busted down in rank three times.

Two decades ago when he was at college, Pryvett found himself in a Physical Anthropology class taught by a certifiable nut. He can't remember the prof's name, but vividly recalls the prof's pleas to the class: "Bring me roadkill!" The prof was all about fondling the denuded bones of the recently deceased. At one point during the semester the prof entered the classroom and spent the period raving about the injustice of the Kinesiology department receiving delivery of ten ape carcasses with not a one being designated to the Physical Anthropology department. The prof was rendered nearly wordless with the outrage. But he was not to be outdone.

That night the Physical Anthropology prof used his faculty keys to let himself into the Kinesiology department after hours -- long after hours. In the dead of night, he made off with two ape carcasses and returned to his rural home with them. There he boiled and flayed them, setting the skins out to dry and the bones to grow accustomed to the air. One or two nights later a couple of youths, high and seeking easy access to someone's liquor cabinet, broke into the prof's remote abode. When they came upon the ape skeletons and drying skins, all thoughts of booze and altered consciousness abandoned them. Suddenly sobered, they fled the house and alerted police. The authorities arrived on the scene and at first thought they had some sort of ritualistic murderer on their hands; a Hannibal Lechter of rural Ontario. But soon the prof arrived home and provided them with his incredible explanation. Tests verified the skins and bones belonged to apes, not humans, and the college chose not to press charges, feeling it best to keep the episode quiet.

Pryvett is an avid film buff. He speaks of a time when he brought a girl on a first date over to a film theatre in Detroit to view Cannibal Holacaust, an Italian film so graphic that upon completion the filmmaker was hauled into an Italian courtroom and told to prove that he had not actually murdered human beings to make the film. Pryvett's date had no idea what awaited her. As Pryvett parked the car he borrowed from his father, he noticed a car slowly approaching directly ahead. The person at the wheel appeared to be unconscious, and there was a man running alongside the car, with his arm in the window, shouting at Pryvett and his date, "Get out the way! Get out the way!" Just before they were to collide with Pryvett's father's car, the driver suddenly awoke from his stupor and cranked the steering wheel, sending the car into a lamp post. When Pryvett and his date got into the movie theatre, they found that Cannibal Holacaust had been taken off the bill and replaced with Fright Night. Having come all that way across the border, they stayed. Twenty minutes into the film there was a commotion off to one side of the theatre. Suddenly some booming music erupted. In the flickering light of the film, amid audience members shouting at actors on the screen, an impromptu breakdancing competition started up in a corner of the theatre.

During a bachelor party when Pryvett was in his twenties, he had gotten so drunk that he cut one of his hands quite badly while mishandling a set of darts. His unbandaged hand continued to bleed throughout the pasta dinner, during which Pryvett got most of the red pasta sauce all over his shirt. By the end of the night his hair and face were streaked red with blood and tomato sauce -- he looked like a Medieval warrior after battle; crazed, drunk, lusting for tacos, shouting obscenities, sweating profusely.

Pryvett is the unfortunate man whom I know that works at a package handling company: PHC. During the heat wave this week, he was telling me that it has been murder laboring away in the warehouse, where there is no air conditioning; not even fans to relieve the disabused hourly-waged workers. One day the load of packages that are set aside for inspection by Customs agents was piling up with no indication that they were being dealt with. My buddy asked what was going on, why the Customs agents hadn't come in with their drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs.

The answer: It was too hot in the warehouse for the dogs. And Prvyett was told to get back to work.

There was one day when Pryvett was inexplicably allowed to annouce breaktime over PHC's public address system: "All right, fellow slaves," he intoned, "you can't stop sweating your bags off for ten minutes and take a breather -- all except for Corky --" Corky is lumbering behemoth automaton in his early twenties who walks around the warehouse in elephantine jogging pants with a Big Mac stuffed into one pocket and fries into the other "-- Corky, you dogfucker, stay at your station, you don't get a break." To which Corky, a very tall hulk, as well as fat, let out an inarticulate shout and jumped up onto the conveyor belt in an effort to lunge into the office where Pryvett made his announcement. Corky was restrained before he could cause bodily harm to Pryvett -- but Pryvett was written up for his insult.

As young Pryvett, in his teen years, flush with a black pompador and a chrome polished liver, he was once a part of the military. Once, while on the rifle range being shown the finer points of automatic gunfire, Pryvett noticed something odd when he and his troop were finally allowed to fire their weapons: the grass in front of him was being torn up by automatic gunfire. When Pryvett looked up to see what was happening, he was met with the vision of one of his cohorts grinning maniacally, pointing his weapon down the line of privates, firing not at the target ahead, but over the other guys' heads. This lunatic was immediately tackled by a master sargeant and duly pummelled for his outrage.

A hearing was called to punish the miscreant private and Pryvett and his troop were made to attend. Any illusions Pryvett had about military tribunals was quashed when he entered the tiny windowless room in which an improbable number of people had been crammed. To add further to the black comedy, after the private was drummed out of the corp, the other privates -- of whom Pryvett was one -- were then ordered to march out of the room in "double quick time!" Which led to Pryvett and the privates comedically -- albeit unintentionally -- running into one another like a horde of directionless robots, as they tried exiting the tiny room.

Royal Commission Studies the Problem of Heat (or, more properly, the lack of air conditioning in civil service offices)

A respondent wrote to me about how she and her colleagues were suffering with un-air conditioned office working in the British civil service. I responded with how Canada would effeciently tackle the problem:

A Royal Commission on Air Conditioning would have to be called together in order to evaluate your need for air conditioning. This Royal Commission would receive about $12 million in funding -- and would spend about $20 million, with no repercussions. This Royal Commission would also come together around December of 2012 and would study your need for air conditioning until about March. And their verdict or official conclusion would be "We the Royal Commission on Air Conditioning find no grounds for the request of air conditioning in the offices housing our civil servants. There is probably a need for increased heating as our civil servants were seen to move with the lethargy of snowmen in these offices that were distinctly cold, but since no request for additional heating was made another Royal Commission will have to study this need at a later time."

And so civilization marches forward.