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.