The irreverent, irrepressible, inimitable BC

Paoko Kernahan

If there were no BC Pires, this column wouldn't exist...period. It was ultimately "de madame" who prodded me into approaching a newspaper with the idea of forcing my opinions onto defenceless readers.

Still, it was the work of BC Pires that permitted me to write in my voice.

Plainly put, BC was the bad--s of the written word on the local landscape. He was our Charles Bukowski, albeit without the amorality and inherent vice.

I got hooked on his writings early on. From my twenties onward I never missed his TGIF column – even if it meant retrieving the sodden pages from where they'd been spread out on the floor to soak up a leak.

With every word consumed in awe, I always wondered, how is he getting away with this?

Never mind gyrating bikini-clad carnival revellers and our affinity for liming; Trinidad is a conservative, starchy society. It's in this context that Pires stood out like a sore thumb – and a middle finger.

His was a punk-rock sensibility embodied in a diverse, acerbic, rapier-wit commentary firmly rooted in considered analysis. And he was as funny as hell to read. TGIF might as well have been IDGAF.

Pires was never afraid of ruffling feathers, and indeed, plucking a fowl clean of all plumage where needed.

Woven throughout his work was an unwavering sensibility that there's a cost to creating offence, but it's a cost that must be borne if truth is to prevail. At times it felt like he pushed the boundaries just to see how far he could go.

As a devotee of his gospels, this made for deliciously satisfying reading. There was one occasion I can recall in which he triggered a fair bit of blowback for one of his sorties.BC was describing, in his usual colourful terms, a day of cricket at the Queen's Park Oval. In that column, he poked fun at some attendees observing religious rituals in the stands. When you stone a marabunta nest, you know it is not a pinata.

BC Pires was well known for his strident contempt for all religion, which he viewed as little more than firetruckery.

His irreligious proselytising bled into a fair bit of his work. Pires, like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens, perhaps reviled faiths of all forms because of the evils perpetrated in their name.

In his considerable oeuvre as a columnist, he held to our faces our Dorian Gray picture.

He was by no means, though, a merchant of despair. More than anything, BC peddled hope for a better TT – like those guys trying to sell you polish for your headlamps at the gas station. It's thankless work with few buyers.

I'd already left the media before I met him. In our first encounter he looked exactly like I imagined he would – a clean shaved head and a silver hoop in his ear; a gentleman pirate.

We would speak occasionally over the years, comparing notes and offering comments on each other's work. His was an opinion I valued deeply.

A lifetime ago, when I was doing a purgatory stint of morning television at CNC3, I interviewed him on what, I can't recall now. During the breaks, we chatted about the ups and downs and occasional ignominies of column-ity.

When told how much I was being paid for my column at that time, his mouth opened as wide as a two-car garage. He whispered, "Paolo, you need to tell them they have to pay you more." Had he not said that to me on that day, I would have continued getting milk money for my efforts.

As he started writing about his illness, I was filled with a queasy dread. There is none among us cancer hasn't touched. Perhaps even in his failing health, this is something BC understood and shared his story with those who have lost to this lottery of cruelty.

I was deeply saddened to hear of his passing. It has left a void that, while filled in part by his extraordinary work, can never be made whole.

To those who feel his loss most acutely, close friends and family, you must know BC was cherished by a wide cross-section of the population. For him to have been taken so soon is a hurt that can scarcely be soothed.

But his life was a Roman candle that brought tremendous light and joy for the time that it burned.