In the year BC 35

I don’t know where I read or hear most of the things I remember. It’s terrible.

I’m also terribly victimised because of this, but I’m going to put that aside just this once. Because of things.

Someone once wrote that Shakespeare and Kafka were likely the most significant writers who were more studied, analysed and written about than simply read.

BC Pires has been so eulogised I’m starting to worry he’s about to join that lime.

It is Sunday, and, if things be the way things like to be, that means yesterday was Saturday. It means yesterday was his memorial. So even more people would have had a chance to say things about him.

But that’s ok. I know he was read. I know he brought joy and insight and comess. And a wit you could shave your eyebrows with.

It’s my turn. Mine is a story about growing up BC.

In the late eighties, when I and others of my ilk were young writers – when we were in our mid- to late-teens – he got Thank God it’s Friday off the ground.

You have to understand that time. You also have to try to think of what it was like to not yet be a fully-formed human. At that time. In this place. So there we were, Gen-X and MTV. Caught between grunge and rapso. Half rock, half Rudder. We were – well, I was – definitely trying to make sense of things, like every half-awake kid in every generation before and since.

He was not the messiah of us. But he knew the things we were taking about. And so this person writing for a newspaper made sense. Someone who was already adulting made sense.

People who want to be writers have to find their own way most of the time. I was lucky. With a little help (meaning I was too young to drive but had sisters who could) I found my way to the Pelican to interview this youngish writer. For the school news, no less. Location of interview not revealed at the time.

Thank God It’s Friday was still fresh, and I was still, what, 15, 16? But I got what is still one of my favourite stories.

The story is oft told that he entered the papers as BC Montana.

Here’s a different origin story. When he was looking for a pen name, he asked a friend to help him with one that would roughly translate to something like “the kid from the block.”

The friend remains unknown to me, but I loved him instantly. The name he offered was Cabrito del Barrio.

It took our hero a while before he realised he’d been called a neighbourhood goat. There was no rancour, not even a steups. Just amusement. I would have been spitting razor blades.

Lesson: learn to take a joke.

It could so easily have ended with that interview. But I kept on writing after all, and so did he. And so it was we’d talk. more off than on, and e-mail even less.

We loved cats. We both wrote about the cats in our lives. We also lamented the dreadness of cats who left you with their half-dead prey, saying, as it were, “I’m bored. You kill it.” He wrote an aching column about that before I had a chance to.

He wrote columns like that. Columns that were timeless and wide, so years later you could go back and talk about them, and it would be as if three people were having the conversation: you, Baz and the column. Because the best of his work is so alive, so animated.

He saw us. He saw TT, yes. But the detail and nuance with which he grasped what he saw was heartbreaking. I do not know what his friendship with Wayne Brown was like, but it was something they had in common. That pain of understanding.

In a column from a time I can’t recall with a name I can’t remember, he once wrote this line that sometimes plays in my head, unbidden, but always at the right time. He must have been talking about the way we think we can ignore all problems and wine away our cares. He wrote: “and we chipping and we chipping and we chipping away at ourselves.”

That, as he sometimes described things, was golden.

As a writer and person who commented on things, he took risks. He experimented with form, style, voice. It was a rich and bright career. The landscape of our written heritage is richer and brighter for the 35 years of literature we got from BC Pires.

And to think, as he told me in my high-school interview, if he could have played a lick of music, he would never have written a word.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.